AUSTRALIAN HUMANITIES REVIEW issue 51 2011 Edited by Monique Rooney and Russell Smith Australian Humanities Review Editors: Monique Rooney, The Australian National University Russell Smith, The Australian National University Guest Editor: Lisa Milner Ecological Humanities Editors: Dr Deborah Rose, Macquarie University Dr Thom van Dooren, University of Technology, Sydney Editorial Advisors: Stuart Cunningham, Queensland University of Technology Ned Curthoys, The Australian National University Guy Davidson, University of Wollongong Ken Gelder, University of Melbourne Andrew Hassam, Monash University Marilyn Lake, La Trobe University Sue Martin, La Trobe University Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, University of Sydney Susan Sheridan, Flinders University Rosalind Smith, University of Newcastle, NSW Terry Threadgold, Cardiff University, Wales McKenzie Wark, Eugene Lang College, New York Terri-Ann White, University of Western Australia Adi Wimmer, University of Klagenfurt, Austria Elizabeth McMahon, University of New South Wales Libby Robin, The Australian National University Australian Humanities Review is published by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, with the support of the School of Humanities at The Australian National University. 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The views expressed are not necessarily those of the publisher. Printed in Australia AHR Issue 51 (2011) ISSN 1835-8063 (PRINT), ISSN 1325-8338 (ONLINE) Table of Contents Editors’ Introduction . 1 Monique Rooney and Russell Smith Essays ‘Every Right to be There’: Cinema Spaces and Racial Politics in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia . 5 Maria Nugent A Transnational Gallipoli? . 25 Roger Hillman Special Section: ‘On the Table’: Food in Our Culture Guest Editor’s Introduction—‘On the Table’: Food in Our Culture’ 45 Lisa Milner Essays Making Australian Food History . 49 Colin Bannerman Nineteenth-Century Experimentation and the Role of Indigenous Foods in Australian Food Culture . 65 Barbara Santich Kill Skippy? Red Meat versus Kangaroo Meat in the Australian Diet . 79 Adrian Peace Swimming with Tuna: Human-Ocean Entanglements . 97 Elspeth Probyn Small, Slow and Shared: Emerging Social Innovations in Urban Australian Foodscapes . 115 Ferne Edwards The Civilised Burger: Meat Alternatives as a Conversion Aid and Social Instrument for Australian Vegetarians and Vegans . 135 Jemàl Nath and Desireé Prideaux iii Book Reviews Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, by Lisa M . Hamilton, Reviewed by Kelly Donati . 153 The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics and Civil Society, by Janet A . Flammang, Reviewed by Bethaney A . Turner . 159 A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite (3rd edition), edited by John Germov and Lauren Williams, Reviewed by Mandy Hughes . 163 The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure, by Geoff Andrews; Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture, by Fabio Parasecoli; The Globalisation of Food, edited by David Inglis and Debra Gimlin, Reviewed by Lauren Williams and John Germov . 167 Cake: A Global History, by Nicola Humble; Cheese: A Global History, by Andrew Dalby; Tea: A Global History, by Helen Saberi; Soup: A Global History, by Janet Clarkson; The Bloody History of the Croissant, by David Halliday, Reviewed by Donna Lee Brien . 175 The Ecological Humanities Introduction . 183 Thom van Dooren and Deborah Rose Dogs, Meat and Douglas Mawson . 185 Elizabeth Leane and Helen Tiffin Justice Towards Animals Demands Veganism . 201 Gary Steiner The Posture of the Human Exception . 203 Dominique Lestel ‘Babe’: the Tale of the Speaking Meat: Part I . 205 Val Plumwood L’animal est l’avenir de l’homme, by Dominique Lestel, Reviewed by Hollis Taylor . 