Abstracts
Michael ACKLAND (James Cook University, Australia)
“Comrade Lenin’ viewed from the margin: Christina Stead’s verdict on Australia’s seminal
role as social laboratory and working-man’s paradise”
At imperial margins, or in far-flung domains, structures are often more fluid, reform and
innovation more capable of realisation. That at least is suggested by such impressive
antipodean firsts as embracing women’s suffrage, the eight-hour working-day and
democratically electing Labour Parties to power at state and federal levels. These
achievements, however, pre-dated the Bolshevik Revolution and its alternative model for
worker empowerment. Thereafter workers, intellectuals, and the young Christina Stead had to
decide which program was most appropriate for the antipodes—an issue brought home to
Stead by her father’s controversial role in a reforming Labour government, then by
increasingly dire, and unpredictable events in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as she launched
her career as a writer. One measure of the importance of this issue is arguably its prominence
in Stead’s earliest extant writing: her first published novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, and
the contemporaneous ms. ‘This Young Man Will Go Far’. Focusing on these works, this
paper challenges the widespread belief that political issues are tangential to this novelist’s
creativity by showing how her depiction of characters, classes and local events constitutes a
commentary on white Australia’s proud boast to be at the forefront of progressive social
action. In particular, the paper examines Stead’s efforts to reconcile the competing claims of
local and global perspectives, her diverse explorations of marginality, and her answer to the
pressing question of whether present social ferment in the antipodes was out of step with, or
exemplary within, the broader movement of international socialism.
Susan BALLYN (Barcelona University, Spain)
“Two Marginal Stories: Hannah Thornton and Mary Kelley Transported on the Hydery in
1832”
One hundred and fifty women and children embarked on the convict transport Hydery
between the 14th and 29th of March 1832. On arrival in Van Diemen's Land three women and
three children had died. This is actually a very low death toll if we consider that there was an
outbreak of cholera and dysentery on board. Nobody can accuse the surgeon of negligence or
malpractice. The cases of dysentery and cholera swamped the infirmary at different stages of
the voyage. Using Allen MacLaren’s journal I want to reconstruct two convict women's
stories: Hannah Thornton aged 48 from Ireland and Mary Kelley aged 27 from England. Fate
threw them together on the Hydery and would similarly separate them from their children and
each other on board. Their stories raise a number of questions to which I can often only posit
hypothesis, others find their answer within the journal itself and allied documents.
Reconstructing biographies implies both reading the facts recorded in documents but, above
all, in Surgeons' journals and conduct records it involves reading between the lines,
interpreting the areas of the unspoken, the unwritten that any text is subject to. These two
women exemplify the way in which biographies may be reconstructed but also they represent
the average female convict transported to Van Diemen’s Land. There is nothing extraordinary
about them but it is precisely this; their ordinariness that makes them interesting and
representative of a much wider community of female convicts.
Gillian BARLOW: (University of Western Sydney, Australia)
“Rubbing Out: looking at Aboriginal housing”
As an Australian writing in and about Australia, I have taken up this conference theme as “in
the Margins’ (in the trenches) rather than ‘on’ them. In the margins suggests urgent writing
along a book’s edges responding to the words and ideas contained within. It is this same
urgency I feel for Aboriginal housing with which I have been engaged as an architect and
writer. Aboriginal people have been marginalised in their own country since colonisation. The
demographics are appalling and successive governments make half ditched attempts to
improve these. The many issues involved are inter-related and cannot be dealt with
individually. One of these is poor housing, along with its associated issues of homelessness
and overcrowding. It is the house’s delivery and/or design that are debated. This debate is like
the swing of a pendulum but as Aldo Van Eyck has said, “There are more interesting motions
than that of the pendulum”. Architects see buildings as space. But there is a time element too a ‘ma’ as the Japanese call it. Writers look closely at how to construct this ‘sense of place’
and there are lessons in this for housing. My paper will look at Aboriginal housing, how it is
delivered and the possibilities of looking at it differently both architecturally and writerly.
Emma BARROW & Barry JUDD (RMIT, University, Melbourne, Australia)
“Whitefellas at the Margins: The politics of going native in post-colonial Australia”
This paper discusses ethical engagements between ‘whitefellas’ and Indigenous Australia and
how such engagements are characterised by the marginalization and silencing of ‘ethical
whitefellas’. Such individuals who ‘go native’ become positioned at the periphery of formal
interactions between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australia. While genuine relations
between non-Indigenous and Indigenous individuals continue to grow as a part of everyday
contemporary life in Australia, within the context of formal organizational interactions the
politics of Anglo-Australian identity continues to limit the ability of whitefella Australians to
engage with Indigenous people in a way that might said to be truly ethical and selftransformative. Instead the identity politics of Anglo-Australia, a politics that originates in
the old colonial stories of the 19th century, continues to function in a way that marginalises
individuals who choose to engage in a way that goes beyond the organizational rhetoric of
government and civil institutions. Australia founded on the oppression and attempted racial
and cultural elimination of Indigenous peoples, has a history of settler/native engagements
that continues to impact on contemporary relationships in ways that impedes the ability of
‘whitefellas’ to adhere to ethical frameworks in building professional relationships with
Indigenous people. The history of Australian colonialism teaches us that when a deep and
productive engagement between settler and native has occurred, the stability of ‘AngloAustralian identity is destabilised as the colonial establishment is reminded of Indigenous
dispossession and questions associated with the moral and legal legitimacy of the
contemporary Australian state. So what of the ‘White’ or non-indigenous worker ethically
engaged with Indigenous Australia whose work gives rise to social and political
understandings that question and are perceived to threaten the status quo? In what ways do the
particularities of genealogy and rights persist? To what extent does this slow down
reconciliation directives? How can such problematics in the politics of national identity be
overcome? Framing the contemporary context of change and resistance the authors will
discuss the historical trajectory of select settlers. Settlers, who co-existed with the first people
and actively challenged the limitations of the time – yet remain hidden in the recesses of
Australian history. Then in order to consider effective methods to supersede matters of
marginalization the authors will discuss examples of inclusive institutional practice, in the
quest for a democratic modeling that points to a pathway for a truer recognition, acceptance
and inclusion of Indigenous peoples in the ‘mainstream’ of Australian social and political life.
Renate BROSCH (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Making the Marginalized Matter: The Production of Empathy in the Australian Movie
Samson and Delilah
Samson and Delilah (2009) is a very unusual movie. It may be seen in the context of the
recently identified “cinema of reconciliation”. Yet, it also confronts audiences with harrowing
images of poverty, unemployment, petrol sniffing, violence and clashes within the Aboriginal
community. The film about two young Aboriginal lovers from an isolated community in the
Central Australian desert puts centre stage people who are marginalized in every way:
socially, economically, culturally, politically and even geographically. Its real achievement is
to create not only intercultural understanding but enormous disturbance and compassion
among non-Aboriginal viewers. In my paper I will investigate the film’s politics and
aesthetics of “rewriting the margin”. I argue that a double strategy is at work: on the one
hand, the film employs realistic, almost documentary techniques in its presentation of social
conditions in the homeland. On the other, it appears quite artificial in its avoidance of
conventional representation (Samson does not speak). As a result, the romance of two outcasts
becomes a complex allegory of the struggle for love, dignity and self-respect. I argue that the
film radically rejects mainstream political correctness about Aboriginals on the margin of
society, while, at the same time, forcing the viewer to imaginatively adopt the marginal
position and to desire the utopian solution offered at the end. This combination of allegory
and honesty (I can’t help using this old-fashioned term) has a special appeal: it is an
exemplary case of making the experience of social, economic and political marginality
available vicariously to its Other.
Marilyne BRUN (University of Lorraine, France)
“White Australia: An Axial Margin in Federation Debates”
This paper discusses the importance of the notion a “white Australia” in Federation debates.
Maintaining a “white” Australia was a central preoccupation at the time of Federation in
Australia, as the rapid institutionalisation of racial discrimination in 1901 through the
Immigration Restriction Act and Pacific Island Labourers Acts makes clear. The nineteenthcentury debates that led to Federation recurrently focused on the theme of tariffs, the question
of rivers flowing across several colonies, postal and telegraphic services, and the distribution
of political representation for the future states. In comparison with the all-important subject of
tariffs, the idea of white Australia was marginal in Federation debates. Using extracts from
political pamphlets and speeches, from nationalist journal The Bulletin and from Charles
Pearson’s National Life and Character: A Forecast, this paper investigates the unique
racialisation at work in the notion of white Australia in order to account for the marginality of
the topic in Federation debates. Processes of racial exclusion in Federation Australia were
integrated into a wider discourse of social progress and social peace. The marginal status of
white Australia in debates mirrors this unique form of racialisation, and underlines the axial
role played by that ideology in structuring the Australian Commonwealth.
David CALLAHAN (University of Aveiro, Portugal)
“The Edge of the Australian Empire”
While conventionally Australia has been situated on edges, certain of Australia’s neighbours
live a geopolitical reality in which they exist on the edge of Australian power and neoimperial ambitions. From Papua New Guinea to small Pacific nations, even New Zealand, the
assertion of Australian priorities is a structuring factor in the life of the region. The most
recent and perhaps most awkwardly apparent example of these priorities concerns East Timor,
where a series of competing agendas and values are at present grating against each other in
unpredictable fashion. This paper will examine how this border between an Australian
presence and the power of Indonesia and South-east Asia is being represented in the
touchstone of cultural energies that is provided by generic fiction. Where there was formerly
little attention to the tragic situation in East Timor in Australian fiction, since the Australian
intervention in 1999 a certain number of popular fictions, principally thrillers, have begun to
emerge in which East Timor’s position at the margins of Australia’s visible footprint becomes
a stage for the acting out of a range of meanings. This paper will concentrate on Australia’s
‘Westernness’, and masculinity, as articulated in several works of generic fiction recently
published in Australia.
Hervé CANTERO (University of Rouen, France)
“Skirting and straddling the confines of Australianness in Robert Drewe’s fiction”
In spite of his efforts to shed light on the distinctive features of today’s mostly urban
Australian society, Robert Drewe frequently fills the fictional continent depicted in his novels
and memoirs with wild, remote settings (from the 19th-century Tasmanian hinterland in The
Savage Crows to the Pilbara Coast of Montebello) and the perplexed, stumbling characters
exploring them. Along with his self-diagnosed islomania, these elements underline a
persistent preoccupation of the author with the actual nature of the Anglo-Celtic presence in
the Great Southern Land, as he portrays non-indigenous Australians often struggling with the
antipodean cipher of a bewildering habitat only matched by the marked otherness of its
human and animal inhabitants. This paper aims at highlighting the frequent figures of
marginality, liminality and in-betweenness in Drewe’s works; it should thus show how these
occurrences aggregate into a composite reassessment of a conventional discourse of
Australianness progressively displaced from its central dominant position. This gradual
undermining is at the heart of Robert Drewe’s career-long commentary on a literary and
ideological landscape in which the previous status quo has to concede some ground to native
claims, to cultural and economic globalization and now to the encroachment of online
existential projections.
