Article

Thesis Eleven 2016, Vol. 135(1) 3–13 Way Out West: Mapping ª The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Western Australia DOI: 10.1177/0725513616657882 the.sagepub.com Jon Stratton Independent Scholar and retired Professor of

Peter Beilharz , Australia

Abstract Western Australia, like Tasmania, can slip too easily off the map, a periphery on the periphery, its significance occluded by the hegemony of the eastern states of Australia. Yet Western Australia is core to Australia’s economy, not least through mining, and through its proximity to Asia. The West is itself connected more closely to region, in both the local and transnational senses. Its tradition of secessionist thinking indicates a kind of exceptionalist culture. This is a difference which begs for explanation. This essay introduces some motifs and themes of this special issue of Thesis Eleven, entitled ‘Way Out West: Mapping Western Australia’. It locates the West in some recent historical, geographical and narrative context. It gestures toward the biography of its editors, Jon Stratton and Peter Beilharz, and their locations spread across the west and east of the continent. It calls for further scrutiny of these, and other antipodes.

Keywords antipodes, Asia, culture, Perth, power, Western Australia

Looking out Perth is not only the largest city on the west coast of Australia, it is the only major city on that coast. Australia was settled from the south-east corner by British ships that by- passed the western coast to reach the area mapped by James Cook, who had himself traversed the Pacific Ocean reaching the east coast by way of Tahiti and New Zealand. Indeed, as the story is frequently told, the British had little interest in the western side of

Corresponding author: Jon Stratton, Perth, WA, Australia. Email: [email protected] 4 Thesis Eleven 135(1) the Australian island until, in the wake of the French Revolution, French ships started visiting and developing detailed maps of the southern part of the western coastline. The area around what is now Albany, the oldest colonial settlement in Western Australia on the south-western coast, had been claimed for Britain by Captain George Vancouver in 1791. However, it was not until 1829 that Captain James Stirling founded the Swan River Colony, which he subsequently named Perth in 1832, some 14 km up the Swan River. Forced on Britain by a fear of French colonization, Western Australia was secured by a Scotsman and its capital was named after the home city of another Scotsman, Sir George Murray. The colonial structure here is complex. The Act of Union bringing together Scotland and England in a full political unification in which England was the dominant partner had been signed in 1707, 126 years previously. Perth, the only Aus- tralian capital not to be named after a person apart from Canberra, was linked with a Scottish city. One early colonist, William Leake, was so concerned that he even wrote to Under Secretary Twiss in London that: ‘I have heard that a vast number [of prospective colonists] already declare against Swan River because they now consider it a place where the Scottish interest only will prevail’ (quoted in James, 2007: 37). In the end, the 1859 Western Australian census records only 6% of the British settler population as having been born in Scotland, roughly half the average across Australia, but, Leigh Beaton writes, ‘their influence in the establishment of Western Australia was disproportionate to their numbers’ (2004: 8). For about 40 years the only means of communication and transport between Perth and the eastern states were by ship. The East-West Telegraph was built in the 1870s. In 1917 a railway line connected the mining centre of Kalgoorlie with the eastern states. A railway between Perth and Kalgoorlie had been built in 1896. When the East-West Telegraph had been constructed a rough track had been carved across the Nullarbor Plain. In the Second World War, in 1940 and 1941, this track was upgraded for military purposes to a useable road. It was not completely sealed until 1976. It is this history, the difficulty in crossing the Nullarbor Plain, that gives Perth its reputation for remoteness within Australia. Perth evolved in a very different environment to the eastern state cities. The Nullarbor continues to be identified as a barrier dividing east from west. People in Perth tend to see the cities of Sydney and Melbourne as dens of iniquity and Perth as a suburban Arcadia1 while the populations of those eastern cities view Perth as backward and conservative. A good example of the way Western Australians see those from the east as a threat is the reporting of a visitation by Rebels bikies in September 2013:

