Kim Scott's Writing and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
The Literary Studies Convention @ Wollongong University 7 – 11 July 2015
1 The Literary Studies Convention @ Wollongong University 7 – 11 July 2015 with the support of AAL, the Australasian Association of Literature ASAL, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature AULLA, the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association The Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts School of the Arts, English and Media English and Writing Program University of Wollongong and Cengage Learning Maney Publishing The convention venues are Buildings 19, 20 and 24 of the University of Wollongong. The Barry Andrews Memorial Lecture and Prize-Giving will be in the Hope Lecture Theatre (Building 43) ** Please note that some books by delegates and keynote speakers will be for sale in the University of Wollongong’s Unishop in Building 11. Look for the special display for the Literary Networks Convention. 2 3 Barry Andrews Memorial Address: Tony Birch .......................................................................... 10 Keynote Address: Carolyn Dinshaw ............................................................................................. 11 Keynote Address: Rita Felski ......................................................................................................... 12 Dorothy Green Memorial Lecture: Susan K. Martin .................................................................. 13 Plenary Panel: Australia’s Literary Culture and the Australian Book Industry ....................... 14 Plenary Panel: Literary Studies in Australian Universities – Structures and Futures ........... 16 Stephen -
Weightlessness and Weightiness in Kim Scott’S Benang: from the Heart
HONOURS THESIS IN ENGLISH AND CREATIVE WRITING A GROUNDED EXISTENCE: Weightlessness and Weightiness in Kim Scott’s Benang: from the heart Holly Guise This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English and Creative Writing at Murdoch University, 2015. DECLARATION I declare that this dissertation is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not been previously submitted for a degree at any tertiary educational institution. Holly Guise October 2015 i COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I acknowledge that a copy of this thesis will be held at the Murdoch University Library. I understand that, under the provisions s51.2 of the Copyright Act 1968, all or part of this thesis may be copied without infringement of copyright where such a reproduction is for the purposes of study and research. This statement does not signal any transfer of copyright away from the author. Signed: … Full Name of Degree: Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English and Creative Writing Thesis Title: A Grounded Existence: Weightlessness and Weightiness in Kim Scott’s Benang: from the heart Author: Holly Guise (31511451) Year: 2015 ii ABSTRACT This thesis argues that, in Indigenous Australian Kim Scott’s novel Benang: from the heart (1999), images of weightlessness and weightiness contrast and coalesce in myriad ways. Spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the South-West region of Western Australia, Scott constructs a polyphonic, subversive and inclusive narrative that represents various Nyoongar identities struggling for identity and place. Current criticism predominantly focuses on weightlessness in relation to Indigenous protagonist Harley Scat’s fragile grasp on identity, history and culture. -
21 – 23 February University of Western Australia Welcome to Literature & Ideas
PERTH FESTIVAL LITERATURE & IDEAS 21 – 23 FEBRUARY UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA WELCOME TO LITERATURE & IDEAS Perth Festival acknowledges the Noongar people who continue to practise their values, language, beliefs and knowledge on their kwobidak boodjar. They remain the spiritual and cultural birdiyangara of this place and we honour and respect their caretakers and custodians and the vital role Noongar people play for our community and our Festival to flourish. Welcome to Perth Festival’s Literature & Ideas Weekend, nestled on the campus of the University of Western Australia, our Founding Partner. Within a broader Festival 2020 program that celebrates this city and its stories, this weekend acknowledges the importance of histories both oral and written, as we share figurative campfires of understanding here on Whadjuk Boodja. This festival-in-a-festival has been curated by extraordinary local writer, Sisonke Msimang. Her broad knowledge is matched only by the size of her heart – traits that shine through in this program of big ideas and intimate revelation. I do trust you’ll enjoy it. IAIN GRANDAGE Image: Jess Wyld ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Image: Nick White The Stevie Wonder song ‘Love’s in Need of Love Today’ was an a more overt role in our public discussions. This is no excuse to integral part of my childhood. At every family party it would be avoid truth telling: we have asked our guests to bring their most played at full blast and everyone would join in, singing along at the loving, direct and clear selves to the table. top of our voices until we were drowning out Stevie, belting out We are excited to introduce you to an international roster of the lyrics which managed to be simultaneously saccharine and writers from Indonesia, Bangladesh, Thailand, Nigeria and Pakistan poignant: whose books we love. -
