Journal of the association for the study of Australian literature, 2018
Most literary histories of Australian regions are positioned as a small part of a national litera... more Most literary histories of Australian regions are positioned as a small part of a national literary map, meaning that, with the restrictions brought by scope alone, these are inevitably partial, focussing on a handful of representative writers. But there are other challenges, too. ‘Literary history’ in a scholarly sense is a western idea; its tendency to focus on material textual outputs implicitly excludes oral and other modes of narrative. It is therefore a field that could easily, and sometimes willingly, participate in the colonial project which seeks to position pre-colonial time as past and outside the designation of what is culturally significant or potent. We offer some reflections generated by a project which will produce the first dedicated literary history of the Mallee region of north-west Victoria. Exemplifying our observations of regional literary history in Australia, existing Mallee literary history is fragmented and limited, and overwhelmingly, white and male. Discu...
Journal of the association for the study of Australian literature, 2018
Much attention has been given to the representation of place in Australian literature (e.g. Gerst... more Much attention has been given to the representation of place in Australian literature (e.g. Gerster; Darian-Smith, Gunner and Nuttall; Haynes; Cranston and Zeller), but comparably little to this literature’s participation in the production, or making, of place. This special issue brings together scholars working in a field that can be identified by various critical and historical movements in literary and cultural studies which constellate around questions of literature’s intersections with the materiality of place. This field includes literary and cultural geography, psychogeography, critical regionalism, new materialisms, spatial history, and place-making studies. While diverse and dynamic, a commonality across these theoretical and methodological approaches is the understanding of place as an unbounded, non-geographically determined, and relationally constituted, real-world context for practices of living and meaning-making; and the recognition of complex, more than material, and...
The term 'place made after the story' (Barton and Barton 2004; Carter 2015) acknowledges the powe... more The term 'place made after the story' (Barton and Barton 2004; Carter 2015) acknowledges the power that stories have on emergent communities and their more-than-human worlds. It is a concept inspired by Indigenous place-making practices in Australia (and the land now called Australia), which are performative and ephemeral as well as material, understood as constellations of space and time brought into being by song, ritual, and other collective storytelling practices (Watson 2009). As this position paper will advance, place-making through narrative practice is not isolated to Indigenous Australian culture, but is, rather, a relation that is immanent to all acts of storytelling. In line with this, the colonisation of Australia, and subsequent engagements with this history, can be understood as narrative, as much as material, processes. As we go onto suggest, the question of literary geography in Australia prompts a reconsideration of literary history that takes into account an expanded, geographically inflected, field of story-telling. These questions have come to light in the context of our ongoing project of literary history, in the Mallee region of southeastern Australia. What happens if we consider the place
How do we know climate change? How do we encounter its reality? This question brings to mind a hi... more How do we know climate change? How do we encounter its reality? This question brings to mind a history of scepticism and denial-those who ask 'where is the evidence?' against scientific efforts to model and map out predicted temperature rises. Yet the word prediction is telling here: how can you know something that is still unfolding? In order to respond to the manifesting consequences of environmental change, there is an imperative to capture and convey change in the midst of process. Somewhere between scepticism and prediction is the problem of representation-a concern that unites scientists and artists in the desire to say something of truth about the world. Signs of change obsess us and we look to science for orientation through these. Poetic representation is valued as a tool of communication and inspiration-to educate, warn and motivate responses. Yet as the consequences of climate change continue to manifest, representation sits ambiguously in a context of these materially-grounded concerns. This paper offers a rethinking of the role of representation in environmental discourse. It suggests that rather than representation's inability to access the real, the more pressing issue is the relationship between humans and the non-human environment that modes of representation assert. It is ultimately our ontological and epistemological traditions, and the work of representation within these, that determine our distance from or proximity to the elements of a transforming ecology.
This collection of essays, grouped under the theme of 'Naturecultures', offers a range of approac... more This collection of essays, grouped under the theme of 'Naturecultures', offers a range of approaches to a common concern: to decentre humans from our ontological, ethical-political and cultural stories. The imperative to think about non-human matter in ethical-political terms is fuelled by the environmental calamities currently facing the Earth. But it is inspired by the recognition that humans and non-humans are intimately bound in ways that put into question some of the fundamental precepts of western thought.
Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour S.A.C.. Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour S.A.C... more Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour S.A.C.. Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour S.A.C.. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit. Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse https://www.cairn.info/revue-anthropologie-des-connaissances-2018-4-page-681.htm Découvrir le sommaire de ce numéro, suivre la revue par email, s'abonner... Flashez ce QR Code pour accéder à la page de ce numéro sur Cairn.info.
