Last updated: 05/09/2023
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Keynotes
Gail Jones (Western Sydney University; Australian National University)
“Wing-flutter, air-sweep and human breath: the ethics of voice and encounter in Australian Studies”
This is a talk which stands in solidarity with, and adjacent to, the call in Australia for a First Nations ‘Voice’. Introduced in a bill to parliament on the 30th March 2023, the call for constitutional recognition of indigenous voices carries the hopes of decades of activism in the reconciliation movement. Formally proposed by the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ in 2017, it is a persisting plea by indigenous Australians constructed in both political and intimate dimensions, as the call for a national referendum and as the acknowledgement of deeply material claims – the heart, the breath, the singular and collective body, embedded in particular places and local centres of meaning.
Voice and encounter are necessarily contested terms; this talk hopes by personal narrative and improvisatory thinking to open and multiply the tropic and ethical logic of these ideas. Voice is language and dialogue; it is also an acoustic field of other vocalisations. I take as my starting point William Barton’s Kalkani, a digeridoo performance that voices, with Véronique Serret’s violin, the eagle of his home in NW Queensland. Combining radical indigeneity and Western accompaniment, this piece rehearses solidarity, community and the melding of traditions, as well as performing honour to the totemic and the local.
Encounter is also language and dialogue, but includes the silence of the trace, the affective regimes of mourning and celebration, the now-time of heartfelt and possibly wordless communication. I consider the ceremonial aspects of the repatriation of indigenous Australian remains by European museums, but also private moments of my own encounters with the vastly complex and intelligent modes of indigenous knowing.
How are those of us who are non-indigenous, working in the service of Australian studies, able respectfully and with humility to approach this moment in the history of indigenous struggle for recognition? Are our terms of critical inquiry sufficient? How might affect, one of the most fraught elements of human experience and study, be introduced into the field not as a sentimental pleasure or indulgent shame, but as a genuinely troubling and difficult aspect of any cross-cultural encounter? Are our terms fit for purpose? Might ‘heart’ have a place in theory? Might a familiar word like ‘trace’ (Benjamin), crucial perhaps to thinking about the repersonalisation of human remains, still have scholarly purchase? Might recent debates on the limits of critique (Felski) assist us in reconfiguring cross-cultural encounters and possibly reintroduce ideas like resonance (Rosa) or communities of feeling?
These are big questions; my modest hope is to invite listeners into a community of the question.
Gail Jones is the author of two short-story collections and nine novels, which include Sixty Lights, Dreams of Speaking, Sorry,The Death of Noah Glass and most recently, Salonika Burning (2022). A new novel, One Another, will be published in March 2024. Her work has been highly awarded in Australia and also shortlisted for international prizes, including the Dublin IMPAC and the Prix Femina Étranger.
She is Professor Emerita of Western Sydney University and Visiting Professorial Fellow at Australian National University (ANU).
Ellen van Neerven
“‘By Heart’: The role of memory and family in First Nations Literature”
Ancient Greek communities believed that the heart was the site of memory and emotion – the basis for the English expression ‘learn by heart.’ Indigenous people’s ways of memorising come from Country; oral storytelling traditions and stories attached to place are in the night sky, in sophisticated mapping systems, in songlines, in ceremony, in song, dance and repetition. Body memory is activated through craft such as weaving, carving and dying and cultural values and laws are inscribed in nature. When Indigenous people adopt these English expressions ‘by heart’ and ‘from heart’ it is to evoke compassion and express passion and sincerity. I illustrate in my fiction in Heat and Light (UQP, 2014) how gaps and lapses in memory can disrupt a person’s identity, and the complications of waking up intergenerational memories. Trauma-informed making can bring self-knowledge and autonomy to both its author and audience. Writing becomes a new way to remember— Indigenous texts can become memorials and memory sites in themselves. Indigenous writers such as Natalie Harkin: Archival-Poetics (Vagabond Press, 2019) and Jeanine Leane: Purple Threads (UQP, 2011) complicate the ways the nation-state remembers wrongly, and embody collective memory as a forging and weaving. I use memory in my poetry practice – activating collective family memory with intention in Throat (UQP, 2020) in individual poems such as ‘Chermy’ which references the place where my mother and her siblings spent their youth. Memory is like water or blood – it is vessels and veins and arteries – and like the mistreatment of water by the settler state— can be blocked or dry or poisoned. Works of Indigenous literature, across genres, tend to centre family and express kinship as a coded storytelling against forgetting.
