Contents Contributors . iii Emerging Perspectives on Automobilities in Non-Urban Australia: A context for Cruising Country . 1 Ursula Frederick and Lisa Stefanoff The Flip Side: Women on the Redex Around Australia Reliability trials of the 1950s . 17 Georgine Clarsen ‘Going Back’: Journeys with David MacDougall’s Link-Up Diary . 37 Catherine Summerhayes ‘Now we got truck everywhere, we don’t travel anywhere’: A phenomenology of travelling by community mutika in the northern Kimberley, Western Australia . 61 Anthony Redmond Country Love (day 1) . 75 Pamela Lofts Roadworks: Automobility and belonging in Aboriginal art . 81 Ursula Frederick ‘we’re not truckin’ around’: On and off-road in Samuel Wagan Watson’s Smoke Encrypted Whispers . 109 Katherine Bode Fuel, Cars and the Geography of Petrol Sniffing . 121 Maggie Brady HUMANITIES RESEARCH GUEST EDITORS Ursula Frederick and Lisa Stefanoff EDITORIAL BOARD Paul Pickering (Chair), Ned Curthoys, Melinda Hinkson, Kylie Message, Kate Mitchell, Adrian Walter, Karen May (Managing Editor) EDITORIAL ADVISORS Tony Bennett, University of Western Sydney; James K. Chandler, University of Chicago; Deidre Coleman, University of Melbourne; W. Robert Connor, Teagle Foundation, New York; Michael Davis, University of Tasmania; Saul Dubow, University of Sussex; Christopher Forth, University of Kansas; William Fox, Center for Art and Environment, Nevada; Debjani Ganguly, The Australian National University; Margaret R. Higonnet, University of Connecticut; Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge; Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge; W. J. F. Jenner, The Australian National University; Peter Jones, University of Edinburgh; E. Ann Kaplan, State University of New York, Stony Brook; David MacDougall, The Australian National University; Iain McCalman, University of Sydney; Fergus Millar, University of Oxford; Anthony Milner, The Australian National University; Howard Morphy, The Australian National University; Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University, Hong Kong; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Australian National University; Paul Patton, University of New South Wales; Kim Rubenstein, The Australian National University; Gillian Russell, The Australian National University; Monique Skidmore, University of Canberra; Mandy Thomas, The Australian National University; Caroline Turner, The Australian National University; Andrew Vincent, University of Sheffield; James Walter, Monash University. Humanities Research is published by the Research School of Humanities & the Arts at The Australian National University. The Research School of Humanities & the Arts came into existence on 1 January 2010 and brings together the following schools and centres: School of Archaeology & Anthropology, School of Art, School of Cultural Inquiry, School of Language Studies, School of Music, Australian National Dictionary Centre, ANU Centre for European Studies, Digital Humanities Hub, Freilich Foundation, Humanities Research Centre, Institute for Professional Practice in Heritage & the Arts, and the Rock Art Research Centre. Humanities Research was first published in 1997 and in 2005 was transformed into an electronic journal published by ANU E Press. Issues are thematic with guest editors and address important and timely topics across all branches of the humanities. Enquiries: Managing Editor, Research School of Humanities & the Arts, Sir Roland Wilson Building (120), The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. Research School of Humanities & the Arts general enquiries T: +61 2 6125 6674, URL http://rsha.anu.edu Published by ANU E Press Email: [email protected] Website: http://epress.anu.edu.au © The Australian National University. This Publication is protected by copyright and may be used as permitted by the Copyright Act 1968 provided appropriate acknowledgment of the source is published. The illustrations and certain identified inclusions in the text are held under separate copyrights and may not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the respective copyright holders. Copyright in the individual contributions contained in this publication rests with the author of each contribution. Any requests for permission to copy this material should be directed to the Managing Editor, Research School of Humanities & the Arts. The text has been supplied by the authors as attributed. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the publisher. Cover image: Deborah Clarke, After the Rain (detail) (2007), reproduced courtesy of the artist. Printed in Australia Vol XVII. No. 2. 