Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 Antipodean Dream, Antipodean Nightmare : Spatial Ideology and Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This essay begins from a simple premise: determinations of ‘Australianness’ and ‘the Australian character’ have been and continue to be inextricably linked to the fetishisation and reification of space in popular cultural manifestations of Australia. This is evident throughout white Australian cultural histories, as well as white histories of Australian culture. Perhaps this is a tautological claim in relation to any conception of nation, tied as such conceptions are to modern practices of cartography and geography. However, it is my contention that whilst notions of space play a determinant role in general vis-à-vis the configuration of nation (and national character), they play a larger role than usual in the configuration of ‘Australia’; the function of space in the conception of Australia is less modulated through competing discourses such as class, ethnicity and religion than in other national examples. This emphasis continues to privilege a mythical vision of space, with terra Australis incognita reified according to either of two dominant paradigms: the landscape is cultivated as a blank space offering the egalitarian opportunity for ‘man’ to reassess and reassert ‘his’ place in the natural order; or the landscape is cultivated as a sublime object—grand, and at times terrifying in its vastness and emptiness, a spectral antipodean environment that seems to ‘naturally’ lend itself to the gothic mode.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Humanities Review Unfinished Business : Apology Cultures in the Asia Pacific no. 61 May Monique Rooney (editor), 2017 11455878 2017 periodical issue

    'This special section of Australian Humanities Review, entitled ‘Unfinished Business: Apology Cultures in the Asia Pacific’, arose out of a Monash University Arts Faculty Interdisciplinary Research Project of the same name. This project brought together an interdisciplinary team across the fields of Literary Studies, History, Film, and Cultural Studies, encompassing aspects of law, human rights and ethics. The project sought to understand how various forms of cultural practice and narrative mediate our comprehension of the past and of ongoing human interactions within and between nation-states, in particular, of past, present and future social and cultural interactions that coalesce around the material and symbolic consequences of apology in the Asia Pacific region.' (Editorial Introduction)

    2017
Last amended 11 Jul 2017 10:29:06
http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2017/06/13/antipodean-dream-antipodean-nightmare-spatial-ideology-and-justin-kurzels-snowtown/ Antipodean Dream, Antipodean Nightmare : Spatial Ideology and Justin Kurzel’s Snowtownsmall AustLit logo Australian Humanities Review
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