Seven Versions of an Australian Badland

Author: Ross Gibson
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
ISBN: 9780702233494
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
"To travel this long, lonely road is to traverse a stretch of brutal history and to enter a gigantic crime scene. The landscape itself holds a million clues to a horror story blazing across two centuries. Winding through a haunted place that is forever frontier territory, this road is the scene of casual as well as callous murder whether from the 1970s, the 1960s or the 1860s. Not for nothing is it known as the 'Horror Stretch'. In this compulsively readable new book, Ross Gibson drives right back along that dangerous stretch and finds himself deep in the Badland. Part road movie, part memoir, part murder mystery, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland embarks on an enthralling journey through time, into the realms of myth and magic, narcissism and genocide."--Publisher's website.

Animals and Science Fiction

Author: Nora Castle
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031416953
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description

Alex Miller: the ruin of time

Author: Robert Dixon
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743324073
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Book Description
Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time is the first sole-authored critical survey of the respected Australian novelist's eleven novels. While these books are immediately accessible to the general reading public, they are manifestly works of high literary seriousness - substantial, technically masterful and assured, intricately interconnected, and of great imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight. Among his many prizes and awards, Alex Miller has twice won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, for The Ancestor Game in 1993, and Journey to the Stone Country in 2003; the Commonwealth Writers' prize, also for The Ancestor Game in 1993; and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize, for Conditions of Faith in 2001 and Lovesong in 2011. He received a Centenary Medal in 2001 and the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Having published his eleventh novel, Coal Creek, in 2013 - which won the Victorian Premier's Fiction Award in 2014 - Miller is currently writing an autobiographical memoir with the working title 'Horizons'.

Visualizing the City

Author: Alan Marcus
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040293573
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
This anthology presents a range of interdisciplinary explorations into the urban environment, through film, photography, digital imagery, maps and signage. Contributors examine our fascination with the city through the history of art and architecture, urban studies, environmental studies, cultural geography and screen studies. Bringing together a wide spectrum of urban contexts, Visualizing the City’s diverse essays explore visual representations of urbanism and modernity reflected through the prism of global cultures using an engaging variety of methods and texts.

Made to Matter

Author: Fiona Probyn-Rapsey
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1920899979
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
Most members of the Stolen Generations had white fathers or grandfathers. Who were these white men? This book analyses the stories of white fathers, men who were positioned as key players in the plans to assimilate Aboriginal people by 'breeding out the colour'. The plan to 'breed out the colour' ascribed enormous power to white sperm and white paternity; to 'elevate', 'uplift' and disperse Aboriginality in whiteness, to blank out, to aid cultural forgetting. The policy was a cruel failure, not least because it conflated skin colour with culture and assumed that Aboriginal women and their children would acquiesce to produce 'future whites'. It also assumed that white men would comply as ready appendages, administering 'whiteness' through marriage or white sperm. This book attempts to put textual flesh on the bodies of these white fathers, and in doing so, builds on and complicates the view of white fathers in this history, and the histories of whiteness to which they are biopolitically related.

Travel Writing from Black Australia

Author: Robert Clarke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317914740
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
Over the past thirty years the Australian travel experience has been ‘Aboriginalized’. Aboriginality has been appropriated to furnish the Australian nation with a unique and identifiable tourist brand. This is deeply ironic given the realities of life for many Aboriginal people in Australian society. On the one hand, Aboriginality in the form of artworks, literature, performances, landscapes, sport, and famous individuals is celebrated for the way it blends exoticism, mysticism, multiculturalism, nationalism, and reconciliation. On the other hand, in the media, cinema, and travel writing, Aboriginality in the form of the lived experiences of Aboriginal people has been exploited in the service of moral panic, patronized in the name of white benevolence, or simply ignored. For many travel writers, this irony - the clash between different regimes of valuing Aboriginality - is one of the great challenges to travelling in Australia. Travel Writing from Black Australia examines the ambivalence of contemporary travelers’ engagements with Aboriginality. Concentrating on a period marked by the rise of discourses on Aboriginality championing indigenous empowerment, self-determination, and reconciliation, the author analyses how travel to Black Australia has become, for many travelers, a means of discovering ‘new’—and potentially transformative—styles of interracial engagement.

Edgelands: A Collection of Monstrous Geographies

Author: Erin Vander Wall
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848884818
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Book Description
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. We are captivated by the monstrous. The monstrous encapsulates a variety of emotions, actions, behaviors, and re-sponses. In general usage it draws attention to the physicality of bodies, the fear and repulsion that have so often driven societal response, and the marginal status of those defined by such terms. Monstrous geographies draw on the unease and uncanniness at the core of the monstrous while shifting the consideration from bodies to places and spaces, away from corporeality and toward the sites or landscapes within which bodies move; away from the mon-strous form of a creature like the Yeti and toward the environment in which the Yeti thrives, an environment that must be monstrous to produce and sustain such a being. Considering such geographies allows for a nuanced under-standing of the places, both real and imagined, subtle and fantastic, that make up our world.

By-roads and Hidden Treasures

Author: Paul Ashton
Publisher: Apollo Books
ISBN: 9781742586243
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
What is keeping people strong in isolated and under-populated locales, and how much of that is cultural? In 2008 the Cultural Asset Mapping for Regional Australia (CAMRA) project was born with the very simple question: 'how can we best map regional culture in contemporary Australia so that we can assess that culture's value?' In the five years that followed, what transpired was an unpredicatable journey into unlikely places and too-often neglected communities across regional Australia, from western Sydney to the central desert, from east coast surfboard-shapers to Torres Straight hip-hop musicians. Their experiences, stories and insights confronted existing assumptions, and challenged many of the cherished precepts of cultural policy and creative industries research. By-roads and Hidden Treasures brings together the project's researchers, cultural critics and arts and creative industry figures to discuss culture and its connection to community, particularly in isolated circumstances. The book contains thought-provoking discussions on regional Australia's colonial and cultural heritage, and details innovative new methods for measuring cultural assets, as well as reflecting on fostering collaborations with peak cultural bodies in order to inform imminent policy and planning decisions for regional Australia.

Living with the Locals

Author: John Maynard
Publisher: National Library of Australia
ISBN: 0642278954
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
Living with the Locals comprises the stories of 13 white people who were taken in by Indigenous communities of the Torres Strait islands and eastern Australia between the 1790s and the 1870s, for periods from a few months to over 30 years. The shipwreck survivors, convicts and ex-convicts survived only through the Indigenous people's generosity. They assimilated to varying degrees into an Indigenous way of life and, for the most part, both parties mourned the white people's return to European life. The authors bring fresh insight to the stories and re-evaluate the encounters between Indigenous people and the white people who became part of their families.

Graveyard Gothic

Author: Eric Parisot
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526166305
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
Graveyard Gothic is the first sustained consideration of the graveyard as a key Gothic locale. This volume examines various iterations of the Gothic graveyard (and other burial sites) from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, as expressed in numerous forms of culture and media including poetry, fiction, TV, film and video games. The volume also extends its geographic scope beyond British traditions to accommodate multiple cultural perspectives, including those from the US, Mexico, Japan, Australia, India and Eastern Europe. The seventeen chapters from key international Gothic scholars engage a range of theoretical frameworks, including the historical, material, colonial, political and religious. With a critical introduction offering a platform for further scholarship and a coda mapping potential future critical and cultural developments, Graveyard Gothic is a landmark volume defining a new area of Gothic studies.