A big police contingent has met hundreds of bikie gang members near the West Australian Nullarbor town of Eucla. Members of the Rebels motorcycle gang crossed the border earlier this morning and are expected to travel to Perth via Norseman and Kalgoorlie. Police say the convoy stretches three kilometres and they are urging motorists travelling along the Great Eastern Highway to take care. (ABC News, 2013)

The bikies represent the decadence, dissolution and mayhem feared by upright, law- abiding Western Australians. Stratton and Beilharz 5

In a mirror image, the eastern cities think of themselves as having culture and civi- lization while Perth is thought of as an oversized country town, its only reason for existence being that it services the mining industry in Western Australia’s east and north. Even now it is difficult to attract applicants from the eastern states for positions in the culture industries and academia. What is suppressed in this narrative of Perth as remote and backward that has become accepted by people in the eastern states – t’othersiders in the old Western Australian vernacular – is that Perth is closer to Indonesia, including the holiday destination of Bali, than are Sydney and Melbourne, and Perth is closer to Indonesia than it is to those cities. In the financial year 2010–11, 385,000 Western Australians visited Bali (Thomas, 2011). Western Australia’s population at that time was 2.35 million. At the same time, Perth is closer to Europe by plane than are the eastern states. During the high point of British and European migration to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, when most migrants still came by boat, Fremantle, Perth’s port at the mouth of the Swan River, was the first Australian stop. Often migrants disembarked and stayed in Western Australia. There is a story told by eastern staters that those who stayed in Fremantle and Perth were the weaker migrants, the ones who could not handle being on the boat for the extra few days nec- essary to get to the eastern cities. In Perth it is argued that many stayed because of the opportunities and pleasures offered by the city. The narrative of Perth’s remoteness is located in the story of Australia’s geography told from the point of view of people in the eastern states. In the same way that Darwin in the north of Australia sees itself as integrated into a web of South-East Asian interests and political and cultural concerns rather than looking south and being preoccupied with national Australian matters, so Perth, and Western Australia, tends to look west across the Indian Ocean (on Darwin and the Northern Territory see Stratton, 1989). Aside from the UK and New Zealand, most migrants to Perth in 2011 now came from, in order, South Africa, India, Malaysia, Italy, China, Singapore (Australian Bureau of Statistics: Australian Social Trends, 2014). Many of the Asian migrants had come to Perth to study in universities and have converted their student visas to residency visas. In 2011, during the mining boom, Western Australia supplied 46% of the income from Australia’s exports. In 2014–15 the state’s major export partner was China with 49.7% of total export income, followed by Japan with 18.9%. The next three countries in terms of export income are the Republic of Korea, Singapore and Malaysia. Most of this income was from the sale of iron ore. In dollars, exports to China were worth A$55,070 million. China was also the supplier of most imports at 13.8% and A$4,888 million (Australian Government: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Western Australia, n.d.). The disparity here is worthy of note. It is clear that Western Australia is deeply entwined with its Indian Ocean neighbours. This can be seen in the current migrant flows and in the ways the Western Australian economy is integrated into the Indian Ocean region. Western Australia tends to be thought of as a resource-based economy with Perth as its administrative centre, and indeed Western Australia’s most significant exports in dollar terms in 2014–15 were iron ore (A$53,376 million) and then, in order, natural gas (A$13,477 million), gold (A$12,968 million), and wheat (A$2,989 million). 6 Thesis Eleven 135(1)

