Australian Studies Commons^™

[Review] Joshua Lobb, The Flight Of Birds. Sydney University Press, 2019. 322pp, Alex Lockwood

Animal Studies Journal

Why, one could ask, does such a high proportion of the very best works of recently published literary and creative prose, which choose to engage with climate change, environmental shock, biodiversity crises, and extinction risks – the existential threats we face as a global multispecies population – all tell stories with and of nonhuman animals? My theory, one shared by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement (although with differing conclusions) is that the very nature of the threats we face is a reckoning with our alienation from the nonhuman world. It is a reckoning we need to have, without ‘hiding’ …

[Review] Sue Coe, Zooicide: Seeing Cruelty, Demanding Abolition. With An Essay By Stephen F. Eisenman Ak Press, 2018. 128pp, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

Eisenman imagines, in 2050, in a scenario devoutly to be wished and striven for, that animals are no longer ill-treated in zoos, factory farms or laboratories. His informative essay substantiates debates in animal ethics, historically and in art, relating the ‘thingification’ of animals to colonial notions of ‘racial’ superiority. Sue Coe’s work, he demonstrates, comes from a long history of protest against the treatment of animals in zoos and menageries. Like John Berger in Why Look at Animals? (Penguin, 2009), he connects zoos with money-making, dismissing the claims that zoos are geared for conservation. Eisenman regards Sue Coe as the …

[Review] Lesley A. Sharp, Animal Ethos: The Morality Of Human-Animal Encounters In Experimental Lab Science. University Of California Press, 2018. 312pp, Denise Russell

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Ethos. What is that? This heading on its own is a puzzle. Taken together with the subheading and reading the book it seems that ‘Animal Ethos’ means the customary way of interacting with animals in lab settings. The sub-heading led me to believe that the book would be not just about the ethos in the sense just described but about what is right and what is wrong in the human-animal encounters in animal experiments. Lesley Sharp coming from the discipline of anthropology shies away from making such judgements with some very rare exceptions, for example, when describing the abhorrent …

How Shall We Live Together? A Response To Paola Cavalieri, Sue Donaldson

Animal Studies Journal

Paola Cavalieri asks whether the animal rights/liberation (AR/L) movement should be ‘selfsufficient and self-reliant’,2 and develop ‘an autonomous presence both in the political arena and in the electoral process’3 rather than focusing on alliance building with the broader Left. Cavalieri’s hesitation about alliance-building is motivated by worries about diffusion and loss of focus, but also by the thought that ‘humanism leads the worse-off to cling to their humanity to the detriment of animals’. Thus, acting ‘as a full member of the family of social justice struggles’ will lead either to wasting energy on alliances that never materialize, or to watering …

Towards Multispecies Solidarity: Individual Stories Of Learning To Consume Ethically, Elisabeth Valiente-Riedl

Animal Studies Journal

This research problematises the translation of economic agency into political agency through ethical consumption. Employing narrative enquiry, the experiences and perceptions of three young women are documented and analysed. This permits a grounded examination of the advocacy and consumption nexus, including participants relative prioritisation of (competing) ethical values and practices relative to traditional consumption concerns. A key finding is that prioritisation of wellbeing, comprising that of humans, animals and other forms of life, requires a rearticulation of the traditional concept of ‘political solidarity’ to a more multifaceted conception of ‘multispecies solidarity’. Moreover, conception of self and of solidarity through consumption …

[Review] David Brooks, The Grass Library. Brandl And Scheslinger, 2019. 223pp, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

The Grass Library constitutes its own genre – a memoir of embodied humans and animals who write themselves not quite equally into the text – the nonhuman takes precedence. On the cover, fittingly, the human is an absence although there is evidence in the background, full bookshelves and a water bowl lovingly placed on a window shelf. In the foreground is one of the principal subjects, an assertive presence who gazes directly at the viewer with sheep-openness and beauty. Brooks mentions an antiquarian library elsewhere that had been subjected to ‘the scrutiny of grass’ (65). This book too has been …

Myth And Monstrosity: Teaching Indigenous Films, Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

The past few times that I have taught my course on religion and film I have included a number of Indigenous movies. The response from students has been entirely positive, in part because most of them have rarely encountered Indigenous cultural products of any kind, especially contemporary ones. Students also respond well to the way in which many of these films use notions of the monstrous to explore, and explode, colonial myths. Goldstone, for example, by Kamilaroi filmmaker Ivan Sen, draws on noir tropes to peel back the smiling masks of the people responsible for the mining town’s success, …

Melbourne’S Chinatown: Continuous Chinese Enclave For 168 Years In Australia, Wendy W. Tan

Publications and Research

Melbourne’s Chinatown is the longest continuous Chinatown in the western world. Besides the long history, it is also known for having many alleys; hosting largest dragon exhibits; and showing strong characteristics of cultural diversity. The author made a journey there to witness the beauty of being a well-preserved community.