209 iv Editors’ Introduction Monique Rooney and Russell Smith Welcome to Issue 51 of Australian Humanities Review. This issue kicks off with two essays that engage with the politics of representation in Australian cultural life. Maria Nugent’s essay, ‘“Every Right to be There”: Cinema Spaces and Racial Politics in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia’, shows how Luhrmann’s recent, controversial film provides insight into the experience of watching movies in segregated cinemas. This important essay brings together analysis of racial segregation as it is represented visually in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia with the recollections of Aboriginal cinema-goers who experienced or observed segregation first-hand. In doing so, Nugent reminds us of the significance of ‘non-realist’ cinema images that can captivate audiences and at the same time represent the material conditions of cinema-watching. While Nugent’s essay points to how relations of domination and subordination organize everyday, supposedly egalitarian, practices of cinema-going in Australia, Roger Hillman’s essay adds a transnational dimension to representations of an historical event that has become the preeminent site of national memorialisation. In ‘A Transnational Gallipoli?’, Hillman contrasts the masculinist heroics and celebratory nationalism of Peter Weir’s iconic film,Gallipoli , and Roger McDonald’s 1915, with more recent novels and films produced outside Australia’s borders that provide alternative forms of cultural memory. Louis de Bernières’ Birds Without Wings and Tolga Örnek’s documentary film Gallipoli: The Front Line Experience are significant as texts that ‘situate the Gallipoli legend in a transnational rather than a national framework, while providing a fuller understanding of how cultural memory works in relation to the national imaginary’. This issue features a special guest-edited section, ‘“On the Table”: Food in Our Culture’. Lisa Milner has brought together essays and book reviews that engage, in various ways, with how food is produced and consumed. Topics canvassed in this section include Adrian Peace on the ethics and politics of kangaroo consumption; histories of Australian food culture, including Barbara Santich on colonial appetites for native foods, and Colin Bannerman on the quest to define a distinctive Australian food culture; Ferne Edwards on the tension between large-scale capitalist and localized non-commodified food production systems; Elspeth Probyn on the intertwinement of humans, fish and oceans; and Jemàl Nath and Desireé Prideaux on the role of ‘mock meats’ in vegetarian eating practices. 1 Australian Humanities Review - Issue 51 Our Ecological Humanities section continues the food theme but with a specific focus on the impact of the human/animal divide on attitudes to consumption. Included are Elizabeth Leane and Helen Tiffin’s essay on Douglas Mawson’s relationship to his sled dogs, as well as excerpts from books by Gary Steiner (on the ethics of veganism), Dominique Lestel (on the human exceptionalism implicit in vegetarianism) and Val Plumwood (on the moral dualisms surrounding meat- eating). Concluding this section is Hollis Taylor’s review of Dominique Lestel’s L’animal est l’avenir de l’homme. 2 ESSAYS ‘Every Right to be There’: Cinema Spaces and Racial Politics in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia Maria Nugent During Baz Luhrmann’s childhood in a small country town in New South Wales in the 1960s and 1970s, his father operated the local picture theatre. It’s a detail much mentioned by Luhrmann in interviews, and often included in biographical sketches of him. His Wikipedia entry, for instance, notes that: ‘He was raised in Herons Creek, a tiny rural settlement in northern New South Wales, where his father ran a petrol station and a movie theatre, both of which would influence his son’s film-making’ (‘Baz’). An interview with Luhrmann that appears on various fan websites likewise states: ‘Mark Anthony Luhrmann grew up in rural Australia and it was at his father’s movie theatre that he first became enthralled by the world of movies and the power of story telling’ (Fischer). Film theorist Pam Cook says that Luhrmann ‘delights in … telling his own life story, which he views as inseparable from his creative journey’ (14). As part of that story, Luhrmann credits his father’s cinema with exposing him to the old movies and musicals that would become inspiration for, and sources in, his own films. For instance, when explaining influences for Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann told one interviewer that: I grew up in the middle of nowhere and we got lots of old television and my dad ran a cinema for a while, so I loved musicals as a kid. You know, music cinema, all this artificiality making you feel things, I’ve done a lot of opera and theater, and I just thought that somebody’s got to get around to making that work in the cinema again. And so that was the project. (Keefe) That Luhrmann’s film-making owes a