This incorporation of Perth, and Western Australia, into the Indian Ocean region, combined with the perception that Perth is cut off from the rest of Australia, means that Perth has developed an idiosyncratic culture that is not Australian in the sense that the cultures of Sydney and Melbourne are Australian but is Australian in the sense that Perth, and Western Australia, are a part of the Australian nation-state and share much of the political and cultural baggage that is definitively Australian. Perth is the most suburban of Australian cities. In 1947 the population of Fremantle and Perth combined was just under 400,000. By 2014 it was around 2 million. During this time Perth overtook Adelaide and is now roughly equal to in population size. This makes Perth the equal third most populous city in Australia. This large and rapid increase was accommodated by the growth of suburbs mostly up and down the coast. More than any other Australian city Perth is a product of the internal combustion engine. As a suburban city Perth lives out the myths of suburbia. It is thought of as safe, respectable, mostly middle class, a good place to bring up children, and, by those fru- strated with its endless grass lawns and free-standing houses supporting the privatized, nuclear family, banal and soul-eroding. Dave Warner, the musician popular in Perth in the 1970s and early 1980s, failed in the national Australian market because his songs were a sympathetic commentary on a suburban life that people in cities outside of Perth found hard to understand. To assume that Australia is culturally homogeneous, that the states and their cities are different only in small and minor things, not in any fundamental ways, is to play into the claims of the long-standing Sydney-and-Melbourne-centric historiography and the cul- tural nation-building rhetoric of the 1970s and 1980s. There are significant cultural, economic, and socio-political differences between the states and territories. Globally, this is a time of the development of regional markets such as the European Economic Union. At the same time, acknowledging that nation-states have often been forged in the fire of oppression and even violence, groups claiming national status have emerged; for example Catalonia in Spain and, as it happens, Scotland in the UK. The Perth experience, and that of Western Australia, has differences that need to be recognized for what they are, rather than airbrushed over in the cause of generating a unified historical narrative that privileges the south-east corner of the continent and the reinforcement of Australia as a unified nation-state. From this point of view it is not surprising that in a referendum in 1933 Western Australia voted for secession by a factor of almost two to one. Western Australia was not colonized by the French but its divergences from the socio-cultural order of the New South Wales and Victoria axis are nonetheless significant. This issue of Thesis Eleven is a step in the direction of giving Perth and Western Australia a voice, and a visibility on the national and international stage, too long occluded.

The accidental migrant I came to Australia from England for a one-year contract at in Brisbane in June 1981 for the start of second semester. I was collateral damage in Margaret Thatcher’s war on the Humanities, having been called into my Head of School’s office in the Sociology Department at Essex University and told that because of cutbacks there would be plenty of work the following year but no funds with which to Stratton and Beilharz 7 pay me. My contract at Griffith was for a Visiting Fellow. Andrew Tolson had held the position before me and I wrote to him to ask what I needed to know about Brisbane and Australia before I went there. In his reply he told me two important things: Australians don’t dance at parties, and if I liked reggae I should tape my collection and take it with me as reggae was virtually unknown in Brisbane. Andrew was right on both counts. When I arrived the local community radio station 4ZZZ was still overwhelmingly playing punk. Queensland was in the last years of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s regime. I learnt what it was like to have one’s phone tapped. At the end of my year’s fellowship I was offered a number of short-term contracts which enabled me to stay on in Australia. My first continuing position, and the job which enabled me to get permanent resi- dency, was in Darwin at what was then the Darwin Institute of Technology. This later became the Northern Territory University. The local urban myth was that this august institution had been going to be called the University of the Northern Territory. How- ever, after nameplates were made and letterheads had been printed someone realized the possibility this title had for graffitists. Darwin and I got on very well. Far from its reputation as being remote and backward (much like Perth’s reputation), it was then, in the late 1980s, a lively multicultural city on Indonesia’s doorstep that had recovered successfully from the devastation of Cyclone Tracy. I stayed there three years in the small sociology department, but opportunities were scarce for a theorist of popular culture, so I moved on in my anti-clockwise circumnavigation of the Australian continent. I reached Perth in late January 1990 for a position at what was then Curtin University of Technology. My first degree was taken at Bradford University of Technology. I have no idea why I have so often found myself at institutions that have privileged the sciences. That being said, I have often felt I was pioneering the study of culture in places which found it difficult to see the worth of it. At Curtin, though, I walked in the footsteps of John Fiske and Graeme Turner (on Curtin’s involvement in Perth Cultural Studies see Stratton, 2016). Academic life was somewhat easier provided one kept out of the way of the technology spruikers. Perth has always felt a little uncanny to me. Around 1960 my parents had thought about migrating to Australia. I remember they got pamphlets from Australia House. They had wondered if they were eligible for the ‘Ten Pound Pom’ scheme. My mother worried about the weather. My father ran a small steel company in London manufacturing and selling angle-iron fence-posts and the like. He made enquiries and I remember him saying that he thought he wouldn’t be able to make a success of things in Australia because steel there was monopolized by one company. In retrospect I realize that he was talking about BHP. Finally, they decided not to migrate. The city where they had been thinking of settling was Perth. Every so often I find myself wondering where they would have lived if they had come. Probably, I suspect, in one of the northern suburbs and, knowing their typically English taste, in an early McMansion near the coast. Occa- sionally, in the city, and especially before it was rebuilt with money from the most recent mining boom, I would catch sight of their ghosts; my mother flitting into Aherns (taken over by David Jones in 1999) or Boans (taken over by Myers in 1984), or my father walking up St George’s Terrace to conduct business. 8 Thesis Eleven 135(1)