Michelle CAREY & Michael PRINCE (Murdoch University, Australia)
“Erasure, survival and the mobilisation of difference”
Lorenzo Veracini’s (2010; 2011) recent theorisation of the distinction between colonialism
and settler colonialism is important to scholars of Indigenous studies in Australia. However,
his central notion of Indigenous erasure, and its anti-colonial counterpoint, Indigenous
survival, warrant further enquiry. For Veracini, progress towards decolonization necessitates
a moving beyond the tension between an ongoing settler colonial need for Indigenous erasure,
and a concomitant Indigenous “permanent presence.” This paper investigates the implications
of Veracini’s call for an end to Indigenous erasure as the only meaningful path to
decolonization. It wonders if this is not, in the end, a valorization of Indigenous difference for
its own sake. If so, has not Albert Memmi (1965; 2006) warned us already about the dangers
inherent in basing political identities and programs for political change on the notion of a self
that is eternally different from an undifferentiated other? Bringing into play Marcia
Langton’s (2012) recent work on Indigenous exceptionalism, we attempt to clarify and extend
Veracini’s argument by establishing a working distinction between oppositional versus real
difference.
Estelle CASTRO (LIA TransOceanik, CNRS/JCU-Cairns Institute, Australia)
The Poetics of Relation in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria
In her essay entitled ‘On Writing Carpentaria’, Alexis Wright acknowledges Edouard
Glissant for his Poetics of Relation and highlights how the Martiniquais writer suggested that
through a relationship with the poetics of relation, ‘which is a relationship with all of the
senses of telling, listening, connection’, a writer could aspire to ‘transform mentalities and
reshape societies’ (17). Such narrative devices and philosophical hopes were also identified
and commented upon by critics in France, Switzerland and Belgium who reviewed Wright’s
novels. Marc de Gouvenain, who initiated the Antipodes Collection in Actes Sud Publisher in
France, explained that Wright’s writing appealed to him for its ‘beauty, its ability to convey
emotions, a whole universe, and to mingle reality and the invisible’. This paper will
demonstrate that Carpentaria can be characterized by its poetics of relation. The first part will
examine the reception of Alexis Wright’s work in France. The second part will then lead to an
analysis of the distinctive ‘imagining role of language’ in the novel. The third part will look at
humour in Carpentaria, which is often used to highlight processes of exclusion and
distancing, and as a device to invite the readers to rehumanise situations and see them anew.
Cécile CAU (Independent Scholar)
"Recentering Indigenous (hi)stories. ‘Redfern Now’ : from the margins of Aboriginal
drama to mainstream TV"
Redfern is a popular area of Sydney notoriously known for the 2004 riots that followed the
death of a young Indigenous person. The percentage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
peoples there is higher than in other parts of New South Wales (about 3.5% vs 2%). They are
concentrated in a precinct called The Block. However marginal, this reality had never been
shown in works of fiction on TV until Redfern Now. Aboriginal movies (either made by or
representing mainly Aboriginal peoples) have gained some professional and popular
recognition lately as the multi-awarded film The Sapphires still demonstrates. But having a
TV series broadcast primetime on ABC implies a different audience. What is more, the topics
dealt with pertain to the realm of the ordinary and thus make the Indigenous characters look
like any Australian. Redfern Now represents a clear move to re-center the marginalized citydwellers. The questions of cultural activism but also of an ‘ordinary activism’ will thus be
addressed.
Alison CLARK (King’s College London, United Kingdom)
“[Un]Bounded objects: exhibiting the multiple histories present in an Indigenous
Australian collection”
The history wars divided Australian historical narrative into two categories; black armband
and three cheers (Blainey 1993). The way that Indigenous Australians have been represented
in museum exhibitions has reflected this either/or dichotomy. Museums have been seen as
sites of conflict in which these heavily debated histories competed against one another in
order to be heard (Appadurai 1986), and curators increasingly found themselves representing
Indigenous Australian material culture from either the settler or the indigenous perspective.
However, in the last five to ten years museums have begun to move away from the notion of a
competition, to become instead engaged in looking at how the multiple histories in museum
collections can become unbounded and in turn interact with each other within the exhibition
space, with many calling for exhibitions to show all traces of a collections history (Jones
2007). This paper will consider whether it is possible to blur the historical boundaries that
exist within museum collections, in order to exhibit the multiple histories that are present in a
single object or collection in a cohesive way.
Donna COATES (University of Calgary, Canada)
“From the Margins to the Military: Cross-Dressing Soldiers in Second World War Fictions
by Mandy Sayer and Sara Knox”
The fiction that emerged from both women and men writers in Australia during the First
World War was essentially a form of “writing back” to the Empire, where the myth of the
Anzac legend decreed that Australian soldiers had, despite their inauspicious beginnings,
acquired cultural and physical superiority. The Anzacs fighting prowess and fighting
capacity for combat (especially at Gallipoli), was said to achieved nationhood history for a
new nation, and international acclaim. Writers of Second World War literature were under
intense pressure to prove that the Anzac legend had not been a mere “fluke” of history, or that
the Sons of Anzacs were neither second-rate nor second best, but as worthy of hero worship
as their forefathers. Women writers unequivocally supported the legend, which continued to
assign women a subordinate place in Australian society. But contemporary women writers
Mandy Sayer and Sara Knox have imaginatively reconstructed events of the war from a
temporal distance. In Love in the Years of Lunacy and The Orphan Gunner respectively, they
examine the phenomenon of women dressing as men to impersonate soldiers. In their texts,
their central characters long for male privilege and to escape domestic confinement and
powerlessness. These women warriors, who journey away from the feminine ideals of
Australian society to the battlefields of New Guinea and bomber command in England,
become exemplary soldiers/gunners/pilots who earn the respect and admiration of their fellow
(male) soldiers, thereby proving that if women can “perform” masculinity without being
detected, then both masculinity and femininity are social constructs, not biographical fact.
Both novels shatter the notion of the brave invincible Australian soldier fighting (and dying)
gallantly for the imperial ideal, for both women dress as their brothers who are timid and
terrified in battle. In these texts, women are the new Anzacs who step readily and easily into
their military roles as defenders of the nation, but when their gender identities are exposed,
their superior officers recognize the truth must never become public knowledge, as the
reputation of the military depends upon the stability of its codes, rules, and skill of its men.
But in the act of assuming men’s identities, these characters signal their discontent with the
restrictive norms of both femininity and masculinity.
Delphine DAVID (University of Paris-Dauphine, France)
“White, Australian and Aboriginal: shifting identities in today’s Australia”
Since Australia was colonized, Indigenous people have often been relegated to the margins by
white Australians. Considered inferior and doomed to extinction for a long time, they were
not even recognized as proper citizens before 1967. But more recently, things have evolved :
with the Reconciliation policy, the 2000 Olympics Games or the Mabo decision, and the
growing interest generated by Indigenous art and culture at home and abroad, we can wonder
if and how the margins have shifted. In a country becoming aware of the potential of
Indigenous culture, it now seems easier to embrace one's Indigenous heritage. In order to
analyse the changes aforementioned, I propose to study a group of people whose identity is
challenged by the barriers created around Indigenous and white Australian identities. I would
like to focus on young Australians who grew up with Reconciliation -and hypothetically a
more positive image of Indigenous Australia- and in a white cultural environment but who
found out that they have Indigenous heritage. Hybridity has always been a problematic
concept in Australia: « half-caste » children were taken from their family in the hope of «
breeding out the colour » and erasing Indigenous culture. Fair-skinned Aborigines have often
passed for white in order not to be marginalized. Because they inhabit an in- between space,
hybrid people often are on the margins. It cannot be easy to identify as Indigenous Australian
when one does not look the part or is not familiar with the culture. Identifying can also mean
being associated with negative stereotypes and racism. Overall it means taking the risk of
being marginalized, by white or Indigenous Australians. In spite of this, why would someone
decide to identify as Indigenous Australian today? How are the margins -real and imaginarylinked to Indigenous and Australian identities being displaced today?
Gabriella T. ESPÁK (University of Debrecen, Hungary)
“Literary Nationalism in Teaching Australia”
A question of upmost importance in today’s reassessing our curriculum is where to place what
kind of Australian Studies courses, if any, in it. In such a context, the instructor has to make
compromises and be able, again, after decades of lavish support, to exercise the skill of earlytwentieth-century scholarship: to synthesise, rather than to analyse. If we do not want to lose
the accumulated knowledge built by the analytical studies since the formal 1980s, then, often
for pragmatic reasons of financial and bioeconomics, we again have to find synthesising
master-narratives, in which much analytical knowledge can be integrated. Unavoidably
though, we will then begin a new canonising process, to which many will feel marginal, only
to begin critical reassessments, which are actually parts of the productive process of teaching
and scholarship. The master-narrative to teach Australian literature in, I suggest, is that of
literary nationalism.
Éva FORINTOS (University of Pannonia, Hungary)
“Semantic Aspects of Australian-Hungarian and New Zealand-Hungarian Language
Contact Phenomena”
This paper investigates how the written language (Hungarian) of two minority groups
functions outside its traditional setting in central Europe, in an environment where another
language is used (English in Australia and New Zealand). They are intraregional language
contact situations where Hungarian immigrants live among the dominant language(s)speaking population of Australia and New Zealand. The two languages involved are
genealogically non-related and structural-typologically non-identical languages. The aim of
the paper is to carry out research to study the lexical contact phenomena in which Standard
Hungarian and Australian and New Zealand Hungarian differ, e.g., what lexical items are
present in AuH and NzH that are not part of SH as the result of the influence of the English
language. In the focus of the research are the loanshifts found in the corpus with special
regard to semantic extensions (where the SH word form is used with the meaning of an
English word) to see whether they make the second largest group of lexical borrowings
similarly to the findings of other researchers. The study employs the machine-readable corpus
of written language samples taken from the Australian-Hungarian community’s only weekly
published newspaper titled Magyar Élet (MÉ) on the one hand. Additional sources include
issues of Magyar Szó (MSz), which is the newspaper of the Hungarian community in New
Zealand.
Mark FROUD (University of the West of England, United Kingdom)
“The Lost Child at the Centre of the Story”
This paper will analyse David Malouf’s argument that a ‘land can bear any number of cultures
laid one above the other or set side by side. It can be inscribed and written upon many times.’
I will discuss the inter-relationship between language, thought and the physical, social world
through a Malouf short story, ‘Blacksoil Country’ and Gail Jones’ 2011 novel Five Bells. The
former is narrated by a dead child who became the centre of a cycle of violence during early
European settlement. He begins his narration from within a land ‘crowded with ghosts.’ The
latter follows the past and present of four characters who become linked around the
disappearance of a young girl, a lost child who signifies ‘no guarantee that everything […]
would repair’ but conversely offers the only promise of ‘something in the future’. It has been
noted by critics such as Peter Pierce that the figure of the lost child is significant for
Australian culture and society since the days of the early European settlers. My argument is
that the lost child is not only the fracture within our selves and society, but also the absence
within inscription around which different narratives weave and intersect.
Tomasz GADZINA (Opole University, Poland)
“Tim Winton’s Australia as a Margin: Remarks on Australian Postcoloniality”
In Australia, contemporary social policies of egalitarianism and multiculturalism are believed
to provide solutions to its social problems and opportunity to free the nation from its colonial
past. However, inequalities, intolerance and discrimination still prevail and permeate
Australian societies. In fact, multiculturalism is believed to be a legacy of racial policies since
it aims at establishing seemingly deracialised but still white Anglo-Celtic core culture.
