Hasil untuk "History of Oceania (South Seas)"

Laura Campbell

This article analyses the wave of avant garde art movements that arrived on our shores in the late nineteenth century and its impact on applied art and the general lifestyles of artists and patrons in New Zealand. With particular reference to Kennett Watkins’ speech given at a meeting of the New Zealand Art Students’ Association’ in 1883, this account looks at the display of Māori objects in both public settings and in the privacy of the artist’s studio. It also acknowledges the role of illustrated magazines in promoting the public profile of professional artists working in Auckland at the turn of the twentieth century. Many patrons in the elite social circles of Auckland admired artists such as Charles F. Goldie for being arbiters of taste and hisbeautifully decorated studio both linked him to the ways European academic artists presented themselves, while using local artifacts to connect his practice to New Zealand. The dispersal of illustrated art magazines in New Zealand became a marketing tool for artists to promote their art practice but, most of all, elevate their status as members of the social elite in urban centres.

Gail Jones

Fra Angelico’s painting, Pious Women at the Tomb (1440), depicts four tragically bewildered women looking for the absent body of Christ. One holds her hand at her brow like an explorer, and is peering down into his marble casket as into a vastly deep well. Three others stand by, sadly dumfounded. Behind the women, floating in air, is an image of the risen Christ, autonomous, autotelic, blazing in a mystical disc. But the women all look the wrong way and are left bereft. An angel points to the vision, but still their gaze is misdirected. A Dominican monk kneels in reverence before the empty space; a passage of gospel script instructs as to the correct sign to read; still, the four women stare into darkness

Thor Kerr, Shaphan Cox

This paper is directed towards furthering understandings of popular television news reporting on Aboriginal solidarity gatherings at Matagarup on Heirisson Island, a state-registered Aboriginal Heritage Site in Perth, Western Australia. In doing so, it also seeks to identify the practical limits of heritage making in disrupting the legitimization of state action not recognizing such heritage claims. In 2012 and 2015, Aboriginal citizens gathering and camping at the heritage site were subject to police raids legitimized by popular media organizations reporting a breach of municipal bylaws prohibiting camping and fires on Heirisson Island. This paper examines a shift in popular television reporting over the three years towards acknowledging that Aboriginal people should be able to assemble, without police harassment, around a fire at the site. The most radical shift in reporting is observable in Nine News coverage of events. For this reason, eight televised items from Nine News in 2015 are analysed alongside Nine News reporting described in the authors’ previous study of reporting of events at Matagarup in 2012. The paper identifies and discusses the implications of two key dialogical processes in the news production: Firstly, a process of cross-cultural reading and shared understandings of fire as hearth, and secondly a process of reproducing a dominant discursive tradition locating home for Aboriginal people outside the city.

Julieta Mallari

After the eruption of Mt Pinatubo (Philippines) in 1991, most Aytas living at the foot of the volcano were resettled in lowland areas. Breaking with the past entailed a painful struggle particularly among these indigenous people who were uprooted from their source of life. As they tried to adapt to their new environment, they had no choice but to conform in re-establishing their habitat and in attempting to find ways of achieving a better future. Since formal education was a most promising venture, there were Ayta parents who welcomed the scholarships offered by the government or the private sector to their children. This study features interviews with Pinatubo Aytas—who were given the opportunity to finish college—and highlights their struggle as they aspire for socio-economic mobility. The new generation of Aytas has become an emerging breed of acculturation that puts their identity fundamentally at stake: their case demonstrates a “struggle of identification,” to use Bhabha’s term. Their experience of self-consciousness in their psychic identification with the dominant culture or their alacritous acceptance of their assimilated condition remains a critical issue calling for further inquiry.

Cornelis Martin Renes

This paper locates the postcolonial crime novel as a space for disenfranchised groups to write back to the marginalisation inherent in the process of colonisation, and explores the example of Australia. From its inception in the mid-19th century, Australian crime fiction reflected upon the challenging harshness and otherness of the Australian experience for the free and convict settler, expelled from the metropole. It created a series of popular subgenres derived from the convict narrative proper, while more ‘standard’ modes of crime fiction, popularised in and through British and American crime fiction, were late to develop. Whereas Australian crime fiction has given expression to the white experience of the continent in manifold ways, up until recently it made no room for Indigenous voices – with the exception of the classic Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte series written by the prolific Arthur Upfield in the first half of the 20th century. For the longest time, this absence reflected the dispossession, dispersal and disenfranchisement of the colonised Indigenous peoples at large; there were neither Aboriginal voices nor Aboriginal authors, which made the textual space of the Australian crime novel a discursive terra nullius. This paper will look at the only Indigenous-Australian author to date with a substantial body of work in crime fiction, Philip McLaren, and elucidate how his four crime novels break new ground in Australian crime fiction by embedding themselves within a political framework of Aboriginal resilience and resistance to neo/colonialism. Written as of the 1990s, McLaren’s oeuvre is eclectic in that it does not respond to traditional formats of Australian crime fiction, shifts between generic subtypes and makes incursions into other genres. The paper concludes that McLaren’s oeuvre has not been conceived of as the work of a crime writer per se, but rather that its form and content are deeply informed by the racist violence and oppression that still affects Indigenous-Australian society today, the expression of which the crime novel is particularly well geared to.

