Reading race, aboriginality in Australian children`s literature

This text looks at the ways in which Australia's indigenous peoples have been, and continue to be, represented in books for children. These varying representations have helped to colour the attitudes, beliefs and assumptions of different generations of Australians.

Strange reading: Keith Windschuttle on race, Asia and White Australia

In his recently published book, The White Australia Policy, Keith Windschuttle accuses academic historians of errors of fact and judgement in their accounts of white Australia. This article examines these claims of exaggeration and distortion with particular reference to the nature and meaning of race, racism and representations of Asia in Australian history. The article rejects Winschuttle's sweeping claim that academic historians have sought to make Australia appear a much more racist society than the historical record would suggest.

Beyond Abrahamism : a fresh reading of the Tanakh traditions respecting Lot, Moab and Ammon

At the heart of this study is my interest in the way in which a religious community establishes its sense of identity and its boundaries in relation to other groups. I explore the case of Israel's attitude towards her eastern neighbours, the Moabites and Ammonites, as portrayed in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Most commentary from the last one hundred years privileges one particular view of Moab and Ammon as traditional enemies of Israel. I aim to show the validity of readings of the biblical accounts that reveal a more complex relationship between Israel and her neighbours. Tanakh exhibits a dialectic between eirenic and hostile viewpoints. The stories of Abraham and Lot, who are presented as ancestors of Israel and of Moab and Ammon, to some degree represent Israel’s understanding of her neighbours. Conventional commentaries take for granted the accepted orthodoxy of Judaism, Christianity and Islam concerning Abraham and his significance in terms of faith and righteousness and blessing and covenant. As none of these notions is specifically linked to Lot at any point, he is treated as a pathetic figure and remains secondary in conventional commentary. Many commentaries denigrate the character of Lot, often in direct comparisons with Abraham. My reading of the texts of Genesis attempts to free the story of Lot from the constraints imposed by the way the story of Abraham functions. A careful reading of the Genesis account shows that Lot and Abraham exhibit similar elements of moral ambiguity, and Genesis contains no statement that condemns Lot on moral or religious grounds. Genesis 19, the single narrative in which Lot appears independently of Abraham, participates in the dialectic elsewhere in Tanakh. On the basis of a consistent pattern of action and speech throughout the first portion of Genesis 19, I advance my own original conception of the eirenic viewpoint of the narrator concerning Lot and his relationship to the divine. I attempt to demonstrate ways in which the story of Lot critiques or deconstructs the dominant ideology centred upon Abraham. My conception of the particular interests of the compiler of Genesis 19 is supported by several intertextual studies. These include the traditions of Sodom and of Zoar, the story of hospitality in Judges 19, the story of the deluge (Genesis 6-9) and stories of women who, like Lot’s daughters, act to continue the family line. In a treatment of the history of Lot traditions, I find evidence to separate the story of Lot from the work of the Yahwist. I consider whether the stories of Lot have a derivation east of the Jordan and whether the stories were of particular interest to the Deuteronomists. In the final chapter of this study, I focus on the main themes of the narratives concerning Lot and Abraham, and Moab and Ammon and Israel. The question of social boundaries arises in regard to many of these themes, such as the interaction of female and male, the role of wealth, the relation of city and country, kinship, and rights to land settlement. In this way, the treatment of Lot and Abraham in Tanakh and in subsequent traditions offers a perspective upon the formation of identity in the contemporary world of religious plurality.

Reading between the lines

This dissertation provides a critical reflection on the author's published work over 30 years to forge an understanding of the indivisibility of cultural and natural heritage values, both tangible and intangible, in the Australian landscape. There are prospects for establishing a distinctively Australian conservation management of cultural landscapes.

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.

Reading indigeneity : the ethics of interpretation and representation

The transmission of indigenous stories is a fraught enterprise. In contrast to Western practices of the free circulation of ideas, many indigenous cultures view their stories as sacred, and have strict rules about who may tell certain tales, and in what settings and with whom they may be shared. Indigenous storytellers and novelists who want to tell contemporary stories also face the minefields of a history of (mis)representation of their cultures' values and practices. Australian literary scholar Clare Bradford picks her way carefully through this minefield, identifying its perils and proposing a self-reflexive practice that enables scholars to approach these works with sensitivity; Abenaki children's author Joseph Bruchac adds his own impressions and frustrations as an author to Clare's frank assessment of the possibilities of criticism, cross-talk, and mutual understanding in the fìeld.