Consequently, power struggles between the centre (white Australian culture) and peripheries
characterise contemporary Australia, where margins resist various attempts and strategies of
the dominant discourses (from rejection through subordination and incorporation to
exploitation) to accommodate the other. In his Land’s Edge (1993), Tim Winton admitted
that after six months in Europe, he found himself “crazy for the margin” (1993: 63). However,
for Winton, situating Australia and its society on the margin is an attempt to seek a pseudoIndigenous relationship with the land. In his fiction, Winton provides Australian landscapes
with mystical and spiritual qualities but neglects to recognise Australian cultural diversity.
This paper aims at examining Tim Winton’s exploitation of Aboriginal spirituality to
indigenize the relationship of the settler society with the land – a process in which the
acquisition of indigeneity is a strategy to establish closer links with an unfamiliar country.
Peter GALE (University of South Australia, Australia)
“Framing Public Debate on the Northern Territory Intervention: The Media and Moral
Panic on the Margins”
On 17th September 2007, 143 nations voted in support of the United Nations Declaration on
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Australia was one of only four nations who did not initially
endorse the declaration while subsequently adopting and endorsing the Declaration in April
2009. However, the continued support for the NT Intervention by the Gillard Government
appears to be in contrast with the National Apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008 and the
adoption of the UN declaration on rights of Indigenous peoples in 2009. In June 2012 the
Gillard Government passed the Stronger Futures legislation to effectively extend the Northern
Territory Intervention for a further ten years. This paper explores some of the tensions and
contradictions inherent within media and political discourse in the recognition of Indigenous
rights on the one hand while embracing an interventionist Stronger Futures policy in the
Northern Territory.
Lise GAROND (Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, Paris, France)
“Ambivalent memories of colonial others on Palm Island”
Palm Island, a small island in North-East Queensland, is host of a large Aboriginal
community of about 2500 people. In the early 20th century, it was designated by the state of
Queensland as the site of one of its largest Aboriginal reserve: many Aboriginal people were
subsequently removed to the island from various regions across the state. Until the 1970s, the
Aboriginal inmates of the reserve were subjected to intense control and surveillance of white
administrators, employees and missionaries. Based on anthropological fieldwork on Palm
Island, this paper will describe how Aboriginal islanders today reflect on this past and their
relationships with these “colonial others”, who are not solely portrayed as active agents of
domination, but often as more ambivalent figures, sometimes described with affection and
nostalgia. How to account for these ambivalent memories, which seem to blur the boundaries
between the oppressor and the oppressed? Why do such ambivalences so rarely appear in the
historical accounts of the colonial past? I will argue for the importance of engaging with these
unsettling questions, which complexify the work of “speaking back” to the colonial “archive”.
Eleonora GOI (University of Udine, Italy)
“‘A steely impersonality”: marginalised characters in David Malouf’s Child’s Play
In my essay I would like to investigate the concept of margin in David Malouf's short
novel Child’s Play. My essay will briefly consider the main themes contained in the novel in
the light of the history of the Italian Brigate Rosse, focusing on the fact that, by setting his
novel in Italy, David Malouf detaches himself from his more typical Australian setting,
focusing on social and personal rather than geographical marginalisation. In this sense I wish
to critically interrogate how the two main characters, the unnamed terrorist and the writer he
is set to kill, experience marginalisation in different ways even when they both autonomously
and consciously decided to live withdrawn from society. By gathering intelligence on his
target in a sort of cloistral seclusion while leading an anonymous life, the terrorist can live
only through the words of the Master, to the point that his style begins to imitate the Master's
art with its pompousness and high rhetoric. Even if estrangement is essential, the terrorist is
still able to challenge anonymity through imagination. Through this analysis I aim to describe
how art, narration and words are for Malouf the only way to proceed towards a deeper
understanding of self and overcome marginalisation.
Oliver HAAG (Edinburgh University / Austrian Centre for Transcultural Studies, Vienna,
Austria)
“Replicating Marginality through Translation”
This paper examines two relatively recent translations of Australian literature: the German
version of Jeannie Gunn’s The Little Black Princess (1905) (Die kleine schwarze Prinzessin,
2010) and William Peasley’s The Last of the Nomads (1982) (Die letzten Nomaden, 2007).
The focus rests on the translation of Australian historical and political contexts into the
foreign context of German target culture. It argues that the specifics of inter-racial Australian
history evident in the two books have been rendered invisible, without the very contexts
having completely disappeared. Rather, the translations have reproduced Australian racisms
and German ideas of Aboriginal authenticity and traditionalism, as reflected in the notions of
the harmonious Naturvolk (natural people). Both translations, the paper ultimately contends,
testify to the persistency of German ideas of Aboriginal Australia, construing Aboriginal
people as timeless, unchanging and pre-modern.
Martin HARRISON (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
“Am I Marginal?”
When applied to Australian literature and art, the term marginal is bound to be both
provocative and also deeply connected with long-lived levels of Australian cultural
anxiety. Post-modern concepts of marginality and in-betweenness have undoubtedly had an
applicability to Australian senses of identity. That said, in this paper I want to argue for a
different, possibly more contemporary approach to over-arching concepts of cultural
placement - namely, concepts more attuned to ecological concepts of cultural diversity and to
the ramifying, complex systems of the new information systems of the emerging international
order. The intensity with which these more appropriate models (critical and metacritical) are
thought through in composition, theme and structure will deeply affect the nature of the work
we produce as writers. The paper considers a recent novel closely associated with
centre/margin ideas of Australian inventiveness, Murray Bail’s The Voyage (2012) as well as
other recent works. The paper in part also focuses around my own work as a poet widely
recognised for the identification of local places within a larger psycho-geography. It seems to
me a “wordly” activity. But by establishing nearly all my own work as a contribution to
Australian literature, does that mean I remain nonetheless marginal?
Sissy HELFF (Goethe-University of Frankfurt, Germany)
“Commodifying Port Arthur? History and Memory in the Limelight of Dark Tourism”
While dark tourism is certainly not new, it has developed into a global phenomenon today
which involves the journeying of many tourists over great distances to sites associated
with death and tragedy. Dark tourist attractions include many former prisons, death
camps, castles and battlefields. Even sites of disaster and genocide such as Hiroshima, the
Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, Chernobyl and Ground Zero are commonly labelled dark
tourist attractions. While scholars agree that tourists visit these locations mostly because of
their historical value rather than their links with death and suffering, it is similarly true that a
‘dark site’ also plays an enormous economic role in a district’s engagement with tourists
because such sites commonly tend to attract numerous visitors. This observation already
describes the complex entanglement of a historic site, municipal corporation and the politics
of national heritage schemes. This paper hence follows a twofold trajectory; firstly it seeks to
scrutinise the function of Port Arthur as one of Tasmania’s major touristic sites by drawing on
recent tourism studies. In this way the paper seeks to explore the meaning of dark tourism in
Tasmanian society and economy.Secondly, by following a memory studies approach the
paper explores the representation of the former prison in selected documentaries and feature
films, e.g. Norman Dawn’s For The Term of His Natural Life (1927), Port Arthur (2007)
and Van Diemen’s Land (Jonathan auf der Heide, 2009) as well as in Richard Flanagan’s
novel Wanting (2008). Thus the paper’s aim is to find answers to questions such as how
Tasmanian society and its popular culture (visual and literary) commodifies Port Arthur as
a dark lieu de memoire while being fully aware of the selling-out of one of Australia’s
bleakest chapters in history to tourists.
Marie HERBILLON (Liège University, Belgium)
“Decentralizing the Australian short story: Murray Bail's “Camouflage”
Although the short story is regarded as a marginal genre in many literatures, it is arguably a
dominant one in Australia. Deriving from the oral yarns that were spun in the early days of
the European settlement and sometimes referred to as ‘hard-luck stories’, most of these
narratives were, for many decades, felt to be characterized by their overwhelming realism,
which was in turn seen to result from the archetypal dryness of Australia itself. In the wake of
Patrick White and his 1958 programmatic essay “The Prodigal Son”, the contemporary
Australian writer Murray Bail has repeatedly questioned the realistic quality of the national
literature and of short fiction in particular. However, instead of rejecting realism altogether,
he has tended to borrow some of its stylistic codes with a view to subverting its all too dry
treatment and, ultimately, to pushing back the limits of the genre. With “Camouflage” (2000),
one of his most recent short texts in which a group of pseudo-artists paints a mimetic
reproduction of the local landscape on the corrugated iron roofs of their bush camp in order to
escape the attention of their enemies’ Air Force during WWII, Bail provocatively appropriates
the proverbial ‘hard-luck story’ to convey a marginal point of view. In this essay, I will try to
show how this self-reflexive strategy of revision allows him to contest both the archetypality
of the genre and the stereotypical perceptions of the landscape, thereby problematizing the
relationship – a highly controversial one in the Australian context – between place and
literature.
Dolores HERRERO (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
Chris Womersley’s Bereft: Ghosts that Dwell on the Margins of the Traumatic Memory
Bereft is a gloomy story of war, family secrets and a traumatized man’s search for justice.
Pushing at the borders of popular fiction, literary fiction and thriller, Chris Womersley’s
novel turns a traumatic incident in one man’s life into a reflection on grief, guilt and shame,
on the very nature of storytelling and its achievements and shortcomings, and on the ghosts
that dwell on the dark recesses of our memory, telling us what to believe and what stories to
tell ourselves in order to survive. The aim of this paper will be to draw on trauma and
memory studies to show that two different readings of the novel can be offered. Just as
readers can choose to take the story at face value, another allegorical reading, in which
some characters and situations may not be what they at first seem to be, can also be
possible. After all, memory can play all sorts of tricks on the individual’s mind, all the more
so when s/he is under the paralyzing effects of trauma. The figures and situations that
trauma relegated to the margins gradually come to the fore to reclaim their rightful
prominent role and demand justice. It is this suffocating and traumatic atmosphere that
makes familiar locations look strange and terrifying, while others, in keeping with the
strategies often used by magic realist texts, appear to be conjured by some kind of
mysterious magic, which is nonetheless closely rooted in reality. By inviting readers to go
beyond the surface in order to interpret conspicuous gaps and silences, this novel discloses,
not only the dark side of the Australian dream, to take the title of Vijay Mishra’s well
known book, but also the human mind’s incapacity to fully remember the past, confront the
present and work through deeply rooted traumas. On the other hand, Bereft also offers some
room for hope: in this gothic portrait of isolated, rural Australia devastated by the Great
War and Spanish flu, murder and terror can also allow for dignity, loyalty and true love to
bloom; and the human mind, despite its many limitations, still has the potential to narrate
stories that can help the individual to stay sane and circumvent the paralyzing effects of
incurable wounds.
Jenny HOCKING (Monash University, Australia)
‘The Forgotten History of 11 November 1975: Gough Whitlam, the House of
Representatives and Sir John Kerr’s Second Dismissal’
One hour after the Governor-General Sir John Kerr’s unprecedented dismissal of the
Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam from office on 11 November 1975, Whitlam
returned to the House of Representatives intending to reclaim office. What followed was not
only gripping political theatre but a critical moment in Australian history. The fate of two
governments – Gough Whitlam’s and his opposition successor Malcolm Fraser’s - depended
on the outcome of events in the House of Representatives that afternoon, and yet its role has
been largely ignored. This paper will reassess the dismissal of the Whitlam government,
exploring the forgotten history of the House of Representatives on the afternoon of 11
November 1975 and the Governor-General’s actions before and during that day, as revealed
in the author's recent biography of Whitlam, Gough Whitlam: His Time. The apparently
settled history maintains that, in the hours after his dismissal, Whitlam made a fatal tactical
blunder by focusing on events in the House of Representatives, failing to tell the Labor
Senators that he had been dismissed, and thereby missing a crucial opportunity for upsetting
the Governor-General’s actions. It is an easy and caricatured history, but little more. The
result of the historical myopia has been three-fold: to overlook Whitlam’s political strategy in
the House of Representatives; to deny the definitive role of the House of Representatives in
the formation of government; and to ignore the continuing political actions of the GovernorGeneral Sir John Kerr throughout the afternoon of 11 November 1975, culminating in ‘the
second dismissal’.