A not-so-quiet revolution seems to be occurring in wealthy capitalist societies-supermarkets sell... more A not-so-quiet revolution seems to be occurring in wealthy capitalist societies-supermarkets selling ‘ guilt free’ Fairtrade products; lifestyle TV gurus exhorting us to eat less, buy local and go green; neighbourhood action groups bent on ‘ swopping not ...
The problem with not seeing waste as matter is that cultural frames, from moralism to green ideol... more The problem with not seeing waste as matter is that cultural frames, from moralism to green ideology, reduce it to an effect of human action and manipulation. If waste is ‘socially constructed’, if it is merely a product of human action and classification then its easy to imagine a future where new ecological practices render it redundant. It’s also easy to use waste to reveal the logic or illogic of a culture, to diagnose the social through the textualisation of garbage. But in the demand to show how waste is just an effect of cultural practices—from environmental ethics to consumer capitalism—the active connections between humans and wasted material in which both are produced are hard to see. The action seems to flow all one way. Waste is reduced to a product of historically variable human practices. It becomes a slave to the vagaries of desire, and its ‘material recalcitrance’, to use Jane Bennett’s term, is denied.Yet surely what worries us most about waste is its material recal...
Australia write straight into one of the most discussed and contentious issues of our time: fresh... more Australia write straight into one of the most discussed and contentious issues of our time: fresh water. The book is an edited collection of eighteen essays, by twenty-seven authors from around Australia. The authors write from professions and perspectives ranging across the visual arts, academia, Indigenous First Nation organisations, and government natural resource management. The book's origins lie in a two-day workshop held in Adelaide, supported by the Hawke Research Institute at the University of Adelaide, the Academy of the Social Sciences, and the Academy of the Humanities. The workshop's focus on 'water justice' translates to the essays in the collection, which illuminate issues over 'fresh water' (mostly surface river water), with concerns for current, past, and future social and environmental (in)justice in Australia. Fresh Water attempts to create interdisciplinary conversations about water in Australia by bringing together such diverse perspectives. Underpinning the diversity of views is a bass chord that resonates with each essay. In introducing the collection Emily Potter and Stephen McKenzie highlight the deeper connection between the chapters: 'At the heart of the book is the relationship between humans and water: the tensions born of an intimacy predicated on our physical needs and a Western cultural history of environmental exploitation' (3). The strength of this volume is that the authors do not shy from the big issues, the political and social entanglements of water in riverine communities, injustice in access to water, and the need for change in government policy and non-indigenous conceptions of water more generally. Deborah Bird Rose (whose chapter 'Justice and longing' begins the book) calls for a 'new ethos' of water that is 'cross-cultural and inclusive'. Rose argues that we need to live for water, 'not just make a living from it' (original italics. 8). Drawing on her experiences working with Aboriginal communities on land claims from 1982 to 2006, Rose explores Indigenous connections with water, and what they reveal about western water values, as articulated in science, legislation, and everyday imaginings of water in Australia. Ecologists, such as those who worked to prevent irrigation dams being built upstream from Cooper's Creek, recognised the need to conserve
The release of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) report, Bringing Them Ho... more The release of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) report, Bringing Them Home (1997), sent shock waves through the Australian nation. 1 The commission received over 585 submissions from witnesses, institutions and interested parties in every state and the territory that documented the history, effects, and consequences of the forcible removal of mixed race children from their families between 1910 and 1970. During that time it is estimated that between 50,000 to 100,000 children, mainly girls, were removed and placed in orphanages, mission schools, and foster care for the purpose of gradually assimilating them into the White population. Witnesses to the commission gave evidence of the trauma of removal, and how children, referred to in the report as the Stolen Generation, typically lost their language, cultural knowledge, and connection to family and cultural heritage. The HREOC Inquiry, in recognition of the gross violations of human rights that had occurred under the guise of assimilation, made fifty-four recommendations 'directed to healing and reconciliation for the benefit of all Australians'.2 These included the pursuit of measures to restore land, language, and culture and to ensure Indigenous self-determination and nondiscrimination in line with international standards. The report also proposed an annual Sorry Day to commemorate the history of forced separations and their effects, and called for a national apology as a gesture towards reconciliation. The BREOC not only presented the testimony of witnesses within a human rights framework, it also called for an active ethical engagement on the part of its readers to become involved in a process that might bring about justice by acknowledging the loss and harm that had been done to Indigenous witnesses and their families. The national government, under the leadership of John Howard, refused to apologise, arguing that people in the present were not responsible for what had happened in the past, and that the policies and practices of assimilation, whatever their consequences on the lives of the children) were ~ell intentioned'. Although his remarks sparked outrage from many parts of the community, in the years since the release of the report widespread public sympathy for the plight of the children and their families has waned as the country, under continued liberal Party leadership, turns increasingly towards denial and wilful forgetting. The premiere in 2002 of the internationally acclaimed film Rabbit-Proof Fence, directed by Philip Noyce with a screenplay by Christine Olsen, proved to be a remarkable exception to the general trend. Not only did the film capture widespread media attention in Australia, it also attracted enthusiastic audiences from around the world. The film, based on Doris Pilkington Garimara's
This paper proposes an atmospheric understanding of regional writing, and considers a critical me... more This paper proposes an atmospheric understanding of regional writing, and considers a critical methodology for assembling a literary history of the Kurangk/Coorong region of South Australia. In opposition to literary history guided by national forms, this methodology works from within the shifting entanglements of postcolonial place and its many stories, recognising the material impacts of poetic practice on more-than-human environments. The future of the Kurangk/Coorong is caught up in how this place has, and continues to be, imagined and narrated.
