Cirrus@Austlit

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.

It is September 2016. I take my glasses off to swim. I leave them tucked in the folds of my discarded dress, follow the softened outline of Lucas's body down and into the water. I let it form the world for me. Definition is unnecessary in water; fluidity renders mute any firm lines or clear distinctions. The water has its own clarity, one of light going forever down, and a brilliance of deep colour-Homer's winedark sea. I did not understand the metaphor until we arrived and saw it, this water with its surreal intensity of blue. Luminous, the opulence of wine. Lucas dives and tells me that it just keeps going down past the point of view.' (Publication abstract)

'In 1959, while stationed in the Trobriand Islands as a Cadet Patrol Officer, Randolph Stow drew a mud-map in the back of his diary, coloured with red and green pastel. Titled ‘Forrest River Mission from Memory,’ it shows the layout of the Mission near Wyndham in the Kimberley, complete with rivers and tributaries, place names in two languages, a scale and a compass rose. This paper suggests that the drawing balances pride in precision of representation of the space with a sense of desire in remembering it across time and from a distance. This paper considers this act of mapping and compares it to the representations of space in Stow’s novel To the Islands (1958). It discusses the manoeuvres it highlights within Stow’s creative practice, and the tension it invokes in relation to his growing consciousness of his own settler-colonial subjectivity.'  (Publication abstract)

'Collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous practitioners in Australian writing has a long and fraught history, and appropriation remains a serious issue in the Australian publishing industry today. At the same time, however, positive instances of collaboration, particularly in contemporary writing, have shown its capacity to produce rich and nuanced cultural outcomes. This article is part of a developing project aiming to investigate collaborations like these and their related industry outcomes. It looks to feel out some of the complexities around Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration, considering as a starting point Randolph Stow’s work with Daniel Evans, which led to the publication of “The Umbali Massacre […] As told to him by Daniel Evans” in the Bulletin in 1961. As a case study, it has several interesting features: the context of Stow’s work with Indigenous peoples and his friendship with Evans; Evans’s direct contribution to Stow’s Miles Franklin Award–winning To the Islands (1958); Stow’s failure to properly acknowledge Evans in the novel’s frontmatter; and his subsequent appropriation of Evans’s voice in the Bulletin piece, even while advocating for Indigenous sovereignty. As such, it illustrates both the dangers and the potential of Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration as a dual inheritance in the industry today.' (Publication abstract)

'Hannah Mulvey left her island home as a teenager. But her stubborn, defiant mother is dying, and now Hannah has returned to Chesil, taking up a teaching post at the tiny schoolhouse, doing what she can in the long days of this final year.

'But though Hannah cannot pinpoint exactly when it begins, something threatens her small community. A girl disappears entirely from class. Odd reports and rumours reach her through her young charges. People mutter on street corners, the church bell tolls through the night and the island's women gather at strange hours...And then the miracles begin.

'A page-turning, thought-provoking portrayal of a remote community caught up in a collective moment of madness, of good intentions turned terribly awry. A blistering examination of truth and power, and how we might tell one from the other.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public. (Morrison 1993)

'These lines, drawn from novelist, essayist, and teacher Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel lecture, offer a vivid description of the kinds of rhetoric dominating our public, professional, and even our cultural spaces today, although the cracks are beginning to show, and we would be hard pressed to claim that ‘harmony’ prevails.' (Deborah Hunn, Ffion Murphy, Catherine Noske and Anne Surma, Introduction)

'Randolph Stow’s expatriate novels, Visitants (1979), The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) and The Suburbs of Hell (1984) are often read as emerging from specific experiences in Stow’s expatriate life, beyond Australia—the two former as his ‘fever’ novels, informed by his work and illness in the Trobriand Islands and subsequent recovery in England; and the latter carrying the experience of an event from Stow’s Australian past into the setting of Harwich, England, where he lived from the early 1980s until his death in 2010. I have discussed elsewhere the overt connection in The Suburbs of Hell to Australia (Noske, ‘Chatter’), but it is also possible to read in the earlier texts connections with Stow’s life in Australia, particularly in his representation of landscape. Reading The Girl Green as Elderflower in this context opens interesting possibilities in understanding the spaces constructed within. This article will argue that Stow’s writing in the novel presents a complex transnationalism, one which challenges extant critical responses to Stow’s expatriation. It reads Stow’s place-making as embracing a fluidity that allows him to actively respond to postcolonialism as a global phenomenon and in doing so, examine Australian spaces through the lens of expatriation.' (Publication abstract)

'Writing has long been recognised as a way of locating the self. As a concept, this functions in multifaceted ways, from the importance of cultural expression and representation, to philosophical and linguistic conceptualisations of subjectivity in language. Emile Benveniste wrote of the fall into language : 

'it is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of 'ego' in reality, it its reality which is that of the being. '

(From the Editors 8)

'Randolph Stow’s ‘English’ novels, The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) and The Suburbs of Hell (1984) offer complex representations of space in text, which layer narrative and memory each over the other to inform the known setting. The resulting conceptualisation of place holds at its centre a transnational fluidity, which, when combined with the overt textual links between the stories and Stow’s own life, suggests a unique practice of place-making within his writing as an oeuvre. Reading Stow’s The Suburbs of Hell along these lines suggests it has a greater connection to a more general consideration of Australian narratives of place that might be assumed given its English setting. But what is specifically functioning within Stow’s writing practice to create places which embody this transnational mutability? This paper will examine Stow’s practice in writing for the purpose of understanding the manner in which the text constructs its setting, and whether or not reading these connections between Stow’s life and the text are productive of a cognizance of place-making in terms of writing practice.'  (Publication abstract)

'Alison Croggon has worked across many forms in her career, and connections to several are represented in these pages – the nine-part poem ‘Specula’, for example, comes from a larger work of the same title which also involves an essay and a radio play. Her previously published poetry collections are likewise represented. But there is no distinction in this new collection between these various sources from which Croggon has drawn – a deliberate choice she carefully underlines in her author’s note to this selection. In the acknowledgements, her own titles are grouped with that of the numerous journals she has published in, and given no special attention. There is no distinction in the table of contents or in the book’s design which demonstrates each poem’s source – the only overt indication is the inclusion of titular poems from previous collections. Recognition of these moreover confirms that the new collection is not arranged chronologically, or by any other immediately comprehensible logic. Something larger is at play in the construction of the collection than the ‘historicisation’ of a writing career.'  (Introduction)

'Contemporary Australian cultural studies has seen a move towards a multimodal awareness of space and place in writing – a speculative turn in both critical and creative work confronting the subject/object dichotomy as a limitation in place-making. Theorists such as Ross Gibson, Stephen Muecke and Michael Farrell offer beautiful conceptualisations of written spaces, drawing from several philosophical traditions, which might give context to contemporary creative practices. This writing regularly draws from movement as an integral feature of the practice discussed, with walking emerging in several approaches to re-envision the poet wanderer. But it is also possible to trace in this writing an act of selfmanifestation, a desire for the ‘doing-making’ of self to be inscribed within the multimodal spaces created. This paper will argue that this layering of self and space in the act of writing is both akin to and actively opposing the tradition of Romantic thought. While several features of the practices invoked might seem to draw from similar acts of immersion in landscape, the underlying trope of the Romantic poet’s divine communion is inverted in the speculative drive towards multimodal relation.