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Swings And Roundabouts: Changes In Language Offerings At Australian Universities 2005-2011, Kerry S. Dunne, Marko Pavlyshyn

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In this study we report on changes in language offerings in Australian universities for the period 2005–2011, focusing on languages with small enrolments. We also give a progress report on collaborative arrangements that were introduced to ensure wider availability of language programs. These programs were surveyed most recently in the 2009 DASSH project on collaborative models for the provision of languages in Australian universities (Winter 2009). We find that there has been an increase in the number of less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) offered across the tertiary sector. However, it is not the case that all of these languages are …

The Role Of Beyond Zero Emissions In The Australian Climate Debate, Adam Robert Lucas

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Early in 2011, the Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE) published a special issue titled, ‘Challenging Climate Change’. It brought together a number of papers by climate change researchers and activists who had been invited during 2009 to contribute their perspectives to a one-day forum covering four different aspects of the climate change debate: carbon markets and the regulation of renewable energy; technological pathways toward sustainability versus a low-tech, ecosufficiency future; climate justice; and the experiences of a variety of environmental NGOs in campaigning for policy reform (Goodman & Rosewarne, 2011: 7). The aim of the forum and those who …

Interpodes: Poland, Tom Keneally And Australian Literary History, Paul Sharrad

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article is framed by a wider interest in how literary careers are made: what mechanisms other than the personal/biographical and the text-centred evaluations of scholars influence a writer’s choices in persisting in building a succession of works that are both varied and yet form a consistently recognizable “brand.”

Translation is one element in the wider network of “machinery” that makes modern literary publishing. It is a marker of success that might well keep authors going despite lack of sales or negative reviews at home. Translation rights can provide useful supplementary funds to sustain a writer’s output. Access to new …

Citizen Of Australia...Citizen Of The World: An Australian New Woman's Feminist And Nationalist Vision, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Writing in the 1890s, South Australian author, Catherine Martin, contributed to what John Docker has labelled ‘those feverish years of utopian and dystopian visions’. Her popular 1890 novel, An Australian Girl, presents modern historians with one fin-de-siècle vision for a newly emerging Australian nation, a vision that reveals itself as a utopian blend of feminist and nationalist aspirations. What emerges from this book is a sense of an Australian landscape that was as feminised as masculinised; a belief in a national identity that may have been transnationalist in that it was shaped by understandings of what it meant to be …

Debating Vaccination: Understanding The Attack On The Australian Vaccination Network, Brian Martin

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

The Australian Vaccination Network (AVN), a citizen group advocating parental choice in whether children should be vaccinated, has come under an extraordinary attack by advocates of vaccination. Controversies over vaccination involve both disagreements about scientific matters, such as the effectiveness of vaccination to prevent disease, and clashes of values, including compulsion versus free choice. To help understand the attack on the AVN, I give an overview of the nature of scientific controversies, including the roles of evidence, vested interests, solutions, paradigms and methods of debate. I analyse a formal complaint against the AVN to highlight the assumptions underlying the anti-AVN …

Tiny Leaf Men And Other Tales From Outer Suburbia: Re-Presenting The Suburb In Australian Children's Literature, Kelly E. Oliver

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper explores how, through word and image, Tan’s Tales From Outer Suburbia challenges stereotypical representations of the suburban. Typically, suburban spaces have been represented as aesthetically bland, mundane, and ornamental. Tan takes these tropes and ironically re-deploys them anew, and in doing so undermines anti-suburban sentiment, which has dominated Australian literary and popular culture.

Although the notion of anti-suburbanism in Australian fiction has been well documented, its presence in children’s literature has received far less attention. As a case study, Tales From Outer Suburbia, signals the ability of children’s literature to present more positive representations of suburbia because …

Les Murray In A Dhoti: Transnationalizing Australian Literature, Paul Sharrad

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

My first encounter with Australian literature as such (that is, as more than a few works of children’s fiction read at home), was in high school in Papua New Guinea. There, we read Vance Palmer’s The Passage alongside Shakespeare in a setting that made both seem equally strange. It was an early and only dimly apprehended lesson in the cultural politics behind curricula.

