School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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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.
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ItemCreating new climate stories: Posthuman collaborative hope and optimism(Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2022-01-01)This paper considers an evolving project about climate change that will explore using collaborative creative writing strategies to emotionally support and engage writers, primarily focusing on how narratives of hope and optimism might counter affective responses of anxiety, and the resultant solipsistic inertia or surrender. We ask: what role could collaborative fiction play in helping to create positive futures that emotionally strengthen us to manage what may come and what already is? We outline the inspiration and background to our project and begin to theorise justification for applying posthuman approaches to the question of reimagining climate fiction. We review a number of collaborative climate change projects located outside of traditional writing but still drawing on narrative storytelling, and consider how our project – which focuses on genre fictions – might add to the horizon point; one that is not delusional, but also does not lead to dystopian despair.
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ItemGoverning creative industries in the post-normative cultural condition(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2021-09-19)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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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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ItemThilly Weissenborn: Photographer of the Netherlands East Indies(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2021-04-30)Thilly Weissenborn (1883–1964) was one of Indonesia’s first woman photogra- phers of significance. She was born in Java but schooled, like most Netherlands colonials, in The Hague. At the age of eighteen, Thilly returned to Java where she trained in the famous Atelier Kurkdjian before opening her own studio in the province of Preanger. For more than two decades, she supplied the colonial government’s tourist bureau with photographs featuring Java’s exotic-looking scenery and Balinese temples and dancers. She also supplied Dutch dignitaries, colonial officials and wealthy Dutch families with souvenir albums featuring scenic photographs and Bali’s governors and royalty. I argue that although her growing obsession with light was a feature shared by many contemporary American photographers, her photographs differed from theirs by dint of their connection to Netherlands colonialism. I further argue that this is most evident in their focus on the beauty of the landscape and the seeming tranquillity of life under colonial rule, but also their strong allusions to the Mooi Indië style of paintings popular among Dutch settlers. In the twenty-year period leading up to Japan’s invasion of Indonesia, Weissenborn’s images were widely sought after and reproduced by the Dutch East Indies Tourist Bureau; however, their strong connection to Netherlands colonialism means that they are today not just regarded ambivalently by photographic historians, but are frequently overlooked.
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ItemEmpire, Early Photography and Spectacle: The Global Career of Showman Daguerreotypist JW Newland(TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-07-03)