Martina HORAKOVA (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
“Double-edged Files: Writing Back to the Colonial Archive in Indigenous Life Writing”
In this paper I am going to reflect on the ways in which Indigenous life writers work with the
colonial archive. Using Stephen Kinnane’s Shadow Lines (2003) as the main text of reference,
I will suggest that the key strategy is not only integrating the archival materials to enhance the
authenticity of their narrations but it is also the appropriation of the archive in intricate and
multiple ways. For example, some authors may juxtapose fragments of the archive (such as
personal files, letters, official reports) with Indigenous oral histories in order to bring forward
alternative representations of Indigeneity. Or, they may examine the biopolitical function of
the archive, i.e. monitoring and regulating Aboriginal population, in order to point out its
structural basis. They may also foreground the ideological slippages and gaps in the archive to
show that some lives were able, through various tactical moves, to escape the panopticon-like
surveillance. Whichever the strategy, the archive resonates strongly in Indigenous life writing:
on the one hand, it is denounced as an instrument of colonial governmentality and hence a
source of grief and trauma for Aboriginal community. On the other hand, however, it may
also be employed to activate counter-memory and to function as a source of intellectual
engagement and creativity. The Indigenous authors, in this light, become researchers
themselves who deconstruct the double-edged files and write back to the archive.
Helen IDLE (King’s College, London, United Kingdom)
“Nothing to see: an enquiry into the space between two paintings: ‘Old Bedford’ (2005)
and ‘September’ (2005)”
My research focuses on the experience of viewing contemporary visual art by Indigenous
Australian artists in exhibition in Western Europe. It both develops new methodologies for
assessing Indigenous Australian art by placing it in international frameworks, and considers
the affective power of this art when viewed ‘outside country’. My interest in the encounter
with artworks in specific times and places also makes use of methodologies derived from
ficto-criticism and ego-histoire. In this paper these processes drive my juxtaposition of work
by Australian Indigenous painter Paddy Bedford and German painter Gerhard Richter. The
paper uses the vibrations in the margins between the works, and between the viewer and the
works, to elicit ways of thinking about Australia and Europe, Indigenous and European
contemporary art, history painting and nation.
Lars JENSEN (Roskilde University, Denmark)
“Mining their own Business: The Australian mining industry and the construction of the
national imaginary and its margins”
In this paper I wish to cross-examine two ways of speaking about margins/marginalisation; a)
as something conducted beyond the horizon, something which defines the horizon – and; b) as
a process through which remoteness defines the (national) self. The focus is on mining which
has long been established in Australian public discourse as an activity that has driven the
Australian economy, and guaranteed Australia against the economic ills of the rest of the
West. Or put slightly differently, the positive spin on mining in public discourse and the
financial market, has kept attention away from the fact that as a nation Australians live
beyond their means just as the rest of the West, and they do so in one of the most consistently
unsustainable societies in the world. In my paper I wish to look at how mining companies
operating in Australia and beyond construct story-telling of what they are, and what they do
and how this feeds into a national imaginary. I also want to relate the story-telling to broader
issues, such as CSR, environmental protection and the effect on local communities where they
operate. I am particularly interested in the question of mining in ‘remote areas’ (in ‘’ because
what is remote to whom?) in Australia and outside. At the time of writing this, I am thinking
about taking my departure in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria as representing one of the
marginalised ways of telling alternative versions of mining and its impact on – in this case an indigenous community. Finally, I wish to look at the presence in Greenland of a large
Australian owned and managed mining company involved in the exploration of ‘specialty
metals’ in an area that also contains deposits of uranium.
Amanda JOHNSON (University of Melbourne, Australia)
“The Expedition of Female Mourning: Jane Franklin as marginal ‘adventuress’ and colonial
mourner”
This paper compares fictional portraits of Lady Jane Franklin as celebratory mourner,
energetic traveller and despised colonial social reformer in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting
(2008), Sten Nadolny’s The Discovery of Slowness (1997), Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of
the Narwhal (1998) and Adrienne Eberhard’s verse novel Jane, Lady Franklin (2004).
These novels variously reconstruct Franklin’s often vilified roles as an independent traveller
and social reformer in Tasmanian colonial society, also evoking her public lamentations over
the loss of her explorer husband on the doomed North-West Passage expedition. While these
novels privilege white, bourgeois expeditions and viewpoints, they also distinctively
foreground the female colonial subject as political agitator, traveller, and hubristic public
mourner. I argue that these novels show that Franklin’s decades-long grief ‘performance’,
traversing two hemispheres, served a personal memorial function while also guaranteeing her
tentative access to, and ‘safe passage’ through, the male-dominated imperial political, social
and cultural discourses of her day. For Franklin, the ‘expedition of mourning’ was in itself a
grand adventure in personal and public narrative-making, a compensatory surrogacy given the
limits placed on nineteenth-century female exploration and travel. These writers’ portrayals of
Franklin’s ‘performance’ refashion a space for postcolonial feminist threnody, reconstituting
Franklin’s ‘passive’ mourning as active and complex public story. However, the ‘retrieval’ of
Jane Franklin is also enacted alongside trenchant critiques of the parochial, racist colonial
culture of ‘Hobarton’.
Dr Beate JOSEPHI (Edith Cowan University, Australia) & Christine BOVEN
“On the margins of literary journalism: Anna Funder’s All That I Am and Ursula
Krechel’s Landgericht”
In 2012 the top book prizes in Australia and Germany went to Anna Funder and Ursula
Krechel. Anna Funder was given the Miles Franklin Award for her book, All That I Am, and
Ursula Krechel took out the Deutsche Buchpreis [German Bookprize], presented on the eve of
the Frankfurt Bookfair, for her novel Landgericht [District Court]. What is striking about
these two books is that they not only cover similar ethical and moral dilemmas but also that
both books are settled on the margins of literary journalism. Both books are based on real
people, and both books draw extensively on factual material or quote actual documents. In
fact, Funder’s previous book, Stasiland, is classified as literary journalism and took out the
highly coveted BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in 2004. Krechel, on the other
hand, was primarily known as a poet until the 2008 publication of her prize winning,
Shanghai fern von wo [Shanghai distant from here], which traced the lives of German
migrants, mostly Jews, who managed to flee Hitler’s Germany, in Shanghai in 1938. The
intent of this paper is to compare these two works with regard to the way authenticity and
credibility are generated. These two criteria are central to the definition of literary journalism.
However, Australia and Germany have developed diverging understandings of how these can
be created. This paper will argue that the differing approaches to literary journalism has had a
strong influence on the writing of these two award-winning books, even though both are
classified as novels.
Houda JOUBAIL (Liège University, Belgium)
“Sorry in the Margin : ‘Trauma Envy” in Gail Jones’s Sorry”
In an essay entitled “Sorry-in-the-Sky: Empathetic Unsettlement, Mourning, and the Stolen
Generations”, Gail Jones ponders the relevance of the ‘trauma paradigm’ to the theorizing of
historical loss and injustice, with a view to identifying a “discourse of bereavement [that]
might be sufficiently honorable, cautious and historically specific to function in the service of
political phronesis” (2004: 160). She is concerned about what she terms “the traumatic turn”
in cultural, historical and literary studies which, in her words, “invests heavily in a
pathological characterization, and […] multiplies victims to the point of misrecognition”
(2004: 162). Nevertheless, whilst adamant – as her essay advocates – that traumatic
experiences “ought properly to deserve strict and careful distinction” (2004: 167), her
novel, Sorry (2007), pursues an altogether different agenda which bespeaks an ambivalent
attitude towards Australia’s colonial trauma. Indeed, although ostensibly offered as a literary
apology to the Indigenous people, the novel spins a web of entangled traumas in which
domestic violence and the wounds of the Second World War ultimately occlude the specific
significance of the losses incurred by victims of the Stolen Generations. In view of Michael
Rothberg’s statement, that “trauma often functions as the object of competitive struggle, a
form of capital that bestows moral privileges” (2009: 87), there is room for arguing that the
novel’s juxtaposition of different categories of traumas, ranging from the personal to the
historical, is symptomatic of what is known as “trauma envy”. It is, therefore, my intention in
the paper to trace the manifestations of “trauma envy” in Gail Jones’s Sorry in order to unveil
the ambivalence inherent in this particular apologetic gesture.
Nataša KAMPMARK (University of Novi Sad, Serbia)
“The Indispensable Margin and the Collapsing Centre in Andrew McGahan’s The White
Earth”
The centre/margin division, initially part of the imperial rhetoric and colonial discourse and
subsequently criticised by resistance to imperial rule and post-colonial discourse, has proven
to be difficult to dismantle since the criticism of it often entails its perpetuation. The same
binary is deployed by other powerful and empowering discourses such as patriarchy, with the
same disempowering inferior status imposed on the margin. In Andrew McGahan’s The White
Earth, both colonial and patriarchal discourses are built into the mansion on the Kuran Station
which dominates the lives of its inhabitants. On one hand, the novel could be read as an
expression of the view that the centre cannot exist without the margin, that the margin is
central to the centre’s raise to and experience of power and that the centre exists at the
expense of the margin (e.g. in order for Kuran Station to exist the Kuran people had to
disappear; William, who almost dies of neglect, is central to both his uncle’s and his mother’s
selfish plans). However, in its progressively eerie narrative, the novel could suggest that the
interpretation involving the binary is a ghost from the past and that the entire structure needs
to be torn down. Who or what, then, survives?
Megumi KATO (Meisei University, Tokyo)
“Diversity in the Centre of the Margin: Perceptions of the Japanese in the Literature of
Australia’s North”
Unlike their more European southern counterparts, northern towns like Darwin and Broome,
with their ethnically diverse populations, often have very different stories. While writing
Narrating the Other: Australian Literary Perception of Japan (2008), I discovered that preWorld War II, Japanese people, one of a number of marginalised ethnic groups in Australia at
the time, were depicted differently in short stories and novels set in these northern locations.
Despite the ‘White Australia Policy’ of the time, reality in northern Australia was different –
it was the centre of diversity where Japanese, and other ethnic groups, played a significant and
recognised role in the community through their involvement in the pearl-shell industry.
While mainstream literature from the south used ‘imagination’ to narrate the Japanese, with
subsequent ‘madama butterfly’ and ‘possible enemy’ stereotypes, literature from the north
conveyed a more nuanced description of the complex race issues of the time; it provided a
different perspective of race relations (including the Australia-Japan relationship) and their
background. Using this literature, this paper explores how far marginality can be enforced,
and what it means when the concept of margin does not match reality. It also illustrates the
effect of this ‘special marginality’ with a recent example involving the Broome-Taiji sister
city relationship and the 2009 dolphin hunting controversy.
