Poetry, politics and place : black and white perceptions of landscape in modern Australian poetry 1965-1990

Argues that the most influential landscape poetry deals with landscape as an aesthetic concept, and also with the politics of land ownership. Several "landscape poets". Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, have given voice to some of the most compelling social currents in society, and their work has an important place in contemporary political debate.

Papers from Marrakech : a post-colonial reading of western women's travel writing in North Africa and the Middle East

This thesis takes the form of a collection of theoretical and fictional documents comprising a journal, letters and essays sent home to Australia by a woman travelling in Morocco. In different modes, these papers examine issues of colonialism, gender and desire in western women's travel writing about North Africa and the Middle East.

Celluloid dreaming : cultural myths and landscape in Australian film 1970-1990

Examines the way in which cultural myths in selected Australian feature films of the 1970s and 1980s reflect changing attitudes towards nationalism, Australian identity, gender roles, mateship and how the Australian settler culture defines (or fails to define) its relationship with indigenous Australians.

Red shoes : obsessive and contagious narratives

The fairytale motif of the red shoes continues to fascinate many contemporary authors and artists. What inspires these obsessive and contagious narratives? The raw, unfettered femaleness of the red shoes, reminiscent of the pre-oedipal realm, suggests a means of escaping confining patriarchal conceptions of woman, desire and creativity.

Beth Shalom : rethinking history and memory

Explores the meanings generated by and through the establishment of Beth Shalom, Great Britain's first memorial center to the Jewish Holocaust. Memorial's location near Laxton in Nottinghamshire, England; Ways in which the mnemonic site's relationship with its surrounding location is important in the making of meaning; Relevance of the Holocaust to past and contemporary British social relations.

Race, history, and the Australian faith missions

In 1901, the parliament of the new Commonwealth of Australia passed a series of laws designed, in the words of the Prime Minister Edmund Barton, “to make a legislative declaration of our racial identity”. An Act to expel the large Pacific Islander community in North Queensland was followed by a law restricting further immigration to applicants who could pass a literacy test in a European language. In 1902, under the Commonwealth Franchise Act, “all natives of Asia and Africa” as well as Aboriginal people were explicitly denied the right to vote in federal elections. The “White Australia policy”, enshrined in these laws, was almost universally supported by Australian politicians, with only two members of parliament speaking against the restriction of immigration on racial grounds.

That's doctor Ginibi to you : hard lessons in the history and publication of Ruby Langford Ginibi

On May Day this year at La Trobe University, a woman who hasblazed the trail of die hard Australian political writing for the past decade finally got some of her due. Ruby Langford - Ginibi in her Bundjalung language - took on the mantle of Honorary Doctor of Letters with all the grace and majesty of her namesake, the black swan. Doctor Ginibi seems a far cry from the Koori woman who built fences in the scrub, fought on the streets for Aboriginal justice, and can show you some pretty angry scars to prove it. Yet the Koori writer, educator, grandmother, auntie and activist reckons it is all part of the same history, all another step in the struggle to realise the justice for her mob that is not only slow coming but, even as she dons the robes of those she is asked to re-educate Koori way, draws further and further into the neocolonial distance.

New cinema history and the computational turn

This paper outlines how the digitisation of both the film industry and contemporary research practices bear on the work of the new cinema historian. How might the opportunities presented by an unprecedented proliferation of data for example, also challenge the unspoken assumptions and ordinary practices of conventional film studies research? And how might the 'computational turn' present opportunities (and challenges) for a revisionist cinema history at the intersection of qualitative historiographies (focussed on the social experience of the cinema) and quantitative research approaches such as data mining, empirical analysis and digital visualisations?