Writing/reading a life : the rhetorical practice of autobiography

This essay examines how the introduction/preface to a non-fiction text is constructed as autobiographical practice – a sort of ‘introduction-as-memoir’. The use and autobiographical effects of rhetorical tropes (stake inoculation, metaphor and binary oppositions) are examined in the introduction that prefaces Massacre myth (Moran, 1999), a polemic account of the 1926 police massacre of Aborigines that was the catalyst for Australia’s ‘History Wars’. Using the analytical methods of deconstruction, I tease out how language, structure and a (seemingly) objective account of historical virtues are recruited to the project of autobiography, and illuminate the role of language in the construction of the authorial subject (and Others), and show how these are entangled with broader social, political and epistemological issues. The analysis underlines the dialogic relationship between text, reader and society, and the instability of truth claims and the authorial subject of autobiography.

How did we ever arrive at the conclusion that teachers are the problem? A critical reading in the discourses of Australian schooling

A Quality Teacher debate is presented within historical and contemporary contexts, including a political history of Australian schooling over the last 20 or so years. It is argued that there is a crisis of confidence in schooling, which is currently being played out by positioning teachers as the 'problem' and not just the 'solution' to this crisis.

Reading in brown paper : Beckett's budget and the sensationalist press in interwar Sydney

This article addresses the audience reception of sensationalist newspapers in interwar Australia through a case study of Sydney weekly Beckett's Budget. During a libel trial brought against Beckett's in 1928, readers came to its defence and their testimony reveals overlaps between reading and political allegiances: reading Beckett's equated with voting Labor. While histories of sensationalist media in Australia have rightly emphasised illicit sexuality and public outcry, connections between sensationalism and working-class political movements remain on the margins of academic interest. Responding to the question 'Do you read Beckett's?' readers' evidence at the trial constitutes an audience response and invites debate over the ways gender and class could inform political engagement in the 1920s. Viewing Beckett's Budget outside of 'brown paper' and beyond the sensationalist genre reveals a shift in Australian political culture as party strategists embraced a broader electorate, using Beckett's Budget to tap into the culture and concerns of interwar society.

Controlling the philosophical imaginary: reading Pierre Hadot with Luiz Costa Lima

This essay proffers a critical complement to Luiz Costa Lima's claims concerning the nature, history, and control of the imagination in Western culture. Accepting the wide scope of Costa Lima's critical claim about the socio-political control of imaginative literature in Western history, we claim that Pierre Hadot's work on philosophy as a bios in the ancient West cautions us lest we position philosophy in this history as always and necessarily an agency of control. At different times, philosophy has rather stood as an ally in practicing and promoting forms of criticity, and the playful, creative, and transformative envisaging of alternative ways of experiencing the world Costa Lima theoretically celebrates in literary fiction. Any critique of philosophy as always opposed to the critical imagination can only stand, we have argued, relative to philosophy as conceived on what Hadot suggests is but one, albeit the now hegemonic model: namely, as a body of systematic rational discourses, including discourses about the literary, poetics, and imaginary. What this vision of philosophy misses, Hadot shows, is how the ancient conception of philosophy (which survives in figures like Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Goethe) as a way of life promoted distinctly literary, aesthetic, and imaginative practices; first, to assist in the existential internalisation of the schools' ideas; secondly, to envisage in the sage and utopias edifying counterfactuals to help students critically reimagine accepted norms; and thirdly, in the conception of a transformed way of living and perceiving ‘according to nature’, whose parameters of autonomy and pleasurable contemplation of the singularity of the present experiences anticipate the experiences delineated in modern aesthetic theory.

A Foucauldian and Deleuzian reading of autopoietic bisexual lives

This paper will locate the convergence of Foucault’s and ’Deleuze’s critico-political itinerary on the ethics of autopoiesis. It will re-evaluate the aims and objectives of Foucault’s ‘ethical turn’ in the later volumes of the history of sexuality project alongside Deleuzian ideas about the processes of becoming-other. Then, using primary research from a sociological study on bisexual lives, the paper will demonstrate the consonances of their respective theoretical insights about the potential of erotic ‘pleasure’ and ‘desire’ as a force of resistance. The aim of the analysis is twofold: firstly, to set the groundwork for further dialogical exchange between Deleuzian and Foucauldian thinking; and secondly, to highlight a lacuna in queer scholarship on bisexuality.