Cirrus@Austlit

'Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury (1992), K.S. Maniam’s Haunting the Tiger (1996), and Shirley Lim’s Life’s Mysteries (1995) articulate the ambivalence of interpreting the cultural beliefs of the Malays, Chinese, and Indians of the former Malaya with the evolving spiritual beliefs of Christianity and Catholicism influenced by British colonisation. In Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury the ghosts of the colonial past vie for power with the demons of Chinese cultural beliefs in a convent situated in the liminal space between the jungle and the urban environment. The convent is a “civilised space” with the jungle as an encroaching wilderness haunted by Chinese gods and the female vampire ghost Pontianak of the Malay cultural tradition. Similarly, Maniam’s short stories in Haunting the Tiger situate the supernatural and the abject in the liminal spaces between the city and the jungle to express the metaphorical exile experienced by the Indian and Chinese diaspora in Malaysia. The trope of liminality is most evident in Shirley Lim’s short stories in Life’s Mysteries where the domestic and urban space of culture are viewed through prisms of imprisonment and disempowerment. The authors uncover the psychological and social exile experienced by colonised subjects through the gothic themes of shadows, darkness and the underworld.' (Publication abstract)

'The Melanau people are an indigenous ethnic group living in the coastal wetlands in the southwestern region of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Mukah, famed as the Melanau heartland, is a small town known for its fishing and sago industries. Set in Mukah, this short story tells the tale of two Melanau sisters faced with an unexpected change in their family circumstances leading to a clash of gender, extended family, culture and occupation.'  (Publication abstract)

'Australia’s northern-most tropical city of Darwin has a strong presence in the domestic and international touristic imagination as a tropical escape destination – a small city poised on the edge of outstanding natural beauty – yet in national cinematic representations Darwin is often presented as a frontier zone, whether these tropes are pivoted around culture or nature. I would like to take up this idea of the city of Darwin as special and distinctive in the national imaginary that is discernible in recent Australian cinema, an idea that I show extends to the city’s representation in theatre and literature. This paper performs a close textual reading of the city’s recent representation in two high profile Australian feature films, Charlie’s Country (Rolf de Heer, 2013) and Last Cab to Darwin (Jeremy Sims, 2015). These are films that employ compassionate, humanistic themes, each maintaining a strong focus on main characters who find themselves both marginalized and neglected within the broader mechanisms of Australian society: hence each film is simultaneously performing the secondary work of critiquing Australian culture. In both films, I show how the tropical city of Darwin operates as a space of difference, but unlike the contemporary tourism marketing that simplistically brands the region as a “site of desire”, here we find two unique critiques of Australian law and society that work to show the ethical frontiers of legislation and of human sovereignty.' (Publication abstract)