2011 ISSN: 1440-0669 (print), ISSN: 1834-8491 (Online) Contributors Katherine Bode Katherine Bode is a senior lecturer in literary and textual studies in the Digital Humanities Hub at The Australian National University. Her research focuses on contemporary Australian literature, book and publishing history, and the critical possibilities of exploring using both digital and quantitative methods. Maggie Brady Maggie Brady is a social anthropologist with long-term interests in Indigenous health, and alcohol and other drug use. She has published several books including her ethnographic study of petrol sniffingHeavy ( Metal, 1992); a community action manual on alcohol (The Grog Book, 1998, 2005); and an analysis of alcohol policy and practice (Indigenous Australia and Alcohol Policy, 2004). She has also worked on land tenure for the Northern Land Council, and on the social and environmental impacts of the Maralinga atomic tests in South Australia. Maggie is currently an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at The Australian National University. Georgine Clarsen Georgine Clarsen is a senior lecturer in the History and Politics Program at the University of Wollongong. Her major research interest has been the history of women and motoring, and her Eat My Dust: Early women motorists (Johns Hopkins Press, 2008) explores women’s active roles in shaping automobile culture in Australia, Britain, the United States and British colonial Africa. Her current research is early around-Australia automobile journeys and explores the role of automobility in shaping ideas of Australian landscape and national identity. She is an Associate Editor of the new mobility journal Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies. Ursula Frederick Ursula Frederick is a visual artist and archaeologist based in Canberra. She is currently completing her doctoral project, on art and car cultures, at the School of Art, Australian National University. She is also an Adjunct Research Associate at Flinders University. Ursula’s attention to cars flows out of a broader iii Humanities Research Vol XVII . No . 2 . 2011 research interest in material and visual culture. Ursula is especially drawn to investigating the ways that people make their presence felt in the physical world, as well as examining how their worlds shape them. This line of inquiry has led to publications on rock art, graffiti, historical inscriptions and tourist souveniring. As a related research pursuit, Ursula’s art practice is influenced by re-imagining ‘lost’ meanings and discarded things. The majority of Ursula’s art making is photographic and print-media based, and she is a founder and curator of the online gallery Light Journeys: Exhibiting Australian Women Photographers. She drives a 1981 Datsun Bluebird manual station wagon, affectionately known as Marilyn. Pamela Lofts Pamela Lofts is a visual artist living in Alice Springs in Central Australia where she moved to after attaining her BA at Sydney College of the Arts, in 1989. She established Watch this Space Artist-run Initiative in 1994 and the following year won the twenty-sixth Alice Prize. Pam has exhibited and participated in residencies nationally and overseas. She is represented in State and regional gallery collections including at the National Gallery of Australia, and was awarded a Master of Philosophy at the School of Art, Australian National University, in 2008. Pam’s sculpture, photographic and recent video works are grounded in the narratives, emotions and material substance of Central Australia. She also moonlights as a children’s book illustrator, which has led to a rediscovery of the joy and immediacy of drawing as another way to express her ideas within contemporary practice. Anthony Redmond Before studying anthropology, Anthony Redmond practised as a visual artist for many years, working in the fields of painting, sculpture and print making. Since 1994, he has worked in the northern Kimberley region with Ngarinyin people and their neighbours, then in Central Australia since 2002, and in Cape York Peninsula since 2005. During this time, he has conducted ethnographic research (into transformations in local economies, Indigenous relationships with pastoralists, traditional cosmology, sung traditions and bodily experiences of time and country) as well as conducting applied native title and lands rights research. His most recent work has been focused on death and grieving, the comic in everyday Ngarinyin life, the social and ritual importance of body fat, and a phenomenology of travelling in community trucks. Anthony is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research iv Contributors at The Australian National University where he is Australian Research Council partner working on a pan-Australian project on Aboriginal involvements in frontier and intercultural economies. Lisa Stefanoff Lisa Stefanoff is a cultural anthropologist