Coolabah, No.16, 2015, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians / Australian Studies 

Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 

 

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Editorial: After the Water has been Shed 
 

Martin Renes 

University of Barcelona  

mrenes@ub.edu 

 

Catalina Ribas Segura 

University College Alberta Giménez CESAG 

Palma de Mallorca, Spain 

catymallorca@yahoo.com 

 
 

Copyright©Martin Renes & Catalina Ribas Segura 2015. This 

text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form 

and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are 

properly cited and no fee is charged. 

 

 

The present Coolabah volume, nr 15, flows from the January 2014 Watershed congress at the 

University of Barcelona, organized by the Philology Faculty‟s Centre for Australian Studies 

(ASC) in collaboration with the Centre for Peace and Social Justice (CPSJ) at the University of 

Southern Cross, Australia. A call was put out to delegates to elaborate conference presentations 

into full-fledged essays of academic length (5,000 to 8,000 words), and a select number of 

scholars has contributed to the making of this collection of blind-peer-reviewed essays. The 

resulting volume, as is usual with our post-congress issues, covers a wide range of topics relating 

to the congress theme—Watershed—and so offers an eclectic, yet therefore challenging mix of 

papers within the field of postcolonial and cultural studies. Part of what is left after the water has 

been shed and the streams of conversation have settled down becomes visible in this 

compilation. The following will lay out some of the strands occurring and concurring in these 

pieces, which each in one way or another address the trope of watershed. 

 

In “Pedagogical Change at Times of Change in the Higher Education System: An Exploration of 

Early Career Mentoring, Co-publication and Teaching and Learning Insights”, Bill Boyd locates 

his discursive strand of analysis within the rapidly changing university environment and the 

deluge of social, political, economic and technological pressures on teachers/researchers this 

generates. Boyd has been engaged in developing tailor-made programmes to help early- and mid-

career academics cope with these new demands, and reflects on this research and practice in his 

paper. His “essay provides examples of activities that, on the one hand, assist academics to 

develop the tools they need to navigate the new and evolving environment of higher education, 

while on the other hand directly addresses key pedagogical issues and provides new insight into 

teaching and learning in higher education”. Boyd‟s opting for “human-scale … small team-based 

research and writing projects” is also patent in Jeanti St Clair‟s “Doing it for Real: Designing 

Experiential Journalism Curricula that Prepare Students for the New and Uncertain World of 

Journalism Work”. Her essay centres on the creative adjustments in journalism studies to the 

array of pressures that Boyd detects. Through “a learning-centred curriculum anchored in 

mailto:mrenes@ub.edu
mailto:catymallorca@yahoo.com


Coolabah, No.16, 2015, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians / Australian Studies 

Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 

 

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authentic and experiential activities and settings”, she finds ways for students to ready 

themselves for, and stay afloat in, the sometimes rough waters of the new university as well as 

future work environments.  

 

In “On Matteo Ricci‟s Interpretations of Chinese Culture”, Chen Hong takes a different tack on 

education by delving into the rich cultural exchange between European missionaries and Chinese 

society in centuries past and by investigating its reciprocal character, claiming a more integrated 

and balanced approximation to the establishment of academic knowledge. Hong‟s essay 

endeavours to fill a gap in the knowledge about Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), the 16
th
-century 

Italian Jesuit missionary to the Ming Dynasty who introduced Western learning into China, by 

looking at how Ricci also intensely participated in the reverse stream of knowledge. She points 

out that Ricci, in fact, is at the origins of the study of sinology as we now know it in the West, 

the fountain from which Oriental knowledge first started flowing in Europe. In 

“Transnationalism and the Decentralization of the Global Film Industry”, Jordi Codó Martínez 

looks at recent shifts in the film industry in which the point of gravity in production and 

consumption is swinging transatlantically and transpacifically to Asia and, especially China. 

Codó Martínez points out that, while Eastern cinema themes, genres and techniques have flooded 

Western cinema to cater for the Asian market, the Western consumer resists watching Asian 

cinema. This is on a par with the unidirectional flow detected by Hong in the way Matteo Ricci 

has been studied up to now. In “Louisa Lawson and the Woman Question”, Anne Holden 

Rønning looks at yet another pioneering figure and a different facet of mass media culture 

through Louisa Lawson‟s involvement in The Dawn, the first Australian magazine in which 

women‟s voice was to be heard on the continent. Published on the wave of the first emancipatory 

British women‟s press in 1855, The Dawn “gave women a voice, marked women‟s political 

engagement in the public sphere, and employed women compositors, making available to a 

broader public issues which were politically relevant” in the period of its existence, 1888-1905. 

By studying its content over these seventeen years, Holden highlights the magazine and 

Lawson‟s pioneering role and importance in the struggle for women‟s vote and rights. 

 

In “Developing a Connective Feminine Discourse: Drusilla Modjeska on Women‟s Lives, Love 

and Art”, Ulla Rahbek also explores the current of women‟s emancipation in writing by offering 

an analysis of the Australian author and historian Drusilla Modjeska‟s fiction on the intersection 

of women‟s lives, love and art, which she posits as the bedrock of Modjeska‟s oeuvre. By 

addressing a series of connective images which refer to such womanly activities as weaving, 

folding and talking, Rahbek reveals Modjeska‟s idiosyncratic feminism in the strong current of 

what she terms “connective feminine discourse” in her fiction. In “Identity and friendship in 

Hsu-Ming Teo´s Behind the Moon (2000)”, Catalina Ribas Segura takes us back to the Asian 

strand with her discussion of identity issues in the novel Behind the Moon (2000) by the Chinese 

Australian author Hsu-Ming Teo. In her analysis, Ribas Segura questions the notion of 

“Australianness” and addresses the concepts of belonging and identity in the development of 

some youths of different ethnic backgrounds in the western suburbs of Sydney in the 1990s. In 

her article on the Western-Australian story-teller and poet Alf Taylor, “Literature as Protest and 

Solace: The Verse of Alf Taylor”, Danica Čerče aims for a more expansive definition of 

Indigenous-Australian poetry than is traditionally managed. Rather than inscribing Taylor‟s 

poetry, collected in Singer Songwriter (1992) and Winds (1994), within a narrow politicized 

framework that drowns out the literary qualities of his writing, Čerče takes Taylor‟s oeuvre as 



Coolabah, No.16, 2015, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians / Australian Studies 

Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 

 

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the example that Indigenous poets fuse community responsibility and identity with a rich 

exploration of the inner self, “urg[ing] us to see their careers in a perspective much wider than 

that of social chroniclers and rebels”. In “Negotiating „Negative Capability‟: The Role of Place 

in Writing”, the non-Indigenous poets Lynda Hawryluk and Leni Shilton look at the issue of 

Australian belonging and place by applying John Keats‟s notion of „negative capability‟ (1891, 

p. 48) to their writing. Theirs is a call for writing the Australian self into belonging by shunning 

rational approaches to explain the mystery of (belonging to) place; rather the impact of negative 

capability, which stands for the poet‟s sensory and intuitive openness to the mystery, doubt and 

uncertainty the Australian landscape may inspire, enables the poet to „glimpse‟ a mystic 

connection to the local that goes “beyond the notion of specific place”.  

 

As is habitual in our editions and despite the previous presentation, these articles are listed 

according to their author´s last name in alphabetical order on the contents page so as not to 

predetermine the scope of interconnections these papers may generate. We hope these generous 

contributions will prevent the streams of conversation opened up in our watershed congress from 

drying up. 

 

Martin Renes and Catalina Ribas Segura 

Barcelona, March 2015