AbstractsMichael 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 self-transformative. 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 ‘Anglo-Australian 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 nineteenth-century 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 neo-imperial 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 CarpentariaIn 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 reshape 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 city-dwellers. 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 imaginary- linked 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 early-twentieth-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 pseudo-Indigenous 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 PlayIn 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 MemoryBereft 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 Governor-General 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 pre-World 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, neo-traditionalism 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 IIOn 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 self-congratulatory 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 non-fictional 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 over-looked agency of marginalized subjects.

Luisa PÈRCOPO (Cagliari University, Italy)Humour, Ethics and Indigenous Film: Wayne Blair’s The SapphiresThe 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 FictionThe 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-the-century 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 19 th-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 Asian-Australian 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 GuestHenry 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.