Thea Astley’s millennial novel Drylands, a self-declared ‘book for the world’s last reader’ (1999... more Thea Astley’s millennial novel Drylands, a self-declared ‘book for the world’s last reader’ (1999, title page), offers an opportunity to reappraise literary narrative and creative experimentation in a time of climate change. This essay takes this up by reading Astley’s text as a paradoxical account of literature’s failings to either nourish or repair a drought-ridden, economically, environmentally and empathically beleaguered town in regional Australia. Astley’s vision is ostensibly declentionist, wherein the only hope for the future seems to lie in the inevitable ruins of the present. Within these ruins lies the fate of particular, historical creative forms, most notably the literary novel, which, as an expression of Western epistemology, is now evacuated of meaning. On the one hand, Astley seems to offer no reversed fortune for her characters or the textual practice that ironically brings them to life; however, the essay offers a further, dissonant reading of the text through a pe...
Journal of the association for the study of Australian literature, 2018
Most literary histories of Australian regions are positioned as a small part of a national litera... more Most literary histories of Australian regions are positioned as a small part of a national literary map, meaning that, with the restrictions brought by scope alone, these are inevitably partial, focussing on a handful of representative writers. But there are other challenges, too. ‘Literary history’ in a scholarly sense is a western idea; its tendency to focus on material textual outputs implicitly excludes oral and other modes of narrative. It is therefore a field that could easily, and sometimes willingly, participate in the colonial project which seeks to position pre-colonial time as past and outside the designation of what is culturally significant or potent. We offer some reflections generated by a project which will produce the first dedicated literary history of the Mallee region of north-west Victoria. Exemplifying our observations of regional literary history in Australia, existing Mallee literary history is fragmented and limited, and overwhelmingly, white and male. Discu...
Journal of the association for the study of Australian literature, 2018
Much attention has been given to the representation of place in Australian literature (e.g. Gerst... more Much attention has been given to the representation of place in Australian literature (e.g. Gerster; Darian-Smith, Gunner and Nuttall; Haynes; Cranston and Zeller), but comparably little to this literature’s participation in the production, or making, of place. This special issue brings together scholars working in a field that can be identified by various critical and historical movements in literary and cultural studies which constellate around questions of literature’s intersections with the materiality of place. This field includes literary and cultural geography, psychogeography, critical regionalism, new materialisms, spatial history, and place-making studies. While diverse and dynamic, a commonality across these theoretical and methodological approaches is the understanding of place as an unbounded, non-geographically determined, and relationally constituted, real-world context for practices of living and meaning-making; and the recognition of complex, more than material, and...
