This special issue of Australian Humanities Review foregrounds the Eco- Humanities
section of the journal with the publication of the proceedings of Desert Gardens:
Waterless lands and the problems of adaptation, convened by Ian Donaldson and Libby
Robin for the Australian National University’s Humanities Research Centre, and held at
the National Library of Australia, Canberra, on 29, 30, and 31 March 2005. The
conference, which launched the Centre’s 2005 theme of Cultural landscapes, was the
second in a sequence of three international conferences on gardens sponsored by a group
of research institutions in the United States, Britain, and Australia. A selection of thirteen
essays has been collated and edited by the conference convenors and presented here in a
collection that explores the tensions between “the illusion of stability and rootedness”
created by gardens, which are, in fact, subject to evolution and change.
The journal includes its other regular components including:
Target Essay
In his essay latest essay, “War in the age of intelligent machines and unintelligent
government”, Ian Buchanan argues that the most terrifying phase of the war machine is
when peace itself is the target of destruction and perpetual unrest the desired solution of
war.
Review Essay
In “Reading Stephen Muecke’s Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture, and Indigenous
Philosophy” Ken Gelder identifies a shift away from the self-reflexivity that characterises
much non-Indigenous engagement with Aboriginal stories to an “ambitious nonAboriginal or ‘whitefella’ attempt to describe ‘being Aboriginal’ and to account for what
Muecke calls Aboriginal philosophy”.
Reviews
Richard Waterhouse reviews Dance Hall and Picture Palace; Sydney’s Romance With
Modernity by Jill Julius Matthews,
In “Reading the Other” Grant Hamilton reviews Derek Attridge’s study of J.M. Coetzee
and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event.