Ethics of Representation and Self-Reflexivity: Nicolas Rothwell's
Ethics of Representation and Self-Reflexivity: Nicolas Rothwell’s Narrative Essays STEPHANE CORDIER UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG Australian literature has been preoccupied, perhaps even obsessed, with representations of place and space. What started as a nationalising enterprise, an attempt to artificially cement place-making by substituting landscape for unknown space (Bennett 21), slowly gave rise to texts that interrogate settler colonial culture through spatial contestations. Yet, as Laurie Clancy argued in 1993, literary forms have proven resistant to decolonisation: ‘in the last two decades the self-conscious preoccupation with landscape among Australian fiction writers has become . debilitating and even self-destructive’ (49). The 1988 Bicentenary could be seen as a turning point in Australian history and culture. The array of festivities around the event may be interpreted as an orchestration of reified forms of settler-belonging to counter a rising intellectual opposition to a monolithic conceptualisation of history, art and culture; a last- ditch political effort from centric forms of power to re-assert traditional forms of belonging in the settler imaginary. But the Bicentenary also coincided with non-Indigenous Australian writers beginning to inscribe unbelonging at the heart of their fictions and non-fictions.1 Spatial crises, non-belonging and unbelonging are, increasingly, features of contemporary Australian literature, as demonstrated in the works of Michele de Kretser, Richard Flanagan, Ross Gibson, Christos Tsiolkas or Tim Winton (Cordier, ‘Intimate Immensities’). Non- Indigenous authors who grapple with settler identity in the twenty-first century are also in search of ethical literary forms that reflect a necessary erosion of settler dominance, privilege or class. -
The Blackwords Symposium: the Past, Present, and Future of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Literature
The BlackWords Symposium: The Past, Present, and Future of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Literature KERRY KILNER University of Queensland PETER MINTER University of Sydney We write to create, to survive, and to revolutionise; we write to haunt and we ache because we refuse to leave the past alone. We aim to disrupt the State’s founding order of things, to disrupt ‘patriarchal white sovereignty’ (Moreton- Robinson), white heteronormativity, and the colonial-continuum of history. (Harkin, herein) The BlackWords Symposium, held in October 2012, celebrated the fifth anniversary of the establishment of BlackWords, the AustLit-supported project recording information about, and research into, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and storytellers. The symposium showcased the exciting state of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander creative writing and storytelling across all forms, contemporary scholarship on Indigenous writing, alongside programs such as the State Library of Queensland’s black&write! project, which supports writers’ fellowships, editing mentorships, and a trainee editor program for professional development for Indigenous editors. But really, the event was a celebration of the sort of thinking, the sort of resistance, and the re-writing of history that is evident in the epigraph to this introduction. The speakers, who included Melissa Lucashenko, Wesley Enoch, Sandra Phillips, Ellen Van Neerven, Jeanine Leane, and Boori Pryor alongside the authors of the works in this collection, explored a diverse range of topics -
Single Motherhood As a Site for Feminist Reimagination in Helen Garner’S Monkey Grip and ‘Other People’S Children’
Single Motherhood as a Site for Feminist Reimagination in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and ‘Other People’s Children’ JANE SCERRI UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY Introduction: Helen Garner: Breaking Down Old Structures … Historically Australian single mothers were vilified as ‘fallen’ and considered a ‘polluting influence’ and ‘a danger to [their] child[ren]’ (Swain 10). Contemporarily, as Emily Wolfinger (2016) observes, the dominant critique of single mothers has shifted from concerns about their morality to their ability to provide economically for their children, suggesting that contemporary conservatism prioritises the financial over the social. Garner’s single mothers in Monkey Grip (1977) and ‘Other People’s Children’ (1980) existed in a socially experimental milieu; one that denounced historical vilification and preceded the contemporary negative rhetoric of neoliberalism which characterises single mothers as economically irresponsible, non-working and a burden on society. This milieu, viewed retrospectively, provides a fertile space in which to reimagine and reframe contemporary single motherhood, especially if contemporary single mothers are to be again judged according to outdated ‘good’ mother myths1 reinforced by economic neoliberalism. In this way, a re-examination of Garner’s depiction of single motherhood, with its focus on domestic spaces and female concerns might reorient modern single mothers to a second-wave feminist style presumption of their ‘natural’ equal rights as women and mothers; bearing in mind that economic constraints, a major factor when contending agency, vary across class and time. I argue that single mothers, by virtue of their decampment from the nuclear family, debunk the myth of the ‘good’ mother, either by not adopting, or by abandoning, their traditionally othered position within it, and therefore evade at least some of the mythologised discourse by controlling and managing their own space. -
