AustLit

Beirut-born Australian cultural theorist Ghassan Hage finds an unexpected linkage between the 'anti-intellectual' views and range of worries of his grandmother and the 'White-and-very-worried-about-the-nation' backlash most graphically embodied in Pauline Hanson and her One Nation movement.' Such linkage is replicable both within this author's family experience and the wider Aboriginal community. Self-constructions of 'Whiteness' by non-Anglo 'others' involves conscious or unconscious pursuance of strategies involving consonance with views Hage characterizes as 'fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society'. Potential exists for significant personal and social costs to be incurred. Larbalestier's 'imagined space of 'white Australia ", her core of (White) Australian identity, can only be occupied by 'others' through significant behavioural self-censoring and cognitive morphing. Read estimates 100,000 Australians of Aboriginal descent either are denied or deny their Aboriginality. This paper postulates the existence of a phenomenon of 'strategic Whiteness'. It articulates modes through which 'others' pursue such a strategy and explores the complexity of the possible consequences for health and well- being.'  (Publication abstract)

'This paper is concerned with a very violent incident that was carried out by the perpetrators of the Myall Creek Massacre after that massacre in 1838 and when the party was still on their killing spree. I apologise for the particular distress writing about such things may cause for the Wirrayaraay peoples, for other Indigenous peoples and for women in particular, but also for others who may have experienced direct violence. It is very understandable that you would not want to read again the detail of such events. I do not see my decision to write about such things as at all straightforward and I remain anxious about my ability to tread a path between ideas of testimony, wanting to write it differently and wanting to expand what writing can do for a hopeful postcolonialism.'  (Introduction)

'In this paper I want to reflect on the ways in which I work with teacher education students to assist them to read the cultural codes through which they/we have constructed their/our own narratives and histories and to identify problematic areas when doing this work. I want to focus in particular on 'storytelling', a teaching strategy that seeks to make visible how whiteness functions as a historical and social construction. I conclude with the contention that becoming aware of our own racial positioning is not quite enough if whiteness studies are to progress the work of 'understanding and dismantling racism'.  (Introduction)