And I wonder about myself. How different would my life have been if I had lived in what was then, it has to be said, a tributary of popular culture rather than in a country just engaging with the aftershocks of the so-called Swinging Sixties. I would have missed the Rolling Stones and Blind Faith gigs in Hyde Park in 1969 but seen Dave Warner in his prime. I might, though, have seen the legendary, in Perth anyway, Stones concert at the WACA in February 1973. I now have this on a bootleg. It has often been said that Perth is 10 years behind the rest of Australia, and Australia is 10 years behind the UK. With the World Wide Web and airbuses, neither of these claims holds much water anymore. However, in talking with people who have grown up in Perth about their cultural experiences, their past is surprisingly close to my present – for example, some television programs were screened in Perth 10 years or more later than in the UK. After 25 years in Perth I still feel I walk in the footsteps my parents never took. When they were alive and I would speak with them regularly on the phone, I often wondered if they were aware of the irony of my living in this city. Why, I wonder, have I spent so long in the antipodean city to which they thought of migrating but never did? There are many answers, but I should leave them for another time. Jon Stratton

Looking West / My own various antipodes How does the view look, from Melbourne? Likely it all depends on the weather. Inha- bitants of the eastern states of Australia are often thought to be stuck looking north, or north-east. The big world, as in the Latin American ‘El Norte’, hangs over the antipodes like a treat, a fun palace too far away, and a nightmare. Sometimes we might look east, to Aotearoa/New Zealand, or even south, to Tasmania, to the pastoral? or further south to more ice and penguins (North, 2015). Sometimes, increasingly since the ‘60s, we look due north, to an Asia which also dominates our imagined and future lives as well as our pasts. China, the new big hegemon to the north; the BRICS, scattered variously, apparently now all caught up with the pursuit of the logics of rational mastery rather than the new politics of the South. Sometimes we also look west, to Western Australia, and beyond. Further west, of course, along from Perth, there is Africa. In 2015 the Griffith Review published an excellent issue on the West, called ‘Looking West’ (Schultz and Haebich, 2015). We on Thesis Eleven had for some time been talking about an issue on the West, referring to it in phantom form via the Dingoes’ rock anthem as ‘Way Out West’. The Griffith Review special issue was a terrific stimulant, though of course ours is a different project, and what you have before you reflects something of that difference. It results from a project of collaboration established with Jon Stratton, then at Curtin University. In 2015 I took up a research chair at Curtin, and the process began to accelerate, due not least to Jon’s good offices and enthusiasm. As for me, I discovered WA more than 30 years ago, when I began travelling to the west, following John Curtin’s own tracks to the beach at Cottesloe, seeking out the local talent, sometimes taking some from the east with me to share there. Our main inter- locutors then, at this point via the good offices and enthusiasm of Trevor Hogan, were actors like Peter Newman and George Seddon, later Terri-ann White. Thesis Eleven ran major events in the west, one of which resulted in a special issue honouring the Stratton and Beilharz 9 extraordinary life and work of George Seddon, geographer, geologist, urban planner, lover of literature, and of the combination of all of these things (see Thesis Eleven 74, 2003). We took George back to Mildura, too, to the east, where he was born; and we brought Bernard Smith to Perth, once for events with Newman, Tim Winton and others, once for the memorable seminar organized by Tim Dolin and Neil Levi on antipodean modernism (Dolin and Levi, 2006). Plainly there was an abundance of good ideas and energies in the west, more of which are reflected in this new window, in this special issue of Thesis Eleven on the west: ‘Way Out West: Mapping Western Australia’. Thesis Eleven has often been described as a Melbourne journal, and even with its various ties and bonds elsewhere, there is some necessary truth in this. For 40 years we have breathed the Melbourne air. But there is always much to be learned about other places, as this issue of the journal shows again. The idea of ‘Australia’ is a white nationalist myth. It consists of the sum of its colonial pasts, with Canberra thrown in as an attempt to symbolize the missing hope of unity or shared essential identity. We each of us have different senses of belonging, or antipodes. Antipodes, viewed in this way, are of course personal, familial, narrative, autobiographical. As