Ellen van Neerven is a Mununjali writer and editor. Ellen’s books include poetry collections: Comfort Food (UQP, 2016) and Throat (UQP, 2020); a hybrid short story collection, Heat and Light (UQP, 2014); and a work of creative nonfiction, Personal Score (UQP, 2023). Ellen has also edited Flock: First Nations Storytelling Then and Now (UQP, 2021) and Unlimited Futures: Blak and BlackSpeculative, Visionary fiction with Rafeif Ismail (Fremantle Press, 2022).
Hsu-Ming Teo (Macquarie University)
“Reparative Dreamings of Citizenship in the Koori Lit of Anita Heiss”
Contemporary discussions of citizenship extend the concept beyond individuals’ passive status, enshrined in law, in relation to a set of institutions (political, legal, governmental, economic, etc.). Instead, citizenship is expanded to encompass an active process that also takes place in the realm of the cultural and agentic. We see these concepts of citizenship played out in the press for cultural rights, defined by Jan Pakulski as ‘the right to unhindered and legitimate representation, and propagation of identities and lifestyles through information systems’ (74). Fiction is one of these information systems because it creates a public forum that simultaneously advocates for, disseminates, and achieves cultural rights through ‘dignifying representation, normative accommodation, and active cultivation of these identities and their symbolic correlates’ (Pakulski 77). Beyond the language of ‘rights’, James Tully, perhaps one of the most influential political philosophers of citizenship in recent times, argues for an understanding of citizenship that acknowledges ‘the free agonistic activities of participation’ in the process he calls ‘citizenization’ (147): a public struggle whereby active participants achieve forms of citizenship – diverse citizenship, or cooperative citizenship – that ‘fall outside of modern citizenship with its institutional/status orientation’ (cited in Norval 166).
In this paper I argue that Anita Heiss’s ‘Koori Lit’ novels – the romantic historical novels Cherry Blossoms and Barbed Wire (2016) and Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (2021), and the chick lit novels Not Meeting Mr Right (2007), Avoiding Mr Right (2008), Manhattan Dreaming (2010), Paris Dreaming (2011), and Tiddas (2014) – constitute a public forum where Aboriginal citizenship in modern Australia is interrogated, historic exclusion from various forms of citizenship is repaired, and where the agonistic process of citizenization takes place through love relationships of all kinds. Heiss advocates for and normalizes Aboriginal women’s active participation in a full spectrum of diverse citizenship, from neoliberal ‘consumer citizenship’ (Thoma 2014) to Tully’s notion of ‘cooperative citizenship’ that emphasizes ‘relationships of mutual cooperation and love among all forms of life on the planet’ (cited in Norval 168). Because these musings on citizenship are emplotted through the genre of romantic fiction, Heiss’s novels also illuminate how unspoken assumptions about citizenship play a role in structuring love relationships and determining whether the elusive “happily ever after” ending of romantic narratives can be achieved.
Works Cited
Norval, Aletta J. ‘Pictures of Democratic Engagement: Claim-Making, Citizenization and the Ethos of Democracy.’ In On Global Citizenship: James Tully in Dialogue, edited by James Tully. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 153-180.
Pakulski, Jan. ‘Cultural Citizenship.’ Citizenship Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1997, 73-86.
Thoma, Pamela. ‘Romancing the Self and Negotiating Consumer Citizenship in Asian American Labor Lit.’ Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014, pp. 17-35
Tully, James. Public Philosophy in a New Key, Two Volumes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Hsu-Ming Teo is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, and the Head of the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature at Macquarie University (Australia). Her academic publications include Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (2012), the edited volume, The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia (2017), and the co-edited volumes Cultural History in Australia (2003), and The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2020). She is currently co-editing with Paloma Fresno-Calleja the volume ‘Repairing the Past, Repurposing History: Conflict, colonialism, and exoticism in 21st century romantic historical fiction’. Hsu-Ming is an editorial board member of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies and the Journal of Australian Studies. She has published widely on historical fiction, Orientalism, imperialism, popular culture, love and popular romance studies, and she is starting work on romantic narratives in the fiction of Aboriginal Australian author Anita Heiss.
