After decolonization: Australia and the emergence of the non-aligned movement in Asia, 1954-55

This article is a study of the response of the Australian government under Robert Menzies to the emergence of the Afro-Asian movement in the mid-1950s, especially the element of the non-aligned nations, which culminated in the Bandung meeting of April 1955. Non-alignment and anti-colonialism posed direct threats to the Menzies government's plans for the defence of Southeast Asia and its foreign policy for the region. The study of the Australian response to the Bandung meeting reveals the different legacies which European imperialism left behind in Australia compared with its neighbours in south and east Asia.

Picturing Australian history: visual texts in nonfiction for children

Time is one of the most prominent themes in the relatively young genre of children's literature, for the young, like adults, want to know about the past. The historical novel of the West grew out of Romanticism, with its exploration of the inner world of feeling, and it grew to full vigor in the era of imperialism and the exploration of the physical world. From the end of the 18th century, children's books flourished, partly in response to these cultural and political influences. After Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, literary works began to grapple with skepticism about the nature of time itself. This book explores how children's writers have presented the theme and concept of time past. While the book looks primarily at literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, it considers a broad range of historical material treated in works from that period. Included are discussions of such topics as Joan of Arc in children's literature, the legacy of Robinson Crusoe, colonial and postcolonial children's literature, the Holocaust, and the supernatural. International in scope, the volume examines history and collective memory in Portuguese children's fiction, Australian history in picture books, Norwegian children's literature, and literary treatments of the great Irish famine. So too, the expert contributors are from diverse countries and backgrounds.

From empire to filmi: a fusion of western and Indian cultural practices in Australian music education

During the 19th and 20th centuries, Indian culture was represented in Australia as part of celebrations of the British Empire. Children were presented with stereotypic representations of Indian culture, which provide a snapshot of contemporary perceptions. Such representations were rarely authentic. By removing music from one culture and presenting it in the symbolic gestures of another we strip away much of its meaning. Encouragingly, contemporary popular culture can incorporate a fusion of western and Indian cultural practices, such as filmi (Hindi: `film song' or `Indian film music'). This article describes early imperialist understandings of Indian culture in Australian school music to contextualize recent attempts to engage with more authentic intercultural understandings. To assist teachers in the presentation of `other' musics, guidelines for the inclusion of authentic materials are offered. By selecting music that is already a fusion of cultures and musical styles, it becomes easier for western music educators to engage with the other.

Other musics in the classroom: from assimilation to multiculturalism in Australian school music

This paper considers the notion of 'other musics' within the Australian school context. It presents a theoretical overview of such terms as 'imperialism', 'assimilation', 'integration' and 'multiculturalism' - all terms that we use to summarise our inclusion of 'other' in Australian culture. By providing an historical overview of its development within educational settings, the examples cited articulate the archaic: assimilation of 'the other' matters within a multicultural society. By considering examples of past and present practice we hope to illuminate our use of other musics in Australian schools.

‘To exercise a beneficial influence over a man’ : marriage, gender and the native institutions in early colonial Australia

This chapter examines understandings of marriage among missionaries and humanitarians connected with two early colonial ‘Native Institutions’. A comparison of the Parramatta Native Institution in New South Wales and the Albany Native Institution in Western Australia demonstrates that concerns about marriage were central in discussions about the formation and maintenance of these Institutions. Both of these Institutions were established and supported by British evangelicals, who had brought with them to Australia powerful assumptions about gender roles, particularly in
marriage. These assumptions influenced their decisions regarding the children who resided in the Native Institutions. Within specific colonial contexts, however, the assumptions of humanitarians and missionaries did not remain static, and debates over the futures of the Aboriginal children they sought to educate reveal complex and shifting hierarchies of race, gender and class.

Feminine transports and transformations : textual performances of Australian women convicts and emigrants from 1788 to 1850

While scholars have critiqued early representations of the white colonial female in the form of the novel, short story, or historical narrative, analyses of poetry tend to be located only on that produced in Australia and often in light of a nascent national identity. This article examines how poetic renditions of the desolate woman might be viewed as part of imperialism's mythologising process, displacing more worrying versions of womanhood in relation to the new colonies. While social anxieties over the identity of the white colonial female would result in highly controlled productions of the female convict and female emigrant, this article demonstrates how they also prove unstable and point to a disruptive reality beyond language.