Detention, Displacement And Dissent In Recent Australian Life Writing, Michael R. Jacklin

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Narratives of persecution, imprisonment, displacement and exile have been a fundamental aspect of Australian literature: from the convict narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to writing by refugees and migrants to Australia following World War II, to the narratives of those displaced by more recent conflicts. This paper will focus on two texts published in Australia in the past few years which deal with experiences of persecution and displacement from Afghanistan. Mahboba's Promise (2005) and The Rugmaker of Mazar-e- Sharif (2008) are texts that have to some extent bypassed the quarantining that Gillian Whitlock has argued works to locate …

Introduction: Currents, Cross-Currents, Undercurrents, Frances Devlin-Glass, Tony Simoes Da Silva

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

The similarities in an issue such as this one are often purely serendipitous; JASAL 10 brings together work submitted to a general, non-thematic issue and it should not surprise that the range of material is very diverse. Yet on occasion there are obvious points of contact between the various pieces and that is certainly the case here. The subtitle we have given to this brief Introduction seeks to capture some of the ways in which the essays interrelate, both complementing (and supplementing) each other and complicating particular readings. Essays included here range from critical examinations of well-known works, as is …

"Desde Australia Para Todo El Mundo Hispano": Australia’S Spanish-Language Magazines And Latin American/Australian Writing, Michael Jacklin

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Migrants from Latin America have had a literary presence in Australia since the 1970s and their work forms an important part of Australia's multilingual literature. From their participation in literary competitions organized through cultural groups such as the Spanish Club in Sydney or the Uruguayan Club in Melbourne, to anthologies of community writing produced through the 1980s and '90s, to the publication of numerous volumes of poetry and short stories, to their novels, plays, biographies and autobiographies, Latin American writers in Australia have developed and sustained a significant body of literature over more than three decades. The majority of this …

Seen Through Other Eyes: Reconstructing Australian Literature In India, Paul Sharrad

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Describes the spread of Australian literary texts in Indian bookstores and university courses and reasons for taking on studies of Australian literature. In the context of transnational cultural movements, it considers how the Australian 'canon' and its meanings change in an overseas situation.

Reconfiguring "Asian Australian" Writing: Australia, India And Inez Baranay, Paul Sharrad

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In the fifty or so years of building recognition for first "migrant" and then "multicultural" writing in Australia, it is a fair generalisation to say that visible emphasis shifted from European to East and Southeast Asian voices without much mention of South Asians. Some might attribute this to an exclusionary domination of the label "Asian Australian" by one ethnic group under the influence perhaps of critical debates in the US, or they might regard such a label, whatever it means, as a neo-colonial homogenising of ethnicities and cultural differences by ongoing white hegemony (Rizvi). Without playing a blame game, one …

Special Issue: Australian Literature In A Global World - Introduction, Wenche Ommundsen, Tony Simoes Da Silva

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This Special Issue of JASAL is based on the 2008 ASAL conference ‘Australian Literature in a Global World’ at the University of Wollongong, the conference theme in turn inspired by an ARC Discovery project, ‘Globalising Australian Literature’, currently conducted by a team of researchers at the same institution. The overall (and hugely ambitious) aim of both conference and research project was to explore the effects, on the national literature, of different aspects of globalisation: transnational flows of people, ideas and cultural forms; globalisation in the publishing and education industries; the global marketplace for cultural production. The papers tap into a …

'The Transnational Turn In Australian Literary Studies, Michael Jacklin

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

A significant number of critical and analytical articles by leading scholars in Australian literary studies have recently drawn attention to the transnational dimensions of the discipline. Amongst these calls for the internationalising of Australian literary studies, however, multicultural literature appears to have been given short shrift. This article traces the mainstream enthusiasm for transnational research, notes the work of critics who have identified aspects of multicultural literature that have been overlooked in Australia, and then provides examples of two further areas of transnational literary production that have been critically neglected. The journal Kalimat which published in Arabic and English and …

Women And War: Impacts Of The Vietnam War - Narratives Of Wives Of Australian And South Vietnamese Veterans, John Shoebridge

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

The impacts of the Vietnam War on many wives of Australian and South Vietnamese veterans are profound and permanent. Social histories have largely neglected these impacts on women, focussing instead on the impacts of the war on Australian male Vietnam veterans. This article argues that the impacts on wives of Australian and South Vietnamese veterans should be recognised as a cost of the war and that wives of veterans from both countries deserve a place in history. To support this argument, this article uses spoken and written narratives of wives of Australian and South Vietnamese veterans. The evidence from these …

The Evolution Of 'Malay' Labour Activism, 1870-1947: Protest Among Pearling Crews In Dutch East Indies-Australian Waters, Julia T. Martinez

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

The history of Indonesian labour activism as seen from an Australianperspective is best known in the context of World War Two when the presenceof Asian seamen in Australia sparked a flourish of internationalism and anticolonialprotest under the umbrella organization of the Seamen's Union ofAustralia. But the story of Malay maritime worker protest has a deeper history,reaching back to the early years of the pearl-shelling and trepang industrieswhen Malay workers from the Dutch East Indies were brought to work off thenorthern Australian coast. Before the advent of a seamen's union, these workersfaced harsh working conditions and had little recourse to legal …

