Journal articles on the topic 'Child witnesses Australia'

Courthouse facility dogs are increasingly used to support child witnesses and complainants during testimony in courtrooms across the globe. Although already commonplace in the United States, this practice has been largely unexplored in the Australian context. This paper puts forward the case for courthouse facility dogs in Australia and offers some insight into striking the delicate balance between protecting defendants’ rights to a fair trial, and improving the efficiency and quality of the legal system for vulnerable witnesses and victims.

Witness statements are important piece of evidence in criminal proceedings. Investigative interviews with witnesses are conducted in various stages of the investigative process, and the person conducting the investigative interview must take into account internal and external factors, that influence the quality of witnesses’ statements. The paper gives a systematic overview of the ways of improving the quality of investigative interviews of adult witnesses carried out by investigators, on the basis of a survey of the literature available from continental Europe but also Common Law countries (such as the UK, the US, and Australia). Even though detailed instructions and in-depth training programmes are available, today’s training consists largely of theoretical classroom lectures of a short-term nature that feature minimal practical tasks. Teaching methods of this type are effective in increasing knowledge but fail to transfer the knowledge into practice. Accordingly, the authors found that the training should be more practically oriented, have a longer duration, and incorporate personalised feedback in order to situate the knowledge in practice. In addition, several new computer-based approaches have been developed to help overcome the limitations identified. These provide a more personalised and flexible approach to learning, yet room still exists for further development. The paper concludes by addressing how work in the field of interviewing child and adult witnesses could develop in the future.

AbstractRisk assessments by expert witnesses appointed by the Family Court of Australia (FCA), and as informed by findings of any investigations by police and child protection agencies, play a critical role in the adjudication of custody disputes involving allegations of child sex abuse. This study focuses on the contribution made by these independent advisors as documented in the FCA trial transcripts of a sample of 62 such cases in the period 2012–2016. Analysis reveals that those responsible for assessing risk shared a concern for an emerging pattern of applicant responsibility for systems abuse, in conjunction with emotional abuse, as a significant child protection issue. It also raises issues for the Court when there are multiple risk assessments coming from experts who bring different disciplinary and organisational perspectives. As an exploratory study, the implications of these findings need to be viewed through the lens of protecting the best interests of the child.

Special measures have been implemented across the globe to improve evidence procedures in child sexual assault trials. The present study explored the day-to-day experiences and views on their use by five groups of Australian criminal justice practitioners (N = 335): judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers, police officers and witness assistance officers. Most practitioners reported routine use of pre-recorded police interviews and CCTV cross-examination of child complainants, but rare use with vulnerable adults. Despite persistent technical difficulties and lengthy waiting times for witnesses, high consensus emerged that special measures enhanced trial fairness and jury understanding. The perceived impact of special measures on conviction rates diverged widely. Defence lawyers disputed that this evidence was as reliable as in-person testimony. All practitioner groups endorsed expanded use of expert witness evidence and witness intermediaries. Ongoing professional development in all practitioner groups will further enhance justice outcomes for victims of child sexual abuse.

Purpose – Interviewing victims of child sex abuse requires considerable care in order to minimise error. Due to children’s heightened suggestibility any question asked of a child could potentially incite error that could undermine the witness’s credibility. A focus group was conducted in order to facilitate the development of guidance for interviewers around the circumstances in which it is necessary to ask children follow-up questions in an interview. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Seven Crown prosecutors representing every Australian state and territory (with the exception of one small state) were issued with 25 hypothetical narrative accounts of child abuse and asked to indicate what information, if any, required follow-up in the child’s narrative. Their responses and rationale for requiring following up in some cases and not others were discussed. Findings – Thematic analysis revealed three recommendations to guide questioning: whether the case involved identification or recognition evidence; the presence of contextual features that may influence the witness’s memory, or that should trigger a particular line of questioning; and whether the information can or should be sought at a later stage by the trial prosecutor, rather than by the interviewer. Practical implications – The recommendations are discussed within the context of their implications for interviewing, that is, how each recommendation could be implemented in practice. Originality/value – The present study extends prior literature by elucidating principles to guide decision making across interview topic areas. The need for such guidance is highlighted by research suggesting that topics such as offender identity, offence time and place, and witnesses are a source of overzealous questioning in interviews.

The past several decades have witnessed a shift toward victim interests being considered and incorporated within adversarial systems of justice. More recently, some jurisdictions have somewhat contentiously considered granting sex offences complainants’ legal representation at trial. In Australia, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse (2017), the Royal Commission into Family Violence (2016) and the Victorian Law Reform Commission (2016) considered the potential role of legal counsel for complainants in the criminal trial process. While contrasting quite significantly with the traditional adversarial framework—which sees crime as contested between state and accused—legal representation for complainants is not unprecedented, and victims may already retain counsel for limited matters. Despite broader use of victim legal representation in the United States, Ireland and Scotland, and as recently considered by the Sir John Gillen Review in Northern Ireland, legal representation for sex offences complainants is only just developing in Australia. Notwithstanding recent reference to legal representation for complainants where sexual history or reputational evidence may be adduced, there exists no sufficient guidance as to how such representation may be integrated in the Australian criminal trial context. This article explores the implications of introducing such counsel in Australia, including the possible role of non-legal victim advocates.

There is now increasing recognition that child abuse and domestic violence are not separate phenomena and ‘witnessing’ domestic violence can seriously affect children. This paper reports on a qualitative research project undertaken by researchers from the University of South Australia from June 1998 to January 1999, as part of the Commonwealth and States’ Partnerships Against Domestic Violence initiative. The focus of the research was on assessing the needs of women, men and young people who have experienced domestic violence in South Australia. The participants identified many ‘effects’ of witnessing or experiencing domestic violence on children, along with their needs. The findings will inform early intervention campaigns as well as broader service systems in supporting and responding to the needs of these young people.

Inappropriate or incorrect use of child restraints can influence crash injury outcome. This study examined the role of restraint factors in child passenger deaths and the effect of legislation requiring appropriate restraint systems up to 7 years old. Data for child (0–12 years) passenger deaths occurring in New South Wales (NSW) from 2007 to 2016 were collected by the child death review team including photographs, reports of in-depth crash investigation, witness reports and medical reports. Restraint use, type of restraint, appropriateness of the restraint for the age of the child and correctness of restraint use were examined. The primary contributor to death was determined in each case. Sixty-four child passengers died in NSW during the data period. Twenty-nine (29/64, 45%) were properly restrained. Thirteen children (13/64, 20%) were unrestrained. In 20 cases (20/64, 31%), children were using a restraint that was either inappropriate for their age (6) or not used correctly (14). Restraint factors were a primary contributor in 22 (22/64, 34%) child deaths. Compared to pre-legislation, appropriate restraint use was more common post-legislation (13/22. 59% vs. 30/42, 71%). However, incorrect use was also greater (3/22, 14% vs. 11/42, 26%). Interventions targeting increasing restraint use and reduction of common ‘use’ errors are needed to prevent further restraint factor-related deaths.

Cases of historic child assault typically rely on the complainant's narrative due to lack of corroborating evidence. Although it is important that complainants give their best evidence, concern has been expressed that evidence-sharing procedures are suboptimal. This study explored criminal justice professionals’ perspectives on the utility of introducing reforms to the evidence-sharing process. We interviewed judges, prosecutors, defence counsel and witness assistance officers ( N = 43) on the utility of regulating the questioning of complainants and of using video-recorded interviews as evidence-in-chief. Many professionals perceived that adult complainants of child assault were vulnerable and supported reforms to evidence-sharing. Primary objections to these reforms were the belief that all adult complainants should share evidence in the same way and the poor quality of investigative interviews. This study illuminates potential barriers to the implementation of reforms which would change how adult complainants of child assault give evidence.

In two decisions handed down in 2016, the High Court of Australia considered legal measures designed to deal with children in the criminal justice system in an age-appropriate manner. The first case, The Queen v GW, was a prosecution appeal involving the unsworn evidence of a child witness. In this decision, the High Court reviewed the common law and statutory background to unsworn evidence, and gave important guidance on the proper approach to dealing with such evidence in proceedings. The second case was RP v The Queen, which involved the criminal responsibility of a child defendant, and in particular the application of the doli incapax presumption. In this decision, the High Court reviewed the common law background to doli incapax, and gave guidance on its application in criminal proceedings. This commentary discusses both cases and the principles underlying the High Court’s reasoning.

Abstract The paper documents child poverty levels and trends using both relative (‘deep’) and absolute (‘extreme’) measures in two clusters: Anglo-Saxon high-income countries and upper middle-income countries. We also investigate the influence of different components of household income and other resources on child deep-poverty rates to examine the role of the market and the redistributive effects that materialize through private transfers, public benefits, and tax systems on generating poverty reduction. Overall, middle-income nations have witnessed continuous reductions in their extreme child poverty rates, while mild decreases or fluctuations have been observed in the five high-income nations, with the US highlighted by its relatively high rates of deep and extreme poverty regardless of absolute or relative measures and type of equivalence scale used. Private institutions play a larger role in poverty reduction in middle-income nations compared to its impact on developed nations. The degree of dependence on universal or assistance benefits varies among high-income nation. In the US, universal programs tend to be meager, while Australian social insurance and universal benefit are robust in their fight against deep poverty. Brazil stands out by its overwhelmingly large proportion of social insurance programs that contribute to improvements of its deep child poverty situation, and South Africa’s assistance benefit system performs better in lifting children out of deep poverty.

eader witnesses an Australian wishfulness read in the triumphant adventures of the small – of domestic objects brought to life through the imagination of children. In McFadyen’s highly didactic tales, clothes pegs stolen and deliberately misused come to embody an understated national ethos with biblical pretensions. The Peg family sail the world in their “Ark”, spreading antipodean wonder, cheer and ingenuity everywhere they go. The Pegs themselves – as home-made toys – represent the imaginative ingenuity of Australian children. These are toys any child could make, and so may be read as a social leveller. The dream bringing them to life is that of decent, healthy children and the Pegs (as post-war family, sans father, strive to set themselves and the world good standards). Every anthropomorphism is deservedly read as comment on the human race or some department or aspect of it, and in this case it is Australian class, race and national pretensions which are promoted through the vehicle of mainly exemplary characters who, in their travels – for the sake of plot – negotiate a series of mildly ethical crises, and always come out smiling. This paper proceeds by considering the issues raised above in relation a small number of episodes from the tales: these dealing with the invasion of rogue mice, the creation of the Pegmen, with Pongo (from the Congo) and the Australian Aborigines, with the Peg’s expedition to Antarctica and with the metamorphosis of swagmen into grey kangaroos. Race and Nation in Ella McFadyen’s Pegmen Tales

Historically, forest ecosystem services have been undervalued or not valued at all, thus encouraging the destruction and conversion of our global forest estate. Fortunately, these last decades have witnessed a real shift – the active and innovative development of markets and payments for the ecosystem values of forests and other ecosystems. Payments for Environmental Services programs are now in place around the globe. Schemes focused on forest carbon, such as the California Cap-and-Trade law, programs in China and Colombia, South Korea and Chile, coupled with new initiatives in the aviation sector, point to steady progress toward the carbon/climate value of forests. Innovative green infrastructure initiatives around water and watersheds in Peru, Costa Rica, Australia and South Africa provide another growing stream of value for forests. And sustainable commodity supply chains and conservation banking bring more large-scale private sector actors and new business sectors to the table. Here we provide a global status of PES around the world.

In the recent years, we have witnessed a sharp increase in the number of free trade agreements (FTAs) with gender-related provisions. The key champions of this evolution include Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Australia and Uruguay. These countries have proposed a new paradigm, i.e. a paradigm where FTAs are considered vehicles to achieving the economic empowerment of women. This trend is spreading like a wild-fire to other parts of the world. More and more countries are expressing their interest in ensuring that their FTAs are genderresponsive and not simply gender-neutral or gender-blind in nature. The momentum is on, and we can expect many more agreements in the future to include stand-alone chapters or exclusive provisions on gender issues. This article is an attempt to tap into this ongoing momentum, as it puts forward a newly designed self-evaluation maturity framework to measure gender-responsiveness of trade agreements. The proposed framework is to help policy-makers and negotiators to: (1) measure gender-responsiveness of trade agreements; (2) identify areas where agreements need critical improvements; and (3) receive recommendations to improve the gender-fabric of trade agreements that they are negotiating or have already negotiated. This is the first academic intervention presenting this type of gender-responsiveness model for trade agreements.

We are very pleased to bring you Volume 45 of The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education. At this moment in time, we feel that the work of AJIE has perhaps never been more important, particularly as it relates to engaging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and communities in systems of schooling. In May this year we witnessed the evacuation of school teachers from the remote community of Aurukun, Queensland in fear of violence. A group of 15 disengaged young people had threatened the School Principal and as a consequence of the evacuation, 300 engaged children were subsequently disengaged from School for the remaining five weeks of term following the closure. There is no doubt that teacher safety is paramount, similarly, there should be no doubt that community consultation and engagement in a move like this one equally so. The questions which hang in the air relate to why such levels of disengagement exist. Why are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people disengaged from schooling in Aurukun? What makes it okay that a large number of engaged Indigenous children were forcibly made to disengage from school? Why is there such disengagement from government in engaging local people in the ways in which education business is carried out with and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and communities? The papers in this volume of AJIE then, all speak strongly to issues of engagement – the kinds of pedagogy and curriculum that can and should be in place, the kinds of relationships that can and should be in place, and the kinds of outcomes made possible when such educational moves are made. A resounding message from all of the articles in this volume is that the on-going engagement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, parents, and communities is key to defining and achieving what educational success might mean for each individual child, context and classroom. This is by no means a new message, but the recent events in Aurukun remind us that it is one we must keep returning to – the stakes for complacency and forgetting are too high.

CairnsIn Denmark, the term stenkast (a ‘stone throw’) is used for cairns – stone heaps that have accumulated in places where it was the tradition to throw a stone. A kast (a ‘throw’) would actually be a more correct term, as sometimes the heaps consist of sticks, branches, heather, or peat, rather than stones – in short, whichever was at hand at that particular place. A kast could also consist of both sticks and stones.The majority of the known Danish cairns were presented by August F. Schmidt in 1929. Since then, numerous new ones have been discovered, and we now know of around 80 cairns, cf. the list on page 264 and map Fig. 3. It appears from the descriptions that the majority – a total of 65 – are actual cairns, 14 are heaps of branches, whereas two are described as either peat or heather heaps.Geographically, the majority – a total of 53 – are found in Jutland, with most in North and Central Jutland (Fig. 3). Fifteen are known from Zealand, four from Lolland, four from Funen, and five from Bornholm.Topographically, they are found – naturally – where people would normally be passing: next to roads and in connection with sacred springs, chapels, and places of execution. However, they also occur in less busy places, in woods, along the coast, on moors, and on small islands.A few cairns have been preserved because they are still “active” as reminiscences of customs and habits of past times. This is the case of the cairn called Røsen (“røse” being another Danish term for a cairn) on Trøstrup Moor (no. 45, Fig. 1-2), of Heksens Grav (“The Witch’s Grave”) (no. 27, Fig. 4), and of the branch heap in the wood of Slotved Skov (no. 14, Fig. 5), which was recently revived after having been almost forgotten. Other cairns are maintained as prehistoric relics, as is the case of the branch heap by the name of Stikhoben (“The Stick Heap;” no. 10, Fig. 6) and Kjelds Grav (“Kjeld’s Grave,” no. 59, Fig. 7). Although heaps of stones and branches are included in the Danish Protection of Nature Act as relics of the past worthy of protection, so far merely the two latter have been listed.Whereas the remaining ’throws’ of organic material have probably disintegrated, it is still possible under favourable conditions to retrieve those made from more enduring materials – unless they have been demolished – even if they have practically sunk into oblivion (Figs. 8-10).The oldest known cairn is almost 500 years old. It was situated by the ford Præstbjerg Vad in Vinding parish near the Holstebro-Ribe highroad. Tradition says that the stone heap came into existence as a memorial of a priest in Hanbjerg, who died in the first half of the 16th century following a fall with his horse.Such legends of origin are connected with most of the Danish cairns. They usually tell of some unhappy or alarming happening supposed to have occurred at the place in question. However, they are often so vague and stereotype that they can only rarely be dated or put into a historical context. Indeed, on closer examination several of them turn out to be travelling legends. Apart from the legend of the murdered tradesman, they comprise the legend of the exorcised farmhand and that of the three sisters, who were murdered by three robbers, who turned out to be their own brothers. The latter legend, which is also known from a folksong, is connected to the so-called Varper on the high moor in Pedersker parish on Bornholm (no. 7). Until the early 20th century, it was the custom to maintain these cairns by putting back stones that had fallen down and adorn them with green sprigs. Early folklorists interpreted this as a tradition going back to an old sacrificial ritual, although the custom also seems to have had a pure practical purpose, as these stone heaps were originally cairns marking the road across inland Bornholm.A special group of the Danish cairns are connected with the tradition that someone is buried underneath them, such as a body washed ashore, a murdered child from a clandestine childbirth, a murdered person, several persons killed in a fight, an exorcised farmhand, a suicide, a murderer buried on his scene of crime, or witches and murderers buried at the place of execution. In all these cases, the throwing of a stone was supposed to protect the passers-by against the dead, who was buried in unconsecrated grounds and thus, according to public belief, haunted the spot. Another far less frequent explanation was that the stone was thrown in order to achieve a good journey or luck at the market. In some places, the traveller would throw the stone while shouting a naughty word or in other ways showing his disgust with the dead witch, criminal, or infanticide buried in that particular place. In rather a lot of the cases, as explained by the context, the cairn was merely a memorial to some unhappy occurrence, and the stone was thrown in memory of the deceased.In an article on Norwegian cairns written by the folklorist Svale Solheim, the author attached importance to achieving a clear picture of the position of the cairns (kastrøysarne) in the landscape. A closer examination showed that almost all were situated by the side of old roads – between farms and settlements, through forests, or across mountains – in short, where people would often walk. “The cairns follow the road as the shadow follows the man,” Solheim writes and gives an example of an old road, which had been relocated, and where the cairns had been moved to the new road. Furthermore, the position of the cairns along the roads turned out to not be accidental; they were always found at places that were in one way or other interesting to the travellers. This is why Solheim thought that the stone heaps mostly had the character of cairns or road stones thrown together at certain places for a pure practical purpose. “For instance,” he writes, “we find stone heaps at places along the roads where there is access to fine drinking water. These would also be natural places for a rest, and numerous stone heaps are situated by old resting places. And so it came natural to mark these places by piling up a stone heap, and of course it would be in every traveller’s interest to maintain the heaps.”The older folklore saw the tradition as a relic of pagan rituals and conceptions. As a reaction to this, Solheim and others took a tradition-functionalistic view, according to which most folklore, as seen in the light of the cultural conditions, was considered rational and the rest could be explained as pseudo beliefs, for instance educational fiction and tomfoolery.However, if we turn to our other neighbouring country, Sweden, it becomes more difficult to explain away that we are dealing with sacrificial rites, as here, the most used dialectal term for the stone and branch piles were offerhög, offervål, or offerbål (“offer” is the Swedish word for sacrifice), and when someone threw stones, sticks, or money on the pile, it was called “sacrificing.” An article from 1929 by the anthropologist Sigurd Erixon is especially interesting. Here, he documents how – apart from the cairns with a death motive (largely corresponding to the Danish cases mentioned above), Sweden had both good luck and misfortune averting sacrificial stone throwing (Fig. 13).Whereas the sacrificial cairns connected to deaths were evenly distributed across the whole country, Erixon found that the “good luck cairns” occurred mainly in environments associated with mountain pasture farming or fishing. Based on this observation and desultory comparative studies, Erixon formed the hypothesis that the “good luck cairns” represented an older and more primitive culture than the cairns associated with sacrifices to the dead. “The first,” he writes, “belong rather more to the work area of hunting, fishing, and animal husbandry, roads, and environments, whereas the death sacrificial cairns seem to be closer related to the culture of agriculture.”The problem with the folkloristic material is that most of it is based on reminiscences. In order to study the living tradition, one must turn elsewhere. However, as demonstrated by James Frazer in “The Golden Bough,” this is no problem, as the custom of throwing stones in a pile is known from all over the world, from Africa, Europe, and Asia to Australia and America (Fig. 14).Customs last, their meanings perish – the explanation why, for instance, one must throw a stone onto a stone pile, may be forgotten, or reinterpreted, or get a completely new explanation. The custom probably goes back further than any known religion. However, these have all tried to tally the stone throwing with their “theology.” In Ancient Greece, the stone piles by the roadsides were furnished with statues of Hermes (in the shape of a post with a head and sometimes a phallus). As an escort for the dead, Hermes became the god of the travellers, and just as the gods had thrown stones after Hermes when he was accused of murdering Argus, people could now do the same.With the introduction of Christianity, the throwing of stones was denounced as superstition, and a standard question for the penitents in the so-called books of penance was: “Have you carried stones to a heap?” All across Europe, crosses were planted in the stone heaps – which must have caused problems as it was considered a deadly sin to throw stones after a cross. In the culture connected with pilgrimage, the cairns got a new meaning as markers of important places. For instance, enormous stone piles outside Santiago de Compostela mark the location where pilgrims first spotted the towers of the city’s cathedral (Fig. 15). At many places, the cairns were consecrated to saints, so that now people would carry stones to them as a sacrifice or a penance. The jews also adopted the custom. The Old Testament mentions stone heaps gathered over murdered persons or placed around a larger stone, as the “witness dolmen” built by Jacob and his people to commemmorate his pact with Laban, his father-in-law. However, there is no mention of throwing new stones onto these heaps. However, the latter occurs in the still practiced Jewish custom of placing stones on the gravestones when Jews visit the graves of their dead (Fig. 16).Stone throwing in a Muslim context is illustrated by Edward Westermarck’s large investigation of rituals and popular belief with the Berbers and the Arabs in Marocco in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, it only comprises cairns connected to Muslim saints, but even with this limitation, the investigation gives an idea of the variety of applications. If the stone heap is situated near the grave of a saint, it may mark the demarcation of the sacred area, or it may have come into existence because the wayfaring have a habit of throwing a stone when they pass the grave of a saint, which they do not have time to visit. If the heap is situated on a ridge, it is usually an indication of the spot on a certain pilgrim route where the sacred places become visible for the first time. Other stone heaps mark the places where a holy man or woman is supposed to have been buried, or rested, or camped some time. By a large crossroads outside Andira, Westermark was shown a stone heap, which indicated that this place was the gathering place for saints, who met there at nighttime. The sacred cairns in Marocco are often easily recognized by the fact that they are chalked white at intervals. At some places, the cairns may also be marked with a pole with a white flag symbolising the sacred character of the place.Even Buddhism struggled against the stone heaps, especially in the form of the oboo cult, which was repeatedly reformered and reinterpreted by Buddhist missionaries. And in early 17th-century South America, the converted aristocratic Inca, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, made sarcastic remarks about Indians, who “even now” had preserved the bad habit of [sacrificing to] stone heaps (apachitas).”Historically, the Danish cairns can be documented from the 16th century, but the tradition may well be older. Seen in a larger, comparative context, heaps of stones and branches represent an ancient tradition rooted in the deepest cultural layers of mankind. Thus, as cultural relics, they are certainly worthy of preservation, and we ought to put a lot of effort into preserving the few still existing.Whereas it will probably be difficult to establish possible prehistoric stone heaps using archaeology, the possibilities of documenting hitherto unknown stone piles from historical times is considerably higher, if special topographic conditions are taken into consideration. In connection with small mounds on tidal meadows or stone heaps along stretches of old roads and by fords, old places of execution, springs, and grave mounds used secondarily for gallows, one should pay attention to such structures, which may well prove to be covering a grave.In a folklore context, the Danish stone heaps must be characterized as mainly “death sacrifice throws,” whereas only few were “good luck throws.” Due to the limited size of the country, and early farming, cairns and other road marks have not played the same role as a help for travellers and traffic as it did in our neighbouring countries with their huge waste areas.If the stone piles are considered part of a thousands of years old chain of traditions, they belong to the oldest human “monuments.” The global distribution of the phenomenon endows it with a mystery, which, during a travel in Mongolia, Haslund-Christensen caught with a stroke of genius: “We stood before an oboo, one of the largest I have ever seen...one of those mysterious places of sacrifice which are still secretly preserved, built of stone cast upon stone through many generations; a home of mystery which has its roots in the origin of the people itself, and whose religious significance goes much further back in time than any of the religions in the modern world.”Gustav HenningsenDansk Folkemindesamling Jesper LaursenMoesgård Museum Translated by Annette Lerche Trolle

Exposure to parental violence can have devastating consequences for children, including significant personal, social, and academic problems. The present study determined the situational factors that are associated with children’s exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) incidents. To examine whether these factors were unique to child witnesses’ presence at IPV incidents, we also determined the factors that are associated with children’s exposure to family violence (FV) and other family member witnesses’ exposure to IPV incidents. Participants responded to an online panel survey investigating the role of alcohol and other drugs in family and domestic violence incidents in Australia. Nine hundred fifty-two respondents reported an IPV incident and 299 reported an FV incident; they provided details about their most recent incident. Results showed that child witnesses were more likely to be present during IPV incidents if the incident took place at home (odds ratio [OR] = 3.10), if a similar incident had occurred previously (OR = 1.66), if drugs were involved (OR = 1.60), and if a police report was made (OR = 2.61). There was some overlap with the other witness and violence combinations: The presence of a police report also predicted child witnesses’ presence at FV incidents, and a home location also predicted other family member witnesses’ presence at IPV incidents. These results enhance our understanding of the situations in which children might witness IPV incidents; future research is needed to determine whether these situational factors can be used to judge risk.

