Jan Idle Jan Idle i(A138816 works by)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 Landscape Jan Idle , 2019 single work
— Appears in: Cultural Studies Review , December vol. 25 no. 2 2019; (p. 247-249)
1 Yagan, Mrs Dance and Whiteness Jan Idle , 2014 single work essay autobiography
— Appears in: Ngapartji Ngapartji, in Turn, in Turn : Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia 2014; (p. 109-123)

'It is a very hot day in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia; really hot and very dry. It is the kind of day when the shimmer of the temperature distorts the horizon line of the Indian Ocean that I can see when we go to swim. The beach is ten minutes walk from my parents’ house, a 1970s dream home, originally with shag pile carpet, which has long been replaced. On days like this it is too hot to walk, and we drive for our mid-morning swim, the second swim of the day. The heat from the bitumen makes the air shimmer and the sand sears our feet, so we get as close to the sea as possible before running shoeless for the water and gentle waves. It is perfect weather for drying laundry, yesterday’s dirty washing is white, pristine, folded and put away before lunch. It is Perth and this is Christmas. We return ‘home’ regularly to visit relatives and old friends, to reconnect with our shared history, but by the end of two weeks I am always ready to go back to the east coast, where my real life is disconnected from my Western Australian past, which is how I prefer it. Besides, all that swimming gives me water brain and all I can imagine is immersing myself in the salty water of the Indian Ocean in order to get cool, and I cannot think. The distance between there and here is geographically and psychically great, and ‘home’ pulls in both directions. That past continues to live into my present, hounding my academic endeavours, luring me into remembering history and acknowledging it.' (Introduction) 

1 Walking to Work : Community and Contact Jan Idle , 2010 single work prose
— Appears in: Cultural Studies Review , vol. 16 no. 2 2010;
'The settler community must negotiate the difference of the stranger and the melancholy and violence of a past haunted by colonization and death. Through writing the details of everyday contact in a walk across the city this essay explores notions of community. It owes much to the writing of Linnell Secomb who writes of the haunted nature of the settler community in the Australian context. Secomb writes of community through the ideas of Jean Luc Nancy where community is a process of negotiation of difference, a listening to the unfamiliar other in conflict and acceptance. The work of Alphonso Lingis and Richard Sennett has informed my ideas of the stranger and the city while Kim Scott's Benang has influenced how I think and write about the echo of the past in the present. These theoretical interruptions punctuate this writing of negotiating community.' (Author's abstract)
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