Abstracts
Michael ACKLAND (James Cook University, Australia)
“Comrade Lenin’ viewed from the margin: Christina Stead’s verdict on Australia’s seminal role as social laboratory and working-man’s paradise”
At imperial margins, or in far-flung domains, structures are often more fluid, reform and innovation more capable of realisation. That at least is suggested by such impressive antipodean firsts as embracing women’s suffrage, the eight-hour working-day and democratically electing Labour Parties to power at state and federal levels. These achievements, however, pre-dated the Bolshevik Revolution and its alternative model for worker empowerment. Thereafter workers, intellectuals, and the young Christina Stead had to decide which program was most appropriate for the antipodes—an issue brought home to Stead by her father’s controversial role in a reforming Labour government, then by increasingly dire, and unpredictable events in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as she launched her career as a writer. One measure of the importance of this issue is arguably its prominence in Stead’s earliest extant writing: her first published novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, and the contemporaneous ms. ‘This Young Man Will Go Far’. Focusing on these works, this paper challenges the widespread belief that political issues are tangential to this novelist’s creativity by showing how her depiction of characters, classes and local events constitutes a commentary on white Australia’s proud boast to be at the forefront of progressive social action. In particular, the paper examines Stead’s efforts to reconcile the competing claims of local and global perspectives, her diverse explorations of marginality, and her answer to the pressing question of whether present social ferment in the antipodes was out of step with, or exemplary within, the broader movement of international socialism.
Susan BALLYN (Barcelona University, Spain)
“Two Marginal Stories: Hannah Thornton and Mary Kelley Transported on the Hydery in 1832”
One hundred and fifty women and children embarked on the convict transport Hydery between the 14th and 29th of March 1832. On arrival in Van Diemen's Land three women and three children had died. This is actually a very low death toll if we consider that there was an outbreak of cholera and dysentery on board. Nobody can accuse the surgeon of negligence or malpractice. The cases of dysentery and cholera swamped the infirmary at different stages of the voyage. Using Allen MacLaren’s journal I want to reconstruct two convict women's stories: Hannah Thornton aged 48 from Ireland and Mary Kelley aged 27 from England. Fate threw them together on the Hydery and would similarly separate them from their children and each other on board. Their stories raise a number of questions to which I can often only posit hypothesis, others find their answer within the journal itself and allied documents. Reconstructing biographies implies both reading the facts recorded in documents but, above all, in Surgeons' journals and conduct records it involves reading between the lines, interpreting the areas of the unspoken, the unwritten that any text is subject to. These two women exemplify the way in which biographies may be reconstructed but also they represent the average female convict transported to Van Diemen’s Land. There is nothing extraordinary about them but it is precisely this; their ordinariness that makes them interesting and representative of a much wider community of female convicts.
Gillian BARLOW: (University of Western Sydney, Australia)
“Rubbing Out: looking at Aboriginal housing”
As an Australian writing in and about Australia, I have taken up this conference theme as “in the Margins’ (in the trenches) rather than ‘on’ them. In the margins suggests urgent writing along a book’s edges responding to the words and ideas contained within. It is this same urgency I feel for Aboriginal housing with which I have been engaged as an architect and writer. Aboriginal people have been marginalised in their own country since colonisation. The demographics are appalling and successive governments make half ditched attempts to improve these. The many issues involved areinter-relatedand cannot be dealt with individually. One of these is poor housing, along with its associated issues of homelessness and overcrowding. It is the house’s delivery and/or design that are debated. This debate is like the swing of a pendulum but as Aldo Van Eyck has said, “There are more interesting motions than that of the pendulum”. Architects see buildings as space. But there is a time element too - a ‘ma’ as the Japanese call it. Writers look closely at how to construct this ‘sense of place’ and there are lessons in this for housing. My paper will look at Aboriginal housing, how it is delivered and the possibilities of looking at it differently both architecturally and writerly.