Sophie KOPPE (Université du Sud-Toulon, France)
“The appropriation of the margin: Learning from Australian welfare reform”
At the beginning of the 20th century, Australia was referred to as a “social laboratory” and as
the “workers’ paradise”. These characteristics led to the emergence of a very specific welfare
system. If Esping-Andersen did classify Australia as part of the liberal welfare regime, experts
working on Australasia were quick to dismiss the categorization and put forward the existence
of an Antipodean welfare regime which also included New Zealand. So much so that as far as
social policy was concerned, Australia and New Zealand were seen as unique systems. In
order to better face the challenges of globalization that hit them before most western
countries, Australia and New Zealand chose to reform their welfare system. As other
countries came to confront similar challenges, Australasian experiments gained their attention
and Australia gradually became a significant source of inspiration for them. The OECD
reinforced this interest for Australia by publishing several reports about potential lessons to be
learned from the Australian experiment. From a little known welfare system, Australia thus
became a model to be followed by others. This paper will show how Australia, traditionally
presented as having a very specific way to deal with welfare issues (a way that was not really
transferrable elsewhere) became described as a model to imitate. The United Kingdom will be
used as an example of the evolution of the role of Australia in the international policy learning
process. It will specifically focus on the treatment of the unemployed who are generally
represented as being on the margins of society, especially in a country with an unemployment
rate as low as 5%.
Jaroslav KUŠNÍR (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
“Rewriting the Margins: The Margin Strikes Back in Murray Bail’s The Voyage (2012)”
In his recent novel, Murray Bail depicts an Australian grand piano maker who travels to
Vienna, Austria and where he meets an Austrian family admiring Austrian and other,
especially what could be called “high cultures.” Bail’s depiction of Australian and Austrian
characters turns out to be a metaphor of the relationship between Old and the New world, but
also between the high (Austria) and low culture (formerly Australia understood as cultural
margin), between the centre (Europe) and the margin (Australia). In my paper, I will analyze
the way Murray Bail uses narrative strategies and imagery of the centre as well as the margin
and travelling to reconsider cultural marginality of Australia and its relation to European
culture and to undermine and relativize a bipolar opposition between formerly high
(European) and low cultures (Australia). At the same time, I will point out the way Bail
emphasizes a difference between changed roles of Australian cultural identity as a cultural
margin in the past and its present status in the modern world. In addition, this paper will also
emphasize Bail’s rewriting of the concept of marginality as connected with cultural
subordination of Australia in a post-colonial world.
Bronwyn LAY (European Graduate School)
“Swapping one great silence for another”
“Clothed by colonialism, the naked body (law, land and peoples) is subjected under layers of
the colonists rules and regulations. Nakedness awaits the time when the covering layers are
peeled away, to be naked again. And the cycle and the beginning comes around like a circle
again. The song waiting to be sung.” (Watson, 3)
“Raw Law, indigenous law…exists in all matter” (Watson 1, my emphasis) Watson argues
that non-indigenous Australians also have a form of Raw Law which has been clothed and
forgotten. Western sovereignty, via anthropocentric jurisprudence, globalisation and
accelerated capitalism, continues to appropriate the material margins, the periphery, the space
beyond the ‘polis’ or social contract. This process brings colonially inherited laws in conflict
with what might be called prior ‘Natural contracts’, which according to the French
philosopher Michel Serres (Serres, 1990), are pacts of reciprocity and symbiosis between
humans and nature. Through a process of ‘legal capture’ (Patton), Australia subsumes its
material margins and perpetuates the anthropocentric imperial project that commenced in
Europe. Albeit different, both Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians have bonds,
connections and attachments to the materials that comprise and uphold life. While the
indigenous body has been symbolically and cunningly (Povinelli) recognized after the Mabo
decision, I will argue that the ‘marginal voices’ in Australian jurisprudence remain the silent
non-human bodies such as trees, dirt, soil, minerals, coastlines etc., which due to this great
legal silence, are subjected to material imperialism, a version of terra sacer (Agamben). Thus
the Raw Law of all Australians remains marginal, clothed in regulation and in the case of
mining jurisprudence, literally ‘subterranean.’ Without a version of the Natural Contract that
recognizes the bonds between the human and non-human as being reciprocal and symbiotic
and not purely possessive property rights, Australian jurisprudence will continue to perpetuate
objective violence against its constructed margins. Australia is one of the few countries
where private landholders only ‘possess’ the topsoil. Material Imperialism refers to two
intersecting processes, firstly being the introduction and process of altering the praxis of the
relationship between the human and non- human for the purposes of social and territorial
control, and secondly by extension, the appropriation of nature/the non-human by forcings
and legal maneuovres that impose anthropocentric control over the trajectory, agency and life
of material (Bennett). As defined by Serres, both are forms of objective violence. I will
argue that cont cunning recognition (Povinelli) of the indigenous peoples continuing
connection to land in Mabo occurred without equal recognition of the rights, relationships and
connections of the non-human. Without a version of the Natural Contract, Australia will
continue to perpetuate objective violence.
Anne LE GUELLEC-MINEL (University of Bretagne Occidentale, France)
“Writing away in the fringe in Carpentaria by Alexis Wright”
While not a life story, Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise was reminiscent of what Mudrooroo
Narogin in Writing From the Fringe, termed ‘the battler genre’, stories of courage in the face
of poverty and tragedy by which Aboriginal women in particular attempted to resist the
double marginalisation imposed upon them because of their race and their sex. With
Carpentaria, however, Wright broke free from a genre, which as Carol Ferrier pointed out
was substantially trapped in ‘white dominance and either Aboriginal acceptance of this
dominance, or a seeking to come to grips with this dominance’. The scope and style of
Wright’s latest novel clearly mark it out as an epic novel, a genre not usually associated with
women’s writing but which won her an enviable visibility within mainstream fiction. Rather
than having stepped out from any generic margin, however, Wright, as this paper will attempt
to show, subverts the classic seriousness of the epic by resorting to a form of grotesque that
provocatively seems to sweep aside entrenched allegiances. Furthermore, by setting down the
action of her proliferating novel in a territorial and imaginative context that defies stable
liminalities, Wright casts a new and exhilarating light on the topoi of the margin (pauperized
Indigenous fringe-dwellers vs paranoid exiled whites).
Jeanine LEANE (Australian National University, Australia)
“The Margins Write Back”
Until well into the 20th century Aboriginal people occupied marginal spaces in the settler
literary imagination. Aboriginal characters in white literature were relegated to fringes,
borders, boundaries and frontiers. These small spaces are cultural metaphors in settler
imaginations where ‘the Aborigine’ as a literary object was represented in certain ways
imbued with the standard commodities of settler understandings. In contrast to settler
literature, Aboriginal published literature in Australia has had a short but intense history. It
was not until 1964 that the first Aboriginal authored volume of poetry was published by
Oodgeroo Noonucal. Since the 1980s the field of fiction has seen a proliferation of Aboriginal
work across the genres of social realism, young adult fiction, historical fiction, neotraditionalism and magical realism. Representation from the Aboriginal side of the frontier
fills many gaps and silences in Australia’s literary landscape. The published works give
creative expression to a range of themes and realities emerging from Aboriginal experience.
This paper looks across the body of Aboriginal writing since 1988 and examines the ways
Aboriginal authors write back from the literary margins to centre Aboriginal voices.
Kun Jong LEE (Korea University, South Korea)
“Australia Seen from the Asian Australian Margins: Dono’o Kim’s The Chinaman”
Don’o Kim’s The Chinaman (1984) is one of the first major novels by a writer of Asian birth
in Australian literature. The novel situates the 1980 Yeppoon bombing of a Japanese resort
project in the trajectory of the 1854 race riots against Chinese miners at Bendigo. A white
supremacist character also recalls the 1976 “Koreagate” in the U.S. and identifies it with the
Japanese investment in Australia. With the three episodes, Kim criticizes white Australians’
stereotype of East Asians as Fu Manchus infiltrated into white societies. He also highlights
the fact that in Australia a “chinaman” is not only a racial slur against Chinese, Japanese, and
Koreans but also a racist term designating a fish, a ciguatoxin carrier at that. The racist term
tellingly demonstrate white Australians’ subconscious wish to dehumanize East Asians who
were feared to contaminate and corrupt their imagined whiteness of Australia. Kim
problematizes the fact that East Asians are identified with the toxic fish as they were
previously equated with leprosy and smallpox. Thus addressing the crucial issue of race
relations, The Chinaman is Kim’s arduous and sustained reflections on the directions of
multiracial Australia from his unique Asian Australian margins.
Jan LENCZNAROWICZ (Jagiellonian University, Poland)
On the Margins of Two Worlds: Polish Displaced Persons’ Life in Occupied Germany and
Their Settlement in Australia after World War II
On the basis of the agreement with the International Refugee Organisation between 1948 and
1953 Australia accepted c. 60 thousand Polish Displaced Persons, mainly from occupied
Germany and Austria. Determined not to return to Communist-dominated Poland,
disillusioned with post-war Europe and alienated from societies in the countries of their
sojourn these former slave laborers deported to Germany from their homeland during the war
as well as prisoners of German POW and concentration camps decided to try their luck and
rebuild their life in Australia. Drawing on Polish migrants organizational materials and
bulletins, the paper traces their journey and attempts to reconstruct the first phase of their
Australian life. It focuses on their changing expectations and perceptions of the new country,
expressions of nostalgia and homesickness as well as hopes and desire to settle down in the
new and exotic land. Special emphasis is placed on Polish arrivals’ encounters with ‘Old
Australians’ and Ango-Australian culture on the one hand, and their attempts to form and
maintain on the permanent basis separate Polish ethnic community on the other.
Dr Kiera LINDSEY (University of South Australia, Australia)
“Coercion and Consent: How the Australian nation state uses Forced Marriage to
construct margins and assert control over ethnic, cultural & religious difference”
In 2012 the Attorney General announced the first Australian criminal legislation concerned
with forced marriage, declaring that there was no place for such practices ‘in a modern
democratic nation like Australia’. This legislation passed in the House of Representatives
despite the fact there has been no sustained response to a 2010 Senate Committee which
recommended the acquisition of ‘solid empirical data’ before the development of legislation.
The Government’s announcement was accompanied by a flurry of media reports in which a
handful of sensationalised episodes were repeated in print, radio and television as evidence
that a form of ‘hidden exploitation’ was taking place ‘underground’ and ‘behind closed doors’
throughout Australia. In this coverage forced marriage was linked, almost exclusively to
Islam, vilifying and alienating Muslim communities in ways that religious spokespeople claim
threaten to drive the practice underground and silence the women involved. Torn between
loyalties to family, community and faith, as well as experiences of autonomy that are the right
of all Australians, the women involved in these experiences are also caught in a tug-of-war
between the liberal nation state and migrant communities intent upon preserving their
traditional values as a way of resisting the ‘permissive’ ways of the West. This paper explores
the volatile nexus of rights, race and religion raised by the potent image of the forced bride in
contemporary Australia.
Jatinder MANN (King’s College London, United Kingdom)
“A comparison of the introduction of multicultural policies in Canada and
Australia, 1960s-1970s”
Multicultural policies replaced those of integration in Canada and Australia between the
1960s and 1970s. An official policy of multiculturalism was introduced first in Canada, with
Australia following soon after. But in the earlier period, integration actually continued to be
the main approach of the governments in both countries. The contexts in which integration
and multicultural policies emerged in Canada and Australia were the ‘new nationalism’ and
the rise of a philosophy of multiculturalism, and the total abandonment of the White Canada
and White Australia policies and the introduction of a non-discriminatory immigration policy.
