Cirrus@Austlit

'Maps are central to Kim Mahood’s practice as a writer, artist, and intercultural collaborator. She began making them in the wake of her father’s death in a helicopter mustering accident thirty years ago. This tragic event compelled her to make a pilgrimage to the country where she spent her late childhood and teenage years living on Mongrel Downs cattle station in the Tanami Desert. This journey became the subject of her award-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake (2001). This journey set in motion a renewed relationship with the place that has seen her return to the Tanami annually for more than twenty years. The relationships that developed during this period resulted in Mahood’s longstanding preoccupation with maps and mapmaking developing into collaborative mapping projects with Walmajarri and Jaru peoples, the contours of which she traces in her second book Position Doubtful: Mapping landscapes and memories (2016).' (Introduction) 

' I begin with this quote from Ernestine Hill because her description of the Northern Territory as 'problem child of empire' evocatively captures the paradoxical nature of the 'north' in the settler-Australian imagination - from the moment British settlement pushed further inland and north in the mid-nineteenth century, the north of the continent, the Northern Territory in particular, has simultaneously been construed as both a 'promised land' and a 'white elephant'.'  (Publication abstract)

'Rebe Taylor’s Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity both begins and ends in the very recent past in Kutalayna, Tasmania. Known to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community as a seasonal meeting place of the mumirimina people, archaeological evidence has dated human occupation of the site at 41000 years, making it the oldest known site in Tasmania and one of the oldest in Australia. In 2009 the Tasmanian State Government chose it as the site for a bypass bridge that would divert traffic from Hobart suburbs, which led to the Aboriginal community launching a campaign to try and reroute the bypass and save this special place. It is there that we meet Jim Everett, a Tasmanian Aboriginal who Taylor has known for over fifteen years. At the beginning of the book Taylor writes that Everett has inspired and assisted her writing, guided her understanding of history, and been a key part of her ‘education’, and that this book is written in the ‘spirit of reciprocity’ for what he and other Tasmanian Aboriginal people have given her (p. 3). Beginning and ending her history with Jim in the here-and-now, situates Taylor’s book in a body of historical scholarship that ‘privileges the necessity of responding to the voices of the present as the starting point for studying the past’. 1 Thus, Into the Heart of Tasmania is both an excavation of Tasmania’s colonial past and an exploration of the ways in which that past, and Tasmania’s much deeper human history, continues to resonate in the present for Tasmanian Aboriginal people.' (Introduction)

'Settler colonialism produces distinctive structures, spaces and boundaries that seek to differentiate coloniser from colonised, black from white. Two works that explore these cultural spaces, social structures, racial hierarchies—and the intimate and actual lived-in spaces that lay in-between—are Fiona Davis’ Australian Settler Colonialism and the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Station: Redrawing Boundaries and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey’s Made to Matter: White Fathers, Stolen Generations. Both works engage with theories of whiteness, foregrounding it as a necessary concept to grapple with the different racial, cultural and social spaces produced by settler colonialism in Australia, yet they do so from different “fields” or “sites”.' (Introduction)