HJEAS Australian Issue, Spring/Fall 2006

ABSTRACTS

(in alphabetical order by author)

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Michael Ackland (Monash University)

The Triumphant Word: Malouf’s Heideggerian Vision in An Imaginary Life

Malouf remarked that he had found in Martin Heidegger’s thought all that he himself had felt, thought, and written about in his early work. This proposition is tested in terms of Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, with specific reference to Heidegger’s notions of the abyss, language, and transfiguration, all of which have close fictional parallels in Malouf’s novel. Direct influence is neither argued for nor explicitly excluded, although it is demonstrated how Heidegger’s work helps clarify significantly the implications of Ovid’s sojourn and adventures in Tomis.

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Bárbara Arizti Martín (University of Zaragoza)

Fathercare in Tim Winton’s Fiction

In his 1983 study The Changing Role of Fathers, the Australian psychologist Graeme Russell analyses the current patterns of participation by fathers in child care, and concludes that a new role for fathers will probably be the most important change in the family in the immediate future. There is, however, in his opinion, an urgent need for models, since it is still difficult to find examples in popular culture and the media of men caring for children. This paper aims at studying Tim Winton’s fiction, himself an atypical father, in search of alternative models of fatherhood. Winton’s portraits of caring fathers are approached from the perspective of ethical criticism, in particular Andrew Gibson’s “ethics of affect,” based on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity.

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Roslyn Atkinson (Supreme Court of Queensland)

Denial and Loss: Obstacles to Litigation in Stolen Generations Cases

In August 2004, the Forgotten Australians report revisited the issue of how children were mistreated in institutional and out-of-home care. This study discusses the experience of removal and of institutional and out-of-home care, with a particular focus on the removal of Indigenous Australian children. It is clear, from recent litigation, that there are many, and perhaps insurmountable, barriers to successful legal action to remedy inflicted harms. Observing these barriers, the article concludes that, besides litigation, an integrated approach to reconciliation must be adopted.

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Joost Coté (Deakin University)

Terra-ising the Homeland: Recent Debates on Australian National Identity

This paper sets out the parameters of what has been widely referred to as Australia’s history wars, the current debates surrounding the deconstruction of an Australian nationalist identity. In re-presenting the current discourse on an Australian ontological crisis, the paper draws attention to a central preoccupation with the primordial, yet, apparently, still crucial, category of territory, which continues to disturb the contemporary national psyche. This apparent retro allusion to territory in a global age can, perhaps, be explained by the need of a not-yet-postcolonial society to address its postcolonial moment as a precursor to entering the global age.

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Uta Daur (University of New South Wales)

The Melodramatic Imagination of Tracey Moffatt’s Art

While Tracey Moffatt’s works have often been connected to particular postcolonial debates and identity politics, several critics have claimed that a sense of ambiguity is also imparted by her work in regard to clear moral and political positions. This article establishes a link between the aspect of moral ambiguity of Moffatt’s art and the literary and filmic genre of melodrama. Melodrama is understood as a mode that is crucially concerned with the quest for an ethics, and that constructs indeterminate and unstable realities. The author addresses the particular aesthetics and ethics of the melodramatic imagination of Moffatt’s art, examining several of her works.

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Brian Dibble (Curtin University of Technology)

The Presence/Absence of Tropes in Ngarla Speech and Song

This study provides a brief explanation of the metaphor-free everyday language of the Ngarla Aborigines of the Pilbara area of Western Australia, along with an explanation of how the Ngarla language dealt with the artefacts, flora, and fauna introduced with European colonisation from the 1860s onward. Then it analyses some seventy Ngarla yirraru, as collected in Alexander Brown and Brian Geytenbeek’s Ngarla Songs (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre, 2003). Traditional anecdotal songs from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s, but now no longer written, Ngarla songs employ similes/metaphors, but assume familiarity with the tenor rather than with the vehicle (in I. A. Richards’ terms); that is, rather than using the vehicle to illuminate the tenor, they use the tenor to add meaning to the vehicle. Such use of language could be employed in secret ceremonies, whereby new contexts could encode further meaning into words which, subsequently, would have special significance to their limited number of initiates.

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Ildikó Dömötör (Budapest)

British Gentlewomen’s Perception of the Australian Bush

A great number of Victorian gentlewomen left the British Isles in the nineteenth century in search of a better, more prosperous, and healthier life in Australia. Upon arrival in the unsettled country areas, these women faced a challenging new life that often brought about the modification of certain genteel values. While female bush settlers were preoccupied with their daily struggle for survival, they also had to come to terms with the surrounding environment. British genteel ladies’ descriptions of the Australian landscape express a great variety of reactions towards the bush. Although negative terms do appear in women’s descriptions, a positive appreciation is the dominant tone in their narratives. The identification of how images of Britain influenced genteel female settlers’ ways of seeing the bush landscape is another major theme of this paper.