Beyond Celebration: Australian Indigenous Festivals, Politics And Ethics, Lisa Slater

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In contemporary Australia public discourse about Indigeneity in general and remote Indigenous communities in particular has been circumscribed by a climate of crisis. This has awakened mainstream Australia to vast inequalities, but the discursive frame continues to disable, or severely limit, an engagement with Indigenous lived experience and values. It also protects non-Indigenous, primarily I speak of, white, settler, Australians from comprehending and taking responsibility for their/our role in re-producing Indigenous marginality. The very sovereignty of the good, white, liberal subject-citizen rests upon being the universal image of good and healthy. I argue that the resistance by white, settler Australians …

'By Diggers Defended, By Victorians Mended': Australian Soldiers And The Reconstruction Of Villers Bretonneux, Linda Wade

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

The city of Melbourne adopted the French town of Villers Bretonneux under the auspices of the British League of Help in 1920. Money was raised in Victoria and sent to Villers Bretonneux to help with rebuilding the town after it was destroyed in fighting during April 1918. Many Australian soldiers had been involved in that fighting, and had lived in the cellars and dilapidated homes there. They had also helped the local population flee from the advancing Germans, and to pick up the pieces of their lives when they began returning to the area, such that the Australian men were …

The Past Is A Foreign Country: The Australian Middle Ages, Louise D'Arcens

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

No abstract provided.

Recent Perceptions Of Rural Australia In Italian And Italian Australian Narrative, Gaetano Rando

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

The publication in 2008 of the English translation of Emilio Gabbrielli’s novel Polenta e Goanna based on Italian migrants in the West Australian goldfields brings into focus the themes of the bush, the outback and migration that since the mid 1850s (Raffaello Carboni, Rudesindo Salvado) have emerged as a constant thread in texts produced by Italian Australian writers. Italian settlement in rural and outback areas of Australia during the late 1800s and early 1900s has remained a largely unsung saga while most Italians migrating to Australia after 1947 ultimately settled in urban areas. Among the few who have written creatively …

Talking Salvation For The Silent Majority: Projecting New Possibilities Of Modernity In The Australian Cinema, 1929-1933, Brian M. Yecies

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This chapter analyses the distinctiveness of the coming of permanent sound (the talkies) to the Australian cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The coming of sound resulted in fundamental, but not uniform, change in all countries and in all languages. During this global transformation, substantial capital was spent on developing and adopting modern technology. Hundreds of new cinemas were built; tens of thousands were wired with sound equipmentthat is, two film projectors with sound attachments, amplifiers, speakers and electrical motorsand some closed in financial ruin during the Great Depression. The silent period ended and sound became projected as …

Reviews: Australian Plays For The Colonial Stage 1834-1899 Edited By Richard Fotheringham, 2006, Louise D'Arcens

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This volume offers an extremely valuable collection of nine nineteenth-century plays whose content engaged specifically with representations of life in the Australian colonies. Running the gamut of popular genres from melodrama to burletta, pantomime and masque, these plays’ significance lies in their reflection of ‘popular myths and . . . mass enthusiasms and anxieties’ (p. lxxvii) around such ideologically charged themes as bushranging, pioneering, indigenous Australia, urban life and convictism. It is this that warrants their resurrection in this volume, for, as Fotheringham points out, they were not necessarily representative of the colonial Australian theatre industry, dominated as it was …

Collaboration And Closure: Negotiating Indigenous Mourning Protocols In Australian Life Writing, Michael Jacklin

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Examines 'indigenous mourning protocols, as they are negotiated in life writing texts and in all manner of public discourse in Australia...' (p.190)

Researching The Australian New Right: A Glimpse At The Process Of Discovery, Damien Cahill

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

When asked to contribute an article to this inaugural edition of Rhizome I felt a certain hesitancy. What, I wondered, would be an appropriate offering to a postgraduate journal from someone who has already graduated? This led me to decide upon an approach which is unusual for a scholarly journal. What follows is an outline of the central findings of my recently completed PhD thesis. This is done by guiding the reader through the process of discovery I underwent during my candidature. My hope is that students and educators will recognise the messy, uneven and often unpredictable process of academic …

Of Dragons And Devils: Chinese-Australian Life Stories, Wenche Ommundsen

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article is about Chinese-Australian life stories.