'This essay offers a study of Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven’s short story “Water”. It will look at its creative use of a group of futuristic characters, who turn out to be Indigenous ancestral spirits. How do their long-debated identity question all sorts of categories, making them appear as socially-constructed and highlighting their material effects? Traits pertaining to the bildungsroman will be elucidated through an analysis of the main character whose quest for her Aboriginal identity finds an auxiliary in the spirits’ leader and an opponent in a representative of the government. The story unfolds as a political one of becoming-as-resistant against the latest form of segregation conducted in the name of national reconciliation. Drawing on the past, reflecting the present and imagining the future, at the intersection of Western and Indigenous worldviews, it challenges the literary genres and definitions of the real and the fiction. In its imagination of Indigenous futures, navigating between epistemologies, it may be called a work of Murri realism which draws a set of parallels to reflect on current postcolonising conditions.' (Publication abstract)
'This paper emerges from a panel discussion at the ‘Texts and Their Limits’ conference (2021) between four scholars in the field of Australian regional literary history to consider its current concerns, practices and relationship to the frameworks of Australian literary studies. The panel flagged a renewal of regional literary scholarship in Australia through exploration of the panelists’ own projects and collaborations in regional and rural Victorian and Western Australian communities. Drawing on their reflections on the doing of regional literary history, the conversation canvassed the distinct qualities of contemporary regional Australian literary scholarship; the role of place, situated practice and community engagement in this field; and the implications for the regional literary studies of the always unsettled boundaries and status of the ‘region’ in Australian life. Following the original panel event, this paper discusses questions such as: what is regional literary history, where is it going, and what are limits? ' (Publication abstract)
Non-Traditional Research Output, Statement of Intent
Research Background
This practice-led research was written as part of a broader project considering how childbearing and -rearing can recognise (and pay respect to) Indigenous sovereignty. Sovereignty as a concept sees the body overlap with place, while the act of childbearing is complicated in the Australian context by the inheritance of the colonial world into which the child is born. Poetry offers a nuanced and emotionally sensitive mode for traversing this complex terrain. This work moves conceptually through the multivalent structure of the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari) in accommodating the influences of placemaking studies, critical whiteness studies and creative practice studies.
Research Contribution
Drawing from Anne Brewster’s conceptualisation of “beachcombing” as a methodology for white Australian creative practice, this work extends on “body in reverie” (Brewster 135) and its openness to an embodied awareness of First Nations sovereignty through generative contact with place, in contemplating the function of colonial epistemologies of mapping in placemaking and childbearing alike. It uses the rhizome and its capacity to encompass indeterminacy as a means to challenge the epistemic certainty of the map, and to reiterate complex and multifaceted experiences of embodiment.
Research Significance
The significance of this work lies primarily in the relevance of its thematic interests to the experiences of contemporary Australians. It highlights the importance of recognising First Nations sovereignty in the domain of childbearing, where it is often overlooked by popular/medical discourse. Other works within the ongoing project have been published in journals and anthologies, including Antipodes and Plumwood Mountain, attesting to the value of the project as a whole.
Author's note: 'Research Background
This practice-led research was written as part of a broader project into digital literary creative practice. This project explores the process of creating digital-born literature, i.e. works that depend on a computer to exist. It uses Italo Calvino’s Six memos for the Next Millennium as a means to produce digital literary works that renegotiate text and images through recombinant poetics.
'Research Contribution
Building upon Natalie Harkin’s concept of archival-poetics, this work employs digital literary techniques to interrogate and navigate the Australian archive. The ‘icastic’ image of the camel is used to lighten and quickly navigate the posthuman weight of the archive. Following text-image practitioners such as W.G. Sebald and Ross Gibson, the initial ‘static’ work is reimagined using curatorial software, augmented reality, and recombinant poetics. This makes a contribution to both Australian archival studies and Australia digital literary practice.
'Research Significance
The significance of this work is its use of the icastic image as a prismatic symbol to navigate the posthuman weight of the archive. If the archive is both problematic and posthuman, then such creative research techniques are requisite. Traditional scholarly approaches are limited, so the implementation of creative practice that employs Calvino’s values and digital technologies are necessary to interrogate the archive and address the ‘grave consequences’ (Derrida’s proviso) that result from challenging the processes by which the archive has been established.' (Publication abstract)
'In recent years, various studies have drawn attention to a lack of Australian literature being taught in secondary classrooms in Australia, with these findings often attributed to teachers’ minimal experience of Australian texts during their senior secondary and tertiary education. This paper draws on a state-wide study of texts studied in Year 12 English and Literature classrooms in Western Australia in 2018, which revealed that Australian works, and particularly Western Australian texts, were popular inclusions for study. The externally examined English course in WA not having a prescribed text list, yet this condition of text list expansion does not necessarily ensure that a wider variety of texts will be studied in schools. This paper explores some possible explanations for this situation by referring to sites of sociability and to the work of John Guillory on canonicity and cultural capital (1993), to consider the impact of a parochial canon on Western Australian English subjects.' (Publication abstract)
(Introduction)