AustLit

'The sudden death of Peter Pierce at the relatively young age of 68 has robbed Australian Studies of one of its ablest practitioners. On Tuesday 4 September Peter collapsed in the foyer of the apartment complex in inner city Melbourne where he and wife Rae lived, and died shortly afterwards.' (Introduction)

'Visual representations of colonial violence constitute an overlooked source of evidence that, although shaped by contemporary visual and cultural conventions, allow us to engage with this troubling history in significant ways. The “history wars” of the turn of the millennium have been accused of focusing on disciplinary protocols with the effect of obscuring the moral implications of colonial invasion and dispossession. By contrast, images evoke empathy, creating social relationships across the British Empire that defined identities and aligned viewers with specific communities. Images also return the modern viewer to the emotional and moral intensity of 1830s and 1840s frontier violence in south-eastern Australia. They map colonial “blind spots” by demonstrating the ways that these emotions were politicised to legitimate colonial interests, for example, by directing sympathy towards white colonists, or seeking to evoke compassion for Aboriginal people. From our present-day perspective, these visual images help us to see our “reflection”, and acknowledge the truth of our history and its legacies.' (Publication abstract)

'It has been observed that art is a communicative tool, a way of acting in the world in order to express opinions, attitudes and ways of knowing. The expressive power of art was a recurring theme raised by many of the Aboriginal artists, from New South Wales, who have collaborated with me. Here, artists positioned their work as a communicative tool via which they were able to educate, challenge and connect to their audiences, particularly regarding loaded, complex or sensitive political or personal issues associated with their experiences of being an Aboriginal person in contemporary Australia. In view of the communicative aim of such artists, this article focuses on the various responses – excitement, distress, pleasure, anger – of audiences to the works of Aboriginal artists. Taking as its case study the responses of various commenters on social media, including Herald Sun journalist Andrew Bolt, to an award-winning work by multidisciplinary artist Jason Wing and Wing’s counter-response, the article will explore the way public responses to Aboriginal artworks, articulated online and via print and social media, offer a sometimes unnerving insight into particular iterations of Australian attitudes regarding art, nationality, history, race relations and identity.'  (Publication abstract)

'The dynamic relationship between Aboriginal groups and ethnic immigrants in Australia remains theoretically unconstructed as it largely falls outside the binaries of race and ethnicity. Historically, Aboriginal people have developed longstanding contacts with Asian groups, traversing national, cultural, sexual and legislative boundaries. Although indigeneity and diaspora embody disparate and even opposite meanings, there are synergies between diasporic identities and Aboriginal people who suffer from dislocation due to the enduring impact of colonisation and migration. The postcolonial adaptation of liminality or threshold may provide an apt framework for theorising the literary representation of a convergence of border-crossing and diasporic experiences of Aboriginal and Asian Australians in the marginal, interstitial and in-between spaces. Due to a shared predicament and a sense of comradeship, Aboriginal–Asian encounters forge communitas, which does not suggest inherent subversiveness or unproblematic co-option. This paper considers Ubby’s Underdogs (2011, 2013) by Brenton E. McKenna and A Most Peculiar Act (2014) by Marie Munkara to explore Aboriginal–Asian relations under the White Australia policy. Through the recurrent theme of Japanese and imaginary Chinese invasions, these novels complicate the crossings in the porous and precarious borderlands, remap the intersecting power relations and reroute Aboriginal characters back to the centre.'  (Publication abstract)

'The fictional work of Olga Masters primarily focuses on family and domestic life in rural New South Wales between World War I and World War II. This article examines some forms of pernicious oppression and constrictions that overshadowed the lives of the author’s characters and, in particular, the constraints enforced upon her female characters. The article explores how the notion of community in the author’s fiction prefigures both as pervasive and invasive modes of social power and coercion. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1995), the article contends that the community acts as a collective presence that subjects its members to a form of overarching disciplinary power through the use of constant surveillance, supervision and control.' (Publication abstract)

'This article reframes an icon of twentieth-century cross-cultural folklore. It argues that the protagonist in The Rocky Horror (Picture) Show is both a hybrid of two types of comic entertainers and an example of the way the pantomime tradition travelled between England and Australia. By clarifying what original Rockydirector, the Australian Jim Sharman, likes to call his “colourful past”, and by exploring his many reflections on popular culture, this article maps out his relationship to the aesthetics of the circus world and to clowning in order to understand their echoes in Rocky Horror. Sharman’s numerous references to Australian popular culture unveil a circus-struck theatrical ethos. They also convey that Dr Franknfurter, the Transylvanian scientist protagonist in the musical and film, is funny because he is so much a clown. In fact, this sweet transvestite extraterrestre draws on qualities of two quintessential comic favourites of the circus world: violent clowns and panto dames. The Franknfurter character is thus related to both: the axe-wielding cannibalesque antics of comic madcaps from the (sawdust) stage and the Australian comedians and dame role performers Bobby le Brun and Barry Humphries. Frankie is a blend of particular clown traditions as well as their dashing actualisation.'  (Publication abstract)

'The recent “Uluru Statement from the Heart” (May, 2017), and the Final Report of the Referendum Council (June, 2017) are significant expressions of a rapidly evolving discourse on sovereignty in Australia. Alexis Wright's The Swan Book (2013) is a futuristic meditation on the limits of sovereignty from an Indigenous perspective: what if national borders disappear under the rising waters of global warming? What if national governments are superseded by global rule? The Swan Book explores these scenarios in a complex interplay of utopian and dystopian modes. This article argues that Alexis Wright's work is an instance of how the Indigenous world novel can address real world issues of anthropocene futures, Indigenous rights and national sovereignty.'  (Publication abstract)

'Billy Griffiths, a non-Indigenous Australian historian, has written a comprehensive historical overview of the main characters involved in Australia’s modern-day archaeology and their excavations. Griffiths’ narrative style of writing allows his story to be read by the general population not just those in the scholarly world. Indeed, Griffiths has weaved, with overwhelming historical research data and evidence, a yarn that is accessible to all Australians. In the introduction, Griffiths clearly identifies his purpose for engaging in a field, archaeology, outside of his profession, history. Griffiths feels that undertaking an historical account of recent archaeology provides him the opportunity to belong to a land that his forebears conquered. He believes that Australia’s original inhabitants were discoverers, explorers and colonists, not unlike his ancestors. Griffiths succinctly explains the title, “Deep Time” and “Dreaming”, as a twin revolution and accommodating two intellectual traditions. Griffiths believes he is attempting to merge the relationship between Australia’s past and present, while at the same time acknowledging his limited understanding of Aboriginal cultural, legal and historical information. Griffiths hopes his story creates an international perspective conveying that Indigenous Australian history is dynamic, diverse and ancient.'  (Introduction)

'Without a doubt, the High Court Mabo decision of 1992 represents one of the defining moments in recent Australian history, since it has re-evaluated the relationship between Indigenous and settler-Australians. Yet, despite its significance for the nation as a whole, its consequences for Australia’s literary production, in contrast to its effects on the country’s cultural production more generally (a fully-fledged study on the effects of the Mabo decision on Australian film already appeared in 2004), have only been studied in patches. With his recent study The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction (2018), which is based on his PhD project conducted at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, Geoff Rodoreda attends to this neglect and offers a highly readable account of the ways in which Australian literature has responded to the changed political, cultural and emotional landscapes after Mabo.' (Introduction)