Issue Details: First known date: 2010... 2010 Frontier Skirmishes : Literary and Cultural Debates in Australia after 1992
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

"The frontier has been the central metaphorical figure governing discursive configurations in the last two decades in Australia. The cultural landscape since the Australian High Court's 'Mabo' decision of 1992 has been increasingly openly defined as a site of animosity and hostility. Frontiers, both real and imagined, past and present, continue to haunt the cultural landscape of Australia. This volume explores a range of paraliterary and literary discussion of recent years which can be interpreted as displacements into the cultural realm of erstwhile frontier conflicts along the borders of white colonial settlement. The collection gathers together a distinguished group of scholars and writers from Australia, Europe and Asia to investigate the dual manifestations of frontiers - both genuinely historiographical and more broadly metaphorical - in the cultural debates taking place in the Australian public sphere from the early 1990s onwards. Long since terminated as real armed conflicts, these past skirmishes none the less continue to resonate in the consciousness of white Australia, leaving their mark upon literary texts, films, artworks, and public discourse."--Back cover.

Contents

* Contents derived from the Heidelberg,
c
Germany,
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Western Europe, Europe,
:
Winter Verlag , 2010 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Historical Controversies and the History Wars in Australia, Bain Attwood , single work criticism (p. 33-44)
National Narratives and Local Impacts : The Legacy of the Australian History Wars in Tasmania, James Boyce , single work criticism (p. 45-56)
Apologies, Agency and Resiliance, Kim Scott , single work criticism (p. 57-70)
Don McLeod's Law : The Genesis of the Aboriginal Concept of the Strike, Stephen Muecke , single work criticism (p. 71-80)
Fencing in the Frontier, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism
'...examines a rather less masked from of cultural domination and inscription : that of the fence as a marker of territorial possession, management and (from the settler point of view) 'improvement.' In a number of contemporary texts, ranging from Rodney Hall's The Second Bridegroom (1991), via Doris Pilkington-Garimara's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) and Philip Noyce's subsequent 2001 film adaptation, through to Kate Grenville's The Secret River (2005) and poetry by Anthony Lawrence, the fence is analyzed as a material semiotic form inscribing both the text of the land and the spaces of texts.' (Introduction: Imaginary Antipodes, 12-13)
(p. 81-94)
The Scene of the Crime, Christopher Kelen , single work criticism (p. 95-114)
'How Do You Plead?' : Guilt, Responsibility and Reconciliation on the Frontier in Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, Sarah Pinto , single work criticism (p. 115-128)
Frontier Violence and the Power of the 'Sacred' : Alex Miller's Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell, Rebecca Dorgelo , single work criticism (p. 129-140)
'The Myth of Settlement' : Grey Nomads, Papunya Tula and Frontier Violence in Pat Jacobs' Going Inland, Frances Devlin-Glass , single work criticism (p. 141-152)
History : The Much Less than Final Frontier, and the Story of Thea Astley's Short Stories in It's Raining in Mango, Victoria Kuttainen , single work criticism (p. 153-168)
'This is How I'm Sorry' : Witnessing the Frontier in Contemporary Australian Historical Writing, Kelly Butler , single work criticism (p. 169-184)
Bearing Witness : Memory and Decreation in Kim Mahood's Craft for a Dry Lake, Jennifer Wawrzinek , single work criticism (p. 185-198)
'All Are Implicated' : Violence and Accountability in Sam Watson's The Kadaitcha Sung and Alexis Wright's Plains of Promise, Kate Hall , single work criticism

'Just like historians, writers of fiction have evinced an enduring fascination with the Australian frontier. In and around the decade of the 1990s, writers seemed particularly interested in Tasmania as a place distinguished by its antipodean isolation, and by the bloody violence of its colonial history (see Mudrooroo 1991; Castro 1994; Flanagan 200 l ). Equally violent, though less geographically remote, the Queensland frontier is vividly evoked in two novels from the 1990s: Sam Watson's The Kadaitcha Sung (1990) and Alexis Wright's Plains of Promise (1997). Both novels are by Aboriginal writers, and they both represent, in different ways, the uneasy, ambivalent and often violent connections between their Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal characters. Watson's novel assaults the reader with visceral descriptions of murder, rape, and other forms of violence, between and amongst white and black individuals and communities, in late twentieth-century Brisbane. At the same time, the text details the massacres of Indigenous populations in colonial Queensland (and other states) with a lack of restraint that recalls U.S. writer Cormac McCarthy's depiction of frontier violence in Blood Meridian (1985). Plains of Promise foregrounds the horror of stolen children and the myriad forms of violence and abuse against women (by white and black men) that occurred in missions and institutions from the mid nineteenth century up until at least the 1970s in Australia. The Aboriginal mission is a significant 'frontier' place in the Australian psyche, in part, perhaps, because of its remote or 'outback' setting, but also because it represents a place where a clear boundary exists to demarcate Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural groups. In examining evocations of the frontier in Australian fiction it is helpful to remember that the frontier is, among other things: a literal (historical) space describing a specific geographical region, an actual or imagined boundary line, a discursive concept and a metaphor. In whatever context it is used the frontier inscribes a boundary between a number of familiar Manichean oppositions: savagery/civilisation, black/white, wild/tamed, us/them, and so on. And, just as the historical and geographical frontier shifts with the creep of colonial expansion, so the figurative frontier of Australian history is an unstable and shifting construct. Australian historiography has, of course been renegotiating this frontier for some time, and it is useful to recall that the recent history wars "were preceded by a long, complicated and strongly contested process of historiographical transition" (Veracini 439). It is an encouraging mark of progress that, during the history wars of the 1990s, right-wing combatants such as historian Keith Windschuttle and former Prime Minister John Howard found themselves in the minority, railing against what they saw as "poses of political correctness" (Howard 23) as the frontier they knew was radically redefined by historians intent on providing "counter-narratives of the nation". I've used Homi Bhabha's much borrowed phrase from The Location of Culture because it applies equally well to historiographical and fictional retellings of the past, and because writers of fiction and historians seemed equally interested during the 1990s in interrogating history. Wright and Watson are just two of a number of Indigenous novelists (see, for example, Kim Scott and Bruce Pascoe) who were producing historical counternarratives of the nation during the 1990s, from 'the other side of the frontier'.' (Introduction)