The 37th Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) witnessed some painful political inflammation in 2006. Its October annual heads of government meeting, held in Fiji, saw Australian prime minister John Howard face a Melanesian wall of resentment. This was instigated by a row that erupted over former Solomon Islands attorney general Julian Moti, an Australian lawyer facing extradition over child sex charges, who was sheltered by Solomon Island prime minister Manasseh Sogavare and his Papua New Guinea counterpart, Sir Michael Somare. With Australian impatience and willingness to assert aid conditionality, the temperature rose sharply. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer claimed that taxpayers deserved a far better return for what had been invested in the region.

In 2017, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended reforms to the law of competence of child witnesses. We examined Australian judges’ practices in assessing children’s competence to give sworn evidence. Trial transcripts from 56 victims revealed that 64% were posed competence questions, with fewer to older children. The most frequent manner of posing such questions was to ask children to evaluate the morality of truths and lies. Most questions were yes-no format, and children nearly always answered these satisfactorily. When questions were ‘wh-’ format, children provided a satisfactory response only 51% of the time. Only nine children testified unsworn, and they were asked more than twice as many competence questions as sworn children. Competence inquiries have been challenged for underestimating children’s abilities, and because responses to questions about truths and lies are not predictive of behaviour. We discuss how reforms could be implemented.

Although the impact of child sexual abuse (CSA) is well documented in the international literature, little is known about the critical points of recovery across the life course for survivors of institutional CSA. The aim of this study was to identify critical points, or events across the life course that may increase, or decrease, a survivor’s vulnerability to the complex traumatization of institutional CSA (ICSA). The sample consisted of two hundred and forty-eight witness statements extracted from the 56 publicly available case studies presented to the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse during 2013–2016 (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017). A content analysis and thematic coding of the statements identified seven main themes in the witness statements (Gender, Organization, Triggers, Trauma, Mental Health, Intervention and Compensation), that appeared to be critical events across the life course. The themes were transformed into variables for further analysis using SPSS. Significant Likelihood Ratios were found between associations with the organization where the abuse occurred and between triggers and breastfeeding/sensory, breast feeding/childcare, emotional and physical distress, and mental health ( p < 0.01). Significant associations were also found between receiving compensation for the CSA and triggers, trauma, breast feeding-sensory and childcare ( p < 0.05) and gender and breast feeding ( p < 0.05). Overall, the findings showed that triggers can be random across the life course occurring mainly through indirect association, or in situations that evoke memories of the CSA, and that receiving compensation can assist survivors in their recovery journey. The findings also indicate the need for health care professionals to be aware of the critical points in a CSA survivor’s recovery and how triggers may impact on their mental welling throughout the life course.

Child sexual assault (CSA) cases reliant on uncorroborated testimony yield low conviction rates. Past research demonstrated a strong relationship between verdict and juror CSA knowledge such as typical delays in reporting by victims, and perceived victim credibility. This trial simulation experiment examined the effectiveness of interventions by an expert witness or an educative judicial direction in reducing jurors' CSA misconceptions. Participants were 885 jurors in New South Wales, Australia. After viewing a professionally acted video trial, half the jurors rendered individual verdicts and half deliberated in groups of 8–12 before completing a post-trial questionnaire. Multilevel structural equation modeling exploring the relationship between CSA knowledge and verdict demonstrated that greater CSA knowledge after the interventions increased the odds ratio to convict by itself, and that the judicial direction predicted a higher level of post-trial CSA knowledge in jurors than other expert interventions. Moreover, greater CSA knowledge was associated with heightened credibility perceptions of the complainant and a corroborating witness. At the conclusion of the trial, the more jurors knew about CSA, the higher the perceived credibility of both the complainant and her grandmother, and the more likely jurors were to convict the accused.

Abstract This article explores a lifetime involved in the child protection system from a unique autoethnographic perspective. Providing a descriptive account of the negative language, stereotypes and expectations, I have both experienced and witnessed in Victoria, Australia, I examine how the nexus between records, recordkeeping practices, the legal system, rights and Care experienced people perpetuates discrimination, and disadvantage and denies Care experienced people their rights. As research has grown, so has the recognition of the importance of recordkeeping to Care experienced people. This has been followed by demands that records be inclusive of the child, providing greater agency and autonomy. Academic and some Care experienced people are now seeking a Charter of Lifelong Rights in Childhood Recordkeeping in Out-of-Home Care. However, I recommend that there is a fundamental need to examine and understand the nexus between records, recordkeeping practices, the legal system, rights and Care experienced people. All the reforms, policies and legislative changes to date, have made little difference to the reality of Care experienced people. This nexus which I refer to as the inextricable conflict must be understood and addressed in ongoing research to avoid further ineffective reforms, policy and legislative amendments to ensure rights are enjoyed by all.

This paper explores the factors that lead to increased carbon dioxide emissions in the 18 countries of the APEC. We apply the LMDI multiplicative decomposing method to 18 countries between 1971 and 2012. We summarize these factors that are as follows: (1) population increase and economic growth play a key role in increased carbon dioxide emissions. (2) All the 18 countries of the APEC have improved their energy efficiency as manifested in the change of energy intensity ([Formula: see text]), which is less than 1 in the 42 years; (3) In terms of energy substitution effect ([Formula: see text]) and fuel coefficient effect ([Formula: see text]), the decomposition results point out that Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia witnessed growth in [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], indicating the only factor to reduce the emissions for these three countries is intensity effect, which gives rise to relatively higher emission for these three countries during the period. In the case of Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, we witnessed increases in [Formula: see text], but decreases in [Formula: see text]; In the case of Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Taiwan, and the US, there seem to decrease in [Formula: see text], but increases in [Formula: see text] during the 42-year period.

Our capacity to tell stories is a skill that can be considered both natural and learned. Storytelling and oral history are parts of all human societies, and we seek to understand ourselves and each other through our stories. Our individual and collective memories collide in our stories, and reconcile to construct what Kansteiner calls our "collectively shared representations of the past" (182). It is our personal narratives that are the building blocks to public understanding, and as Harter, Japp and Beck maintain in Narratives, Health and Healing, "narrative is a fundamental human way of giving meaning to experience" (3). Adding to this idea of narrative as way of illuminating meaning, Goodall posits narrative as also being a way of knowing and as a research methodology, stating "narrative provides us with a range of forms and styles for discovering meaning and communicating it to readers through stories. It is an epistemology" (13). This re-imaging and re-purposing of narrative and storytelling has the capacity to significantly influence and shift the ways in which cultural and social research is carried out. This emerging approach can also influence the ways we understand the experiences of marginalised groups, and consequently how we respond to issues around social inclusion through policy and community based solutions. For researchers personal stories and narratives have the capacity to illuminate the nuances of broad issues; this potential also means that seemingly intractable social problems are given a human face with which to engage. It is in this way that personal narratives energise public narratives and shape our ways of thinking and collective understandings (Harter et al. 4). This paper investigates a digital storytelling project conducted in late 2009 with a group of Forgotten Australians in the months leading up to the public apology in the Australian Parliament, and how the personal stories of the participants brought to life previous research about the marginalisation of individuals who had experienced out-of-home care as children. This paper also explores how the endemic, institutionalised abuse of a group of people was translated to the broader community and galvanised support through the impact of their personal stories. Digital Storytelling As a dynamic practice storytelling, in all its forms, must be nurtured and developed if it is to contribute to the lives of individuals and communities. The number of storytelling, and in particular digital storytelling, initiatives and projects in Australia has increased rapidly since the early 2000s, and are utilised by various public and community organisations for a variety of reasons. Digital technology has had a profound impact on the ability for "ordinary" people to tell their stories, and research has identified the potential of digital storytelling in these contexts to assist in the representation of multiple voices and viewpoints in society through inclusive processes of co-creation (cf. see Burgess; Hartley, Uses and "TV"; Klaebe and Burgess). The storytelling project that forms the basis for this paper used some traditional written storytelling practices but was mainly concerned with digital storytelling. Digital stories are generally a two to four minute multi-media story that uses photographs, film and drawings to convey a personal story which the author narrates in their own voice over the series of images. Much has been, and continues to be written, about digital storytelling as a site of participatory culture and as a means of improving digital literacy in pockets of the community traditionally absent in the realm of digital citizenship (cf. Hartley, Uses; Hartley and McWilliam; Burgess; Meadows; Lundby). As Hartley points out digital storytelling has become such a compelling medium in which to record stories in communities because it "fills a gap between everyday cultural practice and professional media" (Uses 122). As a means of creating narratives digital storytelling has proven to be a significant mode, due in part to its ability to reach a large number of people relatively easily. The rise of digital storytelling partially mirrors the broad shift towards more participatory online culture that privileges user generated content and ordinary voices over official content. The origins of digital storytelling lie in a response to the absence of "ordinary" voices in mainstream media and policy making and grew with the increasing affordability of digital technology. The potential for social inclusion and participation along with the promise of self-representation is implicit in the discourse surrounding digital storytelling. "The ability to express oneself in digital media and in the case of digital storytelling using digital video editing, has become a central literary for full participation in society" (Lambert 85). Social Inclusion in an Australian context is defined by the Australian Government as all Australians feeling valued and having "the opportunity to participate fully in the life of our society. Achieving this vision means that all Australians will have the resources, opportunities and capability to" learn, work, engage in the community and have a voice (Social Inclusion Unit). The aims articulated by Lambert in the previous paragraph and the philosophy of social inclusion and the belief that individual stories have the capacity to impact on national agendas and policy lay at the heart of the digital storytelling project outlined later in this paper. The Forgotten Australians As cohort the Forgotten Australians are defined as individuals who were removed from their families, or were orphaned or child immigrants from the United Kingdom. These children were placed in institutions where they suffered abuse or neglect between 1930 and 1970, and it is estimated that up approximately 500,000 children were placed in out of home care during this time. In November 2009 the Australian Parliament delivered a bi-partisan apology to the Forgotten Australians for the pain and suffering they experienced in church and state run institutions. The stories of the Forgotten Australians were beginning to make their way into the consciousness of the Australian public in the lead up to the apology through documentaries on the national broadcasting service and stories in the mainstream media. Like most large groups the demographic of the Forgotten Australians is diverse, within those who identify as part of this group are successful and well-known Australians, along with ordinary Australians many of whom have struggled significantly as a direct result of their childhood experiences. Those involved in this project were considered to be individuals who were quite profoundly marginalised in mainstream society. A number lived with mental illness, the majority lacked stable housing and all had been severely emotionally, physically and sexually abused during their time in State or Church run institutions as children. The apology to the Forgotten Australians was preceded many years of advocacy and activism by community groups and individuals. They utilised personal stories, the digitisation of records and as the apology drew closer a number of digital storytelling projects to bring the personal narratives into the public arena in the hope of affecting change. Stories from these projects were broadcast across a variety of platforms such as YouTube, the websites for the major advocacy groups and community organisations and more recently the National Library Australia website. The stories differed from site to site and served different functions depending on the place from which they were disseminated. Hildebrand identifies the role of YouTube as a site for the intersection of personal experience, popular culture and historical narratives, and, as such, a vehicle for cultural memory "allow[ing] users to seek out the media texts that have shaped them and that would otherwise be forgotten in 'objective' histories" (54). YouTube videos relevant to the Forgotten Australians ranged from locally made stories and documentation, news items and presentations recorded by major organisations, but uploaded by individuals, and also those posted by these institutions themselves. A notable feature of all of these contributions is their role in the representation of witnesses' stories. In the case of reports on Forgotten Australians from major news organisations the commentary they attracted was largely from those who identified as fellow forgotten Australians attesting to—and corroborating—the interviewees' stories. Whether they were posted by survivors themselves or by mainstream media or other institutions, they exhibited a unity around a particular will to memory: setting the record straight through testimony. Here, the clips and posts were characterised by the provision of information as evidence for the assertion of cultural trauma as a shared experience and focus of identification (Adkins et al. 15). Storytelling functions as one of our most powerful forms for experiencing, expressing, and enacting sorrow and pain...it is pivotal in the process of sense making, allowing individuals to cope with chaotic, equivocal, and confusing conditions of everyday life, including illness and suffering. (152) Advocacy and community groups such as CLAN were focused on creating a sense of community amongst survivors with no story or artefact too small or insignificant to be included, which differed slightly from the agenda of the National Library of Australia—the institution of public memory that has been most closely involved in recording and disseminating the stories of the Forgotten Australians. The Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project conducted by the National Library Australia was one of the recommendations of the two Senate Community Affairs References Committee reports following the Senate Inquiries and receives funding from the Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. According to the National Library Australia website, this oral history project will run for three years and aims to document a rounded history of the experiences of the children in institutional care and the lifelong impact of these experiences on their lives and their families. This project will also interview a selection of advocates, and allied professionals including welfare officers, employees of institutions and administrators. (Project Team) In many important ways the purposes served in this project were those of the governments—previous and present, which was to capture and keep the stories, memories, documents and artefacts, and to share the officially selected stories with the rest of the nation, and those stories would support and affirm the government's roadmap for moving on from the apology. These digital storytelling projects, to varying degrees and levels of impact, served to provide the public with the personal narratives behind the issue being presented in the media and by advocacy groups as a large scale issue concerning hundreds of thousands of victims. Although the sheer size of the numbers of children affected was confronting, it was the personal stories that created a momentum towards the public apology. The findings of both Senate Inquiries recommended a formal apology; however this did not occur until the individual experiences of the Forgotten Australians were translated and represented in narratives and, through this, the construction of a sense of cultural memory resulting in formal recognition. Many Australians were sceptical about the importance of a public apology to the Forgotten Australians, as they had been of the apology to the Stolen Generation in 2008. To be a genuine act of reconciliation an apology requires the act of listening as much as speaking, fittingly Prime Minister Rudd quoted predominantly from personal oral history testimonies that had been collected over the years and that were of public record, but had not been digitally accessible to all, as many stories now are in the Bringing Them Home report. The Case Study In August 2009 I was funded by the Australasian Centre for Interactive Design (ACID) to conduct a series of digital storytelling and writing workshops in conjunction with Micah Projects, a community building and social justice organisation based in Brisbane. Micah delivers services for people experiencing homelessness, runs programmes for young mothers and is responsible for the Historical Abuse Network which is a network servicing the Forgotten Australians. After some discussion with the CEO of Micah it was decided that the clients involved with the Historical Abuse Network would benefit most from this project. Many of the participants had been involved in the 2003 senate inquiry into the treatment of children in institutional care. In the intervening years they had told the story of their abuse many times in official contexts and provided statements of harm for the inquiry. However, for this project we wanted to encourage the participants to create stories that allowed them some agency in their own lives rather, to re-claim some of their story from the official framework of abuse, and to use digital storytelling as a tool for this. The participants were between 45 and 65 in age, and were divided equally between women and men. There were a number of complexities inherent in this project, some of which were specific to this particular cohort and some specific to all marginalised individuals and groups. The most significant problem arose out the expectation that the "authors" will bring with them photographs and keepsakes from their lives to use in the stories. Many of the participants did not have photographs of their childhoods or of their families; some did not know how old they were (in many institutions all birthdays were celebrated on a single day, and consequently most lost track of their age and birth date) or had not had contact with their biological family for decades and as a result had few keepsakes. These hallmarks of legitimate biography were absent from their pasts and their presents. The combination of these factors meant that for many the ability to create a coherent narrative about their life or to feel ownership over their life had been seriously compromised. However, it became apparent that by using sounds and images in the digital story the technology was able to create a materiality out of memory for the participants. As it became clearer that the foundation of the stories was memory rather than a narrative arc, the more it became imperative to embrace the fragmentation, inconsistency and incoherence of the memories, and to incorporate these aspects into the digital stories. Instead of being easy to follow or emotionally satisfying narratives, some of the stories had much more in common with what is referred to in psychology and health frameworks as "chaos narratives". A chaos narrative has a sense of disconnected events characterised by a lack of closure and the presence of day-to-day uncertainty (Harter 4). Often such stories seem too incoherent to be told and too painful to be heard by others, as was certainly the case with some of the stories created for this project. Conclusion The Finding a Voice digital storytelling project led by Professor Jo Tacchi aligns with the aims of this project in its social innovation, and the role of storytelling and voice as having the genuine potential to impact on the understanding of poverty and disadvantage. Tacchi states that it "is an approach that allows those who are living in conditions that might constitute 'poverty' to tell those who are not what this experience is like, in their own words. Such an approach might challenge our 'expert' conceptions of poverty itself" (170), and confront mainstream or approved versions of social issues. Carabas posits that the agency embedded in the narrative act reforms or reframes the meanings of events through counter narratives and the act of telling transformed personal and social suffering. Those who had been objects of other's reports started to tell their own stories and rewrite official history in the first person singular (154). For the Forgotten Australians, those involved in this project and in similar ones the opportunity to tell their stories in their own words allowed them to push past the detached, impersonal representation of their experiences. Instead they could re-position the debate to being about individuals and the effect of government policy on their lives, and in doing so agitate for a formal apology. Storytelling and narrative as a research methodology, and as a way of knowing, is continuing to be refined by social and cultural researchers and by community organisations. Despite the emerging and nebulous nature of this field one thing is clear: our human desire to tell stories has the ability to be harnessed to build narratives which create understanding and insight and consequently demand that as communities and nations we respond to injustice and disadvantage accordingly. References Adkins, Barbara, Donna Hancox, and Helen Klaebe. "The Role of the Internet and Digital Technologies in the Struggle for Recognition of the Forgotten Australians." Proceedings of the A Decade in Internet Time: OII Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, 21-24 September 2011. Oxford U of Oxford, 2011: 1-23. Burgess, Jean. "Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling." Continuum 20.2 (2006): 201-14. Carabas, Teodora, and Lynn Harter. "State-Induced Illness and Forbidden Stories: The Role of Storytelling in Healing, Individual and Social Traumas in Romania." Narratives, Health and Healing. Eds. Lynn Harter, Linda Japp, and Christina Beck. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2005. 149-69. Harter, Lynn, Linda Japp, and Christina Beck, eds. Narratives, Health & Healing. New York: Taylor & Francis. 2005. Hartley, John. "TV Stories: From Representation to Productivity." Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 16-37.———. Uses of Digital Literacy. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P. 2009. Hildebrand, Lucas. "YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge." Film Quarterly 61.1 (2007): 48-57. Kansteiner, Wolf. "Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies." History & Theory 41 (2002): 179-97. Klaebe, Helen, and Jean Burgess. "Mediatisation and Institutions of Public Memory: Digital Storytelling and the Apology." Australian Historical Studies 41 (2002): 149-65. Lambert, Joe. "Where It All Started: The Centre of Digital Storytelling in California." Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. 79-90. Lundby, Kunt. Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-Representations in New Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Meadows, Daniel. "Digital Storytelling - Research Based Practice in New Media." Visual Communication 2.2 (2003): 189-93. McWilliam, Kelly. "The Global Diffusion of a Community Media Practice: Digital Storytelling Online." Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. 37-77. Project Team. "Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project." National Library of Australia. 16 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.nla.gov.au/oral-history/forgotten-australians-and-former-child-migrants-oral-history-project›. Social Inclusion Unit. "The Social Inclusion Agenda." Social Inclusion. Australian Government, 2011. 19 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/›. Tacchi, Jo. "Finding a Voice: Participatory Development in Southeast Asia." Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 167-75.

This article explores the impact of financial development on the ‘natural resources rents–foreign capital accumulation nexus’ in selected natural resource–rich countries during 1970Q1–2016Q4. In doing so, we propose a new approach by applying the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) rolling regression technique for our empirical purpose. The results show that financial development has a positive and significant effect on the way natural resource rents affect foreign capital in the case of Australia, Chile, Ecuador, Egypt and Peru in both the short run and the long run. We achieve the same results in the case of Colombia and Iran too, but just in the long run. Also, short-term and long-term negative effects of financial development on the rents–foreign capital nexus are witnessed just in the case of Algeria. We provide some empirical evidence for further robustness of our findings. Finally, we suggest that there is a necessity for the development of the financial system in natural resource–rich countries to reach higher levels of foreign capital, which has a crucial role in their economic growth.

