School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemForgetting and remembering the Irish famine orphans: A critical survey(Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand, 2020)A decade ago, while researching family history, Richard Olive of Melbourne was pleased to discover shipping records that revealed his great-grandmother, Johanna Sullivan from County Cork, had arrived in Adelaide in September 1849 on the Elgin. Noticing that she was only 15 years old, he began to search the records for her parents, only to find, to his surprise, that all the 190 passengers on the ship were teenage girls. As Richard drove his granddaughter, Eva, home from school that afternoon, he told her about his discovery. She asked him in what year Joanna Sullivan had arrived and, when he replied '1849', they both quickly realised that this was during the Great Famine. Eva said: 'Sounds to me like she was an Earl Grey orphan'. But, although Richard knew his Australian history well, he had never heard of Earl Grey-beyond it being a type of tea. Eva told him that she had come across the Earl Grey orphans in a novel she had recently read: 'Bridie's Fire', written by Kirsty Murray and published in Sydney in 2003.
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ItemIs This How Participation Goes?(The Department of Visual Arts, University of California, 2019)If the neoliberal regime is a constitutive force in a decentered and globalizing world, then what is the starting point for determining its flows, and what is its impact on art and culture? Conversely, have we not also seen art swell and expand through new kinds of transnational collaborations that are giving aesthetic form to cosmopolitan ideals? Are artists at the vanguard of the resistance against the gaping inequalities threatening to rip apart the social fabric or are they, despite their democratising intentions, an extension of an invidious system? These contradictory forces are played out on many fronts and with divergent inflections. In this brief essay we sketch out the hydraulic tensions between the corporate global culture and mass cultural participation by focusing on recent events in Melbourne. As a second-tier global city, celebrated for its livability and cultural vitality, the development of Melbourne’s cultural scene over the last fifteen years exemplifies the various spatial formations around which aesthetic experience is being organized and redistributed.
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ItemGoverning creative industries in the post-normative cultural condition(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2020-12-13)Contemporary cultural policy seeks to govern an increasingly complex terrain, one marked by rapid technological change, expanded channels for creative production and participation, global interconnectedness and social diversity, and a fluidity of cultural form. Through an analysis of Creative State, the first creative industries strategy in the state of Victoria, Australia, this article argues that the creative industries are, in part, a governmental response to the complexity of the cultural landscape. As critics have identified, these are ideological documents, often prioritising the economic benefits of culture over other forms of value. But they also reflect broader efforts to reconfigure government’s relationship to the cultural field, and to expand the set of actors involved in making culture. In this article we trace out these new relationships through the policy-making process, identifying its tensions and contradictions. Understanding the multi-sited, non-linear nature of policy forms the basis, we argue, for cultivating a generative cultural critique that might engage more productively with cultural policy, taking account of the plural and competing perspectives it must manage.
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ItemThe Practice of Being Human: Narrative Medicine and Cultural Representation(St. Cloud State University Digital Archives, 2020)Narrative medicine may take certain methodological cues from literary studies, linguistics and narrative theory, but until now it has remained firmly grounded in the health sector. It views storytelling and narrative as tools that can improve the performance of medical practitioners – first, by helping them process the confronting nature of their everyday jobs, and then by facilitating more effective communication with patients. Narrative competence thus provides an important supplement to the medical gaze, enhancing the clinical experience for practitioner and patient alike. But narrative medicine also has important implications from a literary point of view. It highlights the special position that the medical worker occupies in terms of being able to observe a cross-section of society. When a medical practitioner decides to engage not only with the scientific method of evidence-based medicine but also in the arts-based practice of narrative medicine, he or she has the opportunity to make an intervention in the broader culture. Consequently, the literature that emerges almost as an offshoot of narrative medicine is capable of creating forms of representation that more accurately reflect the heterogeneity of social conformance. It is a literature that draws attention to demographic sectors of society that might otherwise be denied mainstream representation. This essay examines the ways in which a medical practice can inform a writing practice, and vice versa. Using the work of Chinese-Australian author Melanie Cheng as a case study, I show how narrative medicine traverses an important space between the medical gaze and the empathetic instinct. Cheng has worked as a General Practitioner (GP) for over ten years, whilst developing a parallel writing career. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day (2017), functions on one level as a therapeutic outlet for Cheng’s day job. In addition, by recasting the GP as a repository of secrets, her stories provide matchless insights into the lives of people from a range of different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Cheng’s writing therefore transcends the boundaries of her own personal history and ethnicity, pointedly venturing beyond the territory expected of her as a Chinese-Australian author. Viewing Cheng’s work through the lens of her medical training shows us how the practice of medicine can work alongside that of writing to deepen our understanding of what is commonly referred to as the ‘human condition’.
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ItemDead Europe and the Coming of Age in Australian Literature: Globalisation, Cosmopolitanism and Perversity(Australian National University, 2013)This essay uses Christos Tsiolkas’ 2005 novel, Dead Europe, to re-examine the traditional binary established between old Europe and new Australia. The definition of cosmopolitanism put forward by Tsiolkas takes into account charges of Eurocentricity laid against the concept itself, as well as reflecting on the ways in which cosmopolitanism changes given the accelerated processes of twenty-first century globalisation. In Dead Europe, Tsiolkas links Australia to a pan-European history, bringing national borders into question and broadening notions of Australian identity. I argue that Tsiolkas’ novel is a key example of a recent coming of age in Australian literature - the shift away from Australian national identity as inward-facing, naïve and rural-based, towards a more mature, urban, outward-facing understanding of Australians as culpable participants in global culture.
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ItemFighting off the bulldozers in the sacred kwila forests of Papua New Guinea(Guardian News & Media Limited, 2022-10-09)Villagers are pushing back against logging operations they say are encroaching on designated conservation areas.
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ItemShouldering the weight of four million women: PNG elects its first female MP in a decade(Guardian News & Media Limited, 2022-08-08)Rufina Peter is just the eighth woman elected in Papua New Guinea. But the economist has been battling for her place in society since she was a child.
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ItemEnough is enough: The fight to elect women to Papua New Guinea’s men-only parliament(Guardian News & Media, 2022-08-01)In nearly 50 years, PNG has elected just seven female MPs. Money, culture and corruption are all working against the women trying to address the problem,
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ItemPlagued: TB and Me(Digital Global Mail, 2013-06-12)The greatest infectious killer in human history is making a comeback, morphing into new drug-resistant forms. While it is largely forgotten in wealthy nations, millions of people a year get sick from tuberculosis. Jo Chandler, to her surprise, is one of them.
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ItemAustralian Photography and Transnationalism(Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), 2020)Until very recently, histories of Australian photography have remained primarily (and some would say stubbornly) nation-based, but this trend has begun to change under the impact of studies aimed at exploring the wider cultural influences impacting on the literature and artworks produced in the late colonial period. In this paper, I explore some of the more obvious transnational features of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian photography using examples drawn from the two most popular genres of the day – portrait and landscape photography. Although I draw on only a few examples, it is enough to show that Australian photographers of the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries were not just reliant on British conventions, they were also deploying the styles and conventions used by photographers in the other Pacific-based settler colonies of Canada, USA and New Zealand, a phenomenon that points to the increasingly connected world that was formed by what Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen have classed the white settler societies or ‘new world states’ of the Pacific region.