Public space : its mythopoetic foundations and the limits of the law

Drawing on William Dawes' unpublished notebooks on the Indigenous languages spoken around Sydney Cove at the time of white settlement, this article hopes to provoke critical reflection on the limits of the law. Dawes' record of communication with Patyegarang documents a transaction that was both political and erotic, both about the law and in defiance of it. In performances that were gestural as well as verbal, they marked out a middle ground where the laws governing both of them were placed in parentheses and new, provisional, rules of exchange improvised. This article notices the existence of this middle ground, and marks its disappearance in subsequent legal discourse about the status of Indigenous people. Ultimately, it offers a reflection on the laws that govern the meeting place which the middle ground underwrites. That is, before public space became fixed for the legally binding discourse of politics, it was mobile and self-constituting. Is this simply a myth or is it a mythopoetic mechanism for rethinking the grounding of law in Australia? If it is the latter, then the next step will be to establish a middle ground of exchange with Indigenous law-giving systems.

Drawing to learn in science

Should science learners be challenged to draw more? Certainly making visualizations is integral to scientific thinking. Scientists do not use words only but rely on diagrams, graphs, videos, photographs, and other images to make discoveries, explain findings, and excite public interest. From the notebooks of Faraday and Maxwell (1) to current professional practices of chemists (2), scientists imagine new relations, test ideas, and elaborate knowledge through visual representations (3–5).

The invincible summer : on Albert Camus’ philosophical neoclassicism

What follows is a work of critical reconstruction of Camus' thought. It aims to answer to the wish Camus expressed in his later notebooks, that he at least be read closely. Specifically, I hope to do three things. In Part I, we will show how Camus' famous philosophy of the absurd represents a systematic scepticism whose closest philosophical predecessor is Descartes' method of doubt, and whose consequence, as in Descartes, is the discovery of a single, orienting certainty, on the basis of which Camus would proceed to pass beyond the 'nihilism' that conservative critics continued to level against him (MS 34). Part II will unfold the central tenets of Camus' mature thought of rebellion, and show how Camus' central political claims follow from his para-Cartesian claim to have found an irreducible or 'invincible' basis for a post-metaphysical ethics, consistent with the most thoroughgoing epistemic scepticism. Part III then undertakes to show that the neoclassical rhetoric and positioning Camus claimed for his postwar thought—as a thought of moderation or mesure, and a renewed Greek or Mediterranean naturalism—is more than a stylistic pretension. It represents, so I argue, a singular amalgam of modern and philosophical classical motifs which makes Camus' voice nearly unique in twentieth century ideas, and all the more worth reconsidering today. So let us proceed.

The intimate archive

This articles examines the issues involved in using archival material to research the personal lives of the Australian writers Marjorie Barnard (1897-1987), Aileen Palmer (1915-1988) and Lesbia Harford (1891-1927). the articles provides an introduction into the romantic experiences of the three women, based on their private letters, diaries and notebooks held in public institutions, including the National Library of Australia's Manuscript Collection.

Re-encountering Christina Stead : Why read ‘Workshop in the novel’?

Despite waves of interest in the work of Christina Stead, one aspect of her writing life has been largely neglected. From September 1943, she taught three series of extended writing workshops in New York and in the process left more than three hundred pages documenting her teaching. The question motivating this paper is: Why should we, as writers and teachers of writing, read her writing workshop notebooks nowadays? This paper will place Stead’s workshop in the context of the development of institutional teaching of novel writing and her emergence as a major writer. It will briefly examine how the notebooks have previously been understood and offer a closer analysis than has been made to date of the notebooks and their content and of the key issues raised by them. In particular, we shall explore her pedagogic focus upon workshop participants developing a rigorous, analytical approach to crafting novels and her extensive use of Georges Polti’s Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations to achieve this. That, in turn, will enable us to assess what the notebooks independently reveal about her beliefs regarding the novel and its purpose.