School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    'Death is forgotten in victory': colonial landscapes and narratives of emptiness
    Birch, Tony (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005)
    In late 1998 I toured several sites of colonial ruination in the western district of Victoria. After writing about persistent attacks on Indigenous people and history in this region I was curious to see how colonial society provided legitimacy for its temporal occupation of Indigenous country. While (not unexpectedly) I visited places that attempted to deny the presence of Indigenous culture and evidence of ownership of land on my travels, I also discovered sites weird, wonderful and bizarre. Through these visits I came to realise that colonial commemoration of its past and contemporary identity is often contradictory and confusing, relying on heavy-handed mythologies and poorly-constructed fictions in an effort to authenticate its story. I visited places where whole towns and streets were signposted in the middle of the bush in order to locate a colonial site of occupation that never existed beyond an entrepreneur’s utopian imaginings. I spoke with farmers who relayed colonial fables disguised as historical truth - such as that it was ‘a widely known fact’ that Indigenous rock-art, carbon-dated at thousands of years in age, had actually been painted by a French artist in the late nineteenth century. While driving the roads of the western district I was confronted by giant Koalas, miniature Great Pyramids and Eiffel Towers, and even a rather puny Big Apple. I also consumed an oversupply of commemoration plaques, funereal cairns and ‘I was here’ anxieties that attempted to obliterate Indigenous life from both the landscape and historical consciousness.
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    'The first white man born': contesting the 'stolen generations' narrative in Australia
    Birch, Tony (Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies, 2004)
    The Australian political landscape from the mid-1980s into the 1990s was periodically dominated by issues relating to contested versions of its colonial past in conjunction with a discussion on the legal and human rights of indigenous communities within the nation-state. Key moments within this discourse included the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (established in 1987), the Bicentennial “celebrations” of 1988, the High Court’s Mabo land rights decision of 1992 (and subsequent Native Title amendments), and the reception of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s (HREOC) Bringing Them Home report of 1997, which was the published outcome of a HREOC inquiry into the history of removing indigenous children from their families and communities during the twentieth century.
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    Like a Paintbox
    BIRCH, AK ( 2004)
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    'Who gives a fuck about white society anymore': a response to the Redfern riot
    Birch, Tony ( 2004)
    On 17 February this year the Herald Sun informed readers that the ‘bitter ghetto’ of Sydney’s inner-city Redfern ‘had gone to war’ in a battle against both the NSW police and the nation. In the days after the riot, headlines and editorials condemned Redfern to the singular status of a drug-infested slum, absent of any social function beyond performing the role of the Other within the shadow of the corporately sanctified ‘globally informed and vibrant metropolis’ that is Sydney in 2004.
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    Two Kitchens
    BIRCH, AK ( 2004)
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    ‘These children have been born in an abyss’: slum photography in a Melbourne suburb
    Birch, Tony ( 2004)
    This article is concerned with the role of photography as an agent of ‘social truth’, with a particular interest in the way that the technology was used by slum reformers in Melbourne from the 1930s into the postwar era. The article focuses its attention on the streets and people of the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy and two ‘crusaders’, F.O. Barnett (founder of the Methodist Babies Home) and Father Gerard Tucker (of the Brotherhood of St. Laurence), who would use the propagandist value of the photograph to influence their social and moral interventions into the lives of Fitzroy’s poor.
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    The best TV reception in Melbourne: Fitzroy 'low-life' and the invasion of the renovator
    Birch, Tony (University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association, 2003)
    In the 1960s the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy began a process of economic and social change, resulting in the dislocation of many long-term residents. Some people were shifted out of the suburb as a result of government ‘housing reforms’. Others were more gradually dislocated. It was the renovator’s paint-brush and the commodification of Fitzroy’s ‘diversity’ that would eventually transform the suburb into the place that it is today; a place of ‘real delis’, ‘taste’ and ‘fashion sense’. This article engages with some of these Fitzroy narratives.
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    Collaboration and exchange with Indigenous communities
    Birch, Tony ( 2003)
    In late 2000 I was asked if I would write a series of poems and story panels for an artist, Gordon Burnett, who was visiting Australia from Scotland for a residency at Monash University. In my first conversation with Gordon he told me that he was interested in addressing Australian colonial history in his work through ‘digitally crafted domestic objects’ that would use a ‘Fuse Deposition Modelling machine’ to create objects including icons of British colonial culture such as tea-pots and tea-cups.
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    The true history of Beruk (William Barak)
    BIRCH, A. (Meanjin Company, 2006)
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    The Return
    BIRCH, A ( 2007)