The term 'place made after the story' (Barton and Barton 2004; Carter 2015) acknowledges the powe... more The term 'place made after the story' (Barton and Barton 2004; Carter 2015) acknowledges the power that stories have on emergent communities and their more-than-human worlds. It is a concept inspired by Indigenous place-making practices in Australia (and the land now called Australia), which are performative and ephemeral as well as material, understood as constellations of space and time brought into being by song, ritual, and other collective storytelling practices (Watson 2009). As this position paper will advance, place-making through narrative practice is not isolated to Indigenous Australian culture, but is, rather, a relation that is immanent to all acts of storytelling. In line with this, the colonisation of Australia, and subsequent engagements with this history, can be understood as narrative, as much as material, processes. As we go onto suggest, the question of literary geography in Australia prompts a reconsideration of literary history that takes into account an expanded, geographically inflected, field of story-telling. These questions have come to light in the context of our ongoing project of literary history, in the Mallee region of southeastern Australia. What happens if we consider the place
How do we know climate change? How do we encounter its reality? This question brings to mind a hi... more How do we know climate change? How do we encounter its reality? This question brings to mind a history of scepticism and denial-those who ask 'where is the evidence?' against scientific efforts to model and map out predicted temperature rises. Yet the word prediction is telling here: how can you know something that is still unfolding? In order to respond to the manifesting consequences of environmental change, there is an imperative to capture and convey change in the midst of process. Somewhere between scepticism and prediction is the problem of representation-a concern that unites scientists and artists in the desire to say something of truth about the world. Signs of change obsess us and we look to science for orientation through these. Poetic representation is valued as a tool of communication and inspiration-to educate, warn and motivate responses. Yet as the consequences of climate change continue to manifest, representation sits ambiguously in a context of these materially-grounded concerns. This paper offers a rethinking of the role of representation in environmental discourse. It suggests that rather than representation's inability to access the real, the more pressing issue is the relationship between humans and the non-human environment that modes of representation assert. It is ultimately our ontological and epistemological traditions, and the work of representation within these, that determine our distance from or proximity to the elements of a transforming ecology.
This collection of essays, grouped under the theme of 'Naturecultures', offers a range of approac... more This collection of essays, grouped under the theme of 'Naturecultures', offers a range of approaches to a common concern: to decentre humans from our ontological, ethical-political and cultural stories. The imperative to think about non-human matter in ethical-political terms is fuelled by the environmental calamities currently facing the Earth. But it is inspired by the recognition that humans and non-humans are intimately bound in ways that put into question some of the fundamental precepts of western thought.
Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour S.A.C.. Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour S.A.C... more Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour S.A.C.. Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour S.A.C.. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit. Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse https://www.cairn.info/revue-anthropologie-des-connaissances-2018-4-page-681.htm Découvrir le sommaire de ce numéro, suivre la revue par email, s'abonner... Flashez ce QR Code pour accéder à la page de ce numéro sur Cairn.info.
A not-so-quiet revolution seems to be occurring in wealthy capitalist societies-supermarkets sell... more A not-so-quiet revolution seems to be occurring in wealthy capitalist societies-supermarkets selling ‘ guilt free’ Fairtrade products; lifestyle TV gurus exhorting us to eat less, buy local and go green; neighbourhood action groups bent on ‘ swopping not ...
The problem with not seeing waste as matter is that cultural frames, from moralism to green ideol... more The problem with not seeing waste as matter is that cultural frames, from moralism to green ideology, reduce it to an effect of human action and manipulation. If waste is ‘socially constructed’, if it is merely a product of human action and classification then its easy to imagine a future where new ecological practices render it redundant. It’s also easy to use waste to reveal the logic or illogic of a culture, to diagnose the social through the textualisation of garbage. But in the demand to show how waste is just an effect of cultural practices—from environmental ethics to consumer capitalism—the active connections between humans and wasted material in which both are produced are hard to see. The action seems to flow all one way. Waste is reduced to a product of historically variable human practices. It becomes a slave to the vagaries of desire, and its ‘material recalcitrance’, to use Jane Bennett’s term, is denied.Yet surely what worries us most about waste is its material recal...