Education and the colonial construction of whiteness

European imperialism spawned settlements of invasive white communities throughout Asia and Africa. Stoler and Cooper (1997: 27) argue these evolving colonial societies became subject to what amounts to an extended bourgeois project such that "we can not understand the construction of whiteness without exploring its class dimensions". If in terms of that project, nineteenth-century metropolitan society was deemed vulnerable to the ravages of a brutish and unruly working class, these white colonial outposts, whether constituted as settler colonies or colonies of exploitation, were even more vulnerable to the more insidious danger of miscegenation. Racial intermingling became simultaneously an issue of class and race. Imperialism therefore added a further dimension to the on-going detinition of "bourgeois-ness": the discourse of whiteness transforming a national discourse into a discourse on civilisation.

In focusing on education as the colonial authorities' response to what they perceived of as the danger of mixed parentage, this article develops a comparative framework that links coloniai settlements in Asia and Australia. It examines the discourse surrounding miscegenation, education and the "rising generation" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Dutch East Indies British India, French Indo China and (British) Australia. In so doing, I demonstrate the universality of a linked discourse of whiteness and class across Imperial Asia.

The global classroom

The nature of pedagogy and the collaboration between international parties in subject design ameliorates some of the more negative characteristics of globalized education. I argue that the nature of globalization is to be found in the small and ongoing practices that constitute collaboration between differing parties. In this way, what globalization means is in fact a constantly negotiated contingent and never settled. My argument is that reductive critiques of internationalization are far too simplistic. The example of EME 150 and the uptake through the Malaysian educational system of some of its components is an example not of 'imposition' or 'imperialism' but rather of a more negotiated and collaborative pedagogy that points to some of the benefits of cooperation, collaboration and by inference of globalization.

Colonising Poso : the diary of Controleur Emile Gobee, June 1909 - May 1910

"While the colonisation of Central Sulawesi was a process that was unique to the particular demographic, social, political and economic characteristics of the region, in broad terms it replicated Dutch colonial policy and practice in the rest of the archipelago at the beginning of the 20th century. The diary of Aspirant Controleur Emile Gobee, records the process which imposed the relocation and resettlement of the Pamona people of the Poso region of Central Sulawesi into villages and therefore began a dramatic process of change. The document provides a rare example of the process of colonialism and goes to the heart of understanding the nature of the colonial project in the Dutch East Indies."--Publisher's website.
"The 1909-10 diary of Aspirant Controleur Emile Goběe, of Poso, Sulawesi in the Dutch East Indies, with a scholarly introduction that explains the significance of Dutch colonial and missionary intervention, which intentionally destroyed traditional cultures and lifestyles. During the time covered by this diary, the administration moved entire villages to places where they could be observed, changed their farming practices, and introduced trade and Christianity." -- Publisher.

The global classroom : effective subject and pedagogy design as positive aspects of globalization

The nature of pedagogy and the collaboration between international parties in subject design ameliorates some of the more negative characteristics of globalized education. I argue that the nature of globalization is to be found in the small and ongoing practices that constitute collaboration between differing parties. In this way, what globalization means is in fact constantly negotiated contingent and never settled. My argument is that reductive critiques of internationalization are far too simplistic. The example of EME 150 and the uptake through the Malaysian educational system of some of its components is an example not of ‘imposition’ or ‘imperialism’ but rather of a more negotiated and collaborative pedagogy that points to some of the benefits of cooperation, collaboration and by inference of globalization.

Adventurous girls of the empire : the pre-war novels of Bessie Marchant

Historically, the genre of adventure fiction most readily recalls books for boys and male heroes rather than girl readers and protagonists. These include enduringly well-known works such as H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), the early to mid-Victorian boys' stories of Frederick Marryat, W. H. G. Kingston, and R. M. Ballantyne and the late-Victorian G. A. Henty's tales (his more than one hundred adventure stories sold in excess of 25 million copies). The novel of adventure at the conclusion of the nineteenth century recounted tales of male exploration on land or sea, and quests or conquests in real or imagined lands removed from the gentility of civilized England. These generic features were aligned with masculine traits of activity and strength, and while girls could and did indeed read boys' adventure books, examples with female protagonists were uncommon in the Victorian period. Joseph Bristow argues that between 1870 and 1900, "narratives celebrating empire and techniques in teaching reading and writing gradually converged . . . [B]oth inside and outside the classroom, there was more and more emphasis on heroic adventure, and this involved a number of shifts in attitude towards juvenile publishing and curriculum design" (20–21). The works Bristow refers to were, of course, written by male authors about masculine adventurers.