David Carter (University of Queensland)
“Novels and Novelists, Publishers and Editions, Critics and Readers: Multiple Histories and The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel”
The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel was released by Cambridge University Press in late July 2023. I was the sole editor of the book. The volume features a wide range of chapters (forty including the Introduction), tracing the history of the Australian novel from the period before British colonisation to the present day. This paper will reflect on the multiple tasks of editing, including selecting topics and approaches, and more importantly, within that process, the intellectual position-taking involved at each stage of contextualising and structuring such a volume. The notion of a ‘Cambridge History’ is very familiar to all of us engaged in research and teaching, so much so that the term can largely be taken for granted. In contrast, my editorial decision very early in the process was to give full weight to the term ‘history’ in the given title — to ask authors, for example, how their chapters for this volume would differ from what they might offer to a journal or a more occasional collection. The result, of course, was the multiplication of such histories, of the types of history that mattered to the stories being told and so relevant to the arguments presented in the book: from the reaction of novels and novelists to the most dramatic events in world political history — from war to revolution, imperialism, racism and resistance — to ongoing reactions to key events in Australia’s national history or to local/regional histories — from nationalism itself, to colonial dispossession, settlement and unsettlement (and much more) —and to competing histories of land, environment and climate change, and differently registered histories within the literary or artistic realm — the history of genres and the genre system, histories of modernity, changing publishing opportunities, career management for authorship, and again much more. From this perspective, what might appear ‘naturally’ to be a short and belated history, a delayed colonial story of slow development until, say, late in the 20th century when modernism finally spoke, is revealed instead as a long and complex history, a diverse history of novel writing and reading, covering both conservative and questioning approaches, and across the full range of popular, mid-range and literary fiction.
David Carter AM FAHA is Emeritus Professor at the University of Queensland, where he was previously Director of the University’s Australian Studies Centre and Professor of Australian Literature and Cultural History. His work has focused on 20th-century Australian print culture, Australian novels in the USA, periodical publishing, modernism and anti-modernism in Australia, and the role of Australian Studies internationally (especially in China and Japan). He has close family connections to France and Spain, especially Catalonia. He was President of the International Australian Studies Association, Professor of Australian Studies at Tokyo University in 2007-8 and 2016-7, and Manager of the Australian Studies in China programme (2002-16). He is a board member of the Foundation for Australian Studies in China. In 2018, he published Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace, 1840s-1940s (Sydney University Press), with Roger Osborne, and in 2013 Almost Always Modern: Australian Print Culture and Modernity (2013). In late July 2023, his edited book, The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel, was released.
Guest writers
Simone Lazaroo
Reading from Between Water and the Night Sky, an autofictional novel by Simone Lazaroo
I will read extracts from my novel published in February this year. Between Water and the Night Sky is an autofictinal narrative exploring grief, mourning, migration and the memorialisation of a woman and her unacknowledged courage in the face of hidden trauma. Around these extracts, I contextualise issues that motivated the writing of this novel, including the problems of cross-cultural marriage in the era of the White Australia Policy.
Dr Simone Lazaroo’s novels and many of her short stories explore individuals struggling to make better lives and meaning at the juncture of cultures. Her award-winning novels have been taught in Australian, North American and European universities. Her short fiction has been published in Australia, United States, England, Portugal, Cuba and Spain, where some of it has also been translated and published. Her second novel The Australian Fiancé is optioned for film; she will be co-writing that film-script.
She currently has two novels in progress. One of them explores remembering and forgetting in a small Australian coastal community; the other follows a contemporary Australian traveller’s encounters with residents, tourists and history in Mediterranean Europe. She is also drafting a shorter creative non-fiction piece about searching for a sense of belonging and home.
After teaching creative writing at universities in Perth Western Australia for many years, she continues mentoring emerging writers, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Murdoch University. Between Water and The Night Sky is her most recently published book (March 2023, Fremantle Press).
Ouyang Yu
“Writing with Machine Translation in Mind”
“Writing with Machine Translation in Mind” is a talk I am going to give on the predicament and new possibilities a writer, translator and self-translator faces in this post-people age in which the only thing, among other things, seems machine—robots or machine translation—that one has to work with, and how to work with that is a new challenge.
Ouyang Yu came to Australia in mid-April 1991 and has since published 147 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary translation and criticism in English and Chinese languages, including his award-winning novels, The Eastern Slope Chronicle (2002) and The English Class (2010), his collections of poetry, Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1997), and Terminally Poetic (2020), which won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Book in the 2021 Queensland Literary Awards, his book website: www.huangzhouren.com and his bilingual blog: youyang2.blogspot.com
He was shortlisted for the Writer’s Prize in the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature and won the Fellowship from the Australia Council in late 2021 for writing a documentary novel. And his sixth novel, All the Rivers Ran South, is coming out in late 2023 with Puncher & Wattmann, which is also publishing his seventh novel, The Sun at Eight or Nine in mid-2024, and his first collection of short stories, The White Cockatoo Flowers, is forthcoming in 2024 with Transit Lounge Publishing.