Keynote Speakers (alphabetical order)
Associate Professor Anne BREWSTER (University of New South Wales)
“Protests and Secrets: Aboriginal Women’s Poetry”
Abstract to follow
Professor Helen GILBERT (Royal Holloway, University of London)
“Out of the Exhibition: Indigenous Performance in the Modern-day
Museum”
This presentation examines metropolitan museum practice in Europe as reviewed from its
Antipodean margins in the work of present-day Aboriginal and Maori artists and performance
makers. The main focus is on theatrical engagements with ‘salvage ethnography’ and its
paternalistic attempts to document indigenous cultures apparently on the verge of extinction.
In particular, I analyse performances that imaginatively recuperate museum objects and
images from the margins of colonial history. Such performances draw on the expressive
energies of indigenous voices, bodies and stories to reposition indigeneity as a concept in
transit, both historically and in the present, amid the intensifying intercultural contact zones
that Western modernity has instantiated. Drawing on indicative examples from
performers/artists such as George Nuku, Rosanna Raymond, Christian Thompson and
Victoria Hunt, my larger aim is to probe possibilities for rethinking ‘salvage’ as an ephemeral
artistic practice that forges new connections across time and place even while exposing the
hidden histories of commodity circuits. As part of this conceptual exploration, I will discuss
processes for translating my research into practical strategies for conceiving and staging an
exhibition of indigenous performance in London in late 2013.
Professor Gail JONES (Writing and Society Research Centre, University of Western
Sydney)
Mousterians of the Antipodes : marginal bodies and the untimeliness of
colonial paradigms.
The repatriation of the decapitated head of Yagan, an Aboriginal freedom fighter from South
Western Australia, forms the paradigmatic narrative of this paper. Buried in his homeland in
2010, 177 years late, this event recalls colonial barbarity and the mutilation of both bodies and
time. In Australian studies, ‘margins’ are conventionally, indeed habitually, associated with
the spatial imaginary, with tropes of centre and periphery, borderlands and badlands, and the
physical and discursive exile of Aborigines from the power and possession of place. This
paper considers the time of the margin, the governance in colonial and post colonial thinking
of incommensurable time scales, anachrony and the ‘untimeliness’ of relations between
settlers and indigenous people. Ranging over literature, visual art and colonial texts, and in the
spirit of ‘provincializing Europe’, this view takes narratives of repatriation from Europe of
Aboriginal remains - stories of untimely burial and desacralization – as exemplars of the
detemporalized body committed to a kind of epistemological and ontological margin. The
collection and dispersal of native remains is a well-known feature of colonial anthropology;
here this practice is the basis for a meditation on the ethical implications of distance, the
margin imagined as faraway and pre-historical.
Dr. Philip McLAREN
“Thaw-uma-li: coals for cooking in, or food for thought.”
Are our Aboriginal cultures, languages and beliefs systems being accurately portrayed in
fiction? Millions of readers of fiction featuring Indigenous Australians accept such
expressions as researched factual accounts of Australian Aboriginality. Should we accept such
books as real Australian history?
When a writer approaches a new work she/he considers many elements and eventualities
before the writing commences. Writing is produced within a particular historical moment and
may be interpreted differently in the writer/reader exchange –narrative and ideology –
intention and understanding come into play.
In my paper I will use a selection of literature that uses misinformation and stereotyping of
Indigenous Australians, providing readers internationally with erroneously views; and I will
contrast it with other works that have been painstakingly researched and carefully presented.
And I will include on-topic interviews that I conducted with Kim Scott, Thomas Keneally and
Kate Grenville.