BASTARDYAll children born before matrimony, or so long after the death of the husband as to render it impossible that the child could be begotten by him, are bastards.– Cro. Jac. 451William Toone: The Magistrates Manual, 1817 (66)On 4 September 1832, the body of a newborn baby boy was found washed up on the shore at the port town of Fremantle, Western Australia. As the result of an inquest into the child’s suspicious death, a 20-year-old, unmarried woman named Mary Summerland was accused of concealing his birth. In October 2014, 25-year-old Irish backpacker Caroline Quinn faced court in Perth, Western Australia, over claims that she concealed the birth of her stillborn child after giving birth in the remote north west town of Halls Creek during May of the same year. Both women denied the existence of their children, both appear to have given birth to their “illegitimate” babies alone, and both women claimed that they did not know that they had ever been pregnant at all. In addition, both women hid the body of their dead child for several days while the people they lived with or were close to, did not appear to notice that the mother of the child had had a baby. In neither case did any person associated with either woman seek to look for the missing child after it had been born.Despite occurring 182 years apart, the striking similarities between these cases could lead to the assumption that it is almost as if there were a written script of behaviour that would explain the actions of both young women. Close examination of the laws surrounding child murder, infanticide and concealment of birth reveals evidence of similar behaviours being enacted by women as far back as the 1600s (and earlier), and all are shaped in response to the legal frameworks that prosecuted women who gave birth outside of marriage.This article traces the history of child murder law from its formation in England in the 1600s and explores how early moral assumptions concerning unmarried mothers echoed through the lived experiences of women who killed their illegitimate babies in colonial Western Australia, and continue to resonate in the treatment of, and legal response to, women accused of similar crimes in the present day. The Unlicensed ChildThe unlicensed child is a term coined by Swain and Howe to more accurately define the social matrix faced by single women and their children in Australia. The term seeks to emphasise the repressive and controlling religious, legal and social pressures that acted on Australian women who had children outside marriage until the mid-1970s (xxi, 1, 92, 94). For the purposes of this article, I extend Swain and Howe’s term the unlicensed child to coin the term the unlicensed mother. Following on from Swain and Howe’s definition, if the children of unmarried mothers did not have a license to be born, it is essential to acknowledge that their mothers did not have a license to give birth. Women who had children without social and legal sanction gave birth within a society that did not allocate them “permission” to be mothers, something that the corporeality of pregnancy made it impossible for them not to be. Their own bodies—and the bodies of the babies growing inside them—betrayed them. Unlicensed mothers were punished socially, religiously, legally and financially, and their children were considered sinful and inferior to children who had married parents simply because they had been born (Scheper-Hughes 410). This unspoken lack of authorisation to experience the unavoidably innate physicality of pregnancy, birth and motherhood, in turn implies that, until recently unmarried mothers did not have license to be mothers. Two MothersAll that remains of the “case” of Mary Summerland is a file archived at the State Records Office of Western Australia under the title CONS 3472, Item 10: Rex V Mary Summerland. Yet revealed within those sparse documents is a story echoed by the events surrounding Caroline Quinn nearly two hundred years later. In September 1832, Mary Summerland was an unmarried domestic servant living and working in Fremantle when the body of a baby was found lying on a beach very close to the settlement. Western Australia had only been colonized by the British in 1829. The discovery of the body of an infant in such a tiny village (colonial Fremantle had a population of only 436 women and girls out of 1341 non-Aboriginal emigrants) (Gardiner) set in motion an inquest that resulted in Mary Summerland being investigated over the suspicious death of the child.The records suggest that Mary may have given birth, apparently alone, over a week prior to the corpse of the baby being discovered, yet no one in Fremantle, including her employer and her family, appeared to have noticed that Mary might have been pregnant, or that she had given birth to a child. When Mary Summerland was eventually accused of giving birth to the baby, she strongly denied that she had ever been pregnant, and denied being the mother of the child. It is not known how her infant ended up being disposed of in the ocean. It is also not known if Mary was eventually charged with concealment or child murder, but in either scenario, the case against her was dismissed as “no true bill” when she faced her trial. The details publically available on the case of Caroline Quinn are also sparse. Even the sex of her child has not been revealed in any of the media coverage of the event. Yet examination of the limited details available on her charge of “concealment of birth” reveal similarities between her behaviours and those of Mary Summerland.In May 2014 Caroline Quinn had been “travelling with friends in the Kimberly region of Western Australia” (Lee), and, just as Mary did, Caroline claims she “did not realise that she was pregnant” when she went into labour (Independent.ie). She appears, like Mary Summerland, to have given birth alone, and also like Mary, when her child died due to unexplained circumstances she hid the corpse for several days. Also echoing Mary’s story, no person in the sparsely populated Hall’s Creek community (the town has a populace of 1,211) or any friends in Caroline’s circle of acquaintances appears to have noticed her pregnancy, nor did they realise that she had given birth to a baby until the body of the child was discovered hidden in a hotel room several days after her or his birth. The media records are unclear as to whether Caroline revealed her condition to her friends or whether they “discovered” the body without her assistance. The case was not brought to the attention of authorities until Caroline’s friends took her to receive medical attention at the local hospital and staff there notified the police.Media coverage of the death of Caroline Quinn’s baby suggests her child was stillborn or died soon after birth. As of 13 August 2014 Caroline was granted leave by the Chief Magistrate to return home to Ireland while she awaited her trial, as “without trivialising the matter, nothing more serious was alleged than the concealing of the birth” (Collins, "Irish Woman"). Caroline Quinn was not required to return to Australia to appear at her trial and when the case was presented at the Perth Magistrates Court on Thursday 2 October, all charges against her were dropped as the prosecutor felt “it was not in the public interest” to proceed with legal action (Collins, "Case").Statutory MarginalisationTo understand the similarities between the behaviours of, and legal and medical response to, Mary Summerland and Caroline Quinn, it is important to situate the deaths of their children within the wider context of child murder, concealment of birth and “bastardy” law. Tracing the development of these methods of law-making clarifies the parallels between much of the child murder, infanticide and concealment of birth narrative that has occurred in Western Australia since non-Aboriginal settlement.Despite the isolated nature of Western Australia, the nearly 400 years since the law was formed in England, and the extremely remote rural locations where both these women lived and worked, their stories are remarkably alike. It is almost as if there were a written script and each member of the cast knew what role to play: both Mary and Caroline knew to hide their pregnancies, to deny the overwhelmingly traumatic experience of giving birth alone, and to conceal the corpses of their babies. The fathers of their children appear to have cut off any connection to the women or their child. The family, friends, or employers of the parents of the dead babies knew to pretend that they did not know that the mother was pregnant or who the father was. The police and medical officers knew to charge these women and to collect evidence that could be used to simultaneously meet the needs of the both prosecution and the defence when the cases were brought to trial.In reference to Mary Summerland’s case, in colonial Western Australia when a woman gave birth to an infant who died under suspicious circumstances, she could be prosecuted with two charges: “child murder” and/or “concealment of birth”. It is suggestive that Mary may have been charged with both. The laws regarding these two offences were focused almost exclusively on the deaths of unlicensed children and were so deeply interconnected they are difficult to untangle. For Probyn, shame pierces the centre of who we think we are, “what makes it remarkable is that it reveals with precision our values, hopes and aspirations, beyond the generalities of good manners and cultured norms” (x). Dipping into the streams of legal and medical discourse that flow back to the seventeenth century highlights the pervasiveness of discourses marginalising single women and their children. This situates Mary Summerland and Caroline Quinn within a ‘burden on society’ narrative of guilt, blame and shame that has been in circulation for over 500 years, and continues to resonate in the present (Coull).An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard ChildrenIn England prior to the 17th century, penalties for extramarital sex, the birth and/or maintenance of unlicensed children or for committing child murder were expressed through church courts (Damme 2-6; Rapaport 548; Butler 61; Hoffer and Hull 3-4). Discussion of how the punishment of child murder left the religious sphere and came to be regulated by secular laws that were focused exclusively on the unlicensed mother points to two main arguments: firstly, the patriarchal response to unlicensed (particularly female) sexuality; and secondly, a moral panic regarding a perceived rise in unlicensed pregnancies in women of the lower classes, and the resulting financial burden placed on local parishes to support unwanted, unlicensed children (Rapaport 532, 48-52; McMahon XVII, 126-29; Osborne 49; Meyer 3-8 of 14). In many respects, as Meyer suggests, “the legal system subtly encouraged neonaticide through its nearly universally negative treatment of bastard children” (240).The first of these “personal control laws” (Hoffer and Hull 13) was the Old Poor Law created by Henry VIII in 1533, and put in place to regulate all members of English society who needed to rely on the financial assistance of the parish to survive. Prior to 1533, “by custom the children of the rich depended on their relations, while the ‘fatherless poor’ relied on the charity of the monastic institutions and the municipalities” (Teichman 60-61). Its implementation marks the historical point where the state began to take responsibility for maintenance of the poor away from the church by holding communities responsible for “the problem of destitution” (Teichman 60-61; Meyer 243).The establishment of the poor law system of relief created a hierarchy of poverty in which some poor people, such as those suffering from sickness or those who were old, were seen as worthy of receiving support, while others, who were destitute as a result of “debauchery” or other self-inflicted means were seen as undeserving and sent to a house of correction or common gaol. Underprivileged, unlicensed mothers and their children were seen to be part of the category of recipients unfit for help (Jackson 31). Burdens on SocietyIt was in response to the narrative of poor unlicensed women and their children being undeserving fiscal burdens on law abiding, financially stretched community members that in 1576 a law targeted specifically at holding genetic parents responsible for the financial maintenance of unlicensed children entered the secular courts for the first time. Called the Elizabethan Poor Law it was enacted in response to the concerns of local parishes who felt that, due to the expenses exacted by the poor laws, they were being burdened with the care of a greatly increased number of unlicensed children (Jackson 30; Meyer 5-6; Teichman 61). While the 1576 legislation prosecuted both parents of unlicensed children, McMahon interprets the law as being created in response to a blend of moral and economic forces, undergirded by a deep, collective fear of illegitimacy (McMahon 128). By the 1570s “unwed mothers were routinely whipped and sent to prison” (Meyer 242) and “guardians of the poor” could force unlicensed mothers to wear a “badge” (Teichman 63). Yet surprisingly, while parishes felt that numbers of unlicensed children were increasing, no concomitant rise was actually recorded (McMahon 128).The most damning evidence of the failure of this law, was the surging incidence of infanticide following its implementation (Rapaport 548-49; Hoffer and Hull 11-13). After 1576 the number of women prosecuted for infanticide increased by 225 percent. Convictions resulting in unlicensed mothers being executed also rose (Meyer 246; Hoffer and Hull 8, 18).Infanticide IncreasesBy 1624 the level of infanticide in local communities was deemed to be so great An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children was created. The Act made child murder a “sex-specific crime”, focused exclusively on the unlicensed mother, who if found guilty of the offence was punished by death. Probyn suggests that “shame is intimately social” (77) and indeed, the wording of An Act to Prevent highlights the remarkably similar behaviours enacted by single women desperate to avoid the shame and criminal implication linked to the social position of unlicensed mother: Whereas many lewd Women that have been delivered of Bastard Children, to avoyd their shame and to escape punishment [my italics], doe secretlie bury, or conceale the Death of their Children, and after if the child be found dead the said Women doe alleadge that the said Children were borne dead;…For the preventing therefore of this great Mischiefe…if any Woman…be delivered of any issue of the Body, Male or Female, which being born alive, should by the Lawes of this Realm be a bastard, and that she endeavour privatlie either by drowning or secret burying thereof, or any other way, either by herselfe of the procuring of others, soe to conceale the Death thereof, as that it may not come to light, whether it be borne alive or not, but be concealed, in every such Case the Mother so offending shall suffer Death… (Davies 214; O'Donovan 259; Law Reform Commission of Western Australia 104; Osborne 49; Rose 1-2; Rapaport 548). An Act to Prevent also “contained an extraordinary provision which was a reversion of the ordinary common law presumption of dead birth” (Davies 214), removing the burden of proof from the prosecution and placing it on the defence (Francus 133; McMahon 128; Meyer 2 of 14). The implication being that if the dead body of a newborn, unlicensed baby was found hidden, it was automatically assumed that the child had been murdered by their mother (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia 104; Osborne 49; Rapaport 549-50; Francus 133). This made the Act unusual in that “the offence involved was the concealment of death rather than the death itself” (O'Donovan 259). The only way an unlicensed mother charged with child murder was able to avoid capital punishment was to produce at least one witness to give evidence that the child was “borne dead” (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia 104; Meyer 238; McMahon 126-27).Remarkable SimilaritiesClearly, the objective of An Act to Prevent was not simply to preserve infant life. It is suggestive that it was enacted in response to women wishing to avoid the legal, social, corporal and religious punishment highlighted by the implementation of the poor law legislation enacted throughout earlier centuries. It is also suggestive that these pressures were so powerful that threat of death if found guilty of killing their neonate baby was not enough to deter women from concealing their unlicensed pregnancies and committing child murder. Strikingly analogous to the behaviours of Mary Summerland in 19th century colonial Western Australia, and Caroline Quinn in 2014, the self-preservation implicit in the “strategies of secrecy” (Gowing 87) surrounding unlicensed birth and child murder often left the mother of a dead baby as the only witness to her baby’s death (McMahon xvii 49-50).An Act to Prevent set in motion the legislation that was eventually used to prosecute Mary Summerland in colonial Western Australia (Jackson 7, Davies, 213) and remnants of it still linger in the present where they have been incorporated into the ‘concealment of birth law’ that prosecuted Caroline Quinn (Legal Online TLA [10.1.182]).Changing the ‘Script’Shame runs like a viral code through the centuries to resonate within the legal response to women who committed infanticide in colonial Western Australia. It continues on through the behaviours of, and legal responses to, the story of Caroline Quinn and her child. As Probyn observes, “shame reminds us about the promises we keep to ourselves” in turn revealing our desire for belonging and elements of our deepest fears (p. x). While Caroline may live in a society that no longer outwardly condemns women who give birth outside of marriage, it is fascinating that the suite of behaviours manifested in response to her pregnancy and the birth of her child—by herself, her friends, and the wider community—can be linked to the narratives surrounding the formation of “child murder” and “concealment” law nearly 400 years earlier. Caroline’s narrative also encompasses similar behaviours enacted by Mary Summerland in 1832, in particular that Caroline knew to say that her child was “born dead” and that she had merely concealed her or his body—nothing more. This behaviour appears to have secured the release of both women as although both Mary and Caroline faced criminal investigation, neither was convicted of any crime. Yet, neither of these women or their small communities were alone in their responses. My research has uncovered 55 cases linked to child murder in Western Australia and the people involved in all of these incidences share unusually similar behaviours (Gardiner). Perhaps, it is only through the wider community becoming aware of the resonance of child murder law echoing through the centuries, that certain women who are pregnant with unwanted children will be able to write a different script for themselves, and their “unlicensed” children. ReferencesButler, Sara, M. "A Case of Indifference? Child Murder in Later Medieval England." Journal of Women's History 19.4 (2007): 59-82. Collins, Padraig. "Case against Irish Woman for Concealing Birth Dropped." The Irish Times 2 Oct. 2014. ---. "Irish Woman Held for Hiding Birth in Australia Allowed Return Home." The Irish Times 13 Aug. 2014. Coull, Kim. “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Late Discovery Adoptee Pre-Verbal Trauma into Narrative”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014.Damme, Catherine. "Infanticide: The Worth of an Infant under Law." Medical History 22.1 (1978): 1-24. Davies, D.S. "Child-Killing in English Law." The Modern Law Review 1.3 (1937): 203-23. Dickinson, J.R., and J.A. Sharpe. "Infanticide in Early Modern England: The Court of Great Sessions at Chester, 1650-1800." Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000. Ed. Mark Jackson. Hants: Ashgate, 2002. 35-51.Francus, Marilyn. "Monstrous Mothers, Monstrous Societies: Infanticide and the Rule of Law in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England." Eighteenth-Century Life 21.2 (1997): 133-56. Gardiner, Amanda. "Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia." Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014.Gowing, Laura. "Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England." Past & Present 156 (1997): 87-115. Hoffer, Peter C., and N.E.H. Hull. Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England 1558-1803. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Independent.ie. "Irish Woman Facing Up to Two Years in Jail for Concealing Death of Her Baby in Australia." 8 Aug. 2014. Law Reform Commission of Western Australia. "Chapter 3: Manslaughter and Other Homicide Offences." Review of the Law of Homicide: Final Report. Perth: Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, 2007. 85-117.Lee, Sally. "Irish Backpacker Charged over the Death of a Baby She Gave Birth to While Travelling in the Australia [sic] Outback." Daily Mail 8 Aug. 2014. Legal Online. "The Laws of Australia." Thomson Reuters 2010. McMahon, Vanessa. Murder in Shakespeare's England. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. Meyer, Jon'a. "Unintended Consequences for the Youngest Victims: The Role of Law in Encouraging Neonaticide from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries." Criminal Justice Studies 18.3 (2005): 237-54. O'Donovan, K. "The Medicalisation of Infanticide." Criminal Law Review (May 1984): 259-64. Osborne, Judith A. "The Crime of Infanticide: Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater." Canadian Journal of Family Law 6 (1987): 47-59. Rapaport, Elizabeth. "Mad Women and Desperate Girls: Infanticide and Child Murder in Law and Myth." Fordham Urban Law Journal 33.2 (2006): 527-69.Rose, Lionel. The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain, 1800-1939. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1986. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Swain, Shurlee, and Renate Howe. Single Mothers and Their Children: Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Teichman, Jenny. Illegitimacy: An Examination of Bastardy. Oxford: Cornell University Press, 1982. Toone, William. The Magistrate's Manual: Or a Summary of the Duties and Powers of a Justice of the Peace. 2nd ed. London: Joseph Butterworth and Son, 1817.

ObjectiveTo describe the health and well-being of children and young people (CYP) seeking asylum subjected to Australia’s immigration policy of indefinite mandatory detention on Nauru.DesignCross-sectional analysis of a cohort of CYP seeking asylum.SettingAustralian paediatric clinicians from 10 health services completed detailed health assessments around the time of transfer from Nauru, mostly to Australia.ParticipantsSixty-two CYP who were ≤18 years on entry into offshore immigration detention on Nauru between 2013 and 2019. Mean age at health assessment was 9 years.Main measuresHealth outcomes were categorised as physical, mental or neurodevelopmental concerns/conditions. Risk and protective factor data were collected using the adverse childhood experiences and refugee-specific adverse childhood experiences tools.ResultsOver half of the CYP (n=32, 52%) were held on Nauru for ≥4 years. The vast majority of CYP had physical health (n=55, 89%) and mental health (n=49, 79%) concerns including self-harm or suicidal ideation/attempt (n=28, 45%). Mental health concerns were more likely in CYP who were school-aged (p=0.001), had been held on Nauru for ≥1 year (p=0.01); originated from the Eastern Mediterranean region (p<0.05); witnessed trauma (p<0.05) or had exposure to ≥4 refugee-specific adverse childhood experiences (p<0.05). Neurodevelopmental concerns were seen in eight children (13%).ConclusionsThis study highlights the almost universal physical and mental health difficulties in a sample of CYP who experienced forced migration and were subjected to Australia’s offshore immigration detention policy. Immigration detention in recipient countries, a known adverse childhood experience, may contribute to or exacerbate harmful outcomes in CYP seeking asylum.

ObjectiveProtracted international conflict has seen escalating numbers of displaced and resettled Syrian and Iraqi refugees, raising concerns for their health and well-being. This paper describes the demographic and clinical profiles of recently resettled Syrian and Iraqi refugee children and adolescents across physical, psychosocial, developmental and educational domains using standardised multidisciplinary assessments.DesignA cross-sectional observational study was undertaken of initial specialist paediatric multidisciplinary Refugee Health Service assessments completed at the tertiary paediatric hospital (Western Australia) between June 2015 and September 2019.ResultsThree hundred and twenty-seven children and adolescents (264 Syrian, 63 Iraqi) were assessed following resettlement. Witnessed trauma (86%) and disclosed adversity (median Refugee Adverse Childhood Experiences score 3, range 1–14) were universally high. Almost all patients had health issues identified across physical (99%), psychosocial (76%) and developmental/educational (75%) domains. Interrupted education (65%) and death of a family member (16%) were significantly associated with psychological morbidities. Common comorbidities included dental caries (78%), non-infectious disease (76%), vitamin D deficiency (72%), malnutrition (46%; overweight/obesity 23%), and psychological (32%; post-traumatic stress disorder 4.3%) and developmental (9.5%) concerns. Emerging and alarming child protection concerns were prevalent (17%), with females demonstrating especially high risks.ConclusionThis is the largest comprehensive study demonstrating the complex and cross-dimensional health needs and specific vulnerabilities of resettled Syrian and Iraqi refugee children and adolescents. Early comprehensive standardised multidisciplinary paediatric assessments, and culturally safe, trauma-informed interventions and follow-up are required to optimise resettlement outcomes and promote well-being.

Adverse childhood experiences, including childhood sexual abuse, have significant immediate and lifelong effects including higher risks of alcohol and other drug use and contact with the criminal justice system. The concept of trauma to describe adverse experiences and later behaviours provides potential to reshape prevention and responses for victims. We draw on survivor accounts to a national enquiry, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, to examine the ways in which trauma is narrated in adverse childhood experiences, alcohol and other drug use and contact with the criminal justice system, and how trauma is interpreted by others in the context of policy and legal findings. These accounts showed damaging and unjust experiences of childhood, which were compounded by subsequent contact with the criminal justice system. Trauma seems to be important to both the experienced narrated by survivors and the synthesising of these experiences into narratives. National enquiries play important roles in listening to survivors and advocating for reform. There is a risk, however, that they will fail to result in substantive change, and function primarily as a forum for bearing witness to trauma, but not preventing it.

