Introduction : Understanding Connections between Time, Space and the Body

The experiences and constructs of time, space and bodies saturate human discourse—naturally enough, since they are fundamental to existence—yet there has long been a tendency for the terms to be approached somewhat independently, belying the depth of their interconnections. It was a desire to address that apparent shortcoming that inspired this book, and the interdisciplinary meetings from which it was born, the 1st Global Conferences on ‘Time, Space and the Body’ and ‘Body Horror’ held in Sydney in February 2013. Following the lively, often provocative, exchange of ideas throughout those meetings, the writing here crosses conventional boundaries inhabiting everyday life and liminal experiences, across cultures, life circumstances, and bodily states. Through numerous theoretical frameworks and with reference to a variety of media, the authors problematize or deconstruct commonplace assumptions to reveal challenging new perspectives on the diverse cultures and communities which make our world. If there is an overarching theme of this collection it is diversity itself. The writers here come from numerous academic fields, but a good number of them also draw on first-hand cultural production in the arts: photography, sculpture and fine art instillation, for example. Of course, however laudable it might be, there is a potential problem in such diversity: does it produce fruitful dialogue moving toward creative, workable syntheses or simply a cacophony of competing, incomprehensible, barely comprehending voices? To a large degree this depends upon the intellectual, existential ambitions as well as the old-fashioned goodnatured tolerance of both writers and readers. But we hope three unifying characteristics are discernable in the following chapters viewed as a whole: firstly, a genuine concern for the world humans inhabit and the communities they form as bodies in space and time; secondly, an emphasis upon the experience of the human subject, exemplified perhaps by the number of chapters drawing on phenomenology; thirdly, an adventurous, explorative impulse associated with an underlying sense that being, since it is inseparable from the body’s temporality, is always becoming, and here the presence of poststructuralist influences is unmistakable, often explicit. Our challenge as editors has been to present the enormous variety of subjects and views in a way that would render the book coherent and at the same time encourage readers to make explorations themselves into realms they might usually consider beyond their field of interest. To that end we have divided the book into six sections around loosely defined themes, each offering different angles on how time and/or space unfold in and around bodies.

Pasture Degradation and Recovery in Australia's Rangelands : Learning from History

"The extended drought periods in each degradation episode have provided a test of the capacity of grazing systems (i.e. land, plants, animals, humans and social structure) to handle stress. Evidence that degradation was already occurring was identified prior to the extended drought sequences. The sequence of dry years, ranging from two to eight years, exposed and/or amplified the degradation processes. The unequivocal evidence was provided by: (a) the physical 'horror' of bare landscapes, erosion scalds and gullies and dust storms; (b) the biological devastation of woody weeds and animal suffering/deaths or forced sales, and; (c) the financial and emotional plight of graziers and their families due to reduced production in some cases leading to abandonment of properties or, sadly, deaths (e.g. McDonald 1991, Ker Conway 1989)."--Publisher website

Writing Indigenous vampires: Aboriginal gothic or Aboriginal fantastic?

The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation. (first paragraph)

The day that changed Grantham

"'Within two minutes it went from being no water out in the street to being waist deep inside the shop.' When Queensland went under water in January this year the tiny town of Grantham suffered the greatest loss of life: 12 people died. The locals clung to fences, floated on top of cars and supported each other to survive the unexpected and sudden wall of muddy water and debris that inundated their town. You'll hear tales of fear, bravery and loss in this moving radio feature."

The fantastic in the family sagas : implications for saga authorship

There is increasing acceptance that characterisation in the family sagas is complex enough to include the subtle incorporation of protagonists’ inner lives. Thus, despite saga authors’ apparent desire to pass on traditional stories, saga characterization brings with it the possibility of a connection between the medieval author and the early Icelandic community represented in the sagas, a break in the saga code of objective narration that adds further weight to recent arguments that saga authorship was conceived in broader terms than merely the preservation of oral tales. One such break in objectivity occurs in the range of responses to the fantastic, when characters are forced to interpret the supernatural or strange events in their lives. At such times, the author allows glimpses of the inner lives of characters, focussing our attention on the way in which characters perceived and dealt with extraordinary occurrences, but also highlighting and thematising the distinctive social context of the early Icelandic community.