for me, my folks did not choose Australia; it was chosen for them by the path of world history in Palestine in the Second World War. They discovered that, by their papers, they were in the wrong place. Like many others, they became accidental Australians. Melbourne has always been home to me, though I have only more recently breathed nothing but the city air. There were various other new places to discover. I spent the first decade of the new century discovering New Zealand. I was quickly convinced that whatever the differences across the Tasman, there was a key to understanding Australia in its shared labour market, cultural and maritime traffic, markets for money and ideas that made the antipodes such an interesting unit of analysis (Beilharz, 2015). In due course, we published an issue on New Zealand, via our friends Peter Hempenstall and Philippa Mein Smith, and under the guiding southern star provided by the clear light of the work of JGA Pocock (Thesis Eleven 92, 2008). I do have a sense of antipodean connection to Mildura, heading out northwest. Something happens to my head and body as the plane settles in over the citrus and vines, or as you clear the wheatbelt and line up the city after the long drive across the state. Over the years we have done much good work in Mildura with Stefano and Donata di Pieri and the team of the Mildura Writers Festival. I taught undergrads at La Trobe Mildura, visiting across a 10-year span, and walked along the Murray, and my son cut his ABC broadcasting teeth there. It also feels like home. And I feel at home in the southwest of Germany, where some of the resonances are uncanny, even though I discovered it late in life. Germany was a part of my early imagination, via relay, even though I had avoided it for many years because of a young radical sense of guilt by association for the crimes of Nazism. Like all of us, I suppose, it took me a while to grow up. Of all my travels, most across the path of my life have taken me to the United States, where I also have favourite places, from Detroit to Chicago and Boston, but I still feel more like a visitor. Cambridge, Massachusetts, was full of people trying to behave as though they belonged there, when I lived there; it seemed better to me to wear your transience, like a badge or a T-shirt. There were clearly core and peripheral labour markets here, and many who 10 Thesis Eleven 135(1) would live on the dream of Hollywood or its academic equivalent rather than con- template the prospect of the good work they might get done in Arkansas or Nebraska. In the meantime I discovered, again via the good offices of Trevor Hogan, that I had developed some antipodean connections in Manila. There were some echoes here of earlier vibes in Mexico City and Sa˜o Paulo. But my strongest antipode, these days, is in South Africa, especially since working and living in Stellenbosch in 2015. In 2014 we published our first Thesis Eleven South African issue, thanks to the energy and enthu- siasm of Peter Vale; a follow-up issue on Johannesburg is in the works, as well as further materials on the writing of Ivan Vladislavic´ and Charles van Onselen. Here, Perth is also a kind of umbilical, and this not only historically. South Africa, as the visitor is quick to observe, is full of gumtrees, and bears many traces of passing antipodeans as well as bearing witness to such powerful currents of imperial, colonial and racial history. The bonds of gold and race shout out loud across South Africa and Australia – Mining! and Dispossession, all the way down. The ghosts of South Africa and the West can still be heard, in this issue of the journal. They may not be the same stories, but we can benefit from their more proximate telling. So I now had some sense of personal balance, one antipode in New Zealand, one in Perth, some other significant connections to nodes and clusters of folk scattered around other places. Perth opened up to me in any number of ways, intellectually and personally, then. There was a discernible, maybe ineffable, difference of approach and sensibility apparent among the new colleagues and postgraduate students who greeted me to Curtin after my life at La Trobe. I could walk along the black tea-brown edge of the Canning, following its narrator David Whish-Wilson, and see the violence of the built environ- ment and what remained of the beauty of the river and its earlier and more recent inhabitants, both human and animal (Whish-Wilson, 2013). More ghosts. More spectres of the past, and hopes, and dreams, of the present. More anxieties of a future looking a bit too Californian. More of a sense, perhaps, of others making new lives? Of a society of strangers, of migrants? Unlike Melbourne, the weather in Perth changes only once a day. The elements are clear. Opening more doors to the West lets in some breeze. Peter Beilharz