IntroductionTasmania hangs from the map of Australia like a drop in freefall from the substance of the mainland. Often the whole state is mislaid from Australian maps and logos (Reddit). Tasmania has, at least since federation, been considered peripheral—a region seen as isolated, a ‘problem’ economically, politically, and culturally. However, Tasmania not only cleaves to the ‘north island’ of Australia but is also subject to the gravitational pull of an even greater land mass—Antarctica. In this article, we upturn the political conventions of map-making that place both Antarctica and Tasmania in obscure positions at the base of the globe. We show how a changing global climate re-frames Antarctica and the Southern Ocean as key drivers of worldwide environmental shifts. The liquid and solid water between Tasmania and Antarctica is revealed not as a homogenous barrier, but as a dynamic and relational medium linking the Tasmanian archipelago with Antarctica. When Antarctica becomes the focus, the script is flipped: Tasmania is no longer on the edge, but core to a network of gateways into the southern land. The state’s capital of Hobart can from this perspective be understood as an “Antarctic city”, central to the geopolitics, economy, and culture of the frozen continent (Salazar et al.). Viewed from the south, we argue, Tasmania is not a problem, but an opportunity for a form of ecological, cultural, economic, and political sustainability that opens up the southern continent to science, discovery, and imagination.A Centre at the End of the Earth? Tasmania as ParadoxThe islands of Tasmania owe their existence to climate change: a period of warming at the end of the last ice age melted the vast sheets of ice covering the polar regions, causing sea levels to rise by more than one hundred metres (Tasmanian Climate Change Office 8). Eleven thousand years ago, Aboriginal people would have witnessed the rise of what is now called Bass Strait, turning what had been a peninsula into an archipelago, with the large island of Tasmania at its heart. The heterogeneous practices and narratives of Tasmanian regional identity have been shaped by the geography of these islands, and their connection to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Regions, understood as “centres of collective consciousness and sociospatial identities” (Paasi 241) are constantly reproduced and reimagined through place-based social practices and communications over time. As we will show, diverse and contradictory narratives of Tasmanian regionality often co-exist, interacting in complex and sometimes complementary ways. Ecocritical literary scholar C.A. Cranston considers duality to be embedded in the textual construction of Tasmania, writing “it was hell, it was heaven, it was penal, it was paradise” (29). Tasmania is multiply polarised: it is both isolated and connected; close and far away; rich in resources and poor in capital; the socially conservative birthplace of radical green politics (Hay 60). The weather, as if sensing the fine balance of these paradoxes, blows hot and cold at a moment’s notice.Tasmania has wielded extraordinary political influence at times in its history—notably during the settlement of Melbourne in 1835 (Boyce), and during protests against damming the Franklin River in the early 1980s (Mercer). However, twentieth-century historical and political narratives of Tasmania portray the Bass Strait as a barrier, isolating Tasmanians from the mainland (Harwood 61). Sir Bede Callaghan, who headed one of a long line of federal government inquiries into “the Tasmanian problem” (Harwood 106), was clear that Tasmania was a victim of its own geography:the major disability facing the people of Tasmania (although some residents may consider it an advantage) is that Tasmania is an island. Separation from the mainland adversely affects the economy of the State and the general welfare of the people in many ways. (Callaghan 3)This perspective may stem from the fact that Tasmania has maintained the lowest Gross Domestic Product per capita of all states since federation (Bureau of Infrastructure Transport and Regional Economics 9). Socially, economically, and culturally, Tasmania consistently ranks among the worst regions of Australia. Statistical comparisons with other parts of Australia reveal the population’s high unemployment, low wages, poor educational outcomes, and bad health (West 31). The state’s remoteness and isolation from the mainland states and its reliance on federal income have contributed to the whole of Tasmania, including Hobart, being classified as ‘regional’ by the Australian government, in an attempt to promote immigration and economic growth (Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development 1). Tasmania is indeed both regional and remote. However, in this article we argue that, while regionality may be cast as a disadvantage, the island’s remote location is also an asset, particularly when viewed from a far southern perspective (Image 1).Image 1: Antarctica (Orthographic Projection). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Modified Shading of Tasmania and Addition of Captions by H. Nielsen.Connecting Oceans/Collapsing DistanceTasmania and Antarctica have been closely linked in the past—the future archipelago formed a land bridge between Antarctica and northern land masses until the opening of the Tasman Seaway some 32 million years ago (Barker et al.). The far south was tangible to the Indigenous people of the island in the weather blowing in from the Southern Ocean, while the southern lights, or “nuyina”, formed a visible connection (Australia’s new icebreaker vessel is named RSV Nuyina in recognition of these links). In the contemporary Australian imagination, Tasmania tends to be defined by its marine boundaries, the sea around the islands represented as flat, empty space against which to highlight the topography of its landscape and the isolation of its position (Davies et al.). A more relational geographic perspective illuminates the “power of cross-currents and connections” (Stratford et al. 273) across these seascapes. The sea country of Tasmania is multiple and heterogeneous: the rough, shallow waters of the island-scattered Bass Strait flow into the Tasman Sea, where the continental shelf descends toward an abyssal plain studded with volcanic seamounts. To the south, the Southern Ocean provides nutrient-rich upwellings that attract fish and cetacean populations. Tasmania’s coast is a dynamic, liminal space, moving and changing in response to the global currents that are driven by the shifting, calving and melting ice shelves and sheets in Antarctica.Oceans have long been a medium of connection between Tasmania and Antarctica. In the early colonial period, when the seas were the major thoroughfares of the world and inland travel was treacherous and slow, Tasmania’s connection with the Southern Ocean made it a valuable hub for exploration and exploitation of the south. Between 1642 and 1900, early European explorers were followed by British penal colonists, convicts, sealers, and whalers (Kriwoken and Williamson 93). Tasmania was well known to polar explorers, with expeditions led by Jules Dumont d’Urville, James Clark Ross, Roald Amundsen, and Douglas Mawson all transiting through the port of Hobart. Now that the city is no longer a whaling hub, growing populations of cetaceans continue to migrate past the islands on their annual journeys from the tropics, across the Sub-Antarctic Front and Antarctic circumpolar current, and into the south polar region, while southern species such as leopard seals are occasionally seen around Tasmania (Tasmania Parks and Wildlife). Although the water surrounding Tasmania and Antarctica is at times homogenised as a ‘barrier’, rendering these places isolated, the bodies of water that surround both are in fact permeable, and regularly crossed by both humans and marine species. The waters are diverse in their physical characteristics, underlying topography, sea life, and relationships, and serve to connect many different ocean regions, ecosystems, and weather patterns.Views from the Far SouthWhen considered in terms of its relative proximity to Antarctic, rather than its distance from Australia’s political and economic centres, Tasmania’s identity undergoes a significant shift. A sign at Cockle Creek, in the state’s far south, reminds visitors that they are closer to Antarctica than to Cairns, invoking a discourse of connectedness that collapses the standard ten-day ship voyage to Australia’s closest Antarctic station into a unit comparable with the routinely scheduled 5.5 hour flight to North Queensland. Hobart is the logistical hub for the Australian Antarctic Division and the French Institut Polaire Francais (IPEV), and has hosted Antarctic vessels belonging to the USA, South Korea, and Japan in recent years. From a far southern perspective, Hobart is not a regional Australian capital but a global polar hub. This alters the city’s geographic imaginary not only in a latitudinal sense—from “top down” to “bottom up”—but also a longitudinal one. Via its southward connection to Antarctica, Hobart is also connected east and west to four other recognized gateways: Cape Town in South Africa, Christchurch in New Zealand; Punta Arenas in Chile; and Ushuaia in Argentina (Image 2). The latter cities are considered small by international standards, but play an outsized role in relation to Antarctica.Image 2: H. Nielsen with a Sign Announcing Distances between Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities and Antarctica, Ushuaia, Argentina, 2018. Image Credit: Nicki D'Souza.These five cities form what might be called—to adapt geographer Klaus Dodds’ term—a ‘Southern Rim’ around the South Polar region (Dodds Geopolitics). They exist in ambiguous relationship to each other. Although the five cities signed a Statement of Intent in 2009 committing them to collaboration, they continue to compete vigorously for northern hemisphere traffic and the brand identity of the most prominent global gateway. A state government brochure spruiks Hobart, for example, as the “perfect Antarctic Gateway” emphasising its uniqueness and “natural advantages” in this regard (Tasmanian Government, 2016). In practice, the cities are automatically differentiated by their geographic position with respect to Antarctica. Although the ‘ice continent’ is often conceived as one entity, it too has regions, in both scientific and geographical senses (Terauds and Lee; Antonello). Hobart provides access to parts of East Antarctica, where the Australian, French, Japanese, and Chinese programs (among others) have bases; Cape Town is a useful access point for Europeans going to Dronning Maud Land; Christchurch is closest to the Ross Sea region, site of the largest US base; and Punta Arenas and Ushuaia neighbour the Antarctic Peninsula, home to numerous bases as well as a thriving tourist industry.The Antarctic sector is important to the Tasmanian economy, contributing $186 million (AUD) in 2017/18 (Wells; Gutwein; Tasmanian Polar Network). Unsurprisingly, Tasmania’s gateway brand has been actively promoted, with the 2016 Australian Antarctic Strategy and 20 Year Action Plan foregrounding the need to “Build Tasmania’s status as the premier East Antarctic Gateway for science and operations” and the state government releasing a “Tasmanian Antarctic Gateway Strategy” in 2017. The Chinese Antarctic program has been a particular focus: a Memorandum of Understanding focussed on Australia and China’s Antarctic relations includes a “commitment to utilise Australia, including Tasmania, as an Antarctic ‘gateway’.” (Australian Antarctic Division). These efforts towards a closer relationship with China have more recently come under attack as part of a questioning of China’s interests in the region (without, it should be noted, a concomitant questioning of Australia’s own considerable interests) (Baker 9). In these exchanges, a global power and a state of Australia generally classed as regional and peripheral are brought into direct contact via the even more remote Antarctic region. This connection was particularly visible when Chinese President Xi Jinping travelled to Hobart in 2014, in a visit described as both “strategic” and “incongruous” (Burden). There can be differences in how this relationship is narrated to domestic and international audiences, with issues of sovereignty and international cooperation variously foregrounded, laying the ground for what Dodds terms “awkward Antarctic nationalism” (1).Territory and ConnectionsThe awkwardness comes to a head in Tasmania, where domestic and international views of connections with the far south collide. Australia claims sovereignty over almost 6 million km2 of the Antarctic continent—a claim that in area is “roughly the size of mainland Australia minus Queensland” (Bergin). This geopolitical context elevates the importance of a regional part of Australia: the claims to Antarctic territory (which are recognised only by four other claimant nations) are performed not only in Antarctic localities, where they are made visible “with paraphernalia such as maps, flags, and plaques” (Salazar 55), but also in Tasmania, particularly in Hobart and surrounds. A replica of Mawson’s Huts in central Hobart makes Australia’s historic territorial interests in Antarctica visible an urban setting, foregrounding the figure of Douglas Mawson, the well-known Australian scientist and explorer who led the expeditions that proclaimed Australia’s sovereignty in the region of the continent roughly to its south (Leane et al.). Tasmania is caught in a balancing act, as it fosters international Antarctic connections (such hosting vessels from other national programs), while also playing a key role in administering what is domestically referred to as the Australian Antarctic Territory. The rhetoric of protection can offer common ground: island studies scholar Godfrey Baldacchino notes that as island narratives have moved “away from the perspective of the ‘explorer-discoverer-colonist’” they have been replaced by “the perspective of the ‘custodian-steward-environmentalist’” (49), but reminds readers that a colonising disposition still lurks beneath the surface. It must be remembered that terms such as “stewardship” and “leadership” can undertake sovereignty labour (Dodds “Awkward”), and that Tasmania’s Antarctic connections can be mobilised for a range of purposes. When Environment Minister Greg Hunt proclaimed at a press conference that: “Hobart is the gateway to the Antarctic for the future” (26 Apr. 2016), the remark had meaning within discourses of both sovereignty and economics. Tasmania’s capital was leveraged as a way to position Australia as a leader in the Antarctic arena.From ‘Gateway’ to ‘Antarctic City’While discussion of Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities often focuses on the economic and logistical benefit of their Antarctic connections, Hobart’s “gateway” identity, like those of its counterparts, stretches well beyond this, encompassing geological, climatic, historical, political, cultural and scientific links. Even the southerly wind, according to cartoonist Jon Kudelka, “has penguins in it” (Image 3). Hobart residents feel a high level of connection to Antarctica. In 2018, a survey of 300 randomly selected residents of Greater Hobart was conducted under the umbrella of the “Antarctic Cities” Australian Research Council Linkage Project led by Assoc. Prof. Juan Francisco Salazar (and involving all three present authors). Fourteen percent of respondents reported having been involved in an economic activity related to Antarctica, and 36% had attended a cultural event about Antarctica. Connections between the southern continent and Hobart were recognised as important: 71.9% agreed that “people in my city can influence the cultural meanings that shape our relationship to Antarctica”, while 90% agreed or strongly agreed that Hobart should play a significant role as a custodian of Antarctica’s future, and 88.4% agreed or strongly agreed that: “How we treat Antarctica is a test of our approach to ecological sustainability.” Image 3: “The Southerly” Demonstrates How Weather Connects Hobart and Antarctica. Image Credit: Jon Kudelka, Reproduced with Permission.Hobart, like the other gateways, activates these connections in its conscious place-branding. The city is particularly strong as a centre of Antarctic research: signs at the cruise-ship terminal on the waterfront claim that “There are more Antarctic scientists based in Hobart […] than at any other one place on earth, making Hobart a globally significant contributor to our understanding of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.” Researchers are based at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), with several working between institutions. Many Antarctic researchers located elsewhere in the world also have a connection with the place through affiliations and collaborations, leading journalist Jo Chandler to assert that “the breadth and depth of Hobart’s knowledge of ice, water, and the life forms they nurture […] is arguably unrivalled anywhere in the world” (86).Hobart also plays a significant role in Antarctica’s governance, as the site of the secretariats for the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP), and as host of the Antarctic Consultative Treaty Meetings on more than one occasion (1986, 2012). The cultural domain is active, with Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) featuring a permanent exhibit, “Islands to Ice”, emphasising the ocean as connecting the two places; the Mawson’s Huts Replica Museum aiming (among other things) to “highlight Hobart as the gateway to the Antarctic continent for the Asia Pacific region”; and a biennial Australian Antarctic Festival drawing over twenty thousand visitors, about a sixth of them from interstate or overseas (Hingley). Antarctic links are evident in the city’s natural and built environment: the dolerite columns of Mt Wellington, the statue of the Tasmanian Antarctic explorer Louis Bernacchi on the waterfront, and the wharfs that regularly accommodate icebreakers such as the Aurora Australis and the Astrolabe. Antarctica is figured as a southern neighbour; as historian Tom Griffiths puts it, Tasmanians “grow up with Antarctica breathing down their necks” (5). As an Antarctic City, Hobart mediates access to Antarctica both physically and in the cultural imaginary.Perhaps in recognition of the diverse ways in which a region or a city might be connected to Antarctica, researchers have recently been suggesting critical approaches to the ‘gateway’ label. C. Michael Hall points to a fuzziness in the way the term is applied, noting that it has drifted from its initial definition (drawn from economic geography) as denoting an access and supply point to a hinterland that produces a certain level of economic benefits. While Hall looks to keep the term robustly defined to avoid empty “local boosterism” (272–73), Gabriela Roldan aims to move the concept “beyond its function as an entry and exit door”, arguing that, among other things, the local community should be actively engaged in the Antarctic region (57). Leane, examining the representation of Hobart as a gateway in historical travel texts, concurs that “ingress and egress” are insufficient descriptors of Tasmania’s relationship with Antarctica, suggesting that at least discursively the island is positioned as “part of an Antarctic rim, itself sharing qualities of the polar region” (45). The ARC Linkage Project described above, supported by the Hobart City Council, the State Government and the University of Tasmania, as well as other national and international partners, aims to foster the idea of the Hobart and its counterparts as ‘Antarctic cities’ whose citizens act as custodians for the South Polar region, with a genuine concern for and investment in its future.Near and Far: Local Perspectives A changing climate may once again herald a shift in the identity of the Tasmanian islands. Recognition of the central role of Antarctica in regulating the global climate has generated scientific and political re-evaluation of the region. Antarctica is not only the planet’s largest heat sink but is the engine of global water currents and wind patterns that drive weather patterns and biodiversity across the world (Convey et al. 543). For example, Tas van Ommen’s research into Antarctic glaciology shows the tangible connection between increased snowfall in coastal East Antarctica and patterns of drought southwest Western Australia (van Ommen and Morgan). Hobart has become a global centre of marine and Antarctic science, bringing investment and development to the city. As the global climate heats up, Tasmania—thanks to its low latitude and southerly weather patterns—is one of the few regions in Australia likely to remain temperate. This is already leading to migration from the mainland that is impacting house prices and rental availability (Johnston; Landers 1). The region’s future is therefore closely entangled with its proximity to the far south. Salazar writes that “we cannot continue to think of Antarctica as the end of the Earth” (67). Shifting Antarctica into focus also brings Tasmania in from the margins. As an Antarctic city, Hobart assumes a privileged positioned on the global stage. This allows the city to present itself as central to international research efforts—in contrast to domestic views of the place as a small regional capital. The city inhabits dual identities; it is both on the periphery of Australian concerns and at the centre of Antarctic activity. Tasmania, then, is not in freefall, but rather at the forefront of a push to recognise Antarctica as entangled with its neighbours to the north.AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by the Australian Research Council under LP160100210.ReferencesAntonello, Alessandro. “Finding Place in Antarctica.” Antarctica and the Humanities. Eds. Peder Roberts, Lize-Marie van der Watt, and Adrian Howkins. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 181–204.Australian Government. 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All history of this area and the general talk and all of that is that 1973 was a turning point and the Aquarius Festival is credited with having turned this region around in so many ways, but I think that is a myth ... and I have to honour the truth; and the truth is that old Dicke Donelly came and did a Welcome to Country the night before the festival. (Joseph in Joseph and Hanley)In 1973 the Australian Union of Students (AUS) held the Aquarius Arts and Lifestyle Festival in a small, rural New South Wales town called Nimbin. The festival was seen as the peak expression of Australian counterculture and is attributed to creating the “Rainbow Region”, an area with a concentration of alternative life stylers in Northern NSW (Derrett 28). While the Aquarius Festival is recognised as a founding historical and countercultural event, the unique and important relationships established with Indigenous people at this time are generally less well known. This article investigates claims that the 1973 Aquarius Festival was “the first event in Australian history that sought permission for the use of the land from the Traditional Owners” (Joseph and Hanley). The diverse international, national and local conditions that coalesced at the Aquarius Festival suggest a fertile environment was created for reconciliatory bonds to develop. Often dismissed as a “tree hugging, soap dodging movement,” the counterculture was radically politicised having sprung from the 1960s social revolutions when the world witnessed mass demonstrations that confronted war, racism, sexism and capitalism. Primarily a youth movement, it was characterised by flamboyant dress, music, drugs and mass gatherings with universities forming the epicentre and white, middle class youth leading the charge. As their ideals of changing the world were frustrated by lack of systematic change, many decided to disengage and a migration to rural settings occurred (Jacob; Munro-Clarke; Newton). In the search for alternatives, the counterculture assimilated many spiritual practices, such as Eastern traditions and mysticism, which were previously obscure to the Western world. This practice of spiritual syncretism can be represented as a direct resistance to the hegemony of the dominant Western culture (Stell). As the new counterculture developed, its progression from urban to rural settings was driven by philosophies imbued with a desire to reconnect with and protect the natural world while simultaneously rejecting the dominant conservative order. A recurring feature of this countercultural ‘back to the land’ migration was not only an empathetic awareness of the injustices of colonial past, but also a genuine desire to learn from the Indigenous people of the land. Indigenous people were generally perceived as genuine opposers of Westernisation, inherently spiritual, ecological, tribal and communal, thus encompassing the primary values to which the counterculture was aspiring (Smith). Cultures converged. One, a youth culture rebelling from its parent culture; the other, ancient cultures reeling from the historical conquest by the youths’ own ancestors. Such cultural intersections are rich with complex scenarios and politics. As a result, often naïve, but well-intended relations were established with Native Americans, various South American Indigenous peoples, New Zealand Maori and, as this article demonstrates, the Original People of Australia (Smith; Newton; Barr-Melej; Zolov). The 1960s protest era fostered the formation of groups aiming to address a variety of issues, and at times many supported each other. Jennifer Clarke says it was the Civil Rights movement that provided the first models of dissent by formulating a “method, ideology and language of protest” as African Americans stood up and shouted prior to other movements (2). The issue of racial empowerment was not lost on Australia’s Indigenous population. Clarke writes that during the 1960s, encouraged by events overseas and buoyed by national organisation, Aborigines “slowly embarked on a political awakening, demanded freedom from the trappings of colonialism and responded to the effects of oppression at worst and neglect at best” (4). Activism of the 1960s had the “profoundly productive effect of providing Aborigines with the confidence to assert their racial identity” (159). Many Indigenous youth were compelled by the zeitgeist to address their people’s issues, fulfilling Charlie Perkins’s intentions of inspiring in Indigenous peoples a will to resist (Perkins). Enjoying new freedoms of movement out of missions, due to the 1967 Constitutional change and the practical implementation of the assimilation policy, up to 32,000 Indigenous youth moved to Redfern, Sydney between 1967 and 1972 (Foley, “An Evening With”). Gary Foley reports that a dynamic new Black Power Movement emerged but the important difference between this new younger group and the older Indigenous leaders of the day was the diverse range of contemporary influences. Taking its mantra from the Black Panther movement in America, though having more in common with the equivalent Native American Red Power movement, the Black Power Movement acknowledged many other international struggles for independence as equally inspiring (Foley, “An Evening”). People joined together for grassroots resistance, formed anti-hierarchical collectives and established solidarities between varied groups who previously would have had little to do with each other. The 1973 Aquarius Festival was directly aligned with “back to the land” philosophies. The intention was to provide a place and a reason for gathering to “facilitate exchanges on survival techniques” and to experience “living in harmony with the natural environment.” without being destructive to the land (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Early documents in the archives, however, reveal no apparent interest in Australia’s Indigenous people, referring more to “silken Arabian tents, mediaeval banners, circus, jugglers and clowns, peace pipes, maypole and magic circles” (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Obliterated from the social landscape and minimally referred to in the Australian education system, Indigenous people were “off the radar” to the majority mindset, and the Australian counterculture similarly was slow to appreciate Indigenous culture. Like mainstream Australia, the local counterculture movement largely perceived the “race” issue as something occurring in other countries, igniting the phrase “in your own backyard” which became a catchcry of Indigenous activists (Foley, “Whiteness and Blackness”) With no mention of any Indigenous interest, it seems likely that the decision to engage grew from the emerging climate of Indigenous activism in Australia. Frustrated by student protestors who seemed oblivious to local racial issues, focusing instead on popular international injustices, Indigenous activists accused them of hypocrisy. Aquarius Festival directors, found themselves open to similar accusations when public announcements elicited a range of responses. Once committed to the location of Nimbin, directors Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen began a tour of Australian universities to promote the upcoming event. While at the annual conference of AUS in January 1973 at Monash University, Dunstan met Indigenous activist Gary Foley: Gary witnessed the presentation of Johnny Allen and myself at the Aquarius Foundation session and our jubilation that we had agreement from the village residents to not only allow, but also to collaborate in the production of the Festival. After our presentation which won unanimous support, it was Gary who confronted me with the question “have you asked permission from local Aboriginal folk?” This threw me into confusion because we had seen no Aboriginals in Nimbin. (Dunstan, e-mail) Such a challenge came at a time when the historical climate was etched with political activism, not only within the student movement, but more importantly with Indigenous activists’ recent demonstrations, such as the installation in 1972 of the Tent Embassy in Canberra. As representatives of the counterculture movement, which was characterised by its inclinations towards consciousness-raising, AUS organisers were ethically obliged to respond appropriately to the questions about Indigenous permission and involvement in the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. In addition to this political pressure, organisers in Nimbin began hearing stories of the area being cursed or taboo for women. This most likely originated from the tradition of Nimbin Rocks, a rocky outcrop one kilometre from Nimbin, as a place where only certain men could go. Jennifer Hoff explains that many major rock formations were immensely sacred places and were treated with great caution and respect. Only a few Elders and custodians could visit these places and many such locations were also forbidden for women. Ceremonies were conducted at places like Nimbin Rocks to ensure the wellbeing of all tribespeople. Stories of the Nimbin curse began to spread and most likely captivated a counterculture interested in mysticism. As organisers had hoped that news of the festival would spread on the “lips of the counterculture,” they were alarmed to hear how “fast the bad news of this curse was travelling” (Dunstan, e-mail). A diplomatic issue escalated with further challenges from the Black Power community when organisers discovered that word had spread to Sydney’s Indigenous community in Redfern. Organisers faced a hostile reaction to their alleged cultural insensitivity and were plagued by negative publicity with accusations the AUS were “violating sacred ground” (Janice Newton 62). Faced with such bad press, Dunstan was determined to repair what was becoming a public relations disaster. It seemed once prompted to the path, a sense of moral responsibility prevailed amongst the organisers and they took the unprecedented step of reaching out to Australia’s Indigenous people. Dunstan claimed that an expedition was made to the local Woodenbong mission to consult with Elder, Uncle Lyle Roberts. To connect with local people required crossing the great social divide present in that era of Australia’s history. Amy Nethery described how from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, a “system of reserves, missions and other institutions isolated, confined and controlled Aboriginal people” (9). She explains that the people were incarcerated as a solution to perceived social problems. For Foley, “the widespread genocidal activity of early “settlement” gave way to a policy of containment” (Foley, “Australia and the Holocaust”). Conditions on missions were notoriously bad with alcoholism, extreme poverty, violence, serious health issues and depression common. Of particular concern to mission administrators was the perceived need to keep Indigenous people separate from the non-indigenous population. Dunstan described the mission he visited as having “bad vibes.” He found it difficult to communicate with the elderly man, and was not sure if he understood Dunstan’s quest, as his “responses came as disjointed raves about Jesus and saving grace” (Dunstan, e-mail). Uncle Lyle, he claimed, did not respond affirmatively or negatively to the suggestion that Nimbin was cursed, and so Dunstan left assuming it was not true. Other organisers began to believe the curse and worried that female festival goers might get sick or worse, die. This interpretation reflected, as Vanessa Bible argues, a general Eurocentric misunderstanding of the relationship of Indigenous peoples with the land. Paul Joseph admits they were naïve whites coming into a place with very little understanding, “we didn’t know if we needed a witch doctor or what we needed but we knew we needed something from the Aborigines to lift the spell!”(Joseph and Hanley). Joseph, one of the first “hippies” who moved to the area, had joined forces with AUS organisers. He said, “it just felt right” to get Indigenous involvement and recounted how organisers made another trip to Woodenbong Mission to find Dickee (Richard) Donnelly, a Song Man, who was very happy to be invited. Whether the curse was valid or not it proved to be productive in further instigating respectful action. Perhaps feeling out of their depth, the organisers initiated another strategy to engage with Australian Indigenous people. A call out was sent through the AUS network to diversify the cultural input and it was recommended they engage the services of South African artist, Bauxhau Stone. Timing aligned well as in 1972 Australia had voted in a new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam brought about significant political changes, many in response to socialist protests that left a buoyancy in the air for the counterculturalist movement. He made prodigious political changes in support of Indigenous people, including creating the Aboriginal Arts Board as part of the Australian Council of the Arts (ACA). As the ACA were already funding activities for the Aquarius Festival, organisers were successful in gaining two additional grants specifically for Indigenous participation (Farnham). As a result We were able to hire […] representatives, a couple of Kalahari bushmen. ‘Cause we were so dumb, we didn’t think we could speak to the black people, you know what I mean, we thought we would be rejected, or whatever, so for us to really reach out, we needed somebody black to go and talk to them, or so we thought, and it was remarkable. This one Bau, a remarkable fellow really, great artist, great character, he went all over Australia. He went to Pitjantjatjara, Yirrkala and we arranged buses and tents when they got here. We had a very large contingent of Aboriginal people come to the Aquarius Festival, thanks to Whitlam. (Joseph in Joseph and Henley) It was under the aegis of these government grants that Bauxhau Stone conducted his work. Stone embodied a nexus of contemporary issues. Acutely aware of the international movement for racial equality and its relevance to Australia, where conditions were “really appalling”, Stone set out to transform Australian race relations by engaging with the alternative arts movement (Stone). While his white Australian contemporaries may have been unaccustomed to dealing with the Indigenous racial issue, Stone was actively engaged and thus well suited to act as a cultural envoy for the Aquarius Festival. He visited several local missions, inviting people to attend and notifying them of ceremonies being conducted by respected Elders. Nimbin was then the site of the Aquarius Lifestyle and Celebration Festival, a two week gathering of alternative cultures, technologies and youth. It innovatively demonstrated its diversity of influences, attracted people from all over the world and was the first time that the general public really witnessed Australia’s counterculture (Derrett 224). As markers of cultural life, counterculture festivals of the 1960s and 1970s were as iconic as the era itself and many around the world drew on the unique Indigenous heritage of their settings in some form or another (Partridge; Perone; Broadley and Jones; Zolov). The social phenomenon of coming together to experience, celebrate and foster a sense of unity was triggered by protests, music and a simple, yet deep desire to reconnect with each other. Festivals provided an environment where the negative social pressures of race, gender, class and mores (such as clothes) were suspended and held the potential “for personal and social transformation” (St John 167). With the expressed intent to “take matters into our own hands” and try to develop alternative, innovative ways of doing things with collective participation, the Aquarius Festival thus became an optimal space for reinvigorating ancient and Indigenous ways (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). With philosophies that venerated collectivism, tribalism, connecting with the earth, and the use of ritual, the Indigenous presence at the Aquarius Festival gave attendees the opportunity to experience these values. To connect authentically with Nimbin’s landscape, forming bonds with the Traditional Owners was essential. Participants were very fortunate to have the presence of the last known initiated men of the area, Uncle Lyle Roberts and Uncle Dickee Donnely. These Elders represented the last vestiges of an ancient culture and conducted innovative ceremonies, song, teachings and created a sacred fire for the new youth they encountered in their land. They welcomed the young people and were very happy for their presence, believing it represented a revolutionary shift (Wedd; King; John Roberts; Cecil Roberts). Images 1 and 2: Ceremony and talks conducted at the Aquarius Festival (people unknown). Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Paul White. The festival thus provided an important platform for the regeneration of cultural and spiritual practices. John Roberts, nephew of Uncle Lyle, recalled being surprised by the reaction of festival participants to his uncle: “He was happy and then he started to sing. And my God … I couldn’t get near him! There was this big ring of hippies around him. They were about twenty deep!” Sharing to an enthusiastic, captive audience had a positive effect and gave the non-indigenous a direct Indigenous encounter (Cecil Roberts; King; Oshlak). Estimates of the number of Indigenous people in attendance vary, with the main organisers suggesting 800 to 1000 and participants suggesting 200 to 400 (Stone; Wedd; Oshlak: Joseph; King; Cecil Roberts). As the Festival lasted over a two week period, many came and left within that time and estimates are at best reliant on memory, engagement and perspectives. With an estimated total attendance at the Festival between 5000 and 10,000, either number of Indigenous attendees is symbolic and a significant symbolic statistic for Indigenous and non-indigenous to be together on mutual ground in Australia in 1973. Images 3-5: Performers from Yirrkala Dance Group, brought to the festival by Stone with funding from the Federal Government. Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Dr Ian Cameron. For Indigenous people, the event provided an important occasion to reconnect with their own people, to share their culture with enthusiastic recipients, as well as the chance to experience diverse aspects of the counterculture. Though the northern NSW region has a history of diverse cultural migration of Italian and Indian families, the majority of non-indigenous and Indigenous people had limited interaction with cosmopolitan influences (Kijas 20). Thus Nimbin was a conservative region and many Christianised Indigenous people were also conservative in their outlook. The Aquarius Festival changed that as the Indigenous people experienced the wide-ranging cultural elements of the alternative movement. The festival epitomised countercultural tendencies towards flamboyant fashion and hairstyles, architectural design, fantastical art, circus performance, Asian clothes and religious products, vegetarian food and nudity. Exposure to this bohemian culture would have surely led to “mind expansion and consciousness raising,” explicit aims adhered to by the movement (Roszak). Performers and participants from Africa, America and India also gave attending Indigenous Australians the opportunity to interact with non-European cultures. Many people interviewed for this paper indicated that Indigenous people’s reception of this festival experience was joyous. For Australia’s early counterculture, interest in Indigenous Australia was limited and for organisers of the AUS Aquarius Festival, it was not originally on the agenda. The counterculture in the USA and New Zealand had already started to engage with their Indigenous people some years earlier. However due to the Aquarius Festival’s origins in the student movement and its solidarities with the international Indigenous activist movement, they were forced to shift their priorities. The coincidental selection of a significant spiritual location at Nimbin to hold the festival brought up additional challenges and countercultural intrigue with mystical powers and a desire to connect authentically to the land, further prompted action. Essentially, it was the voices of empowered Indigenous activists, like Gary Foley, which in fact triggered the reaching out to Indigenous involvement. While the counterculture organisers were ultimately receptive and did act with unprecedented respect, credit must be given to Indigenous activists. The activist’s role is to trigger action and challenge thinking and in this case, it was ultimately productive. Therefore the Indigenous people were not merely passive recipients of beneficiary goodwill, but active instigators of appropriate cultural exchange. After the 1973 festival many attendees decided to stay in Nimbin to purchase land collectively and a community was born. Relationships established with local Indigenous people developed further. Upon visiting Nimbin now, one will see a vibrant visual display of Indigenous and psychedelic themed art, a central park with an open fire tended by local custodians and other Indigenous community members, an Aboriginal Centre whose rent is paid for by local shopkeepers, and various expressions of a fusion of counterculture and Indigenous art, music and dance. While it appears that reconciliation became the aspiration for mainstream society in the 1990s, Nimbin’s early counterculture history had Indigenous reconciliation at its very foundation. The efforts made by organisers of the 1973 Aquarius Festival stand as one of very few examples in Australian history where non-indigenous Australians have respectfully sought to learn from Indigenous people and to assimilate their cultural practices. It also stands as an example for the world, of reconciliation, based on hippie ideals of peace and love. 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It is January 1930 and the restless Southern Ocean is heaving itself up against the frozen coast of Eastern Antarctica. For hundreds of kilometres, this coastline consists entirely of ice: although Antarctica is a continent, only 2% of its surface consists of exposed rock; the rest is buried under a vast frozen mantle. But there is rock in this coastal scene: silhouetted against the glaring white of the glacial shelf, a barren island humps up out of the water. Slowly and cautiously, the Discovery approaches the island through uncharted waters; the crew’s eyes strain in the frigid air as they scour the ocean’s surface for ship-puncturing bergs. The approach to the island is difficult, but Captain Davis maintains the Discovery on its course as the wind howls in the rigging. Finally, the ship can go no further; the men lower a boat into the tossing sea. They pull hard at the oars until the boat is abreast of the island, and then they ram the bow against its icy littoral. Now one of the key moments of this exploratory expedition—officially titled the British, Australian, and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE)—is about to occur: the expedition is about to succeed in its primary spatial mission. Douglas Mawson, the Australian leader of the expedition, puts his feet onto the island and ascends to its bleak summit. There, he and his crew assemble a mound of loose stones and insert into it the flagpole they’ve carried with them across the ocean. Mawson reads an official proclamation of territorial annexation (see Bush 118-19), the photographer Frank Hurley shoots the moment on film, and one of the men hauls the Union Jack up the pole. Until the Australian Flags Act of 1953, the Union Jack retained seniority over the Australian flag. BANZARE took place before the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which gave full political and foreign policy independence to Commonwealth countries, thus Mawson claimed Antarctic space on behalf of Britain. He did so with the understanding that Britain would subsequently grant Australia title to its own Antarctican space. Britain did so in 1933. In the freezing wind, the men take off their hats, give three cheers for the King, and sing “God Save the King.” They deposit a copy of the proclamation into a metal canister and affix this to the flagpole; for a moment they admire the view. But there is little time to savour the moment, or the feeling of solid ground under their cold feet: the ship is waiting and the wind is growing in force. The men row back to the Discovery; Mawson returns to his cabin and writes up the event. A crucial moment in Antarctica’s spatial history has occurred: on what Mawson has aptly named Proclamation Island, Antarctica has been produced as Australian space. But how, exactly, does this production of Antarctica as a spatial possession work? How does this moment initiate the transformation of six million square kilometres of Antarctica—42% of the continent—into Australian space? The answer to this question lies in three separate, but articulated cultural technologies: representation, the body of the explorer, and international territorial law. When it comes to thinking about ‘turf’, Antarctica may at first seem an odd subject of analysis. Physically, Antarctica is a turfless space, an entire continent devoid of grass, plants, land-based animals, or trees. Geopolitically, Antarctica remains the only continent on which no turf wars have been fought: British and Argentinian soldiers clashed over the occupation of a Peninsular base in the Hope Bay incident of 1952 (Dodds 56), but beyond this somewhat bathetic skirmish, Antarctican space has never been the object of physical conflict. Further, as Antarctica has no indigenous human population, its space remains free of the colonial turfs of dispossession, invasion, and loss. The Antarctic Treaty of 1961 formalised Antarctica’s geopolitically turfless status, stipulating that the continent was to be used for peaceful purposes only, and stating that Antarctica was an internationally shared space of harmony and scientific goodwill. So why address Antarctican spatiality here? Two motivations underpin this article’s anatomising of Australia’s Antarctican space. First, too often Antarctica is imagined as an entirely homogeneous space: a vast white plain dotted here and there along its shifting coast by identical scientific research stations inhabited by identical bearded men. Similarly, the complexities of Antarctica’s geopolitical and legal spaces are often overlooked in favour of a vision of the continent as a site of harmonious uniformity. While it is true that the bulk of Antarctican space is ice, the assumption that its cultural spatialities are identical is far from the case: this article is part of a larger endeavour to provide a ‘thick’ description of Antarctican spatialities, one which points to the heterogeneity of cultural geographies of the polar south. The Australian polar spatiality installed by Mawson differs radically from that of, for example, Chile; in a continent governed by international consensus, it is crucial that the specific cultural geographies and spatial histories of Treaty participants be clearly understood. Second, attending to complexities of Antarctican spatiality points up the intersecting cultural technologies involved in spatial production, cultural technologies so powerful that, in the case of Antarctica, they transformed nearly half of a distant continent into Australian sovereign space. This article focuses its critical attention on three core spatialising technologies, a trinary that echoes Henri Lefebvre’s influential tripartite model of spatiality: this article attends to Australian Antarctic representation, practise, and the law. At the turn of the twentieth century, Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen trooped over the polar plateau, and Antarctic space became a setting for symbolic Edwardian performances of heroic imperial masculinity and ‘frontier’ hardiness. At the same time, a second, less symbolic, type of Antarctican spatiality began to evolve: for the first time, Antarctica became a potential territorial possession; it became the object of expansionist geopolitics. Based in part on Scott’s expeditions, Britain declared sovereignty over an undefined area of the continent in 1908, and France declared Antarctic space its own in 1924; by the late 1920s, what John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge refer to as the nation-state ontology—that is, the belief that land should and must be divided into state-owned units—had arrived in Antarctica. What the Adelaide Advertiser’s 8 April 1929 headline referred to as “A Scramble for Antarctica” had begun. The British Imperial Conference of 1926 concluded that the entire continent should become a possession of Britain and its dominions, New Zealand and Australia (Imperial). Thus, in 1929, BANZARE set sail into the brutal Southern Ocean. Although the expedition included various scientists, its primary mission was not to observe Antarctican space, but to take possession of it: as the expedition’s instructions from Australian Prime Minister Bruce stated, BANZARE’s mission was to produce Antarctica as Empire’s—and by extension, Australia’s—sovereign space (Jacka and Jacka 251). With the moment described in the first paragraph of this article, along with four other such moments, BANZARE succeeded; just how it did so is the focus of this work. It is by now axiomatic in spatial studies that the job of imperial explorers is not to locate landforms, but to produce a discursive space. “The early travellers,” as Paul Carter notes of Australian explorers, “invented places rather than found them” (51). Numerous analytical investigations attend to the discursive power of exploration: in Australia, Carter’s Road to Botany Bay, Simon Ryan’s Cartographic Eye, Ross Gibson’s Diminishing Paradise, and Brigid Hains’s The Ice and the Inland, to name a few, lay bare the textual strategies through which the imperial annexation of “new” spaces was legitimated and enabled. Discursive territoriality was certainly a core product of BANZARE: as this article’s opening paragraph demonstrates, one of the key missions of BANZARE was not simply to perform rituals of spatial possession, but to textualise them for popular and governmental consumption. Within ten months of the expedition’s return, Hurley’s film Southward Ho! With Mawson was touring Australia. BANZARE consisted of two separate trips to Antarctica; Southward Ho! documents the first of these, while Siege of the South documents the both the first and the second, 1930-1, mission. While there is not space here to provide a detailed textual analysis of the entire film, a focus on the “Proclamation Island moment” usefully points up some of the film’s central spatialising work. Hurley situated the Proclamation Island scene at the heart of the film; the scene was so important that Hurley wished he had been able to shoot two hours of footage of Mawson’s island performance (Ayres 194). This scene in the film opens with a long shot of the land and sea around the island; a soundtrack of howling wind not only documents the brutal conditions in which the expedition worked, but also emphasises the emptiness of Antarctican space prior to its “discovery” by Mawson: in this shot, the film visually confirms Antarctica’s status as an available terra nullius awaiting cooption into Australian understanding, and into Australian national space. The film then cuts to a close-up of Mawson raising the flag; the sound of the wind disappears as Mawson begins to read the proclamation of possession. It is as if Mawson’s proclamation of possession stills the protean chaos of unclaimed Antarctic space by inviting it into the spatial order of national territory: at this moment, Antarctica’s agency is symbolically subsumed by Mawson’s acquisitive words. As the scene ends, the camera once again pans over the surrounding sea and ice scape, visually confirming the impact of Mawson’s—and the film’s—performance: all this, the shot implies, is now made meaningful; all this is now understood, recorded, and, most importantly, all this is now ours. A textual analysis of this filmic moment might identify numerous other spatialising strategies at work: its conflation of Mawson’s and the viewer’s proprietary gazes (Ryan), its invocation of the sublime, or its legitimising conflation of the ‘purity’ of the whiteness of the landscape with the whiteness of its claimants (Dyer 21). However, the spatial productivity of this moment far exceeds the discursive. What is at times frustrating about discourse analyses of spatiality is that they too often fail to articulate representation to other, equally potent, cultural technologies of spatial production. John Wylie notes that “on the whole, accounts of early twentieth-century Antarctic exploration exhibit a particular tendency to position and interpret exploratory experience in terms of self-contained discursive ensembles” (170). Despite the undisputed power of textuality, discourse alone does not, and cannot, produce a spatial possession. “Discursive and representational practices,” as Jane Jacobs observes, “are in a mutually constitutive relationship with political and economic forces” (9); spatiality, in other words, is not simply a matter of texts. In order to understand fully the process of Antarctican spatial acquisition, it is necessary to depart from tales of exploration and ships and flags, and to focus on the less visceral spatiality of international territorial law. Or, more accurately, it is necessary to address the mutual imbrication of these two articulated spatialising “domains of practice” (Dixon). The emerging field of critical legal geography is founded on the premise that legal analyses of territoriality neglect the spatial dimension of their investigations; rather than seeing the law as a means of spatial production, they position space as a neutral, universally-legible entity which is neatly governed by the “external variable” of territorial law (Blomley 28). “In the hegemonic conception of the law,” Wesley Pue argues, “the entire world is transmuted into one vast isotropic surface” (568) upon which law acts. Nicholas Blomley asserts, however, that law is not a neutral organiser of space, but rather a cultural technology of spatial production. Territorial laws, in other words, make spaces, and don’t simply govern them. When Mawson planted the flag and read the proclamation, he was producing Antarctica as a legal space as well as a discursive one. Today’s international territorial laws derive directly from European imperialism: as European empires expanded, they required a spatial system that would protect their newly-annexed lands, and thus they developed a set of laws of territorial acquisition and possession. Undergirding these laws is the ontological premise that space is divisible into state-owned sovereign units. At international law, space can be acquired by its imperial claimants in one of three main ways: through conquest, cession (treaty), or through “the discovery of terra nullius” (see Triggs 2). Antarctica and Australia remain the globe’s only significant spaces to be transformed into possessions through the last of these methods. In the spatiality of the international law of discovery, explorers are not just government employees or symbolic representatives, but vessels of enormous legal force. According to international territorial law, sovereign title to “new” territory—land defined (by Europeans) as terra nullius, or land belonging to no one—can be established through the eyes, feet, codified ritual performances, and documents of explorers. That is, once an authorised explorer—Mawson carried documents from both the Australian Prime Minister and the British King that invested his body and his texts with the power to transform land into a possession—saw land, put his foot on it, planted a flag, read a proclamation, then documented these acts in words and maps, that land became a possession. These performative rituals and their documentation activate the legal spatiality of territorial acquisition; law here is revealed as a “bundle of practices” that produce space as a possession (Ford 202). What we witness when we attend to Mawson’s island performance, then, is not merely a discursive performance, but also the transformation of Antarctica into a legal space of possession. Similarly, the films and documents generated by the expedition are more than just a “sign system of human ambition” (Tang 190), they are evidence, valid at law, of territorial possession. They are key components of Australia’s legal currency of Antarctican spatial purchase. What is of central importance here is that Mawson’s BANZARE performance on Proclamation Island is a moment in which the dryly legal, the bluntly physical, and the densely textual clearly intersect in the creation of space as a possession. Australia did not take possession of forty-two percent of Antarctica after BANZARE by law, by exploration, or by representation alone. The Australian government built its Antarctic space with letters patent and legal documents. BANZARE produced Australia’s Antarctic possession through the physical and legal rituals of flag-planting, proclamation-reading, and exploration. BANZARE further contributed to Australia’s polar empire with maps, journals, photos and films, and cadastral lists of the region’s animals, minerals, magnetic fields, and winds. The law of “discovery of terra nullius” coalesced these spaces into a territory officially designated as Australian. It is crucial to recognise that the production of nearly half of Antarctica as Australian space was, and is not a matter of discourse, of physical performance, or of law alone. Rather, these three cultural technologies of spatial production are mutually imbricated; none can function without the others, nor is one reducible to an epiphenomenon of another. To focus on the discursive products of BANZARE without attending to the expedition’s legal work not only downplays the significance of Mawson’s spatialising achievement, but also blinds us to the role that law plays in the production of space. Attending to Mawson’s Proclamation Island moment points to the unique nature of Australia’s Antarctic spatiality: unlike the US, which constructs Antarctic spatiality as entirely non-sovereign; and unlike Chile, which bases its Antarctic sovereignty claim on Papal Bulls and acts of domestic colonisation, Australian Antarctic space is a spatiality of possession, founded on a bedrock of imperial exploration, representation, and law. Seventy-four years ago, the camera whirred as a man stuck a flagpole into the bleak summit rocks of a small Antarctic island: six million square kilometres of Antarctica became, and remain, Australian space. Works Cited Agnew, John, and Stuart Corbridge. Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy. London: Routledge, 1995. Ayres, Philip. Mawson: A Life. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1999. Blomley, Nicholas. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guilford, 1994. Bush, W. M. Antarctica and International Law: A Collection of Inter-State and National Documents. Vol. 2. London: Oceana, 1982. Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History. London: Faber, 1987. Dixon, Rob. Prosthetic Gods: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance. Brisbane: UQP, 2001. Dodds, Klaus. Geopolitics in Antarctica: Views from the Southern Oceanic Rim. Chichester: Wiley, 1997. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Ford, Richard. “Law’s Territory (A History of Jurisdiction).” The Legal Geographies Reader. Ed. Nicholas Blomley and Richard Ford. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 200-17. Gibson, Ross. The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia. Sydney: Sirius, 1984. Hains, Brigid. The Ice and the Inland: Mawson, Flynn, and the Myth of the Frontier. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2002. Imperial Conference, 1926. Summary of Proceedings. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1926. Jacka, Fred, and Eleanor Jacka, eds. Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Jacobs, Jane. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge, 1996. Pue, Wesley. “Wrestling with Law: (Geographical) Specificity versus (Legal) Abstraction.” Urban Geography 11.6 (1990): 566-85. Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye: How the Explorers Saw Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Tang, David. “Writing on Antarctica.” Room 5 1 (2000): 185-95. Triggs, Gillian. International Law and Australian Sovereignty in Antarctica. Sydney: Legal, 1986. Wylie, John. “Earthly Poles: The Antarctic Voyages of Scott and Amundsen.” Postcolonial Geographies. Ed Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan. London: Continuum, 2002. 169-83. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Collis, Christy. "Australia’s Antarctic Turf" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/02-feature-australia.php>. APA Style Collis, C. (2004, Mar17). Australia’s Antarctic Turf. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture,7,<http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/02-feature australia.php>