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Éva Forintos (University of Veszprém)

Semantic Aspects of Australian-Hungarian Language Contact Phenomena

This essay discusses one aspect of a large-scale study that investigates how the written language of a minority group (Hungarian, L1) functions outside its traditional setting in central Europe, in an environment where another language is used as official, majority language (English in Australia, L2). This is an intraregional language contact situation, where Hungarian immigrants live among the English-speaking population of Australia; and the two languages involved are genealogically non-related and structural-typologically non-identical.

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Sean Gorman (Edith Cowan University)

Krakouer Uncanny: Football, Identity, and the “Magic Makers”

Due to changes in the 1980s and increased professionalism in the 1990s, the Australian Football League has created a space for Indigenous Australians to be celebrated and appreciated in the country’s most successful sporting institution. This analysis of Indigenous athletes’ contribution to the construction of a sporting history in Australia shows how struggle and resistance for Indigenous Australians have taken place in the field of sport and its associated discourses running parallel to broader social and historical themes. By analysing specific historical and media constructions, it is possible to see how Indigenous footballers (read: athletes) have been, and continue to be, discursively dealt with differently. Essentialised notions of Indigenous athletes being referred to as “black magic” are critiqued, as well as Indigenous stereotypes about Indigenous sports people in Australia. Finally, an analysis of the socio-cultural and discursive media constructions of the Noongar footballers Jim and Phillip Krakouer are discussed, using Freudian notions of the uncanny.

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Grahame Griffin (Griffith University)

Mrs Petrov and the “Plug Uglies”: An Australian Press Photograph and the Cold War

A widely distributed and reproduced press photograph shows the alleged Soviet spy, Evdokia Petrov, being escorted to a plane at Sydney Airport by Soviet couriers in April 1954, at the height of the Cold War. The article investigates the uses and meanings of this “iconic” photograph, and their contibution to the political and ideological climate of the fifties and to collective memory.

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Andrew Hassam (Monash University)

From Kangaroo To Salaam Namaste: Australia as an Exotic Film Location

In the 1940s and 1950s, dominant representations of Australia in feature films were presented to audiences through the lenses of Hollywood and British filmmakers. Australia was marketed abroad in terms of sheep and a pioneering history on the periphery of the British Empire. Films like Bitter Springs (1950) and Kangaroo (1952) allowed Australian audiences the defining colonial double vision of looking at themselves through the eyes of a metropolitan film audience. Since the second half of the 1990s, Australia has become increasingly visible to cinema audiences through the lenses of another global cinema industry, Bollywood. Australia now provides a range of exotic images for an Indian domestic audience. However, films like Dil Chahta Hai (2002) and Salaam Namaste (2005) also allow diasporic Indian Australian audiences the pleasure of being regarded by a metropolitan Indian audience, and being an Indian in Australia takes on meaning by being recognised overseas.

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Sissy Helff (Frankfurt University)

Lost in Lantana: Unreliable Narration and Troubled Masculinities

Lantana is a multi-layered film with eerie thriller sequences, gloomy melodramatic moments, and hesitant love stories. Apart from all that, however, the film presents a social panorama of troubled masculinities against the backdrop of modern suburban Sydney. This panorama is stitched together by filmic unreliable narration, a narrative mode that challenges not only the character’s stories but also the visual narrative of the camera. It is not a character but the camera’s unreliable perspective that eventually reveals the hidden truth about the death of the main character, Valerie Sommer. While searching for the truth about Valerie’s death, the complex filmic narrative confronts the audience with their own engagement with stereotypical ideas about women, men, guilt, and innocence.

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Dolores Herrero (University of Zaragoza)

Merlinda Bobis’s Re-Evaluation of Ethics and Identity: Cantata of the Warrior Woman

Merlinda Bobis’s privileged perspective of a bilingual writer born in the Philippines but now living in Australia allows her to speak from different angles and, thus, unveil the similarities that connect, and the discontinuities that separate, one world from another. In particular, Bobis’s works evince the importance of communication between self and other by putting forward a quest for national, collective, and individual identity through reconstructing the lost voices of women in history—especially women who have been suppressed by the combined oppression of religion, patriarchy, and colonialism. This aricle, therefore, aims to show the ways in which Bobis’s epic poem-play Cantata of the Warrior Woman Daragang Magayon re-evaluates personal and (multi)national ethics and identity by questioning patriarchal definitions of morality and offering instead an alternative feminist, but nonetheless transgender, transnational, and transcultural, ethics of care.