Australia write straight into one of the most discussed and contentious issues of our time: fresh... more Australia write straight into one of the most discussed and contentious issues of our time: fresh water. The book is an edited collection of eighteen essays, by twenty-seven authors from around Australia. The authors write from professions and perspectives ranging across the visual arts, academia, Indigenous First Nation organisations, and government natural resource management. The book's origins lie in a two-day workshop held in Adelaide, supported by the Hawke Research Institute at the University of Adelaide, the Academy of the Social Sciences, and the Academy of the Humanities. The workshop's focus on 'water justice' translates to the essays in the collection, which illuminate issues over 'fresh water' (mostly surface river water), with concerns for current, past, and future social and environmental (in)justice in Australia. Fresh Water attempts to create interdisciplinary conversations about water in Australia by bringing together such diverse perspectives. Underpinning the diversity of views is a bass chord that resonates with each essay. In introducing the collection Emily Potter and Stephen McKenzie highlight the deeper connection between the chapters: 'At the heart of the book is the relationship between humans and water: the tensions born of an intimacy predicated on our physical needs and a Western cultural history of environmental exploitation' (3). The strength of this volume is that the authors do not shy from the big issues, the political and social entanglements of water in riverine communities, injustice in access to water, and the need for change in government policy and non-indigenous conceptions of water more generally. Deborah Bird Rose (whose chapter 'Justice and longing' begins the book) calls for a 'new ethos' of water that is 'cross-cultural and inclusive'. Rose argues that we need to live for water, 'not just make a living from it' (original italics. 8). Drawing on her experiences working with Aboriginal communities on land claims from 1982 to 2006, Rose explores Indigenous connections with water, and what they reveal about western water values, as articulated in science, legislation, and everyday imaginings of water in Australia. Ecologists, such as those who worked to prevent irrigation dams being built upstream from Cooper's Creek, recognised the need to conserve
The release of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) report, Bringing Them Ho... more The release of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) report, Bringing Them Home (1997), sent shock waves through the Australian nation. 1 The commission received over 585 submissions from witnesses, institutions and interested parties in every state and the territory that documented the history, effects, and consequences of the forcible removal of mixed race children from their families between 1910 and 1970. During that time it is estimated that between 50,000 to 100,000 children, mainly girls, were removed and placed in orphanages, mission schools, and foster care for the purpose of gradually assimilating them into the White population. Witnesses to the commission gave evidence of the trauma of removal, and how children, referred to in the report as the Stolen Generation, typically lost their language, cultural knowledge, and connection to family and cultural heritage. The HREOC Inquiry, in recognition of the gross violations of human rights that had occurred under the guise of assimilation, made fifty-four recommendations 'directed to healing and reconciliation for the benefit of all Australians'.2 These included the pursuit of measures to restore land, language, and culture and to ensure Indigenous self-determination and nondiscrimination in line with international standards. The report also proposed an annual Sorry Day to commemorate the history of forced separations and their effects, and called for a national apology as a gesture towards reconciliation. The BREOC not only presented the testimony of witnesses within a human rights framework, it also called for an active ethical engagement on the part of its readers to become involved in a process that might bring about justice by acknowledging the loss and harm that had been done to Indigenous witnesses and their families. The national government, under the leadership of John Howard, refused to apologise, arguing that people in the present were not responsible for what had happened in the past, and that the policies and practices of assimilation, whatever their consequences on the lives of the children) were ~ell intentioned'. Although his remarks sparked outrage from many parts of the community, in the years since the release of the report widespread public sympathy for the plight of the children and their families has waned as the country, under continued liberal Party leadership, turns increasingly towards denial and wilful forgetting. The premiere in 2002 of the internationally acclaimed film Rabbit-Proof Fence, directed by Philip Noyce with a screenplay by Christine Olsen, proved to be a remarkable exception to the general trend. Not only did the film capture widespread media attention in Australia, it also attracted enthusiastic audiences from around the world. The film, based on Doris Pilkington Garimara's
This paper proposes an atmospheric understanding of regional writing, and considers a critical me... more This paper proposes an atmospheric understanding of regional writing, and considers a critical methodology for assembling a literary history of the Kurangk/Coorong region of South Australia. In opposition to literary history guided by national forms, this methodology works from within the shifting entanglements of postcolonial place and its many stories, recognising the material impacts of poetic practice on more-than-human environments. The future of the Kurangk/Coorong is caught up in how this place has, and continues to be, imagined and narrated.
Thea Astley’s millennial novel Drylands, a self-declared ‘book for the world’s last reader’ (1999... more Thea Astley’s millennial novel Drylands, a self-declared ‘book for the world’s last reader’ (1999, title page), offers an opportunity to reappraise literary narrative and creative experimentation in a time of climate change. This essay takes this up by reading Astley’s text as a paradoxical account of literature’s failings to either nourish or repair a drought-ridden, economically, environmentally and empathically beleaguered town in regional Australia. Astley’s vision is ostensibly declentionist, wherein the only hope for the future seems to lie in the inevitable ruins of the present. Within these ruins lies the fate of particular, historical creative forms, most notably the literary novel, which, as an expression of Western epistemology, is now evacuated of meaning. On the one hand, Astley seems to offer no reversed fortune for her characters or the textual practice that ironically brings them to life; however, the essay offers a further, dissonant reading of the text through a pe...
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