The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation.Surprising to many, Aboriginal Australian mythology includes at least one truly vampire-like entity, despite Althans’ confident assertion that the Bunyip is “Australia’s only monster” (16) which followed McKee’s equally fearless claim that “there is no blackfella tradition of zombies or vampires” (201). Gelder’s Ghost Stories anthology also only mentions the Bunyip, in a tale narrated by Indigenous man Percy Mumbulla (250). Certainly, neither of these academics claim Indigeneity in their ethnicity and most Aboriginal Australian scholars will happily agree that our heterogeneous Indigenous cultures and traditions are devoid of opera-cape wearing Counts who sleep in coffins or are repelled by crucifix-wielding Catholics. Nevertheless, there are fascinating stories--handed down orally from one generation to the next (Australian Aborigines, of course, have no ancestral writing system)--informing wide-eyed youngsters of bloodsucking, supernatural entities that return from the grave to feed upon still living blackfellas: hence Unaipon describes the red-skinned, fig tree-dwelling monster, the “Yara Ma Yha Who […] which sucks the blood from the victim and leaves him helpless upon the ground” (218). Like most vampires, this monster imparts a similarly monstrous existence upon his prey, which it drains of blood through the suckers on its fingers, not its teeth. Additionally, Reed warns: “Little children, beware of the Yara-ma-yha-who! If you do not behave yourselves and do as you are told, they will come and eat you!” (410), but no-one suggests this horrible creature is actually an undead human.For the purposes of this paper at least, the defining characteristics of a vampire are firstly that it must have once been an ordinary, living human. Secondly, it must have an appetite for human blood. Thirdly, it must have a ghoulish inability to undergo a permanent death (note, zombies, unlike vampires it seems, are fonder of brains than fresh hemoglobin and are particularly easy to dispatch). Thus, according to my criteria, an arguably genuine Aboriginal Australian vampire is referred to when Bunson writes of the Mrart being an improperly buried member of the tribe who has returned after death to feed upon the living (13) and when Cheung notes “a number of vampire-like creatures were feared, most especially the mrart, the ghost of a dead person who attacked victims at night and dragged them away from campsites” (40). Unfortunately, details regarding this “number of vampire-like creatures” have not been collated, nor I fear, in this era of rapidly extinguishing Aboriginal Australian language use, are they ever likely to be.Perhaps the best hope for preservation of these little known treasures of our mythology lies not with anthropologists but with the nation’s Indigenous creative writers. Yet no blackfella novelist, apparently, has been interested in the monstrous, bloodsucking, Aboriginal Undead. Despite being described as dominating the “Black Australian novel” (Shoemaker 1), writer Mudrooroo--who has authored three vampire novels--reveals nothing of Aboriginal Australian vampirology in his texts. Significantly, however, Mudrooroo states that Aboriginal Australian novelists such as he “are devoting their words to the Indigenous existential being” (Indigenous 3). Existentiality, of course, has to do with questions of life, death and dying and, for we Aboriginal Australians, such questions inevitably lead to us addressing the terrible consequences of British invasion and genocide upon our cultural identity, and this is reflected in Mudrooroo’s effective use of the vampire trope in his three ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels, as they are also known. Mudrooroo’s bloodsuckers, however, are the invading British and Europeans in his extended ‘white man as ghost’ metaphor: they are not sourced from Aboriginal Australian mythology.Mudrooroo does, notably, intertwine his story of colonising vampires in Australia with characters created by Bram Stoker in his classic novel Dracula (1897). He calls his first Aborigine to become a familiar “Renfield” (Undying 93), and even includes a soft-porn re-imagining of an encounter between characters he has inter-textually named “Lucy” and “Mina” (Promised 3). This potential for a contemporary transplantation of Stoker’s European characters to Australia was another aspect I sought to explore in my novel, especially regarding semi-autobiographical writing by mixed-race Aboriginal Australians such as Mudrooroo and myself. I wanted to meta-fictionally insert my self-styled anti-hero into a Stoker-inspired milieu. Thus my work features a protagonist who is confused and occasionally ambivalent about his Aboriginal identity. Brought up as Catholic, as I was, he succumbs to an Australian re-incarnation of Stoker’s Dracula as Anti-Christ and finds himself battling the true-believers of the Catholic Church, including a Moroccan version of Professor Van Helsing and a Buffy-like, quasi-Islamic vampire slayer.Despite his once revered status, Mudrooroo is now exiled from the Australian literary scene as a result of his claim to Indigeneity being (apparently) disproven (see Clark). Illness and old age prevent him from defending the charges, hence it is unlikely that Mudrooroo (or Colin Johnson as he was formerly known) will further develop the Aboriginal Australian vampire trope in his writing. Which situation leaves me to cautiously identify myself as the sole Aboriginal Australian novelist exploring Indigenous vampires in his/her creative writing, as evidenced by my 312 page novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance!, which was a prescribed text in a 2014 Indiana University course on World Literature (Halloran).Set in a contemporary Australia where disparate existential explanations including the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholicism, vampirism and atheism all co-exist, the writing of my novel was motivated by the question: ‘How can such incongruent ideologies be reconciled or bridged?’ My personal worldview is influenced by all four of these explanations for the mysteries of life and death: I was brought up in Catholicism but schooled in scientific methodology, which evolved into an insipid atheism. Culturally I was drawn to the gothic novel and developed an intellectual interest in Stoker’sDracula and its significance as a pro-Catholic, covert mission of proselytization (see Starrs 2004), whilst simultaneously learning more of my totem, Garrawi (the Sulphur-crested White Cockatoo), and the Aboriginal Dreamtime legends of my ancestral forebears. Much of my novel concerns questions of identity for a relatively light-complexioned, mixed ancestry Aboriginal Australian such as myself, and the place such individuals occupy in the post-colonial world. Mudrooroo, perhaps, was right in surmising that we Aboriginal Australian authors are devoted to writing about “the Indigenous existential being” for my Aboriginal vampire novel is at least semi-autobiographical and fixated on the protagonist’s attempts to reconcile his atheism with his Dreamtime teachings and Catholicism. But Mudrooroo’s writing differs markedly from my own when it comes to the expectations he has regarding the audience’s acceptance of supernatural themes. He apparently fully believed in the possibility of such unearthly spirits existing, and wrote of the “Maban Reality” whereby supernatural events are entirely tenable in the Aboriginal Australian world-view, and the way these matters are presented suggests he expects the reader to be similarly convinced. With this Zeitgeist, Mudrooroo’s ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels can be accurately described as Aboriginal Gothic. In this genre, Chanady explains, “the supernatural, as well as highly improbable events, are presented without any comment by the magical realist narrator” ("Magic Realism" 431).What, then, is the meaning of Aboriginal Gothic, given we Aboriginal peoples have no haunted castles or mist-shrouded graveyards? Again according to Chanady, as she set out in her groundbreaking monograph of 1985, in a work of Magical Realism the author unquestioningly accepts the supernatural as credible (10-12), even as, according to Althans, it combines “the magical and realist, into a new perspective of the world, thus offering alternative ways and new approaches to reality” (26). From this general categorisation, Althans proposes, comes the specific genre of Aboriginal Gothic, which is Magical Realism in an Indigenous context that creates a “cultural matrix foreign to a European audience [...] through blending the Gothic mode in its European tradition with the myths and customs of Aboriginal culture” (28-29). She relates the Aboriginal Gothic to Mudrooroo’s Maban Reality due to its acting “as counter-reality, grounded in the earth or country, to a rational worldview and the demands of a European realism” (28). Within this category sit not only the works of Aboriginal Australian novelists such as Mudrooroo, but also more recent novels by Aboriginal Australian writers Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, who occasionally indulge in improbable narratives informed by supernatural beings (while steering disappointingly clear of vampires).But there is more to the Aboriginal Gothic than a naïve acceptance of Maban Reality, or, for that matter, any other Magical Realist treatments of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Typically, the work of Aboriginal Gothic writers speaks to the historical horrors of colonisation. In contrast to the usually white-authored Australian Gothic, in which the land down under was seen as terrifying by the awestruck colonisers, and the Aborigine was portrayed as “more frightening than any European demon” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10), the Aboriginal Gothic sometimes reverses roles and makes the invading white man the monster. The Australian Gothic was for Aborigines, “a disabling, rather than enabling, discourse” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10) whilst colonial Gothic texts egregiously portrayed the colonised subject as a fearsome and savage Other. Ostensibly sub-human, from a psychoanalytic point of view, the Aborigine may even have symbolised the dark side of the British settler, but who, in the very act of his being subjugated, assures the white invader of his racial superiority, moral integrity and righteous identity. However, when Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away, readers witness the Other writing back, critically. Receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately ‘Gothicised’: eroded and made into the Other, the villainous, predatory savage. In this style of vicious literary retaliation Mudrooroo excelled. Furthermore, as a mixed ancestry Aborigine, like myself, Mudrooroo represented in his very existence, the personification of Aboriginal Gothic, for as Idilko Riendes writes, “The half caste is reminiscent of the Gothic monstrous, as the half caste is something that seems unnatural at first, evoking fears” (107). Perhaps therein lies a source of the vehemency with which some commentators have pilloried Mudrooroo after the somewhat unconvincing evidence of his non-Indigeneity? But I digress from my goal of explicating the meaning of the term Aboriginal Gothic.The boundaries of any genre are slippery and one of the features of postmodern literature is its deliberate blurring of boundaries, hence defining genres is not easy. Perhaps the Gothic can be better understood when the meaning of its polar opposite, the Fantastic, is better understood. Ethnic authorial controversies aside and returning to the equally shady subject of authorial intent, in contrast to the Aboriginal Gothic of novelists Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright, and their accepting of the supernatural as plausible, the Fantastic in literature is characterised by an enlightened rationality in which the supernatural is introduced but ultimately rejected by the author, a literary approach that certainly sits better with my existential atheism. Chanady defined and illustrated the genre as follows: “the fantastic […] reaffirmed hegemonic Western rational paradigms by portraying the supernatural in a contradictory manner as both terrifying and logically impossible […] My examples of the fantastic were drawn from the work of major French writers such as Merimee and Maupassant” ("Magic Realism" 430). Unfortunately, Chanady was unable to illustrate her concept of the Fantastic with examples of Aboriginal horror writing. Why? Because none existed until my novel was published. Whereas Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright incorporated the Magical Realism of Aboriginal Australian mythology into their novels, and asked their readers to accept it as not only plausible but realistic and even factual, I wanted to create a style that blends Aboriginal mythology with the European tradition of vampires, but ultimately rejects this “cultural matrix” due to enlightened rationality, as I deliberately and cynically denounce it all as fanciful superstition.Certainly, the adjective “fantastic” is liberally applied to much of what we call Gothic horror literature, and the sub-genre of Indigenous vampire literature is not immune to this confusion, with non-Australian Indigenous author Aaron Carr’s 1995 Native American vampire novel, The Eye Killers, unhelpfully described in terms of the “fantastic nature of the genre” (Tillett 149). In this novel,Carr exposes contemporary Native American political concerns by skillfully weaving multiple interactive dialogues with horror literature and film, contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations, postmodern philosophies, traditional vampire lore, contemporary Native literature, and Native oral traditions. (Tillett 150)It must be noted, however, that Carr does not denounce the supernatural vampire and its associated folklore, be it European or Laguna/Kerasan/Navajo, as illogical or fanciful. This despite his “dialogues with […] contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations [and] postmodern philosophies”. Indeed, the character “Diana” at one stage pretends to pragmatically denounce the supernatural whilst her interior monologue strenuously defends her irrational beliefs: the novel reads: “‘Of course there aren’t any ghosts,’ Diana said sharply, thinking: Of course there were ghosts. In this room. Everywhere” (197). In taking this stock-standard approach of expecting the reader to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the Undead, Carr locates his work firmly in the Aboriginal Gothic camp and renders commentators such as Tillett liable to be called ignorant and uninformed when they label his work fantastic.The Aboriginal Gothic would leave the reader convinced a belief in the supernatural is non-problematic, whereas the Aboriginal Fantastic novel, where it exists, would, while enjoying the temporary departure from the restraints of reality, eventually conclude there are no such things as ghosts or vampires. Thus, my Aboriginal Fantastic novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! was intended from the very beginning of the creative writing process to be an existentially diametric alternative to Magical Realism and the Aboriginal Gothic (at least in its climactic denouement). The narrative features a protagonist who, in his defeat, realises the danger in superstitious devotion and in doing so his interior monologue introduces to the literary world the new Aboriginal Fantastic genre. Despite a Foucauldian emphasis in most of my critical analysis in which an awareness of the constructed status and nature of the subject/focus of knowledge undermines the foundations of any reductive typology, I am unhesitant in my claim to having invented a new genre of literature here. Unless there is, undiscovered by my research, a yet-to-be heralded work of Aboriginal horror that recognises the impossibility of its subject, my novel is unique even while my attitude might be decried as hubristic. I am also cognizant of the potential for angry feedback from my Aboriginal Australian kin, for my innovative genre is ultimately denigrating of all supernatural devotion, be it vampiric or Dreamtime. Aboriginal Fantastic writing rejects such mythologies as dangerous, fanciful superstition, but I make the (probably) too-little-too-late defence that it rejects the Indigenous existential rationale somewhat less vigorously than it rejects the existential superstitions of Catholicism and/or vampirism.This potential criticism I will forbear, perhaps sullenly and hopefully silently, but I am likely to be goaded to defensiveness by those who argue that like any Indigenous literature, Aboriginal Australian writing is inherently Magical Realist, and that I forsake my culture when I appeal to the rational. Chanady sees “magic realism as a mode that expresses important points of view, often related to marginality and subalternity” ("Magic Realism" 442). She is not alone in seeing it as the generic cultural expression of Indigenous peoples everywhere, for Bhabha writes of it as being the literature of the postcolonial world (6) whilst Rushdie sees it as the expression of a third world consciousness (301). But am I truly betraying my ancestral culture when I dismiss the Mrart as mere superstition? Just because it has colour should we revere ‘black magic’ over other (white or colourless) superstitions? Should we not suspect, as we do when seated before stage show illusionists, some sleight of (writing) hand? Some hidden/sub-textual agenda meant to entertain not educate? Our world has many previously declared mysteries now easily explained by science, and the notion of Earth being created by a Rainbow Serpent is as farcical to me as the notion it was created a few thousand years ago in seven days by an omniscient human-like being called God. If, in expressing this dubiousness, I am betraying my ancestors, I can only offer detractors the feeble defence that I sincerely respect their beliefs whilst not personally sharing them. I attempt no delegitimising of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Indeed, I celebrate different cultural imaginaries for they make our quotidian existence more colourful and enjoyable. There is much pleasure to be had in such excursions from the pedantry of the rational.Another criticism I might hear out--intellectually--would be: “Most successful literature is Magical Realist, and supernatural stories are irresistible”, a truism most commercially successful authors recognise. But my work was never about sales, indeed, the improbability of my (irresistible?) fiction is didactically yoked to a somewhat sanctimonious moral. My protagonist realises the folly and danger in superstitious devotion, although his atheistic epiphany occurs only during his last seconds of life. Thus, whilst pushing this barrow of enlightened rationality, my novel makes a somewhat original contribution to contemporary Australian culture, presenting in a creative writing form rather than anthropological report, an understanding of the potential for melding Aboriginal mythology with Catholicism, the “competing Dreamtimes, white and black” as Turcotte writes ("Re-mastering" 132), if only at the level of ultimately accepting, atheistically, that all are fanciful examples of self-created beyond-death identity, as real--or unreal--as any other religious meme. Whatever vampire literature people read, most such consumers do not believe in the otherworldly antagonists, although there is profound enjoyment to be had in temporarily suspending disbelief and even perpetuating the meme into the mindsets of others. Perhaps, somewhere in the sub-conscious, pre-rational recesses of our caveman-like brains, we still wonder if such supernatural entities reflect a symbolic truth we can’t quite apprehend. Instead, we use a totemic figure like the sultry but terrifying Count Dracula as a proxy for other kinds of primordial anxieties we cannot easily articulate, whether that fear is the child rapist on the loose or impending financial ruin or just the overwhelming sense that our contemporary lifestyles contain the very seeds of our own destruction, and we are actively watering them with our insouciance.In other words, there is little that is new in horror. Yes, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! is an example of what I call the new genre of Aboriginal Fantastic but that claim is not much of an original contribution to knowledge, other than being the invention of an extra label in an unnecessarily formalist/idealist lexicon of literary taxonomy. Certainly, it will not create a legion of fans. But these days it is difficult for a novelist to find anything really new to write about, genre-wise, and if there is a reader prepared to pay hard-earned money for a copy, then I sincerely hope they do not feel they have purchased yet another example of what the HBO television show Californication’s creative writing tutor Hank Moody (David Duchovny) derides as “lame vampire fiction” (episode 2, 2007). I like to think my Aboriginal Fantastic novel has legs as well as fangs. References Althans, Katrin. Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film. Bonn: Bonn UP, 2010. Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Bunson, Matthew. The Vampire Encyclopedia. New York: Gramercy Books, 1993. Carr, Aaron A. Eye Killers. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1995. Chanady, Amaryll. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. Chanady, Amaryll. “Magic Realism Revisited: The Deconstruction of Antinomies.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (June 2003): 428-444. Cheung, Theresa. The Element Encyclopaedia of Vampires. London: Harper Collins, 2009. Clark, Maureen. Mudrooroo: A Likely Story: Identity and Belonging in Postcolonial Australia. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007. Gelder, Ken. The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Halloran, Vivien. “L224: Introduction to World Literatures in English.” Department of English, Indiana University, 2014. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.indiana.edu/~engweb/undergradCourses_spring.shtml›. McKee, Alan. “White Stories, Black Magic: Australian Horror Films of the Aboriginal.”Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia. Eds. Dieter Riemenschneider and Geoffrey V. Davis. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (1997): 193-210. Mudrooroo. The Indigenous Literature of Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997. Mudrooroo. The Undying. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1998. Mudrooroo. The Promised Land. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2000. Reed, Alexander W. Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables. Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1999. Riendes, Ildiko. “The Use of Gothic Elements as Manifestations of Regaining Aboriginal Identity in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart.” Topos 1.1 (2012): 100-114. Rushdie, Salman. “Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta and Penguin Books, 1991. Shoemaker, Adam. Mudrooroo. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1993. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Keeping the Faith: Catholicism in Dracula and its Adaptations.” Journal of Dracula Studies 6 (2004): 13-18. Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012. Tillett, Rebecca. “‘Your Story Reminds Me of Something’: Spectacle and Speculation in Aaron Carr’s Eye Killers.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 33.1 (2002): 149-73. Turcotte, Gerry. “Australian Gothic.” Faculty of Arts — Papers, University of Wollongong, 1998. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/60/›. Turcotte, Gerry. “Re-mastering the Ghosts: Mudrooroo and Gothic Refigurations.” Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo. Ed. Annalisa Oboe. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (2003): 129-151. Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Eds. Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, 2006.