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Beate Josephi (Edith Cowan University)

Christine Müller (Business and Information Technology School)

Hans-Jürgen Friske (Business and Information Technology School)

How Private a Death? Obituaries in Australia and Germany

Just as every death is different, so are obituaries and the reporting of death. Obituaries commonly honour a social elite. However, in the case of the Bali bombing, the Australian national newspaper, the Australian, ran a series of obituaries, titled Lives Cut Short, for all of the 88 Australian victims. This series was examined quantitatively and qualitatively as to which values were commemorated and how Australians devise a public memory of their dead. This was compared to the results of a study on the New York Times’ series Portraits of Grief. The same questions were also pursued by looking at articles in German newspapers about the victims of the 2000 Concorde disaster and the 2002 Djerba bombing. The results are surprisingly different and reveal that media law, media ethics, cultural sensitivities, and perceptions of the public are defining factors in writing about the deceased and in shaping the tradition of obituaries.

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Catherine Kevin (Menzies Centre, King’s College London)

Subjects for Citizenship: Pregnancy and the Australian Nation, 1945-2000

This article offers an overview of some of the ways pregnant women were constituted as subjects with rights and responsibilities to the nation between 1945 and 2000. Essential here is a history of the links between the concepts of nation, population, and citizenship, as they relate to the changing truths of pregnancy. Medical and legal material produced in the period articulated a relationship between pregnant bodies and the nation. By examining this material I draw out this relationship, ranging over its possibilities, which spanned from pregnancy for the purposes of the state, to an individual’s right to abortion and technologically-assisted fertility. In the 1940s and 1950s, medical and legal discourses of pregnancy typically focused on the responsibilities and national duties of mothers-to-be. As the century progressed, this medico-legal discourse incorporated a language of individual rights that was critical of post-WWII pronatalism in complex and contradictory ways. This article explores these changes as a way of exploring the points of intersection in a history of female citizenship and a history of the pregnant body in Australia.

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Britta Kuhlenbeck (University of Hamburg)

Space as Discourse in Japanese Story

This article explores how contemporary artists address concepts of space, and whether spatial theories developed in geography provide a useful approach to this question. The quest to redefine concepts of space is part of a wider exploration of space in the late 20^th and early 21^st century, considering, for instance, the contemporary socio-economic shifts known as globalization, time-space compression, and localization, which have transformed our conceptions of space and time. Moreover, spatial images function as frameworks of cultural order. As “space” is a core concept in geography and narrative studies, bringing those academic fields closer together is certainly a worthwhile endeavour. In the field of geography, it is the area of so-called humanistic geography that stresses the experience of space and place and the relevance of meaning and intentionality in a geographical context. This analysis of Japanese Story (2003; dir. Sue Brooks), argues for a dynamic concept of space not as container but rather as a part of social relations, that is, space as discourse.

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Keith McConnochie (Unaipon School, University of South Australia)

Wendy Nolan (Unaipon School, University of South Australia)

Re-Visioning Professional Practice: Reconciliation, Professional Indifference, and Indigenous Australians

Australian universities have been educating professionals for 150 years, shaping the thinking and practices of generations of professionals who have played a significant role in structuring relationships between Indigenous Australians and the wider Australian society, including advising on policy and practice, constructing and legitimating attitudes, providing advice to governments, and providing professional services to Indigenous Australians. For most of this time, this education has not included any systematic programs to prepare graduates to work in Indigenous contexts, despite the overwhelming evidence pointing to the failure of Australia’s social institutions to provide Indigenous Australians with access to equitable and just outcomes. The article explores why professions have avoided this involvement, why this has changed in recent years, and what strategies could be introduced to increase the contribution professional education can make towards improving social justice and human rights for Indigenous Australians.

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Barbara H. Milech (Curtin University of Technology)

