Catalogue notes for black noise

Where the speed-up of technology led Marshall McLuhan into the realm of ‘pattern-recognition’ the game has now been ratcheted up a further notch. Technologies themselves are being creatively re-designed and reconfigured to hunt down the Snark (see Lewis Carrol, 1898), a game in which the skill of identifying gaps, ruptures, of cracking the surface, remains critical. In this situation a New Minimalism has taken shape in which narrative and content have not been erased exactly but have retreated, to be resident in the architecture and flow of the apparatus itself. For Marcia Jane this is where the story now sits, to be laid bare on the Gallery floor.

Racialized urban America and Holocaust film : negotiating the limits of representation

Sidney Lumet’s influential film The Pawnbroker (1964) is one of the earliest films to consider the encounter between Holocaust narratives and low-income, urban American racial minorities. As much concerned with contemporary ‘race relations’ in the United States as it is with the Nazis’ persecution of Europe’s Jews, the film intertwines the story of Holocaust survivor Sol Nazerman with the social tensions of 1960s America, represented in his relationship with the young Puerto Rican shop assistant Jesus Oritz. The film stylistically juxtaposes raw footage of concentration camp existence with dismal images of New York slum life. Against these backdrops, the protagonist’s climactic ‘silent scream’ emblematically merges the repressed trauma of the survivor with the filmmaker’s interest in race relations, a theme that has undergone various transformations in a number of films since. One film that contemporizes this encounter is Richard LaGravenese’s Freedom Writers (2007). As opposed to the tragic outcome of the pawnbroker’s induction into urban America, here the Holocaust is a redemptive tool that permits inner-city Black and Latino youth to contextualize their own suffering. After reading The Diary of Anne Frank, this group of ‘at-risk’ sophomores to inspired to collaborate on an ultimately successful effort to bring Miep Geis, the woman who sheltered Anne Frank, to speak at their high school. Foregrounded by the 1992 Los Angeles riots, gentiles teacher Erin Gruwell and savior Miep Geis transform the Holocaust from an amplified parallel of American slums into an event that permits the children of American postcoloniality to triumph in spite of their socio-economic circumstances. Underlining the tension between the Jewish specificity and unprecedented nature of the Holocaust, and the need to generate Holocaust narratives that intersect with intrinsically racialized American narratives, such films have significant implications for how collective memories of suffering are constructed and contested.

Black Caviar

A painting created for the conference Celebrity Aura, hosted by The Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University at Burwood. Exhibited at the Phoenix Gallery as part of this conference.

Race to the White House

Welcome to part four of our Race to the White House podcast series.

Each week we’ll be talking to Australia’s top US experts on the ins and outs of the 2012 US presidential campaign.

This week, Binoy Kampmark and Geoff Robinson discuss Syria, drones, and Mitt Romney’s flagging campaign.

Catastrophic loss and the law : a comparison between 2009 Victorian Black Saturday fires and 2011 Queensland floods and Cyclone Yasi

This article explores insurability relating to loss occasioned by catastrophic events in Australia in the context of the current legal regulatory regime. The analysis includes two case studies, in which we juxtapose the Victorian Black Saturday fires in February 2--9 with the Queensland flooding and Cyclone Yasi (December 2010 - February 2011). We argue that the different responses to, and economic losses stemming from, these events illustrate the urgent need for a national regulatory and insurance regime for the prevention and alleviation of disasters and the management of their consequences.

Boom and bust in Australian screen policy: 10BA, the Film Finance Corporation, and Hollywood's 'race to the bottom'.

In recent years, a narrative has emerged in the Australian popular media about the box office 'unpopularity' of Australian feature films and the 'failure' of the domestic screen industry. This article explores the recent history of Australian screen policy with particular reference to the '10BA' tax incentive of the 1980s; the Film Finance Corporation of Australia (FFC), a government screen agency established in 1988 to bring investment bank-style portfolio management to Australia's screen industry; and local production incentive policies pursed by Australian state governments in a chase for Hollywood's runaway production.

We argue the 10BA incentive catalysed an unsustainable bubble in Australian production, while its policy successor, the FFC, fundamentally failed in its stated mission of 'commercial' screen financing (over its 20-year lifespan, the FFC invested 1.345 billion Australian dollars for 274.2 million Australian dollars recouped - a cumulative return of negative 80 percent). For their part, private investors in Australian films discovered that the screen production process involved high levels of risk.

Foreign-financed production also proved highly volatile, due to the vagaries of trade exposure, currency fluctuations and tax arbitrage. The result of these macro and micro-economic factors often structural and cross-border in nature was that Australia's screen industry failed to develop the local investment infrastructure required to finance a sustainable, non-subsidised local sector.

'Catastrophic failure' theories and disaster journalism : evaluating media explanations of the Black Saturday bushfires

 In recent decades, academic researchers of natural disasters and emergency management have developed a canonical literature on ‘catastrophe failure’ theories such as disaster responses from US emergency management services (Drabek, 2010; Quarantelli, 1998) and the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant (Perrow, 1999). This article examines six influential theories from this field in an attempt to explore why Victoria’s disaster and emergency management response systems failed during Australia’s Black Saturday bushfires. How well, if at all, are these theories understood by journalists, disaster and emergency management planners, and policy-makers? In examining the Country Fire Authority’s response to the fires, as well as the media’s reportage of them, we use the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires as a theory-testing case study of failures in emergency management, preparation and planning. We conclude that journalists can learn important lessons from academics’ specialist knowledge about disaster and emergency management responses.

Distance from water, sex and approach direction influence flight distances among habituated black swans

In many animals, response to predators occurs at greater distances the further an individual is from a refuge, but this has rarely been investigated in birds. Here, we test the hypothesis that the further from refuge (i.e. water) a foraging black swan Cygnus atratus is situated, the longer its flight initiation distance (FID) in response to a pedestrian approach on land. As predicted, swans situated farther from water exhibited longer FIDs compared with those closer to the shore. In addition, there was the possibility of an interesting interaction effect (p < 0.061) of sex and direction of approach on FID. Whilst males tended to not alter their response in relation to the angle of approach relative to the water, females tended to respond at longer distances, when approached from the shore than when approached from the land or parallel to the shore. This is one of the first reports of sex differences in FIDs for birds, with sex differences only manifesting themselves under certain approach types. Group size, the order of repeated approaches, and time of day did not influence responses, although starting distance of approach was positively related to FID.

Bloods, Crips and Southern Cross Soldiers: we are all gangbangers now!

This paper presents findings from the author's PhD thesis exploring violent youth subcultures in Australia. It addresses whether growing uncertainties around issues of cultural identity and belonging in an era of risk has produced more defensive models of DIY youth culture at a local scale. Theoretically, the author examines whether globalisation has unsettled normative youth subject positions associated with the nation-state, problematising conventional logics of youth cultural formation (i.e. which view questions of race and racism through a white/black, mainstream/subculture binary). As Beck (1992;1999) argues, the de-bounding influence of globalisation has led to an ambivalent set of relations where forms of youth identity have become freed from the nation-state and class based forms of community and must be self-organised. In particular, he argues that this has produced cosmopolitan subjects and social movements as well as ‘counter-modern’ subjects and cultures. This paper applies Beck’s theories alongside theories focused on global/local influences on youth culture to an ethnographic study of two violent youth subcultures in Australia, these being the white ‘patriotic’ youth formation which emerged in the Cronulla riots and youth gang formations in Melbourne’s western suburbs. In doing so the author examines the extent to which violent youth subcultures in Australia can be regarded as strategic responses intended to restore forms of collective cultural belonging at a local scale vis a vis ‘the global’ and its destabilizing influences.