Introduction Most developed countries, including Australia, have a strong focus on national, state and local strategies for emergency management and response in the face of disasters and crises. This framework can include coping with catastrophic dislocation, service disruption, injury or loss of life in the face of natural disasters such as major fires, floods, earthquakes or other large-impact natural events, as well as dealing with similar catastrophes resulting from human actions such as bombs, biological agents, cyber-attacks targeting essential services such as communications networks, or other crises affecting large populations. Emergency management frameworks for crisis and disaster response are distinguished by their focus on the domestic context for such events; that is, how to manage and assist the ways in which civilian populations, who are for the most part inexperienced and untrained in dealing with crises and disasters, are able to respond and behave in such situations so as to minimise the impacts of a catastrophic event. Even in countries like Australia that demonstrate a strong public commitment to cultural pluralism and social cohesion, ethno-cultural diversity can be seen as a risk or threat to national security and values at times of political, natural, economic and/or social tensions and crises. Australian government policymakers have recently focused, with increasing intensity, on “community resilience” as a key element in countering extremism and enhancing emergency preparedness and response. In some sense, this is the result of a tacit acknowledgement by government agencies that there are limits to what they can do for domestic communities should such a catastrophic event occur, and accordingly, the focus in recent times has shifted to how governments can best help people to help themselves in such situations, a key element of the contemporary “resilience” approach. Yet despite the robustly multicultural nature of Australian society, explicit engagement with Australia’s cultural diversity flickers only fleetingly on this agenda, which continues to pursue approaches to community resilience in the absence of understandings about how these terms and formations may themselves need to be diversified to maximise engagement by all citizens in a multicultural polity. There have been some recent efforts in Australia to move in this direction, for example the Australian Emergency Management Institute (AEMI)’s recent suite of projects with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities (2006-2010) and the current Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee-supported project on “Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism” (Grossman and Tahiri), which I discuss in a longer forthcoming version of this essay (Grossman). Yet the understanding of ethno-cultural identity and difference that underlies much policy thinking on resilience remains problematic for the way in which it invests in a view of the cultural dimensions of community resilience as relic rather than resource – valorising the preservation of and respect for cultural norms and traditions, but silent on what different ethno-cultural communities might contribute toward expanded definitions of both “community” and “resilience” by virtue of the transformative potential and existing cultural capital they bring with them into new national and also translocal settings. For example, a primary conclusion of the joint program between AEMI and the Australian Multicultural Commission is that CALD communities are largely “vulnerable” in the context of disasters and emergency management and need to be better integrated into majority-culture models of theorising and embedding community resilience. This focus on stronger national integration and the “vulnerability” of culturally diverse ethno-cultural communities in the Australian context echoes the work of scholars beyond Australia such as McGhee, Mouritsen (Reflections, Citizenship) and Joppke. They argue that the “civic turn” in debates around resurgent contemporary nationalism and multicultural immigration policies privileges civic integration over genuine two-way multiculturalism. This approach sidesteps the transculturational (Ortiz; Welsch; Mignolo; Bennesaieh; Robins; Stein) aspects of contemporary social identities and exchange by paying lip-service to cultural diversity while affirming a neo-liberal construct of civic values and principles as a universalising goal of Western democratic states within a global market economy. It also suggests a superficial tribute to cultural diversity that does not embed diversity comprehensively at the levels of either conceptualising or resourcing different elements of Australian transcultural communities within the generalised framework of “community resilience.” And by emphasising cultural difference as vulnerability rather than as resource or asset, it fails to acknowledge the varieties of resilience capital that many culturally diverse individuals and communities may bring with them when they resettle in new environments, by ignoring the question of what “resilience” actually means to those from culturally diverse communities. In so doing, it also avoids the critical task of incorporating intercultural definitional diversity around the concepts of both “community” and “resilience” used to promote social cohesion and the capacity to recover from disasters and crises. How we might do differently in thinking about the broader challenges for multiculturalism itself as a resilient transnational concept and practice? The Concept of Resilience The meanings of resilience vary by disciplinary perspective. While there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, it is widely acknowledged that resilience refers to the capacity of an individual to do well in spite of exposure to acute trauma or sustained adversity (Liebenberg 219). Originating in the Latin word resilio, meaning ‘to jump back’, there is general consensus that resilience pertains to an individual’s, community’s or system’s ability to adapt to and ‘bounce back’ from a disruptive event (Mohaupt 63, Longstaff et al. 3). Over the past decade there has been a dramatic rise in interest in the clinical, community and family sciences concerning resilience to a broad range of adversities (Weine 62). While debate continues over which discipline can be credited with first employing resilience as a concept, Mohaupt argues that most of the literature on resilience cites social psychology and psychiatry as the origin for the concept beginning in the mid-20th century. The pioneer researchers of what became known as resilience research studied the impact on children living in dysfunctional families. For example, the findings of work by Garmezy, Werner and Smith and Rutter showed that about one third of children in these studies were coping very well despite considerable adversities and traumas. In asking what it was that prevented the children in their research from being negatively influenced by their home environments, such research provided the basis for future research on resilience. Such work was also ground-breaking for identifying the so-called ‘protective factors’ or resources that individuals can operationalise when dealing with adversity. In essence, protective factors are those conditions in the individual that protect them from the risk of dysfunction and enable recovery from trauma. They mitigate the effects of stressors or risk factors, that is, those conditions that predispose one to harm (Hajek 15). Protective factors include the inborn traits or qualities within an individual, those defining an individual’s environment, and also the interaction between the two. Together, these factors give people the strength, skills and motivation to cope in difficult situations and re-establish (a version of) ‘normal’ life (Gunnestad). Identifying protective factors is important in terms of understanding the particular resources a given sociocultural group has at its disposal, but it is also vital to consider the interconnections between various protective mechanisms, how they might influence each other, and to what degree. An individual, for instance, might display resilience or adaptive functioning in a particular domain (e.g. emotional functioning) but experience significant deficits in another (e.g. academic achievement) (Hunter 2). It is also essential to scrutinise how the interaction between protective factors and risk factors creates patterns of resilience. Finally, a comprehensive understanding of the interrelated nature of protective mechanisms and risk factors is imperative for designing effective interventions and tailored preventive strategies (Weine 65). In short, contemporary thinking about resilience suggests it is neither entirely personal nor strictly social, but an interactive and iterative combination of the two. It is a quality of the environment as much as the individual. For Ungar, resilience is the complex entanglements between “individuals and their social ecologies [that] will determine the degree of positive outcomes experienced” (3). Thinking about resilience as context-dependent is important because research that is too trait-based or actor-centred risks ignoring any structural or institutional forces. A more ecological interpretation of resilience, one that takes into a person’s context and environment into account, is vital in order to avoid blaming the victim for any hardships they face, or relieving state and institutional structures from their responsibilities in addressing social adversity, which can “emphasise self-help in line with a neo-conservative agenda instead of stimulating state responsibility” (Mohaupt 67). Nevertheless, Ungar posits that a coherent definition of resilience has yet to be developed that adequately ‘captures the dual focus of the individual and the individual’s social ecology and how the two must both be accounted for when determining the criteria for judging outcomes and discerning processes associated with resilience’ (7). Recent resilience research has consequently prompted a shift away from vulnerability towards protective processes — a shift that highlights the sustained capabilities of individuals and communities under threat or at risk. Locating ‘Culture’ in the Literature on Resilience However, an understanding of the role of culture has remained elusive or marginalised within this trend; there has been comparatively little sustained investigation into the applicability of resilience constructs to non-western cultures, or how the resources available for survival might differ from those accessible to western populations (Ungar 4). As such, a growing body of researchers is calling for more rigorous inquiry into culturally determined outcomes that might be associated with resilience in non-western or multicultural cultures and contexts, for example where Indigenous and minority immigrant communities live side by side with their ‘mainstream’ neighbours in western settings (Ungar 2). ‘Cultural resilience’ considers the role that cultural background plays in determining the ability of individuals and communities to be resilient in the face of adversity. For Clauss-Ehlers, the term describes the degree to which the strengths of one’s culture promote the development of coping (198). Culturally-focused resilience suggests that people can manage and overcome stress and trauma based not on individual characteristics alone, but also from the support of broader sociocultural factors (culture, cultural values, language, customs, norms) (Clauss-Ehlers 324). The innate cultural strengths of a culture may or may not differ from the strengths of other cultures; the emphasis here is not so much comparatively inter-cultural as intensively intra-cultural (VanBreda 215). A culturally focused resilience model thus involves “a dynamic, interactive process in which the individual negotiates stress through a combination of character traits, cultural background, cultural values, and facilitating factors in the sociocultural environment” (Clauss-Ehlers 199). In understanding ways of ‘coping and hoping, surviving and thriving’, it is thus crucial to consider how culturally and linguistically diverse minorities navigate the cultural understandings and assumptions of both their countries of origin and those of their current domicile (Ungar 12). Gunnestad claims that people who master the rules and norms of their new culture without abandoning their own language, values and social support are more resilient than those who tenaciously maintain their own culture at the expense of adjusting to their new environment. They are also more resilient than those who forego their own culture and assimilate with the host society (14). Accordingly, if the combination of both valuing one’s culture as well as learning about the culture of the new system produces greater resilience and adaptive capacities, serious problems can arise when a majority tries to acculturate a minority to the mainstream by taking away or not recognising important parts of the minority culture. In terms of resilience, if cultural factors are denied or diminished in accounting for and strengthening resilience – in other words, if people are stripped of what they possess by way of resilience built through cultural knowledge, disposition and networks – they do in fact become vulnerable, because ‘they do not automatically gain those cultural strengths that the majority has acquired over generations’ (Gunnestad 14). Mobilising ‘Culture’ in Australian Approaches to Community Resilience The realpolitik of how concepts of resilience and culture are mobilised is highly relevant here. As noted above, when ethnocultural difference is positioned as a risk or a threat to national identity, security and values, this is precisely the moment when vigorously, even aggressively, nationalised definitions of ‘community’ and ‘identity’ that minoritise or disavow cultural diversities come to the fore in public discourse. The Australian evocation of nationalism and national identity, particularly in the way it has framed policy discussion on managing national responses to disasters and threats, has arguably been more muted than some of the European hysteria witnessed recently around cultural diversity and national life. Yet we still struggle with the idea that newcomers to Australia might fall on the surplus rather than the deficit side of the ledger when it comes to identifying and harnessing resilience capital. A brief example of this trend is explored here. From 2006 to 2010, the Australian Emergency Management Institute embarked on an ambitious government-funded four-year program devoted to strengthening community resilience in relation to disasters with specific reference to engaging CALD communities across Australia. The program, Inclusive Emergency Management with CALD Communities, was part of a wider Australian National Action Plan to Build Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security in the wake of the London terrorist bombings in July 2005. Involving CALD community organisations as well as various emergency and disaster management agencies, the program ran various workshops and agency-community partnership pilots, developed national school education resources, and commissioned an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness (Farrow et al.). While my critique here is certainly not aimed at emergency management or disaster response agencies and personnel themselves – dedicated professionals who often achieve remarkable results in emergency and disaster response under extraordinarily difficult circumstances – it is nevertheless important to highlight how the assumptions underlying elements of AEMI’s experience and outcomes reflect the persistent ways in which ethnocultural diversity is rendered as a problem to be surmounted or a liability to be redressed, rather than as an asset to be built upon or a resource to be valued and mobilised. AEMI’s explicit effort to engage with CALD communities in building overall community resilience was important in its tacit acknowledgement that emergency and disaster services were (and often remain) under-resourced and under-prepared in dealing with the complexities of cultural diversity in emergency situations. Despite these good intentions, however, while the program produced some positive outcomes and contributed to crucial relationship building between CALD communities and emergency services within various jurisdictions, it also continued to frame the challenge of working with cultural diversity as a problem of increased vulnerability during disasters for recently arrived and refugee background CALD individuals and communities. This highlights a common feature in community resilience-building initiatives, which is to focus on those who are already ‘robust’ versus those who are ‘vulnerable’ in relation to resilience indicators, and whose needs may require different or additional resources in order to be met. At one level, this is a pragmatic resourcing issue: national agencies understandably want to put their people, energy and dollars where they are most needed in pursuit of a steady-state unified national response at times of crisis. Nor should it be argued that at least some CALD groups, particularly those from new arrival and refugee communities, are not vulnerable in at least some of the ways and for some of the reasons suggested in the program evaluation. However, the consistent focus on CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘in need’ is problematic, as well as partial. It casts members of these communities as structurally and inherently less able and less resilient in the context of disasters and emergencies: in some sense, as those who, already ‘victims’ of chronic social deficits such as low English proficiency, social isolation and a mysterious unidentified set of ‘cultural factors’, can become doubly victimised in acute crisis and disaster scenarios. In what is by now a familiar trope, the description of CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ precludes asking questions about what they do have, what they do know, and what they do or can contribute to how we respond to disaster and emergency events in our communities. A more profound problem in this sphere revolves around working out how best to engage CALD communities and individuals within existing approaches to disaster and emergency preparedness and response. This reflects a fundamental but unavoidable limitation of disaster preparedness models: they are innately spatially and geographically bounded, and consequently understand ‘communities’ in these terms, rather than expanding definitions of ‘community’ to include the dimensions of community-as-social-relations. While some good engagement outcomes were achieved locally around cross-cultural knowledge for emergency services workers, the AEMI program fell short of asking some of the harder questions about how emergency and disaster service scaffolding and resilience-building approaches might themselves need to change or transform, using a cross-cutting model of ‘communities’ as both geographic places and multicultural spaces (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan) in order to be more effective in national scenarios in which cultural diversity should be taken for granted. Toward Acknowledgement of Resilience Capital Most significantly, the AEMI program did not produce any recognition of the ways in which CALD communities already possess resilience capital, or consider how this might be drawn on in formulating stronger community initiatives around disaster and threats preparedness for the future. Of course, not all individuals within such communities, nor all communities across varying circumstances, will demonstrate resilience, and we need to be careful of either overgeneralising or romanticising the kinds and degrees of ‘resilience capital’ that may exist within them. Nevertheless, at least some have developed ways of withstanding crises and adapting to new conditions of living. This is particularly so in connection with individual and group behaviours around resource sharing, care-giving and social responsibility under adverse circumstances (Grossman and Tahiri) – all of which are directly relevant to emergency and disaster response. While some of these resilient behaviours may have been nurtured or enhanced by particular experiences and environments, they can, as the discussion of recent literature above suggests, also be rooted more deeply in cultural norms, habits and beliefs. Whatever their origins, for culturally diverse societies to achieve genuine resilience in the face of both natural and human-made disasters, it is critical to call on the ‘social memory’ (Folke et al.) of communities faced with responding to emergencies and crises. Such wellsprings of social memory ‘come from the diversity of individuals and institutions that draw on reservoirs of practices, knowledge, values, and worldviews and is crucial for preparing the system for change, building resilience, and for coping with surprise’ (Adger et al.). Consequently, if we accept the challenge of mapping an approach to cultural diversity as resource rather than relic into our thinking around strengthening community resilience, there are significant gains to be made. For a whole range of reasons, no diversity-sensitive model or measure of resilience should invest in static understandings of ethnicities and cultures; all around the world, ethnocultural identities and communities are in a constant and sometimes accelerated state of dynamism, reconfiguration and flux. But to ignore the resilience capital and potential protective factors that ethnocultural diversity can offer to the strengthening of community resilience more broadly is to miss important opportunities that can help suture the existing disconnects between proactive approaches to intercultural connectedness and social inclusion on the one hand, and reactive approaches to threats, national security and disaster response on the other, undermining the effort to advance effectively on either front. This means that dominant social institutions and structures must be willing to contemplate their own transformation as the result of transcultural engagement, rather than merely insisting, as is often the case, that ‘other’ cultures and communities conform to existing hegemonic paradigms of being and of living. In many ways, this is the most critical step of all. A resilience model and strategy that questions its own culturally informed yet taken-for-granted assumptions and premises, goes out into communities to test and refine these, and returns to redesign its approach based on the new knowledge it acquires, would reflect genuine progress toward an effective transculturational approach to community resilience in culturally diverse contexts.References Adger, W. Neil, Terry P. Hughes, Carl Folke, Stephen R. Carpenter and Johan Rockström. “Social-Ecological Resilience to Coastal Disasters.” Science 309.5737 (2005): 1036-1039. ‹http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5737/1036.full> Bartowiak-Théron, Isabelle, and Anna Corbo Crehan. “The Changing Nature of Communities: Implications for Police and Community Policing.” Community Policing in Australia: Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) Reports, Research and Policy Series 111 (2010): 8-15. Benessaieh, Afef. “Multiculturalism, Interculturality, Transculturality.” Ed. A. Benessaieh. Transcultural Americas/Ameriques Transculturelles. Ottawa: U of Ottawa Press/Les Presses de l’Unversite d’Ottawa, 2010. 11-38. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Sociocultural Factors, Resilience and Coping: Support for a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Resilience.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29 (2008): 197-212. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Cultural Resilience.” Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural School Psychology. Ed. C. S. Clauss-Ehlers. 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Diversifying Australian Approaches to Community Resilience and Cultural Difference”. Global Perspectives on Multiculturalism in the 21st Century. Eds. B. E. de B’beri and F. Mansouri. London: Routledge, 2014. Grossman, Michele, and Hussein Tahiri. Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism. Canberra: Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee, forthcoming 2014. Grossman, Michele. “Cultural Resilience and Strengthening Communities”. Safeguarding Australia Summit, Canberra. 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.safeguardingaustraliasummit.org.au/uploader/resources/Michele_Grossman.pdf>. Gunnestad, Arve. “Resilience in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: How Resilience Is Generated in Different Cultures.” Journal of Intercultural Communication 11 (2006). ‹http://www.immi.se/intercultural/nr11/gunnestad.htm>. Hajek, Lisa J. “Belonging and Resilience: A Phenomenological Study.” Unpublished Master of Science thesis, U of Wisconsin-Stout. Menomonie, Wisconsin, 2003. Hunter, Cathryn. “Is Resilience Still a Useful Concept When Working with Children and Young People?” Child Family Community Australia (CFA) Paper 2. Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Joppke, Christian. "Beyond National Models: Civic Integration Policies for Immigrants in Western Europe". West European Politics 30.1 (2007): 1-22. Liebenberg, Linda, Michael Ungar, and Fons van de Vijver. “Validation of the Child and Youth Resilience Measure-28 (CYRM-28) among Canadian Youth.” Research on Social Work Practice 22.2 (2012): 219-226. Longstaff, Patricia H., Nicholas J. Armstrong, Keli Perrin, Whitney May Parker, and Matthew A. Hidek. “Building Resilient Communities: A Preliminary Framework for Assessment.” Homeland Security Affairs 6.3 (2010): 1-23. ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=6.3.6>. McGhee, Derek. The End of Multiculturalism? Terrorism, Integration and Human Rights. Maidenhead: Open U P, 2008.Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2000. Mohaupt, Sarah. “Review Article: Resilience and Social Exclusion.” Social Policy and Society 8 (2009): 63-71.Mouritsen, Per. "The Culture of Citizenship: A Reflection on Civic Integration in Europe." Ed. R. Zapata-Barrero. Citizenship Policies in the Age of Diversity: Europe at the Crossroad." Barcelona: CIDOB Foundation, 2009: 23-35. Mouritsen, Per. “Political Responses to Cultural Conflict: Reflections on the Ambiguities of the Civic Turn.” Ed. P. Mouritsen and K.E. Jørgensen. Constituting Communities. Political Solutions to Cultural Conflict, London: Palgrave, 2008. 1-30. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Intr. Fernando Coronil and Bronislaw Malinowski. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1995 [1940]. Robins, Kevin. The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Final Report on the Transversal Study on Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity. Culture and Cultural Heritage Department. Strasbourg: Council of European Publishing, 2006. Rutter, Michael. “Protective Factors in Children’s Responses to Stress and Disadvantage.” Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore 8 (1979): 324-38. Stein, Mark. “The Location of Transculture.” Transcultural English Studies: Fictions, Theories, Realities. Eds. F. Schulze-Engler and S. Helff. Cross/Cultures 102/ANSEL Papers 12. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 251-266. Ungar, Michael. “Resilience across Cultures.” British Journal of Social Work 38.2 (2008): 218-235. First published online 2006: 1-18. In-text references refer to the online Advance Access edition ‹http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2006/10/18/bjsw.bcl343.full.pdf>. VanBreda, Adrian DuPlessis. Resilience Theory: A Literature Review. Erasmuskloof: South African Military Health Service, Military Psychological Institute, Social Work Research & Development, 2001. Weine, Stevan. “Building Resilience to Violent Extremism in Muslim Diaspora Communities in the United States.” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 5.1 (2012): 60-73. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation World. Eds. M. Featherstone and S. Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194-213. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. Vulnerable But Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of\ Resilience and Youth. New York: McGraw Hill, 1982. NotesThe concept of ‘resilience capital’ I offer here is in line with one strand of contemporary theorising around resilience – that of resilience as social or socio-ecological capital – but moves beyond the idea of enhancing general social connectedness and community cohesion by emphasising the ways in which culturally diverse communities may already be robustly networked and resourceful within micro-communal settings, with new resources and knowledge both to draw on and to offer other communities or the ‘national community’ at large. In effect, ‘resilience capital’ speaks to the importance of finding ‘the communities within the community’ (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan 11) and recognising their capacity to contribute to broad-scale resilience and recovery.I am indebted for the discussion of the literature on resilience here to Dr Peta Stephenson, Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, who is working on a related project (M. Grossman and H. Tahiri, Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism, forthcoming 2014).