Sue Ballyn

This article centres on the first part of James Cameron’s 1878 biography of Adelaida de la Thoreza, entitled Adelaide de la Thoreza: A Chequered Career, in order to briefly discuss the problematics of biography as a literary genre, but in particular to reveal what appears to be a reconstruction of identity in the figure of Adelaide. Although the discussion will leave many questions unanswered due to the lack of documentary evidence, this very lack of evidence will allow for a series of “reasonable doubts” to cast their shadow over the veracity of Cameron’s text.

Alejandra Moreno Álvarez

Veronica Brady, vigorous supporter of Aboriginal causes and deeply concerned with social-injustice issues, underlined that Anglo-Australians were to be excommunicated from the land until they would come to terms with it and its first peoples (in Jones 1997). Nearly twenty years after this statement was postulated, it is my purpose in this paper to look at the land from an Anglo-Australian and non-Indigenous Australian perspective in order to assess if Australian contemporary society has moved beyond what Brady considered a “super ego status” and reconciled to the presence not only of its Indigenous, but also its non-Indigenous others. To do so I will exemplify novels which are part of and influenced by the matrix of relations and social forces in which non-indigenous Australian writers are situated on, including Suneeta Peres da Costa’s Homework (1999) and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2013).

Justin Dabner

The great multicultural experiment that is Australia has engendered a reconsideration of core values. Even the traditionally conservative legal system has not been immune. While the law remains anchored in its British Christian common-law traditions, the influence of other cultures and beliefs are emerging. Taking the term multiculturalism to encompass all cultures, including indigenous peoples as well as new comers, two instances of this are the partial accommodation of Indigenous customary law and a debate over the accommodation of Islamic law principles. The adoption of “foreign” legal concepts poses a dilemma for a liberal democratic society. On one hand, such a society might be expected to embrace wholesale legal plurality. However, there may be some foreign legal principles that are resisted on the basis that they are unacceptable to a free and equal society. The challenge is how to acknowledge the customary and religious laws of minorities whilst establishing one legal framework that applies to all, equally, and without discrimination and protects vulnerable parties. This article explores the implications for the legal system of a multicultural Australia. Taking the instances of Indigenous and Islamic law, it will be observed that legal plurality exists in Australia but largely in the shadows where the vulnerable of society lack protection. It proposes an institutional response that might help shine a light on these shadows.

Lynda Hawryluk, Leni Shilton

Taking its lead from the poet John Keats‟ notion of „negative capability‟ (1891, p. 48), this paper explores the methodology of representing landscapes in writing, specifically using place to effect the process of „…being capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubt, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…‟ (ibid). Keats refers to the poet as „taking part‟ in the life of the poem (1891, p. 48). Being in the poem this way attempts to allow the reader to experience the emotion of the poem. Mary Oliver extrapolated this by referring to „the “mere” diction of the poem [being] the vehicle that holds then transfers from the page to the reader an absolutely essential quality of real feeling‟ (1994, p 84). This paper focuses on the work of two Australian writers whose work captures in verse a sense of connection to rugged and remote terrains. To evoke this sense of connection, Keats‟ negative capability comes into play. This moment is described here as a metaphysical space where a meditative state provides the writer with moments described in this paper as a „glimpse‟. The „glimpse‟ is a recognition of that moment of connection, without which „poetry cannot happen‟ (Oliver, 1994 p. 84). For our purposes here, we read this as being about the connection to a place as written on the page and how that then broadens out upon reading to become a connection to something beyond the notion of specific place. Keats own words speak to this possibility, of allowing uncertainty to provide a sense of meaning and connection. This paper demonstrates, via creative practice and the work of like-minded Australian poets, the internal and external processes that take place to facilitate the „glimpse‟ and inform our own writing about landscapes. This writing is individually informed by knowledge about environment and notions of poetic space, where „aspects of the unconscious move into consciousness‟ (Hetherington, 2012 p. 8). The authors will explore the commonalities and distinctions between their work, using brief examples.

John barnes

Book Review of Paul Eggert, Biography of a Book: Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils. Sydney University Press/Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013 Henry Lawson, While the Billy Boils. The Original Newspaper Versions, edited by Paul Eggert, explanatory notes by Elizabeth Webby. Sydney University Press, 2013.

