School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemArts, Culture and Country(Currency House, 2022)The past two years have been a particularly dark time for the arts in Australia. Not only are we living through a pandemic, but the federal government has shown little interest in—or understanding of—the plight of the sector and its artists. The pandemic comes on the back of seven years of continuous erosion of public assistance to the arts at the national level, with more than ninety arts organisations defunded, while funding to individual artists has been significantly reduced. Many are struggling to survive in the face of repeated lockdowns and border closures to control the pandemic. For years the arts sector has provided evidence of its economic benefits, as well as its intrinsic value to society. Yet politicians remain impervious to these arguments. Increasingly, it is ideology rather than evidence that determines government policy. In other words, support for the arts is not primarily a question of economics. It is a question of values. The pandemic has made people realise the seminal importance of the arts and culture to our national well-being, but politicians do not see them as a central part of policymaking. Arts and culture are intertwined. We need to change how we view the relationship between the two within the political framework. This monograph presents some ideas on how to do it.
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ItemHollywood ending?(Mark Baker, 2021-04-30)Amid the relief at Joe Biden’s engagement with climate change, did we lose sight of what’s happening on the ground?
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ItemNot drowning, fighting( 2021-06-03)Have reporters’ cliches got in the way of understanding how Pacific islanders are dealing with climate change?
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Item‘The fear of this vaccine is real’: how Papua New Guinea’s Covid strategy went so wrong( 2022-12-02)Public confusion and distrust over vaccination have been fuelled by what experts say are crippling failures in authorities’ response to the pandemic
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ItemBuried Treasure: Journey into deep time(Griffith Review, 2022)Over the entire 800,000-year record, atmospheric carbon dioxide has never peaked over 300 ppm. For all of human history, it sat around 275 ppm until about 200 years ago, when we began to dig up and burn coal to fuel the Industrial Age. In 1950, it punched through the 300-ppm historic ceiling. In mid-May, as the forests of the Northern Hemisphere dropped their leaves, the planet exhaled atmospheric carbon dioxide at a new daily record of 421 ppm.
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ItemPNG’s Women in Waiting(Melbourne University Publishing (MUP), 2022)The two women, venerable grandmothers and veteran activists, are plotting revolution and dissecting the exercise of feminine power in Papua New Guinea over plates of fish and chips and salad.
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Item"What Creativeness in This?”: Maintenance and Generation in the Housework of Charmian Clift(Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2022)In her 1959 memoir, Peel Me a Lotus, the expatriate Australian novelist and journalist Charmian Clift details her efforts to create and maintain a writers’ home on the Greek Island of Hydra. This involved the transformation of a pre-established structure that had fallen into a state of disrepair, into a space that was to be part-writer’s studio (for herself and her husband, George Johnston), and part-sanctuary for her family and their many visitors. While this dual functionality could be practically organized within the large structure of the Hydra house, the integral paradox of artistic production occurring in tandem with household maintenance instantiated a challenge for Clift, as she was expected to work simultaneously as writer, nurturer and housekeeper. In this essay I observe how Clift’s memoirs resultingly conjure a poetics of everyday life that minutely and honestly details and aestheticises the work of maintenance. Clift’s vision, which she describes as “my own bit of creation,” was one “of cleanliness and order and warmth and comfort.” Duly, housework—in both the abstract sense, of building and restoration, as well as in the more traditional sense, of housekeeping—receives sustained attention in Clift’s larger body of work. Clift’s memoirs are often absorbed in the details of domestic work performed both by her and by the local women living around her; these descriptions are devoted and artistic, in a way that shows women’s work to be too. Inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, this article discusses the relationship between maintenance and creativity that Clift problematises in the two memoirs she produced during the family’s period of living in Greece.
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ItemMultilingual negotiations: the place and significance of translation in multilingual poetry(The Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona, 2021)Multilingual poetry, which weaves together multiple languages, necessarily straddles multiple cultural contexts. This raises the question of how poets who write multilingually negotiate and deploy their cultural knowledges, who they write for, and how their audiences receive them. Using Suresh Canagarajah’s Negotiation Model to examine poets’ linguistic choices, including whether and when to provide translations, and Mendieta-Lombardo and Cintron’s adaptation of the Myers-Scotton Markedness Model to consider audience and context, this paper will examine examples of contemporary bilingual and multilingual poetry published in Australia and Canada to identify the many conversations and negotiations that must take place between language-cultures as well as between multilingual poets and audiences for these poems to ‘work’.
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ItemWhat's in a Name?: A Cross-Section of Biography, Gender & Metadata in the Design & Art Australia Online Database(DC Papers, 2022-01-01)In this paper, we present preliminary findings about issues identified by the Australian Cultural Data Engine (ACD-Engine) related to name and gender metadata practices, with a focus on the Design & Art Australia Online database (DAAO), and implications that extend to Australian cultural databases more broadly. Grounded in the history, context and specifics of data entry and management, we identify specific naming conventions, metadata contradictions and distinct institutional vestiges in the recording and representation of artists’ careers. Using theoretical and statistical approaches, we categorize the types of variant names, showing a marked (but expected) contrast between men, women and non-binary individuals. By examining the affordances and constraints of naming conventions, we give attention to evolving trends in Australian data collection and use as they relate to the lives of individual artists. We argue that this local-level analysis is potentially applicable to wider transnational debates in humanities research and propose some new conceptual and technical approaches to the collection and use of biographical metadata in cultural databases.