The Erotics of Friendship in Elizabeth Jolley’s Fiction

One way to read the novels, stories, and essays of the Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley is as a long meditation on the blessings and terrors of “that species of love called friendship.” From a traditional (western) point of view, there is a kind of category confusion in Jolley’s figuration of friendship: philia (fellow feeling) blends with eros to issue in an ethic of love whose purchase and generosity (altruism) is like that of agape. Thus, the figure of friendship that presides over Jolley’s fiction and essays is not the western tradition’s “chosen brother” (an imago of self), but rather the figure of the “special Friend,” who in Jolley’s writing appears especially in three guises: the desiring/desirable older woman; the Friend of the family; and the robust widow. This paper draws on psychoanalytic/Lacanian models provided by Julia Kristeva to understand the figure of the special Friend in Jolley’s fictions and essays and, especially, the reasons why that figure, so often, is implicated in an unruly erotic triangle. It argues that Jolley, though deeply ingrained in a western tradition of literature and philosophy, searches the meanings of her own experience through her writings to arrive at a non-traditional notion of friendship that embraces both difference (vs similarity) and heterogeneous sexualities through exploring the loss that drives the desire for a friend, the eroticism that infuses friendship, and the constraints exerted on it by normative heterosexuality. In that way Jolley arrives at an ethic of love/friendship that serves as a stay against all shabbiness and suffering—and so sustains hope.

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Nathanael O’Reilly (Western Michigan University)

Contemporary Nationalist Revisions of “Australia”: Illywhacker and A River Town

Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s theories of nationalism, this article argues that Australian nationalism constructs a conception of the Australian nation that predates the political creation of the nation-state in 1901 by over a century and presents the Australian nation as an inevitable development. After briefly describing the political creation of the Australian nation in 1901 and arguing that it was not a response to an existing nationalist sentiment, the author examines the ways in which Australian nationalism and conceptions of Australian nationhood are presented in Peter Carey’s Illywhacker and Thomas Keneally’s A River Town, which, he argues, are both contemporary fictional nationalist revisions of Australian history. Carey and Keneally revise Australian history in accordance with their contemporary nationalist beliefs, attempting to take ownership of Australia’s past in order to allow Australians to perceive their culture as distinct from English culture.

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Sue Ryan-Fazilleau (Université de La Rochelle)

Re-Visions of Two Aboriginal Histories: Rabbit-Proof Fence and Australian Rules

This article uses Said’s concept of “re-vision” to study and compare Noyce’s 2002 film adaptation (Rabbit-Proof Fence) of Aboriginal writer Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, and Goldman’s 2002 adaptation (Australian Rules) of Gwynne’s novel Deadly, Unna?. Said’s analysis of colonial re-vision of indigenous history invites us to consider not only the material under examination but also who is re-vising it and for which public. Both Pilkington’s and Noyce’s approaches fit into Said’s teaching paradigm, and both Pilkington’s and Noyce’s works received positive responses from the Australian public. Paradoxically, Pilkington’s re-vision of her own family’s chapter of Australia’s Secret History, while in some ways more subtle and nuanced than Noyce’s, actually perpetuates some colonialist stereotypes in its portrayal of the Aboriginal characters—stereotypes that Noyce eliminates in his re-vision. Deadly, Unna?’s author offers a white re-vision of contemporary Australian race relations, which is, to judge by its enthusiastic adoption in Australian school programmes, aimed principally at young white Australian readers. But director Goldman’s re-vision of Gwynne’s novel, undertaken without sufficient consultation of the black community, led to controversy that underlined a conflict between black and white notions of the ownership of histories. The article explores these issues and their implications.

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Sian Supski (Curtin University of Technology)

Chop, Taste, and Read: Examining Stephanie Alexander’s Diary Cookbooks

Stephanie Alexander is central to any discussion of food and food writing in Australia; she may reasonably be considered Australia’s Elizabeth David. This article examines two of Alexander’s cookbooks written in diary format, Stephanie’s Seasons (1993) and Stephanie’s Journal (1999). Although the diary format is an unusual way to present a published cookbook, women have used this method, most commonly in manuscript cookbooks, never intended for publication. What makes Alexander’s diary cookbooks unique is that they were written with the intention of being published. Diary cookbooks provide a means of incorporating aspects of a writer’s everyday life with cookery writing and recipes. Importantly, the diary cookbook allows the writer to explore the minutiae of everyday life, including cooking and eating, whilst simultaneously articulating the performance of multiple identities—in Alexander’s case, as entrepreneur, mother, restaurateur, friend, writer, daughter, community leader, activist, and chef.

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Andrew Taylor (Edith Cowan University)

Beyond Duality: The Development of an “Integrating” Poetry of Landscape in Australia

This article begins with looking briefly at the construction of the Australian landscape in late nineteenth-century painting, comparing it with how the literature of the same period constructed it. It then turns to twentieth-century Australian poetry, looking at poems by Slessor, Wright, Campbell, and Murray, among others, in order to trace changes in the relation of the human to the natural world, with the resultant changes to the way landscape is constructed. Finally, the author examines recent poetry by John Kinsella in order to see whether (and if so how) the dichotomy between the “white,” non-Indigenous human, and the natural world is being bridged. This involves a consideration and redefinition of the term “pastoral.”