AustLit

This article is one of the two keynote addresses (the other by Henry Reynolds) delivered at the interdisciplinary conference Colonialism and Its Aftermath, held at the University of Tasmania in June, 2004. Tiffin's article builds upon her ongoing critique of speciesism in colonial and postcolonial discourses. Her analysis here focuses on responses to the 2001 intrusion into the Melbourne Botanical Gardens by a colony of flying foxes. She traces the shifting discourse relating to bats, from colonial texts to contemporary reactions to the bat "invasions" (with Ratcliffe's text between), in order to suggest the permeable nature of "the lines between wilderness and lawn that we are intent on maintaining."

Elizabeth Leane argues that polar newspapers function as a colonising device, 'imaginatively transforming the tiny, isolated, and provisional expedition community into an established colony' (27). Leane's analysis focuses on the 'Adelie Blizzard,' the unpublished newspaper of Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antartic Expedition of 1911-1914.

The author notes that McElroy's work is rarely considered in examinations of postcolonial travel writing, a result, he argues, of the ambivalence of postcolonial criticism towards African-American contexts. McElroy's recount of her experiences at Uluru and her potential identification with Indigenous Australians provides the article's title quoatation. As Youngs points out, however, simple identification based on skin colour is complicated by 'linguistic and cultural differences', leading to 'a more nuanced empathy.'