On the other hand, a fundamental difference between the two countries was the Quiet
Revolution in Canada. This relates to the French-Canadian presence in that country which
complicated its search for a new national identity even more so than Australia, and certainly
gave it an added sense of urgency. The position of other ethnic groups in Canada, which were
established for considerably longer than their counterparts in Australia also goes a long way
to explaining the differences between the experiences in the two countries.
Lyn McCREDDEN (Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia)
“Tim Winton and the poetics of resurrection”
In the novels of Tim Winton there is a recurrent motif of resurrection; a diverse paradigm
written for a secular, uneasy nation. While Winton has rightly received critical attention for
the grain of his gender and race politics, the characters in novels such as That Eye the Sky,
Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath are pictured in the midst of extreme situations, some
accidental, some chosen, in which they press up against life-threatening actions. Whether it is
through accident and trauma, through extreme physical challenge, or sexual experimentation,
it is in extremis, and then in return from the brink, that characters sometimes bring with them
new, resurrectional insights. What kinds of transformation does Winton envisage, and how do
they speak to the politically riven, secular conditions in the (post)colonial nation of Australia?
Elizabeth McMAHON (University of New South Wales, Australia)
“Castaways: Lost at sea in No Man’s Land”
This paper asks how the figure of the castaway- ostensibly defined by marginality - has been
deployed in the mapping of contested spaces between land and sea in Australian literature and
culture. It will examine a range of castaway fiction and poetry from the shipwreck poems,
which were a staple of colonial journals, legendary accounts of first contact narratives, to the
proliferation of literary treatments of the Batavia shipwreck in the Houtman Abrolhos (1629)
and contemporary accounts of asylum seekers. The paper is framed by recent debates in
Island Studies, which critique the alignment between islands, the imagined capacity to master
space, and reader’s illusion of control. The paper will propose that castaways in Australian
literature operate as contradictory figures, at once embodying homelessness, isolation, and the
impossibility of community, yet a cornerstone to claims to new territory, and to original
possession. In this process, the analysis will test Rebecca Weaver-Hightower’s thesis of the
‘castaway colonist’ narrative in the Australian context, including both its power in the
colonial project and as a site for postcolonial intervention.
Milena MARINKOVA (University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom)
“‘Caught between’: Spectres of the Balkan, Reading Australia”
This paper will interrogate representations of the Balkans in contemporary Australian writing.
Acting simultaneously as ‘a repository of negative characteristics against which a selfcongratulatory image of “Europe” is constructed’ (Todorova, 1997: 188), and as an extension
of an amnesiac Europe that has repressed the memory of the internal conflicts endemic to
capitalism (Žižek, 1993: 200, 209), the ‘imaginary Balkans’ of a range of fictional and nonfictional texts have become a liminality instrumental for the self-definition of other, less
peripheral spaces. This article will investigate, instead, to what extent this erstwhile discourse
on the Balkans functions against the Australian setting of Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe
and J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man. Contesting the coherence of identity, the consistency of
ideological platforms and the promise of ‘new world’ multiculturalism, both novels trace the
peregrinations of a phantom of prejudice that is not coterminous with Europe or the Balkans
alone, but haunts Australia as well, thus challenging the Eurocentric logic of reductive
binarisms juxtaposing ‘Europe’ and its ‘others’ (within or without). In this sense, ‘the Balkan’
emerges in these texts as a site of epiphany that jostles the Australian protagonists out of their
complacency, confronting them with the demons of xenophobia, violence and exploitation
that haunt their seemingly ‘civilised’ worlds.
Giovanni MESSINA (University of Turin, Italy)
“Coloured marginalities: the ‘white/brown sugar’ metonymy in Nancy Cato’s Brown
Sugar”
In my paper I will give a (post)colonial, racial, gender and geographic reading of Cato’s
Brown Sugar. For this reason, I will start by analysing Cato’s remarkable painting of a typical
afternoon tea-drinking scene in order to focus on the ‘sugar’ metonymy suggesting several
‘marginalities’. Firstly, the centre-margin opposition and Australia’s complicit
postcolonialism. The former is conveyed through the tea ritual as performed by the ladies who
follow an etiquette that bushmen don’t. Drawing on Sedgwick’s ‘homosocial desire’ theory, I
will highlight the relation between bushmen’s tea taking, masculinity and the remote place of
its performance as a ‘marginality’ that, at the same time, speaks back to the motherland by
socially excluding women. Marginalities create other marginalities. The latter is clearly
suggested by the exploitation of indentured ‘brown/black’ work and its consequential social
de-humanisation and linguistic de-asthetisation of Kanakas summed up in the ‘brown’ sugar
metonymy. Secondly, the South-North Australia opposition ambiguously unfolding on
philanthropic and economic reasons. South Australia’s campaign against ‘slavery’
(‘blackbirding’) was an excuse for bringing Queensland (the ‘margin’) to its knees since
without the Kanakas its cane sugar business would drop thus keeping white sugar industry in
‘white’ hands (another metonymy). Finally, women’s social exclusion conveyed through
‘realistic’ terms of place and space (the house, the bedroom, the deep North, the river), and its
parallelism with the above Kanakas Question. As for women’s marginality, this is unhinged
by ‘white’ Helga and Emily. The former fulfils her dream of becoming an opera singer thus
escaping the solitude of the deep North and a husband who cares more for his friends with
whom he meets at the ‘pub’ – another symbol of homosocial desire; the latter, Emily, marries
a Kanaka, Joseph. Cato sees such a miscegenation as leading to a form of unsettling
reconciliation and hybridity, though this does not resolve hierarchical power relations. In
Cato’s novel, in sum, marginality is a many-sided, intertwined and shifting place/space
inhabited by Australians, the Kanakas, women and the North.
Stephen MORGAN (King’s College London, United Kingdom)
‘Gained nothing and learnt precious little’: Reassessing the marginal existence of the
Australian films of Ealing Studios, 1946-1959
In 1979, when film historian Eric Reade characterized the role of foreign feature film
production in Australia during the 1940s and ‘50s as having ensured the industry and the
nation ‘gained nothing and learnt precious little’, he was participating in an active
marginalization of a group of films already on the fringes of emerging understandings of
national and international cinema. Amongst those productions were five films made in
Australia by the ‘quintessentially British’ Ealing Studios between 1946 and 1959; The
Overlanders (Watt, 1946), Eureka Stockade (Watt, 1949), Bitter Springs (Smart, 1950),
The Shiralee (Norman, 1957), and The Siege of Pinchgut (Watt, 1959). Examining five films
made in Australia by a British film company, this paper will trace their outlying
historiographical status on the periphery of both Australian and British national cinemas,
whilst also surveying their ongoing marginalization within the exclusively British contexts
ascribed to studies of Ealing Studios. Furthermore, by reassessing the historical status of this
short cycle of films, this paper seeks to consolidate recent efforts to situate them within the
liminal margins offered by the postcolonial and the transnational, and provide a space in
which to reassess their contributions to the Australian film industry and the broader process of
nation building.
Brigitta OLUBAS (University of New South Wales, Australia)
“Intimacy, Division, Geography: political margins in the artworks of Ian Howard”
Australian artist Ian Howard has quite literally traced the porous margins of the nation since
the 1960s. His work comprises large-scale ‘rubbings’ of military fixtures, installations and
fragments from across the Cold War and post-Cold War globe, such as Enola Gay, the Berlin
Wall, the walls of Derry, Northern Ireland, together with work on the borders between North
and South Korea, and between Israel and Palestine. More recently Howard has worked
collaboratively with official and military artists from China, Vietnam and North Korea, with
his own position as artist here inflected unmistakably with a very formal “Australian”
representativeness. Viewed collectively across the past five decades, Howard’s artworks
provide a material and very intimate record of the constitutive relationship between borders,
meanings, and geographical space, and signal the strangely visible constraints of geographical
pasts and presences. This paper will consider the meticulous engagement these works provide
with the visual and haptic dimensions of official sites and commemorations of political
margins as mobile markers not only of nations but also of human communities and selves.
Wenche OMMUNDSEN (University of Wollongong, Australia)
Australian literature: transnational and translingual?
Australian literature has over the last 50 years witnessed the gradual inclusion of writers and
texts formerly considered marginal: from a predominantly white, Anglo canon it has come to
incorporate more women writers, writers of popular genres, Indigenous writers, and migrant,
multicultural or diasporic writers. However, one large and important body of Australian
writing remains excluded from mainstream histories and anthologies: literature in languages
other than English. Is this the last literary margin, how might it be incorporated into the
national canon, and how might it enhance our understanding of the cross-cultural traffic that
feeds into the literature of a migrant nation? This paper reports on an Australian Research
Council Discovery project currently under way, in which researchers at the University of
Wollongong, the University of Sydney and Victoria University investigate Australian writing
in Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese and Spanish. The overall aim of the project is to chart new
directions for thinking about the relationship between local and global cultural production,
shaping while at the same time interrogating the category of the national.
Jean PAGE (University of Lisbon, Portgual)
“Language as Margin: David Malouf’s ‘The Last Speaker of his Tongue’”
David Malouf shows an “intense and overriding concern with the marginalisation,
disenfranchisement and exclusion that are at work in the social order of the postcolony” (
Randall, 2007). For Malouf language plays an important role in establishing an individual’s
relation with place, the function of naming essential to a postcolonial reconciliation with new
worlds, and the linking of self with place.The converse of this, the loss of language and the
alienation brought about by colonisation and also migration, are powerfully explored in
Malouf’s An Imaginary Life concerning the life of the exiled poet Ovid at the edges of the
Roman empire. My paper explores the theme of loss of language in Malouf’s short story
“The Last Speaker of his Tribe”. On the “margins” of language, this story establishes a strong
link between the “other”-sensitive narrator, a Nordic etymologist and the subject of his
studies , an elderly Aboriginal man , reported to be the last speaker of his language. In
his skillful brief double-portrait, Malouf underlines the problematic of what the narrator
etymologist recognises with the falling away from language. The elderly Aboriginal, in
losing his ability to share a language and thus name his own landscape, is fated to
encounter the falling away of his own link with that world. The Nordic narrator’s
growing preoccupation with his dwindling link with his own language both mirrors and
amplifies the plight of the elderly Aboriginal man. Anxiety about language as world as much
as place, articulates Malouf’s particular concerns as a third-generation non Anglo-Saxon
settler in Australia, and, in this work, identifies some commonality between migrant and
Aboriginal experience.
Dr Chloe PATTON (University of South Australia, Australia)
“On the margins of citizenship: Young Muslims and the imaginative work of belonging in
post 9/11 Australia”
The social, cultural and political marginalization of Australian Muslims since 9/11 has been
well documented by scholars working across the social sciences. The distancing of young
Muslims from the centre of national social space is particularly acute; intersecting
governmental discourses construct both their youth and their religiosity as barriers to the
development of good citizenship practices. Drawing on recent work on the theorization of
political subjectivity, this paper explores young Muslims’ lived experiences of citizenship
through an ethnographic study of two Shia youth groups located in super-diverse suburban
Melbourne. How do young Muslims negotiate a marginal experience of citizenship? What
role does religiosity play in their everyday citizenship practices? In answering these questions,
this paper seeks to highlight the imaginative work that goes into fashioning a sense of
belonging in a context in which one’s right to belong is seriously challenged. By elucidating
participants’ attempts to de-centre the hegemony of Anglo-Australian identities in
contemporary conceptualisations of citizenship, this paper ultimately affirms the often overlooked agency of marginalized subjects.