Representations of the Domestic in Kate Grenville's the Secret River and Sarah Thornhill
promoting access to White Rose research papers Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/77334/ Paper: Staniforth, MJ (2013) Depicting the Colonial Home: Representations of the Domestic in Kate Grenville's The Secret River and Sarah Thornhill. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 13 (2). (12). http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal White Rose Research Online [email protected] Depicting the Colonial Home: Representations of the Domestic in Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and Sarah Thornhill MARTIN STANIFORTH University of Leeds In Searching for the Secret River, Kate Grenville’s 2006 account of writing her novel The Secret River, she grounds her decision to write the book in two events. The first was her participation in the 2000 ‘Sorry Day’ Reconciliation Walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge, when an exchange of smiles with an Aboriginal woman led her to wonder about her ancestor’s settling on the land and ‘who might have been living on that land, and how he’d persuaded them to leave it’ (13). The second was an encounter that same year with Aboriginal writer Melissa Lucashenko, who challenged her repetition of the ‘family story: a formula, unquestionable’ (28) that her grandfather took up, rather than simply took, land on the Hawkesbury River. The resulting novel is clearly ‘positioned ... as an expression of progressive politics in relation to reconciliation and the history wars’ (Nolan and Clarke 11). As such it has been described both as ‘a reworking of the narrative of settlement with a contemporary sensibility’ (Kossew 9) and as ‘a most unpalatable and confronting depiction of whiteness as implicated in the massacre of Aboriginal people’ (Kelada 2). -
Canberra Conversations
Anzac Canberra Conversation, 15 April 2013 Remembering war — seeking peace Canberra Conversations Remembering war — seeking peace A Canberra Conversation for Anzac Day 2014 Manning Clark House, Forrest Wednesday 15 April, 6.00 – 9.00 pm Hosted by A Chorus of Women 25 participants (list attached) Introduction Canberra Conversations provide an opportunity for Canberra citizens to talk about important issues in a collaborative environment that provides an alternative to the adversarial debate that we usually see in politics, the media and other public discourse. The conversations are based on the principles of dialogue; however, they are not about getting everyone to agree. We have discovered that many disagreements reflect different ‘framing’ so that both parties can be ‘right’ within their own frame, which is revealed through careful listening. We include story and song in our conversations to allow the emotional and ethical aspects of a topic to be voiced. These human qualities are of central importance but are not easily brought to the fore in public forums. Our songs are written by members of A Chorus of Women. In this summary report, we have included the key points of view and lines of discussion expressed by participants, and conclude with comments on the conversation process itself, as well as ideas for keeping this Anzac conversation going. The topic The 100th anniversary of the 1915 Gallipoli landings is fast approaching and the Australian Government is planning large-scale commemorations to mark this event. This is on top of the already increasing participation in Anzac Day events each year. However, while maintaining the deepest respect for service people who lost their lives in war, there is growing concern in some parts of the community about the intense focus given to the Gallipoli campaign, and to war in general. -
Telling Australia's Story
The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia Telling Australia’s Story —and why it’s important Report on the inquiry into Canberra’s national institutions Joint Standing Committee on the National Capital and External Territories April 2019 Canberra © Commonwealth of Australia 2019 ISBN 978-1-74366-957-0 (Printed version) ISBN 978-1-74366-958-7 (HTML version) This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License. The details of this licence are available on the Creative Commons website: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/. Contents Foreword ............................................................................................................................................ vii Membership of the Committee ............................................................................................................ xi Terms of reference ............................................................................................................................ xiii List of abbreviations .......................................................................................................................... xiv List of recommendations ................................................................................................................... xvi National institutions examined by the Committee .............................................................................. xxi 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ -
Mothering, Resistance and Survival in Kathleen Mary Fallon's Paydirt and Melissa Lucashenko's Mullumbimby
VICTORIA BROOKMAN Mothering, Resistance and Survival in Kathleen Mary Fallon’s Paydirt and Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby The systematic removal of Indigenous Australian children was officially exposed over two decades ago, and the Australian Federal Government made an official apology for the practice in 2008, yet the removal rate of Indigenous Australian children by authorities remains disproportionately high. Child removal, inequalities in health, educational, and financial outcomes, and the pervasive ongoing cultural and systematic hostility against First Nations Australians, combine to create a hostile external culture for Indigenous children to grow up in. This article examines how the struggle to raise Indigenous Australian children within this hostile external context manifests in contemporary Australian literature, with respect to two texts: Paydirt (2007) by Kathleen Mary Fallon and Mullumbimby (2013) by Melissa Lucashenko. Both novels have partially autobiographical elements and feature women mothering teenage Indigenous Australian children. In each novel, the threat of child removal is used as a framing device, and reconnection to traditional Indigenous Australian culture forms both a remedy and an essential component of the survival of the children concerned. This article provides a close reading of the themes and narratives of these novels in relation to the Australian political and cultural context in order to examine how it is that the texts’ authors integrate their characters’ maternal practice with their essential resistance -
Both Hands Full Kim Scott’S Ancestral Noongar 2
Westerly Volume 61 Number 1, 2016 New Writing from 61.1 Western Australia Notice of Intention Publisher Fiction Westerly has converted the full backfile of Westerly Centre, The University of Western Australia, Australia Poetry Westerly (1956–) to electronic text, available General Editor to readers and researchers on the Westerly Essays Catherine Noske website, www.westerlymag.com.au. This Reviews work has been supported by a grant from Editorial Advisors the Cultural Fund of the Copyright Agency Amanda Curtin (prose) Limited. Cassandra Atherton (poetry) All creative works, articles and reviews Editorial Consultants converted to electronic format will be correctly Barbara Bynder attributed and will appear as published. Delys Bird (The University of Western Australia) Copyright will remain with the authors, and the Tanya Dalziell (The University of Western Australia) material cannot be further republished without Paul Genoni (Curtin University) authorial permission. Westerly will honour any Dennis Haskell (The University of Western Australia) requests to withdraw material from electronic Douglas Kerr (University of Hong Kong) Westerly publication. If any author does not wish their John Kinsella (Curtin University) work to appear in this format, please contact Susan Lever (Hon. Associate, The University of Sydney) Westerly immediately and your material will John Mateer be withdrawn. Tracy Ryan (The University of Western Australia) Andrew Taylor (Edith Cowan University) Contact: [email protected] Guest edited by Edwin Thumboo (National University of Singapore) David Whish-Wilson (Curtin University) Stephen Kinnane Terri-ann White (The University of Western Australia Publishing) Administrator Lucy Dougan Web Editor Paul Clifford Production Design: Chil3 Typesetting: Lasertype Print: UniPrint, The University of Western Australia Front cover: Bella Kelly, Untitled (Christmas Trees), c. -
In Defence of Paul Ham: History As Its Own Worst Enemy
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE FJHP – Volume 31 – 2015 provided by Flinders Academic Commons Forum In Defence of Paul Ham: History as Its Own Worst Enemy Bodie A. Ashton, The University of Adelaide Journalist-cum-popular historian Paul Ham’s bad-tempered 2014 attack on the historical discipline within the academy seems to be a very unusual place for a member of that academy to try and find some common ground. Ham was responding to a review by the University of Queensland’s Martin Crotty, of his book 1914: The Year the World Ended. Crotty’s review was, perhaps, much more even-handed than Ham might have expected — he did not, for example, point out the silly melodrama of the title — but nevertheless, there was certainly a sense that the academic was typing his thoughts with a wry smile and perhaps a disbelieving shake of the head. Ham, after all, claimed that the trenches on the Western Front could be seen from space by 1915. Who, Crotty wondered, quite reasonably, was watching from orbit? 1914 was essentially a ‘Boys’ Own adventure’, and it would not pass muster among serious academics.1 However, Crotty was careful to throw a bone to the 1 This is perhaps a little questionable, as the academy has produced some woeful potboilers in the past, and not a few of them on the topic of the First World War. The reader is directed to Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War for an example of faulty research, argument and logic.