The special issue This special issue on Western Australia begins with three scene-setting articles. John Hartley had published an article about Perth in 1987 when he first lived in the city. Now that he has returned we asked him if he would write something about how, from his point of view, the city has changed, and not changed, in the intervening almost 30 years. Hartley’s article begins with an edited version of the original essay, followed by his ruminations on Perth today. Jon Stratton and Adam Trainer’s article discusses Perth as found in the lyrics of Perth musicians. Perth has a strong popular music heritage from the last 50 years, and since the 1970s there have been many lyrical commentaries on the city. Mark Beeson’s consideration of the regional positioning of Western Australia and the importance of the state’s primary industry for Australia’s balance of trade provides a broader context for understanding the pressures that have shaped Western Australia. Stratton and Beilharz 11

Beeson shows the ways Western Australia’s politics are deeply imbricated with the regional demands for Western Australia’s resources. The next three articles are all in different ways concerned with matters related to the Indigenous peoples of Western Australia. Kim Scott, the internationally renowned local writer, thinks through the complex relationship of Indigenous languages to the land. Scott evokes the myths of the local Noongar people of the south-west of the state, finding connections severed by the colonial invasion and settlement. Anna Haebich has exam- ined the archives of Western Australia’s old Department of Aboriginal Affairs which functioned under various names between 1897 and 1972. Haebich considers how the archive is an expression of the totalitarian surveillance and government of the Indi- genous people who found themselves living under the power of the colonists. But, as importantly, Haebich discusses how Indigenous writers have been able to use the archives to gain an alternative view of their own ancestors and stories handed down through generations, enabling a sophisticated talking back to power. The next article, by Sean Gorman, focuses on the treatment of Indigenous people in Perth. Gorman’s par- ticular interest is in a local Perth amusement park known as White City or, more col- loquially, Ugly Land, after the charitable group known as the Ugly Men’s Association who funded it. White City, which was forced to close in 1929, was frequented mostly by the white working class and Aborigines. The authorities were much exercised by anxieties over gambling, drunkenness and, as Gorman discusses, race mixing. This carnivalesque behaviour was seen as a threat to middle-class morality and social order. Gorman argues that similar behaviour recently in Perth’s so-called entertainment pre- cinct of Northbridge has led to similar repressive and discriminatory practices. Fremantle’s and Perth’s built environment is the focus of the article by Thor Kerr, Susan Leong and Shaphan Cox. They are interested in how heritage concerns intersect with the everyday needs of local inhabitants. Kerr, Leong, and Cox take two streets and consider how the evolving built environment shapes the lives of the people who work, shop, relax and are entertained there. David Whish-Wilson’s article is about a specific piece of public art, Entitlement 1, by Simon Gilby. It stood at Bather’s Beach and, being made of salt, gradually decayed. Whish-Wilson understands the art work in relation to Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers who make dangerous journeys in small boats across the ocean only to find themselves incarcerated on arrival, and also in relation to the environmental issues, most importantly the salinity that threatens Western Australian agricultural land. The final article in this collection is by Peter Newman. Newman is an expert on sustainable living and has spent many years campaigning for, among other things, better and more environmentally friendly public transport in Perth. Here, New- man identifies the bigness of Perth and thinks about what the implications are for the size and population density, and the management of urban growth in Perth. This is central to the planning of Perth’s development, as the city has grown so rapidly both in population and spatially over the last 70 or so years. Perth may well retain some of its potential as a social laboratory for the sustainable city project. Its history persistently offers the hope of social alternatives as well as more sobering lessons. ‘Way Out West’ remains a centre as well as a periphery. 12 Thesis Eleven 135(1)