Uninhabited

"A young couple go to a remote and deserted coral island for a camping holiday, only to find that the island is inhabited by a ghost seeking retribution for a past outrage. - Written by Bill Bennett " "Synopsis: Based on actual events…. Harry and Beth want a different kind of holiday. So they charter a boat to drop them off on a remote coral island on the Great Barrier Reef. The island is idyllic – surrounded by a wide reef, covered in palms and full of birds and other wildlife, small and totally deserted. Or is it? The young lovers soon come to believe there is someone else on the island. Things go missing from their camp – and then they discover someone else’s footprints in the sand. What they didn’t realise was that the island has a ghost – a young girl who had died in shocking circumstances some eighty years earlier. The ghost at first plays mischievously with the young couple, but then turns malevolent. And their idyllic island holiday becomes a nightmare."

Wolf Creek, rurality and the Australian gothic

As with Crocodile Dundee before it, the recent Australian film Wolf Creek promotes a specific and arguably urban-centric understanding of rural Australia. However, whilst the former film is couched in mythologized notions of the rural idyll, Wolf Creek is based firmly around the concept of rural horror. Wolf Creek is both a horror movie and a road movie, one which relies heavily upon landscape in order to tell its story. Here we argue that the film continues a tradition in the New Australian Cinema of depicting the outback and its inhabitants as something the country's mostly coastal population do not understand. Wolf Creek skilfully plays on popular conceptions of inland Australia as empty and harsh. But more than this, the film brings to the fore tensions in the rural idyll associated with the ownership and use of rural space. As an object of urban consumption, rural space may appear passive and familiar, but in the context of rural horror iconic aspects of the Australian landscape become a source of fear – a space of abjection.

The Games Concept Approach (GCA) as a mandated practice : views of Singaporean teachers

This paper reports on the views of Singaporean teachers of a mandated curriculum innovation aimed at changing the nature of games pedagogy within the physical education curriculum framework in Singapore. Since its first appearance over 20 years ago, Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU), as an approach to games pedagogy has gathered support around the world. Through a process of evolution TGfU now has many guises and one of the latest of these is the Games Concept Approach (GCA) a name given to this pedagogical approach in Singapore. As part of a major national curricular reform project the GCA was identified as the preferred method of games teaching and as a result was mandated as required professional practice within physical education teaching. To prepare teachers for the implementation phase, a training program was developed by the National Institute of Education in conjunction with the Ministry of Education and well known experts in the field from the United States. For this part of the study, 22 teachers from across Singapore were interviewed. The data were used to create three fictional narratives, a process described by Sparkes (2002a) and used more recently by Ryan (2005) in the field of literacy. The stories were framed using Foucault’s (1980/1977) notion of governmentality and Bernstein’s (1996) notion of regulative discourse. The narratives reveal tales of confusion, frustration but also of hope and enthusiasm.

Playing Pranks: Traditions, communities & co-creative cultural performance practice