The novels of Bessie Marchant—sometimes called "the girls' Henty" —began to be published as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Her girl heroines act independently in isolated areas in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South America, India, South Africa, Siberia, and Central America. From 1894 until her death in 1941, Marchant wrote more than a 130 novels, many of which celebrated the capacity of British or colonial girls to rise to any challenge set before them in rugged.

Be(ing) prepared : girl guides, colonial life, and national strength

This paper seeks to bridge a gap in feminist critique of gender and empire with regard to the founding of the Girl Guide movement in 1909. In contrast with previous studies of the Boy Scouts, which have briefly considered Guides as a mere derivative organisation, it suggests that the formation of the Guides, and printed material such as the first handbook How Girls Can Help Build Up the Empire (1912), were grounded in notions of the part which women, and girls specifically, could play in the imperial project. This paper proposes that, although tempered by an emphasis on raising children in order to prevent the “degeneration” of the British race, the Guide handbook permits increased non-domestic activity for Edwardian girls, which is justified by aims of preparing for home defence in case of foreign attack and for life in the colonies.

Jungle, desert, ice

Between 1884 and 1920 the Society was part of an intense period of international geographical interest, imperialism and nationalism. This empirical history shows that the Society sought to explore New Guinea, Northern and Central Australia, and Antarctica, pursuing issues of land use, labour and commercial development of these regions.

Water in the Indic Traditions

The essay critically discusses the predominant role played by water in the lives of people from Vedic times to the present day, in the Hindu world. A number of ceremonies both happy or auspicious-making and secular have been associated with water. Several hymns of the Vedas, Brāhmanas, Mahābhārata, Āgamic and Purānic texts are drawn upon to bring out the legends and myths, and genuine beliefs, connected with water that underscore the sacred and profane, purificatory, healing and resuscitating dimensions of water. The essay treats readers to many ancient motifs concerning the pervasive value and utility of water. These comprise, variously, sacrifice, fertility rites, water-medium birth, divine metamorphosis, self-conceiving cosmic birth, totemism life-cycle rites, sanctifications, consecration and installation of icons and edifices, food rituals, monsoon rites, to pacifications, possession and exorcism, death, after-life and rebirth rituals. Reference is also made to the ecology of water resources, the economy of water scarcity, ‘war-wars’ or water imperialism, and water justice in the socio-political arenas of post independent India, in a rapidly liberalising and globalising world. In that regard practical applications of the knowledge-base are explored through the work of NGOs and Water Swamis in the subcontinent.

Place-taking and place-making in waterfront renewal, Australia

Waterfront and port zones around the world have long been subject to change, as they have variously been used for trade, waste disposal, leisure and most recently for urban re-imagining, spectacle and lifestyle housing. While such a narrative has been well explored in the urban studies literature, another element of port development – its relation to imperialism and colonisation has not. In the case of colonized countries – such as Australia, but also Canada, the United States and across Africa and Asia – waterfronts were often the entry points of imperial occupancy and key sites for colonial trade and industry. Contestation over how to value and use these sites is integral to their constitution as landscapes, as place taking becomes part of their place making. It will be argued, using case studies drawn from Adelaide and Melbourne in Australia that these sites register a range of culturally-specific imprints connected to the colonisation process. For Indigenous Australians, sea country was indistinguishable from land, but subsequent assessments have seen land demarcated from the ocean, water defiled and obliterated, slums designated but then redeveloped and the Indigenous present rendered benign through its symbolic re-presentation. This post-colonial reading will correlate the divide between land and water with those who have the imperial and class power to define this elemental boundary to add a new dimension to studies of waterfronts.