Issue Details: First known date: 2010... 2010 Historical Controversies and the History Wars in Australia
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Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

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    y separately published work icon Frontier Skirmishes : Literary and Cultural Debates in Australia after 1992 Russell West-Pavlov (editor), Jennifer Wawrzinek (editor), Heidelberg : Winter Verlag , 2010 Z1797661 2010 anthology criticism "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. Heidelberg : Winter Verlag , 2010 pg. 33-44

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 26 Aug 2011 13:56:45
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