Luisa PERCOPO (Cagliari University, Italy)
Humour, Ethics and Indigenous Film: Wayne Blair’s The Sapphires
The reception for Wayne Blair’s The Sapphires has been mixed. On the one hand the movie
that premiered in Cannes receiving a 10-minute standing ovation has been described by the
media as ‘brilliant’, ‘a gem’ and an ‘energetic, feel-good triumph.’ On the other, less
enthusiastic viewers have dismissed it as ‘naive’ and ‘simplistic’ and some critics have
accused Blair of touching too lightly on issues encompassing racial prejudice and social
inequality. As I am writing this proposal the movie is being launched in the U.S., where the
reviews have also been equally mixed. One reviewer criticizes in particular the movie’s mode
of ‘trivializing’ the subject of the Stolen Generation and that of the Vietnam War. Though
these concerns are all there in the storyline, Blair has dismissed the accusations of ‘glossing
over reality’ in the film, motivating his aesthetic choice with the intention of making a
positive and joyous film, in which ‘comedy plays a major healing role’. The points raised by
the mixed reception of The Sapphires resonate with the controversial issues surrounding the
release of Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (1997) whose very personal fairy-like vision of
the Jewish annihilation had also been accused of violating the principles of the ethics and
aesthetics of Holocaust representation. If the comparison between the Italian movie and the
Australian one might feel slightly overstretched, there are many common traits, most
importantly the need for humour and beauty in art, even when dealing with the bleakest of
realities. The aim of this paper is to respond to some of the issues that have emerged from
both the critics’ and viewers’ reception of the film and, in particular, to those of redefining
issues of ethics and aesthetics in Australian Indigenous Art. The argument also touches on the
viability of the genre of ‘dramedy’ as a contemporary response to reality and the important
role media is acquiring in contemporary collective (re)memorialisation.
Annalisa PES (University of Verona, Italy)
“Marginal genre/marginal gender: Australian women writers and the short story”
The relatively recent emergence of the short story as a literary autonomous genre, with the
earliest critical theorization generally ascribed to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Philosophy of
Composition (1846), contributed to relegate it for a long time on the margins of the European
literary tradition and to place it in hierarchical subordination to the centrality of the novel. In
all postcolonial literatures, however, the short story has gained a central role because of its
affinity with marginality, with “submerged population groups” (F. O’Connor, 1963). In
particular, within the Australian literary context the short story has been perceived as a
distinctively and adaptable genre since the late 19th century and as a vehicle of construction of
a white, national identity. An identity, though, that was, and continued to be for many years,
predominantly masculine and that instilled in women writers a sense of alienation and exile at
home. The aim of my paper is to go through some of the most representative short stories by
Australian women writers from the earliest, still colonial, attempts of Rosa Praed or Ada
Cambridge to the more provocative and revolutionary “studies” of Barbara Baynton to the
romantic and realistic pieces of K.S. Prichard to the psychological introspections of H.H.
Richardson or M. Barnard to the feminist experiments of Kate Grenville. The aim is to show
that the non-hegemonic, peripheral and contradictory position of the short story can be seen as
a reflection of the position of women in a patriarchal society (M. Eagleton, 1989), but also to
give evidence of a distinctively female literary tradition of the short story that has contributed
to the making of an Australian literary canon.
Iva POLAK (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
“Deadly Feminae Ludentes: Me, Antman & Fleabag Bitin’ Back”
Indigenous Australian artist Leah Purcell once said “Our survival has been about laughter,
otherwise you cry a river”. The paper takes up on Purcell’s claim to focus on Gayle
Kennedy’s Me, Antman & Fleabag (2007) and Vivienne Cleven’s Bitin’ Back (2001), the two
deadly yarns by Indigenous women writers who add a specific female touch to the tradition of
black humour in Indigenous Australian writing. Kennedy and Cleven construct their narrators
as hysterians (Showalter) who tell hysterical stories to defy cultural, racial and gender
stereotypes. Moreover, apart from challenging the expected representational matrix of
Aboriginality by shifting away from the imaginary “centre identity” (Sheehan), it will be
argued that the two authors also defy the “expected niche of Indigenous writing” (Scott), yet
another imaginary middle ground of Indigenous writing determined by the book market
(Heiss). The double-bind of Kennedy’s and Cleven’s writing, which is black in more sense
than one, reveals that, now more than ever, the desire of the centre to mould and discipline the
margin remains futile.
Xavier PONS (Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail, France)
‘On the threshold of change’: Liminality and Marginality in Steven Carroll’s Fiction
The paper deals with Steven Carroll’s quartet of novels about Melbourne (The Art of the
Engine Driver, The Gift of Speed, The Time We Have Taken and Spirit of Progress). Carroll’s
original brand of realism is an attempt to capture ‘life in motion’ and focuses on the way
individuals and communities evolve. Hence his predilection for describing liminal moments
in his narratives – moments when people and places are on the cusp of change, when they are
‘Poised between one thing and another’. His novels are in this sense the expression of a
philosophy of change as well as examples of narrative methods meant to give concrete form
to that philosophy. Although most people crave stability, change is inevitable – optimists will
equate it with progress, pessimists will see it as a journey towards death and disintegration.
Some changes are of greater moment than others, and it is on those periods that Carroll
concentrates, whether the postwar years when the baby boom and large scale immigration
were about to transform Australia or the years just before the Whitlam era, when the country
was becoming multicultural and more attuned to Aboriginal issues. The individual characters
are also described in liminal moments, when their lives are about to enter a new phase.
Individual and communities are equally in thrall to ‘a future not yet fully formed’ and there is
no predicting whether this future will be better of worse than the present. Liminality
sometimes gives way to marginality: instead of evolving with their social context, some
characters retain features that make them out of place in their brave new world – they are
relics or curiosities, stranded on the wrong side of liminality, a notion whose promises of
resolution do not always come true. In narrative terms, Carroll’s manipulation of chronology,
and his use of prolepses in particular, highlights what is in store for the characters, and thus
the liminal position they are in, whether they realise it or not. Moving back and forth in time
allows a variety of patterns of becoming to emerge, showing that liminality represents the
unlimited possibilities from which social structure emerges and that it underpins the novels’
dynamism.
Martin RENES (University of Barcelona, Spain)
“Spectral Matters: Mudrooroo’s ghostly deconstruction of ‘authentic’ Australianness”
At the end of the last century, the increasing prominence of Indigenous-Australians in the
public sphere had some startling effects on the Australian identity debate, showing how
politicised ‘Australianness’ had become through Native Title legislation and the
Reconciliation process. This politicisation informed the long-lived Howard rule as of 1996,
whose regressive policy towards Indigenous issues was the result of a perceived Indigenous
threat to the settler nation. Under PM Howard, national identity was again to be defined in
assimilative terms reminiscent of a Whiter past and Indigeneity as Australianness under
scrutiny. The questioning of the ‘authenticity’ of the Indigenous ancestry of some public
figures meant to defuse what claims could be made on national resources through Indigenous
belonging. One of the most notorious cases of the latter involved the vociferous ‘Aboriginal’
author and academic Mudrooroo, whose uncertain Indigenous descent became an easy target.
Giving up a frontline position in the public arena, he moved to, and eventually beyond, the
margins of Australia’s political, cultural and geographical space. Yet, histurn-of-thecentury vampire trilogy sees his return to the discursive space of Australianness from a
haunted and haunting identitarian non-location. I will focus on how the Mudrooroo Affair was
determined by not only race but also as gender and class, and how Mudrooroo’s latest fiction
has employed a postcolonial Gothic mode to formulate a highly personal answer to the issue
of Australian identity formation which harks back to Derrida’s work on spectrality.
Marie-Bénédicte REY (Caen University, France)
“Asian people on the margins”
Contemporary Australia is a multicultural country made of immigrants which promotes
diversity. Asian migrants are part of this multiculturalism since they have come to this land
for centuries. From the 1850s until the 1970s, they were officially rejected and considered
dangerous. A fear of Asians was fostered by many stereotypes and their exclusion was
ensured by legislation. They were clearly on the margins of Australian society, a society
dominated by an Anglo-Celtic mainstream. To what extent has their marginal position
changed afterwards and what has been the impact of this evolution on the Australian society?
This paper will discuss Asian migrants and Asian Australians’ peripheral position, and
consequences of this position, from the 1970s until today. I will address the issues of racism,
violence and discrimination experienced by people on the margins, but also the implications
of this situation in terms of power and identity. I will explain how the margin can become a
« site of reaction » in which some Asian people attempt to change their situation, to re-invent
themselves and sometimes to question the mainstream ascendancy by suggesting a new
identity perception to the Australian society.
Geoff RODOREDA (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
“The Swinging Stirrup: Murder at the Margins of Queensland in Recent Australian
Fiction”
The historian Raymond Evans argues that the Queensland frontier was “arguably one of the
most violent places on earth during the global spread of Western capitalism in the nineteenth
century.” He says that “behind a veneer of dismissive euphemism, mass destructive processes
ground inexorably on.” Australia’s fiction writers are now returning to these scenes of
destruction to scratch away at the veneer of euphemism and to investigate the peculiarities of
murder and the dispossession of Aboriginal people in remote Queensland. This process began
20 years ago with the publication of Remembering Babylon by that quintessential
Brisbane/Queensland author, David Malouf. This 1993 novel, widely considered to be a work
addressing the theme of reconciliation, might now be read in a different light, namely, as the
first ‘post-Mabo’ novel. It seeks, like many novels that follow it, to negate the myth of terra
nullius – the legal fiction quashed by the High Court in its Mabo decision of 1992 – and
expose the violence of Aboriginal dispossession by colonial invaders. This paper examines
works by Alex Miller, Andrew McGahan, Alexis Wright and Janette Turner Hospital, to
argue that stories set in the previously secretive, shadowy margins of Queensland have now
become a central focus of Australian postcolonial fiction.
Mitchell ROLLS (University of Tasmania, Australia)
“Centring the Centre and Walkabout magazine (Australia 1934-1978): a Critique of the
Conventions Reading Apprehensions of the Outback’.”
The cliché of Australia’s remote interior being our ‘Dead Heart’ gave way to recognition of
its vibrancy—sometimes subtle, other times spectacularly dramatic—from the early 1930s.
The popular magazine Walkabout played a role in disturbing the cliché. However, whereas
settler Australians were once depicted as huddling uncertainly along the fertile littoral belts
(another cliché), alienated from and haunted by the land in which we dwell (yet another), an
orthodoxy is evident in many critiques of those works that reveal the remote landscapes. It is
argued that in aiding settlers’ emotional possession of the continent, this material also
facilitated (and imagined) the psychic, emotional and actual dispossession of the Aborigines.
In some critiques Walkabout is ascribed a pivotal role in these endeavours. But to render
down Walkabout to the residue that permits this reading is to ignore all that contradicts and to
assemble only that which abets. It is a position reached more by ideological conviction than
attention to the material in all its complex and contradictory messiness.
M. Pilar ROYO (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
“Intertextuality in Gail Jones’s Sorry: Is Perdita an Australian Shakespeare or a
Shakespearean Australian?”