Pranks, hoaxes and practical jokes are co-creative cultural performance practices that appear across times, contexts and cultures. These practices include everyday play amongst families, friends and coworkers, entertainment programs such as Prank Patrol, Punked or Scare Tactics, and aesthetic and activist pranks perpetrated by situationist artists, guerrilla artists, and, most recently, culture ‘jammers’ or ‘hackers’ intent on turning capitalist systems back on themselves. Although it can, in common usage, describe almost any show off behaviour, a prank in the strictest definition of the term is a performance that deploys a very specific set of strategies. It is an act of trickery, mischief, or deceit, that must be taken as real, and momentarily cause real fear, anger or worry for an unwitting spectator-become-performer, who is meant to play along until the trick is revealed and their response can be represented back to the prankster, other spectators, or society as a whole, either for the sake of entertainment or for the sake of commentary on a cultural phenomenon. A prank, in this sense, deliberately blurs the boundaries between daily and dramatic performance. It creates a moment of uncertainty, in which both the prankster’s ability to be creative, clever, or culturally astute, and the prankee’s ability to play along, discern the trick, discern the point of the trick, and, in the end, be duped, be a good sport, or even play/pay the prankster back, are both put to the test. In this paper, I consider a number of pranking traditions popular where I am in Australia, from the community-building pranks of footballers, bucks parties and ‘drop bear’ tales told to tourists, to the more controversial pranks of radio shock jocks, activists and artists. I use performance, spectatorship and ethical theory to examine the engagement between prankster, pranked spectator, and other spectators, in this most distinctive sort of community-driven performance practice, and the way it builds and breaks status, social and other sorts of relationships within and between specific communities.

Reflections from damaged modernity

The cliché about modern architecture being the fairy-tale fulfillment of every fantasy ceases to be a cliché only when it is accompanied by the fairy tale’s moral: that the fulfillment of the wishes rarely engenders goodness in the one doing the wishing (Adorno). Wishing for the right things in architecture and the city is the most difficult art of all: since the grim childhood-tales of the twentieth century we have been weaned from dreams and utopias, the stuff of modernism’s bad conscience. For Adorno writing in 1953, Hollywood cinema was a medium of “regression” based on infantile wish fulfillment manufactured by the industrial repetition (mimesis) of the filmic image that he called a modern “hieroglyphics,” like the archaic language of pictures in Ancient Egypt which guaranteed immortality after death in Egyptian burial rites. Arguably, today the iconic architecture industry is the executor of archaic images of modernity linked to rituals of death, promises of omnipotence and immortality. As I will argue in this symposium, such buildings are not a reflection of external ‘reality,’ but regression to an internal architectural polemic that secretly carries out the rituals of modernism’s death and seeks to make good on the liabilities of architectural history.

Bait

A synopsis and critique of the Australian/Singaporean film, Bait, directed by Kimble Rendall in the horror genre.

Razorback

Synopsis and critique of Australian Film, Razorback, directed by Russell Mulcahy in the horror genre.

Daybreakers

It is 2019, ten years after a plague turns most humans into vampires. Human blood is in short supply. The shortage of causing panic in vampire population Charles Bromley, CEO of pharmaceutic company Bromley Marks - the largest supplier of human blood in the United States- is intent on developing a viable blood substitute. When a cure that can transform vampires back into human...

(Un)dead Japan: A genre analysis of the Japanese zombie film

This study is an in-depth examination of the stylistic and generic characteristics of the Japanese zombie film and its relations to Japanese horror cinema and the conventions and tropes of Western zombie movies more generally. Through generic analysis of key Japanese zombie films released over the last 15 years, this study establishes the sub-genre's ties to transnational production practices and cult cinema. The first monograph length study of this kind, this study provides insight into the growing sub-genre of Japanese zombie films while concurrently broadening current scholarship and understanding of the zombie film genre.

Educational research and strategies of world-forming: The globe, the unconscious, and the child

The passion to eradicate alterity from the earth is also the passion for the home, the country, the dwelling, that authorizes this desire and rewards it. In its nationalism, parochialism and racism it constitutes a public and private neurosis. So, unwinding the rigid understanding of place that apparently permits me to speak, that guarantees my voice, my power, is not simply to disperse my locality within the wider coordinates of an ultimate planetary context. That would merely absolve me of responsibility in the name of an abstract and generic globalism, permitting my inheritance to continue uninterrupted in the vagaries of a new configuration. There is something altogether more precise and more urgent involved. For in the horror of the unhomely pulses the dread for the dispersal of Western humankind: the dread of a rationality confronted with what exceeds and slips its grasp. (Chambers, 2001, p. 196)