Janie Conway-Herron

John Ryan

This paper explores curricula where a cultural study of texts offers opportunities for New South Wales high school students to consider the discourses and stories that have continued to preoccupy and shape their own society and lives these last hundred and fifty years. Walter Benjamin’s astute observation that Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre provides the starting point for the discussion. In particular, the paper will explore the praxis of cultural studies scholar and novelist Gail Jones whose interests in modernity, memory and image currently engage high school students in their final year of study.

Maricel Oró Piqueras

An accumulation of years brings with it an accumulation of experiences. The revision of such experiences usually becomes more recurrent after retirement, a transition time from one period of life to another and, as such, a time in which we, human beings, have a tendency to take stock of our lives. This is actually one of the main issues present in Julian Barnes's last novel The Sense of an Ending (2011). When the main protagonist, a retired man quite comfortable and contented with his present life, receives an unexpected inheritance from the mother of a girlfriend from his university years, he is forced to track down a part of his life that he had left at the back of his mind a long time ago. As he explains his story, the protagonist and narrator of the novel raises a number of questions related to the quality and function of memory as one gets into old age. He experiments the unreliability of memory and questions to what extent memory is constructed through the remembered emotions that invaded him over that episode of his life rather than through the events as they actually took place. On the other hand, the act of revisiting and revising that specific episode, brings with it feelings of guilt and remorse as the protagonist realises that his past acts were not as noble as he remembered them to be. However, these acts are part of the past and they cannot be changed; thus, another question that the novel raises is how to account for those actions of which one does not feel proud and, more importantly, how to manage those bad memories as one gets older

Pauline Mitchell

Francesc Llauradó i Duran

Food Demand. Food Supply.

Sally Brown, Ray Norman, Bill Boyd

For quite a long time it has been claimed that cultural production in Tasmania has an inimitable and idiosyncratic place within the scheme of things. Sally Brown, a young Tasmanian designer, maker, artist, is unlikely to make this kind of claim for her work. Nonetheless, there is a particular sensibility evident in her work that it is doubtful that one might find anywhere other than in Tasmania – or made by someone of an older generation. This paper attempts to unpick, through four reflections upon Sally’s work, some of the thinking to do with the placedness, the vernacular social paradigm, the subliminal politics, the ‘crafting’ and the cultural savvy that gives Sally Brown’s work its presence. The questions that hang in the air around a collection of Sally Brown’s work are those to do with the ways local cultural imperatives might shape and make places they are found in, and in what ways might places shape the cultural realities that inhabit them. The following reflections on Sally’s work are distilled from email and blog conversations.

Ray Norman

This paper sets out to interrogate Tasmanianness and its placemaking. The cultural landscape and social realities lived out in Tasmania are constructed around contested and contentious imaginings of place and the histories, the stories, that belong to it. In the end the question hanging in the air is to do with place and culture and ‘culture’s role’ in shaping ‘place’ – landscapes, artmaking, museums, etc. Tasmania, ringed as it is with water offers a model of containment that allows for the kind of prodding and poking not easily done elsewhere. Also, it has a history of a kind that is not easily found elsewhere. Nonetheless, like places elsewhere Tasmania has idiosyncratic stories that seem to wet everything all at once and all the time.

Susan Ballyn

Introduction to Volume

Roger Bonastre

The work and career of Midnight Oil illustrate a case of interaction between culture and politics in Australia. Furthermore they represent an example of social commitment from the sphere of urban popular culture. For a quarter of a century Midnight Oil offered a critical and ideological interpretation of the Australian social and political evolution. Aware of and sensitive to changes and events happening around them, five Sydneysiders thought about Australian identity in terms of what they considered to be their national challenges from a universal perspective. Hence, they approached issues like pacifism, Indigenous rights and environmentalism and developed a social and political discourse based on the defence of human rights and a condemnation of capitalist excesses. Through more than a hundred songs and almost two thousand gigs the band urged politicians to reassess the institutions. At the same time they criticized people’s apathy asking them for a deeper engagement with the development of the country’s welfare. Finally, in December 2002, Peter Garrett quit his singer-activist journey to launch a political career by joining the Australian Labor Party, for which he is the current Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth in the Julia Gillard Government. It is thus that now we can make sense of the extent to which the political and social message of a rock band can actually generate enough credibility to allow for the lead singer´s transition from the stage to parliament.

Ulla Rahbek

This paper discusses Marion Halligan’s non-fiction, particularly her writing on food: Those Women who go to Hotels, Eat my Words, Cockles of the Heart, Out of the Picture, and The Taste of Memory. The focus is on how Halligan deconstructs and reconstruct a mythology of food, in a Barthesian sense, revealing the contradictions at the heart of food mythology. The texts lay bare Halligan’s own personal and at times idiosyncratic mythology of food, where food is much more that just that. Venturing into areas of autobiography, memory, travel, place and gardens, this paper discusses how Halligan’s mythologizing of food doubles up, especially in her most recent food writing, as a rethinking and celebration of suburbia, which is figured as a site where nature and culture meet, and where paradise can be regained.