Complete Issue

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

The complete issue 1 of volume 8, Landscapes Journal.

The Beholder, Allan Lake

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

A poem on the effect of landscape on the emotions.

Review Of Taboo, By Kim Scott, Picador-Australia, 2017, Rashida Murphy

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Kim Scott's Taboo is a story about beginnings and endings.This novel reminds the reader of the circularity of stories, and how those stories are shaped by intent and weighed by landscape. Scott speaks of dispossession, abuse, colonialism, addiction and racism in lyrical and melancholy prose. The men and women who walk through these pages are startlingly aware of their failings and equally forgiving of those failings in others. There are no quick fixes and the story vacillates between despair and hope. Yet this is not a grim story. The lucidity of its prose lifts it beyond the despair in its …

Poetry Of Roe 8, Nandi Chinna

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Poetry of Roe 8

The occasion for the writing of these poems was activism surrounding the controversial highway known as the Roe 8 extension in the areas of Cockburn and Fremantle in Western Australia. Planned in the 1950s, Roe 8 is contentious for a number of reasons, including extraordinary political deals over funding, undue process regarding environmental reporting, lack of a business case, inadequate noise and traffic modelling, erasure of Indigenous heritage sites, and clearing of the sensitive Beeliar wetlands and Coolbellup banksia woodlands which were designated a Threatened Ecological Community in 2016. During the summer of 2016/2017 contractors started …

Imaginative Geographies: Visualising The Poetics Of History And Space, Clive Barstow

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This essay presents a visual dialogue about our relationship to place. I adopt Henri Lefebvre’s model of cumulative trialectics (1991) as a new thirdspace that more accurately represents the complexities of modern day geographies and hybrid communities by extending the binary analysis of the past and present and beyond the real and the imagined. Trialectics expand our understanding beyond physical geographies by suggesting a cerebral space that searches for new meaning and is therefore more radically open to additional otherness and toward a continuing expansion of [human] spatial knowledge and imagination.

Julia Lossau describes thirdspace as a space that ‘…tends …

Becoming Human In The Land: An Introduction To The Special Issue Of Heritage: Landscapes, Drew Hubbell

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This introduction to the special issue of Landscapes theorizes the questions suggested by the theme, "Landscape: Heritage." Weaving personal narrative with literary criticism, cultural studies, human geography, and ecology, the essay examines the way humans become human by developing complex relationships with landscapes over time. As landscapes contain the physical traces of human habitation and development, certain narratives of human inhabitants are written and memorialized in and by those landscapes. The monumentalization of specific heritages leads to contests between human groups who require certain heritages to be memorialized, but not others. Greater awareness of one's humanity requires recovery of polyphonic …

Bowraville And Phoebe's Fall: Award-Winning Australian Podcasts From The Media Formerly Known As Print, Wendy Carlisle

RadioDoc Review

Digital technology has democratised the audio storytelling space in a quite profound way. This article compares two major podcast investigations produced by established Australian newspaper mastheads: Bowraville by The Australian, and Phoebe’s Fall by The Age. Bowraville examines the unsolved murders of three Aboriginal children in the 1990s – all of whom came from the same small town. Phoebe’s Fall investigates the bizarre death in a garbage chute of a luxury Melbourne apartment building of 24-year-old Phoebe Handsjuk and her troubled relationship with her much older boyfriend.

In depicting what have been described as the three essential ingredients of …

Humanity On The Verge Of Insanity: Maintaining Cultural Identity Against Oppressive Rule, Danica Katarina Skoric

Senior Theses

Ubuntu is a South African term in the Bantu language that translates to “human kindness.” This essay discusses the present-day impact of the South African philosophical concept of Ubuntu in light of the dehumanization, which Aboriginal Australians and Black South Africans faced, specifically during the period of 1960-1985. How has humanity been enslaved and degraded by assimilation and a cruel division of races, yet positively evolved and progressed due to the efforts of both female and male activists--in particular literary figure Oodgeroo Noonuccal and political leader Nelson Mandela? A lack of respect and tolerance as a result of colonialism has …

World Churches Vertical File, Mcgarvey Ice

Center for Restoration Studies Vertical Files Finding Aids

This set of files is especially useful to scholars of the history missions, particularly among Churches of Christ in the twentieth century. Students and researchers interested in applied missiology among Restorationist traditions, Stone-Campbell movements, and Churches of Christ will also find them helpful. For assistance with specific files or items, contact Mac Ice - mac.ice@acu.edu, or 325.674.2144.

