Keynote Speakers (alphabetical order)
Associate Professor Anne BREWSTER (University of New South Wales)
“Protests and Secrets: Aboriginal Women’s Poetry”
Abstract to follow
Professor Helen GILBERT (Royal Holloway, University of London)
“Out of the Exhibition: Indigenous Performance in the Modern-day Museum”
This presentation examines metropolitan museum practice in Europe as reviewed from its Antipodean margins in the work of present-day Aboriginal and Maori artists and performance makers. The main focus is on theatrical engagements with ‘salvage ethnography’ and its paternalistic attempts to document indigenous cultures apparently on the verge of extinction. In particular, I analyse performances that imaginatively recuperate museum objects and images from the margins of colonial history. Such performances draw on the expressive energies of indigenous voices, bodies and stories to reposition indigeneity as a concept in transit, both historically and in the present, amid the intensifying intercultural contact zones that Western modernity has instantiated. Drawing on indicative examples from performers/artists such as George Nuku, Rosanna Raymond, Christian Thompson and Victoria Hunt, my larger aim is to probe possibilities for rethinking ‘salvage’ as an ephemeral artistic practice that forges new connections across time and place even while exposing the hidden histories of commodity circuits. As part of this conceptual exploration, I will discuss processes for translating my research into practical strategies for conceiving and staging an exhibition of indigenous performance in London in late 2013.
Professor Gail JONES (Writing and Society Research Centre, University of Western Sydney)
Mousterians of the Antipodes : marginal bodies and the untimeliness of colonial paradigms.
The repatriation of the decapitated head of Yagan, an Aboriginal freedom fighter from South Western Australia, forms the paradigmatic narrative of this paper. Buried in his homeland in 2010, 177 years late, this event recalls colonial barbarity and the mutilation of both bodies and time. In Australian studies, ‘margins’ are conventionally, indeed habitually, associated with the spatial imaginary, with tropes of centre and periphery, borderlands and badlands, and the physical and discursive exile of Aborigines from the power and possession of place. This paper considers the time of the margin, the governance in colonial and post colonial thinking of incommensurable time scales, anachrony and the ‘untimeliness’ of relations between settlers and indigenous people. Ranging over literature, visual art and colonial texts, and in the spirit of ‘provincializing Europe’, this view takes narratives of repatriation from Europe of Aboriginal remains - stories of untimely burial and desacralization – as exemplars of the detemporalized body committed to a kind of epistemological and ontological margin. The collection and dispersal of native remains is a well-known feature of colonial anthropology; here this practice is the basis for a meditation on the ethical implications of distance, the margin imagined as faraway and pre-historical.
Dr. Philip McLAREN
“Thaw-uma-li: coals for cooking in, or food for thought.”
Are our Aboriginal cultures, languages and beliefs systems being accurately portrayed in fiction? Millions of readers of fiction featuring Indigenous Australians accept such expressions as researched factual accounts of Australian Aboriginality. Should we accept such books as real Australian history?
When a writer approaches a new work she/he considers many elements and eventualities before the writing commences. Writing is produced within a particular historical moment and may be interpreted differently in the writer/reader exchange –narrative and ideology – intention and understanding come into play.
In my paper I will use a selection of literature that uses misinformation and stereotyping of Indigenous Australians, providing readers internationally with erroneously views; and I will contrast it with other works that have been painstakingly researched and carefully presented. And I will include on-topic interviews that I conducted with Kim Scott, Thomas Keneally and Kate Grenville.