Special Care Notice This paper discusses trauma and violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania through the process of colonisation. Content within this paper may be distressing to some readers. Introduction The decimation of the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) was systematic and swift. First Contact was an emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually confronting series of encounters for the Indigenous inhabitants. There were, according to some early records, a few examples of peaceful interactions (Morris 84). Yet, the inevitable competition over resources, and the intensity with which colonists pursued their “claims” for food, land, and water, quickly transformed amicable relationships into hostile rivalries. Jennifer Gall has written that, as “European settlement expanded in the late 1820s, violent exchanges between settlers and Aboriginal people were frequent, brutal and unchecked” (58). Indeed, the near-annihilation of the original custodians of the land was, if viewed through the lens of time, a process that could be described as one that was especially efficient. As John Morris notes: in 1803, when the first settlers arrived in Van Diemen’s Land, the Aborigines had already inhabited the island for some 25,000 years and the population has been estimated at 4,000. Seventy-three years later, Truganinni, [often cited as] the last Tasmanian of full Aboriginal descent, was dead. (84) Against a backdrop of extreme violence, often referred to as the Black War (Clements 1), there were some, admittedly dubious, efforts to contain the bloodshed. One such effort, in the late 1820s, was the production, and subsequent distribution, of a set of Proclamation Boards. Approximately 100 Proclamation Boards (the Board) were introduced by the Lieutenant Governor of the day, George Arthur (after whom Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula is named). The purpose of these Boards was to communicate, via a four-strip pictogram, to the Indigenous peoples of the island colony that all people—black and white—were considered equal under the law. “British Justice would protect” everyone (Morris 84). This is reflected in the narrative of the Boards. The first image presents Indigenous peoples and colonists living peacefully together. The second, and central, image shows “a conciliatory handshake between the British governor and an Aboriginal ‘chief’, highly reminiscent of images found in North America on treaty medals and anti-slavery tokens” (Darian-Smith and Edmonds 4). The third and fourth images depict the repercussions for committing murder, with an Indigenous man hanged for spearing a colonist and a European man also hanged for shooting an Aborigine. Both men executed under “gubernatorial supervision” (Turnbull 53). Image 1: Governor Davey's [sic - actually Governor Arthur's] Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816 [sic - actually c. 1828-30]. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (Call Number: SAFE / R 247). The Board is an interesting re-imagining of one of the traditional methods of communication for Indigenous peoples; the leaving of images on the bark of trees. Such trees, often referred to as scarred trees, are rare in modern-day Tasmania as “the expansion of settlements, and the impact of bush fires and other environmental factors” resulted in many of these trees being destroyed (Aboriginal Heritage Tasmania online). Similarly, only a few of the Boards, inspired by these trees, survive today. The Proclamation Board was, in the 1860s, re-imagined as the output of a different Governor: Lieutenant Governor Davey (after whom Port Davey, on the south-west coast of Tasmania is named). This re-imagining of the Board’s creator was so effective that the Board, today, is popularly known as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines. This paper outlines several other re-imaginings of this Board. In addition, this paper offers another, new, re-imagining of the Board, positing that this is an early “pamphlet” on crime, justice and punishment which actually presents as a pre-cursor to the modern Australian true crime tale. In doing so this work connects the Proclamation Board to the larger genre of crime fiction. One Proclamation Board: Two Governors Labelled Van Diemen’s Land and settled as a colony of New South Wales in 1803, this island state would secede from the administration of mainland Australia in 1825. Another change would follow in 1856 when Van Diemen’s Land was, in another process of re-imagining, officially re-named Tasmania. This change in nomenclature was an initiative to, symbolically at least, separate the contemporary state from a criminal and violent past (Newman online). Tasmania’s violent history was, perhaps, inevitable. The island was claimed by Philip Gidley King, the Governor of New South Wales, in the name of His Majesty, not for the purpose of building a community, but to “prevent the French from gaining a footing on the east side of that island” and also to procure “timber and other natural products, as well as to raise grain and to promote the seal industry” (Clark 36). Another rationale for this land claim was to “divide the convicts” (Clark 36) which re-fashioned the island into a gaol. It was this penal element of the British colonisation of Australia that saw the worst of the British Empire forced upon the Aboriginal peoples. As historian Clive Turnbull explains: the brutish state of England was reproduced in the English colonies, and that in many ways its brutishness was increased, for now there came to Australia not the humanitarians or the indifferent, but the men who had vested interests in the systems of restraint; among those who suffered restraint were not only a vast number who were merely unfortunate and poverty-stricken—the victims of a ‘depression’—but brutalised persons, child-slaughterers and even potential cannibals. (Turnbull 25) As noted above the Black War of Tasmania saw unprecedented aggression against the rightful occupants of the land. Yet, the Aboriginal peoples were “promised the white man’s justice, the people [were] exhorted to live in amity with them, the wrongs which they suffer [were] deplored” (Turnbull 23). The administrators purported an egalitarian society, one of integration and peace but Van Diemen’s Land was colonised as a prison and as a place of profit. So, “like many apologists whose material benefit is bound up with the systems which they defend” (Turnbull 23), assertions of care for the health and welfare of the Aboriginal peoples were made but were not supported by sufficient policies, or sufficient will, and the Black War continued. Colonel Thomas Davey (1758-1823) was the second person to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land; a term of office that began in 1813 and concluded in 1817. The fourth Lieutenant Governor of the island was Colonel Sir George Arthur (1784-1854); his term of office, significantly longer than Davey’s, being from 1824 to 1836. The two men were very different but are connected through this intriguing artefact, the Proclamation Board. One of the efforts made to assert the principle of equality under the law in Van Diemen’s Land was an outcome of work undertaken by Surveyor General George Frankland (1800-1838). Frankland wrote to Arthur in early 1829 and suggested the Proclamation Board (Morris 84), sometimes referred to as a Picture Board or the Tasmanian Hieroglyphics, as a tool to support Arthur’s various Proclamations. The Proclamation, signed on 15 April 1828 and promulgated in the The Hobart Town Courier on 19 April 1828 (Arthur 1), was one of several notices attempting to reduce the increasing levels of violence between Indigenous peoples and colonists. The date on Frankland’s correspondence clearly situates the Proclamation Board within Arthur’s tenure as Lieutenant Governor. The Board was, however, in the 1860s, re-imagined as the output of Davey. The Clerk of the Tasmanian House of Assembly, Hugh M. Hull, asserted that the Board was the work of Davey and not Arthur. Hull’s rationale for this, despite archival evidence connecting the Board to Frankland and, by extension, to Arthur, is predominantly anecdotal. In a letter to the editor of The Hobart Mercury, published 26 November 1874, Hull wrote: this curiosity was shown by me to the late Mrs Bateman, neé Pitt, a lady who arrived here in 1804, and with whom I went to school in 1822. She at once recognised it as one of a number prepared in 1816, under Governor Davey’s orders; and said she had seen one hanging on a gum tree at Cottage Green—now Battery Point. (3) Hull went on to assert that “if any old gentleman will look at the picture and remember the style of military and civil dress of 1810-15, he will find that Mrs Bateman was right” (3). Interestingly, Hull relies upon the recollections of a deceased school friend and the dress codes depicted by the artist to date the Proclamation Board as a product of 1816, in lieu of documentary evidence dating the Board as a product of 1828-1830. Curiously, the citation of dress can serve to undermine Hull’s argument. An early 1840s watercolour by Thomas Bock, of Mathinna, an Aboriginal child of Flinders Island adopted by Lieutenant Governor John Franklin (Felton online), features the young girl wearing a brightly coloured, high-waisted dress. This dress is very similar to the dresses worn by the children on the Proclamation Board (the difference being that Mathinna wears a red dress with a contrasting waistband, the children on the Board wear plain yellow dresses) (Bock). Acknowledging the simplicity of children's clothing during the colonial era, it could still be argued that it would have been unlikely the Governor of the day would have placed a child, enjoying at that time a life of privilege, in a situation where she sat for a portrait wearing an old-fashioned garment. So effective was Hull’s re-imagining of the Board’s creator that the Board was, for many years, popularly known as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines with even the date modified, to 1816, to fit Davey’s term of office. Further, it is worth noting that catalogue records acknowledge the error of attribution and list both Davey and Arthur as men connected to the creation of the Proclamation Board. A Surviving Board: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales One of the surviving Proclamation Boards is held by the Mitchell Library. The Boards, oil on Huon pine, were painted by “convict artists incarcerated in the island penal colony” (Carroll 73). The work was mass produced (by the standards of mass production of the day) by pouncing, “a technique [of the Italian Renaissance] of pricking the contours of a drawing with a pin. Charcoal was then dusted on to the drawing” (Carroll 75-76). The images, once outlined, were painted in oil. Of approximately 100 Boards made, several survive today. There are seven known Boards within public collections (Gall 58): five in Australia (Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney; Museum Victoria, Melbourne; National Library of Australia, Canberra; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; and Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston); and two overseas (The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University and the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, University of Cambridge). The catalogue record, for the Board held by the Mitchell Library, offers the following details:Paintings: 1 oil painting on Huon pine board, rectangular in shape with rounded corners and hole at top centre for suspension ; 35.7 x 22.6 x 1 cm. 4 scenes are depicted:Aborigines and white settlers in European dress mingling harmoniouslyAboriginal men and women, and an Aboriginal child approach Governor Arthur to shake hands while peaceful soldiers look onA hostile Aboriginal man spears a male white settler and is hanged by the military as Governor Arthur looks onA hostile white settler shoots an Aboriginal man and is hanged by the military as Governor Arthur looks on. (SAFE / R 247) The Mitchell Library Board was purchased from J.W. Beattie in May 1919 for £30 (Morris 86), which is approximately $2,200 today. Importantly, the title of the record notes both the popular attribution of the Board and the man who actually instigated the Board’s production: “Governor Davey’s [sic – actually Governor Arthur] Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816 [sic – actually c. 1828-30].” The date of the Board is still a cause of some speculation. The earlier date, 1828, marks the declaration of martial law (Turnbull 94) and 1830 marks the Black Line (Edmonds 215); the attempt to form a human line of white men to force many Tasmanian Aboriginals, four of the nine nations, onto the Tasman Peninsula (Ryan 3). Frankland’s suggestion for the Board was put forward on 4 February 1829, with Arthur’s official Conciliator to the Aborigines, G.A. Robinson, recording his first sighting of a Board on 24 December 1829 (Morris 84-85). Thus, the conception of the Board may have been in 1828 but the Proclamation project was not fully realised until 1830. Indeed, a news item on the Proclamation Board did appear in the popular press, but not until 5 March 1830: We are informed that the Government have given directions for the painting of a large number of pictures to be placed in the bush for the contemplation of the Aboriginal Inhabitants. […] However […] the causes of their hostility must be more deeply probed, or their taste as connoisseurs in paintings more clearly established, ere we can look for any beneficial result from this measure. (Colonial Times 2) The remark made in relation to becoming a connoisseur of painting, though intended to be derogatory, makes some sense. There was an assumption that the Indigenous peoples could easily translate a European-styled execution by hanging, as a visual metaphor for all forms of punishment. It has long been understood that Indigenous “social organisation and religious and ceremonial life were often as complex as those of the white invaders” (McCulloch 261). However, the Proclamation Board was, in every sense, Eurocentric and made no attempt to acknowledge the complexities of Aboriginal culture. It was, quite simply, never going to be an effective tool of communication, nor achieve its socio-legal aims. The Board Re-imagined: Popular Media The re-imagining of the Proclamation Board as a construct of Governor Davey, instead of Governor Arthur, is just one of many re-imaginings of this curious object. There are, of course, the various imaginings of the purpose of the Board. On the surface these images are a tool for reconciliation but as “the story of these paintings unfolds […] it becomes clear that the proclamations were in effect envoys sent back to Britain to exhibit the ingenious attempts being applied to civilise Australia” (Carroll 76). In this way the Board was re-imagined by the Administration that funded the exercise, even before the project was completed, from a mechanism to assist in the bringing about of peace into an object that would impress colonial superiors. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll has recently written about the Boards in the context of their “transnational circulation” and how “objects become subjects and speak of their past through the ventriloquism of contemporary art history” (75). Carroll argues the Board is an item that couples “military strategy with a fine arts propaganda campaign” (Carroll 78). Critically the Boards never achieved their advertised purpose for, as Carroll explains, there were “elaborate rituals Aboriginal Australians had for the dead” and, therefore, “the display of a dead, hanging body is unthinkable. […] being exposed to the sight of a hanged man must have been experienced as an unimaginable act of disrespect” (92). The Proclamation Board would, in sharp contrast to feelings of unimaginable disrespect, inspire feelings of pride across the colonial population. An example of this pride being revealed in the selection of the Board as an object worthy of reproduction, as a lithograph, for an Intercolonial Exhibition, held in Melbourne in 1866 (Morris 84). The lithograph, which identifies the Board as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines and dated 1816, was listed as item 572, of 738 items submitted by Tasmania, for the event (The Commissioners 69-85). This type of reproduction, or re-imagining, of the Board would not be an isolated event. Penelope Edmonds has described the Board as producing a “visual vernacular” through a range of derivatives including lantern slides, lithographs, and postcards. These types of tourist ephemera are in addition to efforts to produce unique re-workings of the Board as seen in Violet Mace’s Proclamation glazed earthernware, which includes a jug (1928) and a pottery cup (1934) (Edmonds online). The Board Re-imagined: A True Crime Tale The Proclamation Board offers numerous narratives. There is the story that the Board was designed and deployed to communicate. There is the story behind the Board. There is also the story of the credit for the initiative which was transferred from Governor Arthur to Governor Davey and subsequently returned to Arthur. There are, too, the provenance stories of individual Boards. There is another story the Proclamation Board offers. The story of true crime in colonial Australia. The Board, as noted, presents through a four-strip pictogram an idea that all are equal under the rule of law (Arthur 1). Advocating for a society of equals was a duplicitous practice, for while Aborigines were hanged for allegedly murdering settlers, “there is no record of whites being charged, let alone punished, for murdering Aborigines” (Morris 84). It would not be until 1838 that white men would be punished for the murder of Aboriginal people (on the mainland) in the wake of the Myall Creek Massacre, in northern New South Wales. There were other examples of attempts to bring about a greater equity under the rule of law but, as Amanda Nettelbeck explains, there was wide-spread resistance to the investigation and charging of colonists for crimes against the Indigenous population with cases regularly not going to trial, or, if making a courtroom, resulting in an acquittal (355-59). That such cases rested on “legally inadmissible Aboriginal testimony” (Reece in Nettelbeck 358) propped up a justice system that was, inherently, unjust in the nineteenth century. It is important to note that commentators at the time did allude to the crime narrative of the Board: when in the most civilized country in the world it has been found ineffective as example to hang murderers in chains, it is not to be expected a savage race will be influenced by the milder exhibition of effigy and caricature. (Colonial Times 2) It is argued here that the Board was much more than an offering of effigy and caricature. The Proclamation Board presents, in striking detail, the formula for the modern true crime tale: a peace disturbed by the act of murder; and the ensuing search for, and delivery of, justice. Reinforcing this point, are the ideas of justice seen within crime fiction, a genre that focuses on the restoration of order out of chaos (James 174), are made visible here as aspirational. The true crime tale does not, consistently, offer the reassurances found within crime fiction. In the real world, particularly one as violent as colonial Australia, we are forced to acknowledge that, below the surface of the official rhetoric on justice and crime, the guilty often go free and the innocent are sometimes hanged. Another point of note is that, if the latter date offered here, of 1830, is taken as the official date of the production of these Boards, then the significance of the Proclamation Board as a true crime tale is even more pronounced through a connection to crime fiction (both genres sharing a common literary heritage). The year 1830 marks the release of Australia’s first novel, Quintus Servinton written by convicted forger Henry Savery, a crime novel (produced in three volumes) published by Henry Melville of Hobart Town. Thus, this paper suggests, 1830 can be posited as a year that witnessed the production of two significant cultural artefacts, the Proclamation Board and the nation’s first full-length literary work, as also being the year that established the, now indomitable, traditions of true crime and crime fiction in Australia. Conclusion During the late 1820s in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) a set of approximately 100 Proclamation Boards were produced by the Lieutenant Governor of the day, George Arthur. The official purpose of these items was to communicate, to the Indigenous peoples of the island colony, that all—black and white—were equal under the law. Murderers, be they Aboriginal or colonist, would be punished. The Board is a re-imagining of one of the traditional methods of communication for Indigenous peoples; the leaving of drawings on the bark of trees. The Board was, in the 1860s, in time for an Intercolonial Exhibition, re-imagined as the output of Lieutenant Governor Davey. This re-imagining of the Board was so effective that surviving artefacts, today, are popularly known as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines with the date modified, to 1816, to fit the new narrative. The Proclamation Board was also reimagined, by its creators and consumers, in a variety of ways: as peace offering; military propaganda; exhibition object; tourism ephemera; and contemporary art. This paper has also, briefly, offered another re-imagining of the Board, positing that this early “pamphlet” on justice and punishment actually presents a pre-cursor to the modern Australian true crime tale. The Proclamation Board tells many stories but, at the core of this curious object, is a crime story: the story of mass murder. Acknowledgements The author acknowledges the Palawa peoples: the traditional custodians of the lands known today as Tasmania. The author acknowledges, too, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation upon whose lands this paper was researched and written. The author extends thanks to Richard Neville, Margot Riley, Kirsten Thorpe, and Justine Wilson of the State Library of New South Wales for sharing their knowledge and offering their support. The author is also grateful to the reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and for making valuable suggestions. ReferencesAboriginal Heritage Tasmania. “Scarred Trees.” Aboriginal Cultural Heritage, 2012. 12 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.aboriginalheritage.tas.gov.au/aboriginal-cultural-heritage/archaeological-site-types/scarred-trees›.Arthur, George. “Proclamation.” The Hobart Town Courier 19 Apr. 1828: 1.———. Governor Davey’s [sic – actually Governor Arthur’s] Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816 [sic – actually c. 1828-30]. Graphic Materials. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, c. 1828-30.Bock, Thomas. Mathinna. Watercolour and Gouache on Paper. 23 x 19 cm (oval), c. 1840.Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg. 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Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 1934.McCulloch, Samuel Clyde. “Sir George Gipps and Eastern Australia’s Policy toward the Aborigine, 1838-46.” The Journal of Modern History 33.3 (1961): 261–69.Morris, John. “Notes on a Message to the Tasmanian Aborigines in 1829, popularly called ‘Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816’.” Australiana 10.3 (1988): 84–7.Nettelbeck, Amanda. “‘Equals of the White Man’: Prosecution of Settlers for Violence against Aboriginal Subjects of the Crown, Colonial Western Australia.” Law and History Review 31.2 (2013): 355–90.Newman, Terry. “Tasmania, the Name.” Companion to Tasmanian History, 2006. 16 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/T/Tasmania%20name.htm›.Reece, Robert H.W., in Amanda Nettelbeck. “‘Equals of the White Man’: Prosecution of Settlers for Violence against Aboriginal Subjects of the Crown, Colonial Western Australia.” Law and History Review 31.2 (2013): 355–90.Ryan, Lyndall. “The Black Line in Van Diemen’s Land: Success or Failure?” Journal of Australian Studies 37.1 (2013): 3–18.Savery, Henry. Quintus Servinton: A Tale Founded upon Events of Real Occurrence. Hobart Town: Henry Melville, 1830.Turnbull, Clive. Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1974 [1948].