The figure of the settler Australian occupies a liminal space halfway between that of the
colonized and the colonizer. According to Curthoys (1999), Australian national settler identity
has traditionally been built on narratives of victimology, which have contributed to masking
the country’s shameful historical past. The Australian foundation myth of expulsion and exile
relegates him/her to the outpost of the British Empire, where s/he is confronted with the
challenge of building a new identity in an unfamiliar and harsh landscape. Far away, Britain
remains as a subjugating Eden from which they strive to separate. At first sight, the numerous
overt and oblique references to Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays in Gail Jones’s Sorry (2007)
may be interpreted as a sign of British cultural domination of the Australian imaginary. This
idea would reinforce the image of the Australian settler as colonized. On the other hand, the
use of these intertexts also suggests and uncovers Australia’s strong links with the British
imperialist enterprise. This paper seeks to explore the novel’s complicit and subversive use of
canonical texts. As will be argued, the intertextual allusions to Shakespeare’s works could be
seen as the novel’s strategy to write back not only to the British Empire but also to the
hebephrenic imperialist settler Australia that the novel depicts.
Andreia SARABANDO (University of Minho, Portugal)
“Object Lessons from Dominic Smith’s Bright and Distant Shores: the exhibition of native
peoples and artifacts”
Bright and Distant Shores, a 2011 novel by Australian/American writer Dominic Smith,
systematically flouts expectations regarding characters’ behaviour in the way it subverts the
roles typically assigned to whites and non-whites by 19th-century popular Western thought.
Set at the end of the 1890s, the book is principally concerned with Owen Graves, an
American sea trader on a commission to gather artefacts and natives from the South Pacific to
be exhibited in Chicago, and Argus Niu, an educated mission houseboy from Poumeta who
dreams of a Western life. While it deals with pillage and plunder, the novel hints at instances
of native agency in local people’s interaction with Western “traders”, at the same time as it
shows how that agency is not easily accommodated, even by those who are uncomfortable
with the dichotomies imposed by colonialist thinking. This paper will address the
commodification of objects and people culturally and geographically on the margins of the
centres to which they were appropriated for entertainment purposes, their supposed cultural
marginality central to their entertainment capital. It will focus both on this novel and more
generally, on the practice of exhibitions which both constructed and reproduced the persistent
representation of native cultures as heritage which, in turn, contrasted heavily with the
representation of the West as the accepted central site of industrial, technological and cultural
achievement.
Amit SARWAL (Deakin University, Australia)
“Real, Imagined and Mythologized: (Re)Presentation of Lost Home in the Short Stories
of South Asian Diaspora in Australia”
South Asian diasporic writing, part of the larger marginal literature, as a genre in Australia
encapsulates the collective social and psychological anxieties of whole dispersed generations
and their children living on the margins. These marginal narratives need to be understood as
inherently and essentially “spatial stories”—stories of movement and stories of
different homes. In Diaspora literature or marginal literature, most homes are constructed
through the memories of the migrants. This construction of home through memory raises an
important question: How do representations of lost home shape the lives of the diasporans?
Home (real, imagined and mythologized), as a place of origin becomes a key site of a
diasplaced migrant’s experiences and connections with past. This paper analyses the
(re)presentation and perceptions of re-visiting “home” in the short stories of South AsianAustralian diaspora written by Satendra Nandan, Yasmine Gooneratne, Michelle De Kretser,
Manik Datar and other minor writers. I contend how this (re)presentation and (re)anlyses of
lost home in these narratives, helps the diasporans in moving, with their eternal diasporic
cultural baggage, towards their Australian future.
Dominique SEVE (Université du Havre, France)
“Tim Winton: A Marginal Individual”
Tim Winton seems to be fascinated by his country being on the margins, typically isolated by
seas. Australia, for him, is at the centre of a whole range of water upheavals which reshape
the coastline along with the memories of the child that Tim Winton tries to recapture, the
deeps and shallow he witnessed as a child are a welcome break from the confines of houses
whose borders are too stifling. Winton also depicts his fellow Australians geographically
caught between sea and desert, thus becoming outcasts and prisoners of the land. The
territorial margins, on which Winton expands in Shallows and Land’s Edge shape the writer’s
mind and become the starting point of a soul-searching quest to wrench oneself from a
normative environment. To do so, he focuses on his inner world and desires. The vastness of
the universe that is depicted is at the same time conflicting with and espousing his seething
emotional life. In Patrick White’s manner, Winton aims at the unity of dichotomies to be in
kilter, by showing the necessary coexistence of the hedonism of Australians living on the
coast and his more inward-looking and somehow spiritual aspirations.
Paul SHARRAD (University of Wollongong, Australia)
“Tom Keneally: The Marginal Mainstream”
Despite a prominent profile, Thomas Keneally inhabits a number of margins. Apart from his
experiment with documentary fiction in Schindler’s Ark, and his subsequent alternating of
novels with books of history, his earlier shift from modernist prose to a simpler style placed
him at the edge of high literary status. This position is complicated by Keneally’s riding a line
between novelist and public intellectual, partly in work for professional arts bodies, but
notably as President of the Australian Republican Movement. Being at the centre of
Australia’s media and creative industries has arguably pushed Keneally to the margins of
literary reputation as celebrity makes him famous for being famous, rather than for writing
interesting novels. Keneally has been central as a nationalist, but this has always been in
conflict with his career. Critical attention continues to celebrate works dealing with Australian
subjects and settings, and, for a while Keneally set books in Europe, then taught in the US and
set works there. He has also inspected the margins of Australian society, writing about
Aboriginal issues, featuring Africa in two novels, and allegorising Iraq’s history to critique
Australia’s refugee policy. The paper surveys this fluctuating marginality of a central
Australia figure.
Laura SINGEOT (Caen University, France)
“Meeting on the Margins: Rewriting First Encounters in Three Australian Novels (Voss
[1957] and A Fringe of Leaves [1973] by Patrick White; Remembering Babylon [1993] by
David Malouf)”
White’s novel A Fringe of Leaves hinges on a shipwreck which leads to the héroine being
held captive by a group of Aborigines in Australia. The eponymous 'fringe' refers at once to
the captive's only item of clothing, a fringe of leaves, and to her marginal position on the
outskirts of indigenous society. Her attempts to survive this meeting on the margins, notably
by partaking in an act of cannibalism, only lead to further alienation and despair. For White
and Malouf the contact zone conceptualized by Mary Louise Pratt is a place of conflict,
aggression and ontological questioning, in which a destructive and irreversible Othering of the
protagonist occurs. The shipwrecks, cannibalism and slavery depicted by White and Malouf
owe much to the earlier tales of exploration by Dampier and Cook. This paper will analyse
how the clichés grounded in such first-hand accounts are reworked and even subverted in
these postcolonial accounts of meetings with the Other. Paradoxically, however, these
depictions of fringes, margins and hybridity lead to a reaffirmation of dominant white culture
at the expense of indigenous society, as theorized by Robert Young in White Mythologies
(1990). The native becomes a distorted mirror used to reflect and reassert European identity.
He is ultimately excised from the text, leaving the European protagonists to play the role of
Other, eternally erring on the fringes of society.
Maria Preethi SRINIVASAN (Queen Mary’s College, Chennai, India)
“The Exceptional Exception: Reflections on Roberta Sykes ‘Black Australian’ Identity”
With the passing away of Roberta Sykes on 14th November 2009, tributes poured in
describing her as a “trailblazer”, a “fighter for indigenous rights” and as a ‘revolutionary’ with
the Black Power movement in Australia. These descriptions fit Sykes every bit. Nevertheless,
there was a time when a cloud hung over with the question of her legitimacy to call herself
‘Aborigine’. For many years it seemed as if much ground was lost to the ‘exposure’ (of Sykes
non-indigenous) roots. Did she impersonate as Aboriginal woman? Was she unaware of her
African- American ancestry? Sykes own voice rises above the din caused by these conflicting
voices. It seemed as if the revelation of her African-American roots had grounded her. But her
writing bears witness to the fact that her case is indeed an exception -Having empowered
herself through education, she clearly articulates her position in her three volume
autobiography – Snake Circle, Snake Cradle and Snake Dancing - and poems such as “Who
Am I”. Roberta Sykes grew up thinking she was Aboriginal, she was gang-raped by a group
of white men who took her for an Aboriginal woman and the course of events following this
traumatic event drew from her soul the resolve to fight for the rights of indigenous people.
This was exceptional. Sykes ability to identify with the Aboriginal at home and have
fellowship with the African American and the Native American abroad brings into focus the
notion of ‘marginality’ and the transnational spaces where experience might be shared and
understanding created.
Martin STANIFORTH (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)
“Figures at the Margins: Reading the Liminal in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon
and Rodney Hall’s The Second Bridegroom”
Representations of the margin are central to David Malouf’s fictional writings. His novels
construct a series of liminal figures, from Ovid in An Imaginary Life to Priam and Achilles in
the more recent Ransom, who test and transgress perceived borders, whether of gender, race
and nation or between the visible and the numinous, and seek to create a culture of wholeness.
These figures are often read in transformative and redemptive terms. They are seen as
performing a hybridizing and integrative role which seeks to overcome the limitations of the
bounded and the exclusive. This paper will consider Malouf’s 1993 novel Remembering
Babylon which looks to reconcile Aboriginal and settler perspectives on the Australian past in
order to create a more inclusive national identity. In doing so it will question how far the
liminal figures within the novel achieve the reconciliations which Malouf espouses. It will
also read the novel against Rodney Hall’s novel The Second Bridegroom as another text of
early colonial encounter in which liminal figures are central to the exploration of different
concepts of place and identity.
Franca TAMISARI (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy)
“The Limits of Recognition. The ‘Politics of Sentiment’ in Australia.”
In reference to Keating’s Redfern speech, the language of the Mabo judgment (Povinelli
2002) as well as the public demonstrations and initiatives – such as Sorry Books, Sea of
Hands, Harbour Bridge March – in response to the ‘The Bringing Them Home Report’, the
paper explores the emergence of a “national sentimentality” (Berlant 1997:53) that since the
late Eighties has characterised the recognition of Australian Indigenous people. The paper
aims at showing that the emotional response expressed mainly in term of guilt and shame
leads to an ambiguous process that discriminates Indigenous people in the moment that it
concedes legal and political rights to them, and marginalises and diminishes Indigenous
people in the moment in which it places them in the central position in the construction of a
new national identity.
Andrew TAYLOR (Edith Cowan University, Australia)
Marginality and Transgression: Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest
Henry Handel Richardson is best known for her charming coming of age novel, The Getting
of Wisdom, (1910), often set as a school text, and her massive trilogy The Fortunes of Richard
Mahony (1930). But her first novel, Maurice Guest, published in 1908 when she was thirty
eight, deserves to be seen as one of the finest novels written by an Australian. Its relation to
margins and marginality is striking. First, it was written by a woman publishing under a
man’s name, and by a colonial, an Australian, living by then in London. It concerns a group of
largely non-German students studying music in Leipzig, i.e. away from the confines but also
the support of family and familiar culture. (Richardson herself studied there for several years
from 1888.) The two central characters are a young Englishman and a passionate and highly
sensual Australian woman who become locked in a destructive relationship reminiscent of
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky – hardly a central theme of English or Australian fiction at that
time. In an interesting reversal of colonial expectations, it is the Australian who survives –
shockingly free-thinking about sex, but with an honest self-knowledge that her lover,
Maurice, lacks. In its depiction of sexual obsession it was, and still is, highly transgressive.