Emma BARROW & Barry JUDD (RMIT, University, Melbourne, Australia)
“Whitefellas at the Margins: The politics of going native in post-colonial Australia”
This paper discusses ethical engagements between ‘whitefellas’ and Indigenous Australia and how such engagements are characterised by the marginalization and silencing of ‘ethical whitefellas’. Such individuals who ‘go native’ become positioned at the periphery of formal interactions between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australia. While genuine relations between non-Indigenous and Indigenous individuals continue to grow as a part of everyday contemporary life in Australia, within the context of formal organizational interactions the politics of Anglo-Australian identity continues to limit the ability of whitefella Australians to engage with Indigenous people in a way that might said to be truly ethical and self-transformative. Instead the identity politics of Anglo-Australia, a politics that originates in the old colonial stories of the 19th century, continues to function in a way that marginalises individuals who choose to engage in a way that goes beyond the organizational rhetoric of government and civil institutions. Australia founded on the oppression and attempted racial and cultural elimination of Indigenous peoples, has a history of settler/native engagements that continues to impact on contemporary relationships in ways that impedes the ability of ‘whitefellas’ to adhere to ethical frameworks in building professional relationships with Indigenous people. The history of Australian colonialism teaches us that when a deep and productive engagement between settler and native has occurred, the stability of ‘Anglo-Australian identity is destabilised as the colonial establishment is reminded of Indigenous dispossession and questions associated with the moral and legal legitimacy of the contemporary Australian state. So what of the ‘White’ or non-indigenous worker ethically engaged with Indigenous Australia whose work gives rise to social and political understandings that question and are perceived to threaten the status quo? In what ways do the particularities of genealogy and rights persist? To what extent does this slow down reconciliation directives? How can such problematics in the politics of national identity be overcome? Framing the contemporary context of change and resistance the authors will discuss the historical trajectory of select settlers. Settlers, who co-existed with the first people and actively challenged the limitations of the time – yet remain hidden in the recesses of Australian history. Then in order to consider effective methods to supersede matters of marginalization the authors will discuss examples of inclusive institutional practice, in the quest for a democratic modeling that points to a pathway for a truer recognition, acceptance and inclusion of Indigenous peoples in the ‘mainstream’ of Australian social and political life.
Renate BROSCH (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Making the Marginalized Matter: The Production of Empathy in the Australian Movie Samson and Delilah
Samson and Delilah (2009) is a very unusual movie. It may be seen in the context of the recently identified “cinema of reconciliation”. Yet, it also confronts audiences with harrowing images of poverty, unemployment, petrol sniffing, violence and clashes within the Aboriginal community. The film about two young Aboriginal lovers from an isolated community in the Central Australian desert puts centre stage people who are marginalized in every way: socially, economically, culturally, politically and even geographically. Its real achievement is to create not only intercultural understanding but enormous disturbance and compassion among non-Aboriginal viewers. In my paper I will investigate the film’s politics and aesthetics of “rewriting the margin”. I argue that a double strategy is at work: on the one hand, the film employs realistic, almost documentary techniques in its presentation of social conditions in the homeland. On the other, it appears quite artificial in its avoidance of conventional representation (Samson does not speak). As a result, the romance of two outcasts becomes a complex allegory of the struggle for love, dignity and self-respect. I argue that the film radically rejects mainstream political correctness about Aboriginals on the margin of society, while, at the same time, forcing the viewer to imaginatively adopt the marginal position and to desire the utopian solution offered at the end. This combination of allegory and honesty (I can’t help using this old-fashioned term) has a special appeal: it is an exemplary case of making the experience of social, economic and political marginality available vicariously to its Other.
Marilyne BRUN (University of Lorraine, France)
“White Australia: An Axial Margin in Federation Debates”
This paper discusses the importance of the notion a “white Australia” in Federation debates. Maintaining a “white” Australia was a central preoccupation at the time of Federation in Australia, as the rapid institutionalisation of racial discrimination in 1901 through the Immigration Restriction Act and Pacific Island Labourers Acts makes clear. The nineteenth-century debates that led to Federation recurrently focused on the theme of tariffs, the question of rivers flowing across several colonies, postal and telegraphic services, and the distribution of political representation for the future states. In comparison with the all-important subject of tariffs, the idea of white Australia was marginal in Federation debates. Using extracts from political pamphlets and speeches, from nationalist journal The Bulletin and from Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character: A Forecast, this paper investigates the unique racialisation at work in the notion of white Australia in order to account for the marginality of the topic in Federation debates. Processes of racial exclusion in Federation Australia were integrated into a wider discourse of social progress and social peace. The marginal status of white Australia in debates mirrors this unique form of racialisation, and underlines the axial role played by that ideology in structuring the Australian Commonwealth.
