Reimagining Australia

REIMAGINING AUSTRALIA Encounter, Recognition, Responsibility BOOK OF CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS (as at 16/11/16) ABOAGYE, Kaiya University of Sydney Re-imagining the African Diaspora in Australia: A discussion paper on the transcultural social history of Indigenous Australians and the African diaspora This paper will seek to draw out and make sense of the complex, transcultural and social history between Indigenous Australians and people of the African diaspora in Australia. Investigating the socio-historical and racial positioning of Aboriginal Australians of African descent, this paper asserts that this is a long often undocumented history. A history that starts from the very beginning of colonization in 1788, with the arrival of eleven settlers of African descent on Australia’s first fleet. It is commonly known among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family groups, that linage can be traced back several generations to long lost African forefathers, changing the nature and kinship of Aboriginal family formation. Dominant interpretations of Australia’s African history and early colonial literature routinely leave out this relationship between people of colour within its nationalist narrative. Our history books are habitual discourses that present an uncomplicated story about black and white protagonist and race relations, but never between the subjects themselves, or the voices of the oppressed “others”. Contemporarily it is a history reduced to occurring only within the early ninetieth centaury. This paper argues that by examining the historical relationship between these groups; we can start to extend our current thinking about the cultural nature of the “African Australian Diaspora” today, specifically as it emerges within transnational spaces of Indigenous Australian social history? As we work to further advance our theoretical articulation of, the development of transcultural black studies in Australia, this paper will not only assess the parameters of this research study. But it will speak to the transformative power of theorizing our spaces, to produce new, exciting and dynamic ways for thinking into the future re-imagining Australia. Kaiya Aboagye is a descendant from the Ashanti people of Ghana, West Africa. She is also a proud Kukuyalanji woman from far north Queensland, Australia and a Torres Strait Islander from Erub (Darnley) Island, with South Sea Islander roots to Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. Kaiya is a current student at The University of Sydney, enrolled in a Masters of Philosophy program where she is currently investigating more fully the issues raised by this paper, in her study. Page | 1 ADUSEI-ASANTE, Kwadwo Edith Cowan University Where Are They? Post-Secondary School Destinations of African High School Graduates In Perth One of the key targets of the 2008 Review of Australian Higher Education (‘Bradley Review’) is to increase the percentage of university students from low-socioeconomic status (LSES) backgrounds to twenty percent by 2020. Since the publication of the Bradley Review, a broad range of equity programs and strategies targeting various LSES students to enhance their access to and participation in higher education have been implemented. While most West Australian residents from Sub-Saharan Africa (SAA) seem to fall into the LSES category, the proportion of the population participating in higher education is anecdotally believed to be low. This paper presents initial findings of a study on the trends and determinants of post-secondary school destinations of SAA students in Perth, drawing on data from five selected schools and the West Australian Department of Education. Kwadwo is a lecturer at the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. Kwadwo's research interests include policy impact assessment, international development and equity issues in higher education. Page | 2 ALLMARK, Panizza STOTZER, Talhy STEVENSON, Kylie Edith Cowan University The Hand Up project: Engaging with the Australian Landscape with Photovoice workshops for St Vincent de Paul WA children The proposed paper aims to detail the ARC Linkage project A hand up: Disrupting the communication of intergenerational poverty which builds a strategic alliance between Edith Cowan University (ECU) and the partner organisation St Vincent de Paul Society of Western Australia (SVDPWA) in order to enable SVDPWA to develop its services by drawing on the tacit knowledge of its clients and volunteers. The paper will explain how this knowledge is captured through a process of creative engagement with children receiving SVDPWA support. In ‘photovoice’ workshops, workshop facilitators guided the children to construct a creative art piece, revealing personal narratives, turning points and engagement with the environment. At a holiday camp outside Perth, the children aged eight-twelve years old were given cameras to capture the Australian landscape from differing perspectives. They recorded their personal experiences of nature and the landscape, away from their suburban homes. As well as visually representing their encounters, the children were given the opportunity to reflect about their experiences with poignant hand written thoughts. Helping them voice their stories means these children experience empowerment and have an opportunity for self-direction and autonomy. It also provides a more nuanced understanding of their experiences. It encourages them to write a different narrative than the one that may be imposed on them externally or that they may have inherited. Associate Professor Panizza Allmark is the Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Perth Western Australia. She has a PhD in Media Studies and is an Associate Professor in Media and Cultural Studies, where she also heads the Media, Culture and Society research group. Alongside this, Panizza is the chief editor of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. Panizza has published in the field of visual culture, photography, gender, identity, transnationalism and urban space. Her photographic fieldwork expands across twenty countries. As an artist, Panizza has had nine solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions. Dr. Talhy Stotzer is a Western Australian documentary photographer. Her work aims to portray human experience and highlight social issues. She recently completed her PhD in documentary photography at Edith Cowan University, where she lectures in Photomedia. She is the picture editor for Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, and her work has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. Kylie Stevenson is researcher at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Western Australia where she is engaged in a number of research projects, including the Hand Up Linkage project with St Vincent de Paul WA, and two other ARC-funded projects: Parents and Peers, about teenagers and social media; and Toddlers and Tablets, a partner project between ECU, London School of Economics and Dublin Institute of Technology about how 0-5 children use tablet technology. In addition, Kylie is a doctoral candidate on a project of her own design ‘Creative River Journeys’, case studies of creative arts researchers at ECU. Page | 3 ARIMITSU, Yasue Doshisha University The Transformation of Subjectivity of Expatriate Writers: A Comparative Study of Patrick White and J.M. Coetzee The Australian writer, Patrick White, is known as one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, and his books are widely read outside Australia. White was born in Australia, and educated mostly in England, where his ancestors came from. After his education, he lived in Europe as well as in America, and this is the reason why he is called an expatriate, but he eventually returned home to Australia after World War II. His background as an Australian writer is, thus, very complicated, and his identity floats between being Australian and being British. His works, therefore, have been often controversial among Australian critics regarding his authenticity as an Australian writer. I intend to examine the transformation of White’s subjectivity as an expatriate writer and compare him with J.M. Coetzee. Coetzee is another great Australian writer, but was born in South Africa and spent most of his life there before migrating to Australia at the age of 62. Coetzee also has a complicated relationship with his homeland and with Australia. In this paper, I intend to focus on how White and Coetzee respectively transformed their subjectivity as expatriate writers and examine how their relationships with their homelands affect their works. I would like to argue this within the framework of colonialism and post-colonialism, whether or not they are British, South African, or Australian, colonizer or colonized, or centred or marginalized. I will examine a selection of their works both before and after their settlement in Australia. It goes without saying that they are both winners of the Nobel Prize for literature; White in 1973, and Coetzee in 2003. Yasue ARIMITSU is Professor Emeritus of English and Australian Studies of Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. She is the author of Finding a Place: Landscape and the Search for Identity in the Early Novels of Patrick White (1986) and Australian Identity: Struggle and Transformation in Australian Literature (2003). She co-authored An Introduction to Australian Studies, 2nd Edition (2007). She has also edited and contributed to translating Diamond Dog: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Short Stories - Reflections on

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