(p. 199-216)
White Aborigines. Re-Imagining Australian Modernity : Performative and Non-Performative Indigenisation in Three White Australian Cultural Texts, Adam Gall , single work criticism (p. 217-230)
Telling Tales About Crossing Borders : David Malouf, Germaine Greer, and the Reception of Remembering Babylon, Peter Otto , single work criticism (p. 231-246)
The Black-White Man in Mudrooroo's The Kwinkan, Maureen Clark , single work criticism (p. 247-260)
Rediscovering Carrolup, Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , single work criticism (p. 261-276)
Teaching the Frontier : Shifting Narratives and Cultural Boundaries in 1990s School Textbooks, Alexandra Sauvage , single work criticism (p. 277-294)
The Albino and the Storyteller : Eugenics and the Best of Intentions in 1930s Darwin, Stephen Gray , single work criticism (p. 295-310)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Works about this Work

The Time of Biopolitics in the Settler Colony Russell West-Pavlov , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , June vol. 26 no. 2 2011; (p. 1-19) Imaginary Antipodes : Essays on Contemporary Australian Literature and Culture 2011; (p. 51-68)

'Kim Scott's description of the Moore River Native Settlement, also known as Mogumber, in his 1999 novel Benang, suggests implicit analogies with the mid-century concentration camps of the Holocaust. The Indigenous detainees are transported there in stock cars, they are welcomed by uniformed overseers armed with whips, they are housed in barracks with barred windows, and a punishment regime of solitary confinement and ritual humiliation operates as a means of coercion (89-94, 99-102). Elsewhere in the novel, Scott leaves us in no doubt about the force of these associations: "' They had some good ideas, those Nazis," Earn said, "but they went a bit far"' (Benang 154). The analogy between twentieth-century government control of the lives of Australian Indigenous people and biopolitics of Nazism has not gone unnoticed in other quarters. Elizabeth Povinelli describes the equation, made by the Royal Commission's Bringing Them Home report in 1994, of a century of child removal practices with cultural genocide, as 'an analogy made more compelling by the age of the Aboriginal applicants, many of whom had been taken in the early 1940s'. The impact of that equation was that 'Australians looked at themselves in a ghastly historical mirror and imagined their own Nuremberg. Would fascism be the final metaphor of Australian settler modernity?' (38).' (Author's introduction, p. 1)

The Time of Biopolitics in the Settler Colony Russell West-Pavlov , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , June vol. 26 no. 2 2011; (p. 1-19) Imaginary Antipodes : Essays on Contemporary Australian Literature and Culture 2011; (p. 51-68)

'Kim Scott's description of the Moore River Native Settlement, also known as Mogumber, in his 1999 novel Benang, suggests implicit analogies with the mid-century concentration camps of the Holocaust. The Indigenous detainees are transported there in stock cars, they are welcomed by uniformed overseers armed with whips, they are housed in barracks with barred windows, and a punishment regime of solitary confinement and ritual humiliation operates as a means of coercion (89-94, 99-102). Elsewhere in the novel, Scott leaves us in no doubt about the force of these associations: "' They had some good ideas, those Nazis," Earn said, "but they went a bit far"' (Benang 154). The analogy between twentieth-century government control of the lives of Australian Indigenous people and biopolitics of Nazism has not gone unnoticed in other quarters. Elizabeth Povinelli describes the equation, made by the Royal Commission's Bringing Them Home report in 1994, of a century of child removal practices with cultural genocide, as 'an analogy made more compelling by the age of the Aboriginal applicants, many of whom had been taken in the early 1940s'. The impact of that equation was that 'Australians looked at themselves in a ghastly historical mirror and imagined their own Nuremberg. Would fascism be the final metaphor of Australian settler modernity?' (38).' (Author's introduction, p. 1)

Last amended 27 Jun 2014 14:25:58
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