David CALLAHAN (University of Aveiro, Portugal)
“The Edge of the Australian Empire”
While conventionally Australia has been situated on edges, certain of Australia’s neighbours live a geopolitical reality in which they exist on the edge of Australian power and neo-imperial ambitions. From Papua New Guinea to small Pacific nations, even New Zealand, the assertion of Australian priorities is a structuring factor in the life of the region. The most recent and perhaps most awkwardly apparent example of these priorities concerns East Timor, where a series of competing agendas and values are at present grating against each other in unpredictable fashion. This paper will examine how this border between an Australian presence and the power of Indonesia and South-east Asia is being represented in the touchstone of cultural energies that is provided by generic fiction. Where there was formerly little attention to the tragic situation in East Timor in Australian fiction, since the Australian intervention in 1999 a certain number of popular fictions, principally thrillers, have begun to emerge in which East Timor’s position at the margins of Australia’s visible footprint becomes a stage for the acting out of a range of meanings. This paper will concentrate on Australia’s ‘Westernness’, and masculinity, as articulated in several works of generic fiction recently published in Australia.
Hervé CANTERO (University of Rouen, France)
“Skirting and straddling the confines of Australianness in Robert Drewe’s fiction”
In spite of his efforts to shed light on the distinctive features of today’s mostly urban Australian society, Robert Drewe frequently fills the fictional continent depicted in his novels and memoirs with wild, remote settings (from the 19th-century Tasmanian hinterland in The Savage Crows to the Pilbara Coast of Montebello) and the perplexed, stumbling characters exploring them. Along with his self-diagnosed islomania, these elements underline a persistent preoccupation of the author with the actual nature of the Anglo-Celtic presence in the Great Southern Land, as he portrays non-indigenous Australians often struggling with the antipodean cipher of a bewildering habitat only matched by the marked otherness of its human and animal inhabitants. This paper aims at highlighting the frequent figures of marginality, liminality and in-betweenness in Drewe’s works; it should thus show how these occurrences aggregate into a composite reassessment of a conventional discourse of Australianness progressively displaced from its central dominant position. This gradual undermining is at the heart of Robert Drewe’s career-long commentary on a literary and ideological landscape in which the previous status quo has to concede some ground to native claims, to cultural and economic globalization and now to the encroachment of online existential projections.
Michelle Carey & Michael Prince (Murdoch University, Australia)
“Erasure, survival and the mobilisation of difference”
Lorenzo Veracini’s (2010; 2011) recent theorisation of the distinction between colonialism and settler colonialism is important to scholars of Indigenous studies in Australia. However, his central notion of Indigenous erasure, and its anti-colonial counterpoint, Indigenous survival, warrant further enquiry. For Veracini, progress towards decolonization necessitates a moving beyond the tension between an ongoing settler colonial need for Indigenous erasure, and a concomitant Indigenous “permanent presence.” This paper investigates the implications of Veracini’s call for an end to Indigenous erasure as the only meaningful path to decolonization. It wonders if this is not, in the end, a valorization of Indigenous difference for its own sake. If so, has not Albert Memmi (1965; 2006) warned us already about the dangers inherent in basing political identities and programs for political change on the notion of a self that is eternally different from an undifferentiated other? Bringing into play Marcia Langton’s (2012) recent work on Indigenous exceptionalism, we attempt to clarify and extend Veracini’s argument by establishing a working distinction between oppositional versus real difference.
Estelle CASTRO (LIA TransOceanik, CNRS/JCU-Cairns Institute, Australia)