Liberating Genocide: An Activist Concept And Historical Understanding, Tony Barta

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

From the outset, historians of genocide have seen themselves as activists. Among historians of colonial societies that is what distinguishes them most in relation to indigenous peoples. An ethnographic sensibility should be visible in any such study, and the more so when a question of genocide is raised. After all, if we do not have a sense of difference between peoples we fail the test of genocide at the first hurdle. And if we do not have an ethnographic sensibility towards our own cultures (including academic cultures) we will fail to make the most of our role in affecting deeply …

Not Quite Cricket By Jon Rose: A Review, Jane Ulman

RadioDoc Review

In Not Quite Cricket, Jon Rose reaches into the well-known story of the first Australian cricket team to play at Lords and draws out a tragedy dressed up as music hall comedy, in what he calls a 'historical intervention'.

Rose is an Australian-based polymath creator: a musician, inventor, composer, improviser, educator and entertainer. Radio production is just one strand of his prolific body of work. Over decades he has forged an innovative style, a distinctive radio form. His work has always been a fusion of genres, a hybrid of fact and invention with composed and improvised music carrying its …

Navigating The Territories Of Indigenous Arts Leadership: Exploring The Experiences And Practices Of Indigenous Arts Leaders, Michelle Evans, Amanda Sinclair

Amanda Sinclair

This article explores the leadership of Australian Indigenous artists and arts leaders. We advance the idea of ‘territories’ to convey the overlapping contexts in which Indigenous artistic leaders work, and through this framework seek to highlight the embodied ways individuals enact leadership across country and community. Thematic, narrative and discursive analysis of 29 in-depth interviews with diverse Indigenous artists identify four territories and multiple practices of leadership in which our participants engage. The four territories are: authorization in a bi-cultural world (cultural authorization and self-authorizing); identity and belonging (both fearless and connected); artistic practice (innovative and custodian of cultural values); …

Teaching Australian Literature In A Class About Literatures Of Social Reform, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article presents an intriguing thesis about proximity and identification, distance and empathy based on the experience of teaching Sally Morgan’s My Place to American university students alongside Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a class examining literature as an agent of social change. Indeed, its response to the question, “How does the Australian production of My Place influence its American reception?” will surprise many people. Students more readily demonstrate empathy with characters and are prepared to ascribe their unenviable life circumstances to social structures that propagate oppression when reading literature about cultural groups …

Socio-Institutional Neoliberalism, Securitisation And Australia's Aid Program, Nichole Georgeou, Charles Hawksley

Nichole Georgeou

This is Case Study Number 8 in the Hawksley and Georgeou edited book 'The Globalization of World Politics' (OUP, 2013).

Decolonising Spaces And The Exemplary Life Of Tess Brill's Activism, Julie-Ann Paredes

Julie-Ann Paredes

Statistics continue to show that quantifiable disadvantages still exist today between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in Australia, collectively referred to in common vernacular as ‘the gap’. This situation may be understood as an ongoing ‘echo factor’ of colonisation, but when ‘the gap’ is considered as metaphor, it may represent the ‘space of disconnect’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges and ‘alternative ways of knowing the world.’ By exploring this space through a lens of reflexivity, this thesis will consider not only the links between Australia’s colonial past and status as a settler nation but the potential of reflexivity as a decolonising …

Into The Desert: The Horn Expedition Of 1894, Sean K. Zimmer

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Signing Off On The State, Amanda J. Allerding

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis provides a contextual analysis of my creative practice as a visual artist. An overview of the social and historical relationships of the individual in societal organisations, and in relation to what Stuart Hall refers to as tendential lines of force, the dominant structures of religion and the state (Hall, 1996), set the context for a selfreflexive analysis of my practice. In carrying out a contextual analysis of my practice, it is the intention of this thesis to map a context by which Australian national identity is manufactured. This context is the hegemonic processes that seek to maintain a …

Constructing Indigenousness In The Late Modern World, Robert Cribb, Li Narangoa

Robert Cribb

Examines changing meanings of the term 'indigenous" in relation to other ideas that have been valued in various (mainly Western) philosophical system, such as priority, attachment to the land, and technical knowledge.

A Turbulent Decade: Social Protest Movements And The Labour Movement, 1965-1975, Rowan Cahill, Beverley Symons

Rowan Cahill

During the decade 1965-1975, a cultural revolution took place in Australia. The future was seeded with movements and ideas that changed Australian society and culture, and enlarged the space for democratic action. This book, edited by Beverley Symons and Rowan Cahill, themselves activists during the period, brings together the candid, at times vulnerable, recollections of thirty-nine participants in the events of the decade.

Especially Good Aboriginal Art, Vivian Johnson

Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International (APRCi)

No abstract provided.

The Harvest Field, Howard L. Schug, Don H. Morris

Stone-Campbell Books

No abstract provided.