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note 1. The literary critic Veronica Brady (1982: 105–10) has noted ‘an Arcadian strain in Western Australian writing – not surprisingly, in a society founded by English gentlefolk in search of ‘‘the good old days’’ which, it seemed, would not come again in England’.

References ABC News (2013) 10/9/13: Police contingent greets bikie convoy on its way to Perth. Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-10/police-greet-bikies/4948442 (accessed 17 April 2016). Australian Bureau of Statistics: Australian Social Trends (2014) Available at: http://www.abs.gov. au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/4102.0mainþfeatures102014#PERTH (accessed 16 April 2016). Australian Government: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Western Australia (n.d.) Available at: https://dfat.gov.au/trade/resources/Documents/wa.pdf (accessed 16 April 2016). Beaton LS (2004) Westralian Scots: Scottish settlement and identity in Western Australia, arrivals 1829–1850. PhD thesis, Murdoch University. Available at: http://researchrepository.murdoch. edu.au/247/2/02Whole.pdf (accessed 17 April 2016). Beilharz P (2015) Thinking the Antipodes: Australian Essays. Melbourne: Monash University Press. Brady V (1982) Place, taste and the making of a tradition: Western Australian writing today. Westerly 4: 105–10. Dolin T and Levi N (2006) Antipodean modern. Australian Cultural History 25. James RM (2007) Settlement on the Swan: The birth of Perth. Australian Heritage. Available at: http://heritageperth.com.au/discovery/the-birth-of-perth/ (accessed 17 April 2016). North I (2015) East Antarctica 1915. Art exhibition. Available at: http://www.greenaway.com.au/ Associated-Guests-Special-Exhibits/2015-IanNorth.html (accessed 17 April 2016). Schultz J and Haebich A (eds) (2015) Looking West. Griffith Review 47. Stratton J (1989) Deconstructing the Northern Territory. Cultural Studies 3(1): 38–57. Stratton J (2016) Perth cultural studies: A brief and partial intellectual history. Thesis Eleven. Thomas G (2011) 27/12/11: Record numbers holiday in Bali. The West Australian. Available at: https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/wa/a/12459107/record-numbers-holiday-in-bali/ (accessed 17 April 2016). Whish-Wilson D (2013) Perth. Sydney: Newsouth.

Author biographies Jon Stratton is an Independent Scholar and retired Professor of Cultural Studies. He has published in Cultural Studies, Popular Music Studies, Australian Studies, Jewish Studies and on race and multiculturalism. Jon’s most recent books are Uncertain Lives: Culture, Race and Neoliberalism in Australia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011); Stratton and Beilharz 13

Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (Jon Stratton and Nabeel Zuberi (eds), Ashgate, 2014); When Music Migrates: Crossing British and European Racial Faultlines 1945–2010 (Ashgate, 2014).

Peter Beilharz co-founded Thesis Eleven with Alastair Davidson and Julian Triado in Melbourne in 1980. He is now Professor of Culture and Society at Curtin University in Western Australia, and Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, Raoul Wallenberg Centre at Stellenbosch, South Africa. He is working on three books: one volume of Davidson’s essays on Gramsci, one volume of essays on Marx, and one on ‘The Rationalization of the World’. Together with Sian Supski, he is working on several papers on the leading South African writer Ivan Vladislavic´.