IntroductionWhen a baby girl born in Britain was endowed with the topical name ‘Hashtag’, a social media post decried the naming, and a media storm followed. Before she was even home from hospital, headlines were at the ready: “Did a mother really just name her child Hashtag?” (Nye) and “Baby Hashtag: has the search for original names gone too far?” (Barkham). Trollers were also poised to react, offering: “The first name is REALLY dumb. And you're even dumber,” prompting a rejection of the baby’s name as well as her ostensibly ill-equipped parents (Facebook). Dubbed a “Public Figure” on her Facebook page, Hashtag Jameson accrued a particularly premature type of celebrity, where, with a handful of baby selfies, she declared via Twitter, and only hours after birth, that she was “already trending”.In this article, I consider the relationship between the infant child and the visual-digital economies in which it – as in the Hashtag hoax, above – performs. The infant child is brought into view with the very first sentence that frames John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. “Seeing comes before words”, he writes. “The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” (1). Berger’s reference to the seeing child positions it as an active agent in cultures and practices of visuality, but also uses an idea of the child to position vision as the primary communicative means by which we “establish our place in the surrounding world” and in which we are enveloped “before” speech (7). Here, I explore the intensified relationship between the visual culture of infancy and the economised digital movement of vision that it produces in one highly specific image-genre: the baby selfie. In doing so I aim to characterise the depictive nature of this format in terms of how it compositionally documents – to further borrow the language of Berger, who was then discussing oil paintings – “a way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange” (87).The new sociology of childhood has been concerned with the construction of the child figure as it has interfaced with new cultural and political realities since the early 1980s (Prout). These include “phenomena such as the flexibilization of production … expanding networks of knowledge … and shifts in labour market participation, work and the global economy” (Prout 5). I suggest here that the baby selfie can be seen as an unprecedented social marker of these transformations, signalling a heightened degree of priceless sentiment within which the child – as an animator of amateur affects, viral tendencies and algorithmic logics – is given to operate. I focus on the compositional propensities of the baby selfie in order to characterise how it visually construes a particular kind of self that is intrinsically entangled with the conception of the image as a form of capital exchange. That is, I suggest that in its intense and yet paradoxical self-performativity the baby selfie depicts a way of seeing that is predicated on, but also troubles, the conceit of a commodified social relation. What Does the Baby Selfie Say?“Should babies really be taking selfies?” yells a headline warning against the perceived dangers of youth digital cultures (Cox). The 2014 story references a phone app built by father Matthew Pegula that uses front-facing cameras to “unintentionally teac[h] your baby to take selfies of themselves” by generating “rattling sounds, pictures of cute animals, and more to get the baby’s attention.” The article explains that “[w]hen the baby reaches out to touch the screen, the camera snaps their selfie and saves it to the device”. While Pegula’s Baby Selfie App is available for purchase on Google Play’s app store for $1.09, a similar device named New Born Fame, featuring “Facebook and Twitter symbols that are activated when the youngster reaches for them” and inclusions such as “a pair of shoes with an internal pedometer that tracks kicks and posts the activity online, a squeezable GPS tracker and a ‘selfie-ball’ that photographs the baby and uploads the shot whenever the ball rotates” (Peppers), artistically interrogated this relatively new category of “insta-infa-fame”.In their article “What Does the Selfie Say?”, Theresa M. Senft and Nancy K. Baym argue that the selfie exists as the hallmark genre of a new kind of self-reflexive image-making, one that is formally characterised by the “self-generated” nature of the photographic portraiture it depicts, which is in turn conceived for its transmissibility, occurring “primarily via social media” (1589). Popularised in part by new technologies (the camera phone, the smart phone, and then the front-facing phone camera) and in part by new digital platforms (“Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Tumblr, WeChat, and Tinder”) (1589), Senft and Baym further explain that the selfie is simultaneously a photographic object which transmits human feeling, a practice of sending (as well as of depicting), and third, a monetized assemblage curated by nonhuman agents. It is this last factor which renders the objecthood of the selfie as it relates to the vernacular that it enacts as well as the practice of its making, political.Notions around the simultaneously constituting and yet virally distributed “self” of social media are not new. A now prominent literature around how the selfie graphically manifests and performs: intimate publics (Walsh and Baker), a normative or resistive image repertoire (Murray), and emotionalised, communicable affect (Bayer et al.), gives rise to a range of viewpoints that aim to characterise how the hyper self-reflexivity of the selfie depicts – visually as well as ontologically – the self as an agent of their own transmissibility (Holiday et al.). From these we understand that the selfie is distinct for its (i) self-representational image-format (it is an image made by the self, of the self, and thereby is identifiable for its capturing of the self in this very process of self-composition); ii) its methods of distribution (selfies are taken and distributed often instantaneously, and thereby are not only objects of, but active agents of, the reshaping of digitally communicative economies); iii) its idiomatic performance of a sociality and aesthetic of the amateur or vernacular (Abidin).The doubled glance both inwards and outwards that the selfie casts is further characterised for how it traces as well as points to a gestural self-awareness held within its compositional characteristics (Frosh). This moves us from a semiotic reading of the selfie to a reading of its “kineasthetic sociability” – that is, its embodied inception of new forms of autobiographical inscription which say “not only ‘see this, here, now,’ but also ‘see me showing you me’” (Frosh 1609-10). Here, the selfie is less a static object and more a gestural imprint of the communicative action in process: it is “simultaneously mediating (the outstretched arm executes the taking of the selfie) and mediated (the outstretched arm becomes a legible and iterable sign within selfies of, among other things, the selfieness of the image)” (Frosh 1611). In this sense, its compositional logic offers a tracing of this very enactive, embodied tendency, which bears more than an indexical relationship to the field that it marks – it depicts itself as a constituting part of that field.While these characteristics are broadly accepted as being true of selfies, the “selfieness” of a baby selfie might be seen to offer a paradoxical reframing of these depictive qualities. That is, if a selfie is a self-depiction of a process of self-depiction, the baby selfie most usually performs this self-reflexivity with recourse to an external agent who is either present in the image frame or who is occluded from it but nonetheless implied by the very nature of the image (a parent or the image-facilitator, or indeed, a baby app). The baby selfie’s scene of self-depiction, then, might be thought of as a kind of self-depiction-by-proxy. At the same time, the baby selfie asks us to invest in the belief that the picture was knowingly self-taken, and in doing so, models a kind of aspirational autonomy for the child/baby figure who is depicted. In this sense, the baby selfie, by its very nature, disrupts the accepted distinguishing format of the selfie: that the picture is both self-depicting and is self-composed. Instead, the baby selfie can be seen to gesturally reincorporate into its visual scene the very question of this structural im/possibility.Depicting the Viral ChildThe figure of the child has been considered by a range of theorists as the organising principle of modernity. Philippe Aries’ foundational work has argued that the modern discovery of childhood is reflected in the rise of the nuclear family and consequential shifts from sociability to privacy. Viviana Zelizer similarly positions the emergence of the economically “useless” but sentimentally “priceless” child against comprehensive social and industrial transformations taking place across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that excluded the child as a labourer and instead situated it with the disciplinary regime of education. The hetero-normatively white child has since been shown to emblematise concepts of social futurity (Edelman) and myths of morality, humanity and the “ordering of time” (Pelligrini 98).Following Zelizer, the more recently ‘digitally’ visual cultures of childhood can be seen to spin the figure of the child around new socio-economic and discursive imperatives. Lisa Cartwright writes about photographs of waiting adoptee children, in which “children of poor countries become commodities and their images become advertisements in a global market” (83). Deborah Lupton similarly considers the coding of infant bodies in popular media for their “represent[ation] as helpless, vulnerable, uncontrolled, dirty and leaky in opposition to the idealised adult body that is powerful, self-regulated, autonomous, clean, its bodily boundaries sealed from the outside world” (349). More recently, children have been considered for how they either accidentally or volitionally interact with mediated technologies (Nansen) as well as for how they are increasingly digitally surveilled as the objects of a necessary – and increasingly normalised – parental “culture of care” (Leaver 2). These studies make clear that while children are increasingly positioned as the ‘viral’ agents of new kinds of visual markets, they are also infantilised as victims in need of unprecedented cyber-protection.In 1994 Douglas Rushkoff coined the term “media virus” to account for the rapid and uncontrollable ways that popular media texts performed to either coerce or awaken viewing publics. While Rushkoff’s medium of reference was television, Henry Jenkins et al. later reframed virality to instead encompass ideas of user-led agency by linking it with a logic of “stickiness” – evoking what he termed a “peanut butter” analogy to describe the “spreadable” (3) movement of ideas in more recent social media practices. Indeed, Liam French finds a strong parallel between the “phenomenal rise in user generated content” and the turn towards newer visual cultures within social media practices more broadly, noting that it is “ordinary people” (French’s term) who actively generate the very forms of visual cultural production that become key to communicatory circulation. The selfie, in this regard, becomes both a format and an icon of the new ways of seeing brought into perspective by social media practices.Given the political, social and industrial ecologies that constitute such image cultures, it is only recently that the “viral” child, as the next delineation of the sentimentally “priceless” child, has arrived into view. Here, the baby Hashtag hoax can be seen to critically narrate a specific cultural moment: one that is concerned with stabilising the figure of the child even as it constitutes the ground through which that figure also becomes undone. I refer to the way that Hashtag, as a figural baby, presents a tautological identity, where the digital grammar of # names the mechanism by which she would also search for herself. If Hashtag is emblematic of the algorithmic and affective assemblage of contemporary image-cultures of childhood – whose image-work shapes the new temporal dimensions of our watching and viewing practices – she also illustrates how the child has been become not only an object, but a medium of the economic logics of communicative capitalism. That is, the image-work of the baby selfie can be seen to point to the very question of autonomous agency that frames the figure of the child and in doing so, provides a disruptive counterpoint to the “peanut butter” logic of spreadable visual cultures of so-called “ordinary people” more broadly.It is this light that I ask (drawing on Senft and Baym): what does the baby selfie say about how we understand or construe the figure of the child? More specifically, I ask (via Berger) what culture of vision is brought into view by the rise of such visual cultures of the viral child? The “Gestural Gaze” of Digital Infant Agency Ellentv.com recently advertised a call for viewers to send in their favourite baby selfies: “If you've got a baby and a camera, it's time to take some selfies! Take a photo of you and your baby making the same face, and send it to us!” The legal disclaimer accompanying the callout additionally advised that “[b]y submitting Materials, … you … do not violate the right of privacy or publicity of, or constitute a defamation against, any person or entity; that the Materials will not infringe upon or violate the copyright or common law rights or any other rights of any person or entity” (Ellentv.com). From the outset, there appears within baby selfie culture a curious calibration of the agency of the child, who is at once a selfie-self-taker but who is also excluded from a legal right to privacy that concerns “any person or entity”. In this respect we might further ask – following Jacqueline Bhabha’s question “what sort of human is a child?” (1526) – what sort of human is a viral child, and how does the baby selfie depict this paradoxical configuration of infantile agency?While the formality of the baby selfie still demonstrates a range of configurations which often incorporate the figure of a parent and hence contradict the discreet self-composing parameters of the selfie, here I focus in closing on one specific baby selfie that I suggest is emblematic of an increasing prevalence of apparently “true” baby selfies which operate on a range of image-sharing platforms and meme sites. These baby selfies are distinguished by seeming to be (i) an image that is made by the self, of the self, and thereby is identified for its capturing of the self in this very process of self-composition; ii) an image that is construed for methods of often instantaneous distribution; iii) an image that puts forward an idiomatic performance of an amateur vernacular – or what Abidin has called “calibrated amateurism”.One compilation, “12 of the Cutest Baby Selfies You Will Ever See”, foregrounds the autonomy of the figure of the viral child as depicted by baby selfie culture, explaining that “These babies might be small, but they can do a lot more than just laugh, crawl, and play. It turns out they can also work their way around a camera and snap some amazing selfies. Talk about impressive!” (Campbell). While all the images in the selection depict the embodied gestural sociality of the selfie that Frosh characterises – that which is “simultaneously mediating (the outstretched arm executes the taking of the selfie) and mediated (the outstretched arm becomes a legible and iterable sign within selfies of … the selfieness of the image)” (1611) – one in particular is arresting for its striking interpellation of the “innocent” figure of the child with what I will extend via Frosh to call the inherent mediality of her gestural gaze. In this iconic baby selfie, the gestural gaze is witnessed in the way that the baby’s outstretched hand seems to be extending towards us, the viewer, but is rather (we think we know) extended towards the phone camera, in order to better see herself.The infant in the image is coded female, wearing a pink bonnet, dummy clip and dummy. The dummy is centred defiantly in the baby’s mouth and doubly defiantly in the centre of the image frame as an infantile ‘technology’ that seems to undercut the technology of the phone camera apparatus. The dummy imbues the image with an iconic sense of the baby’s innate “baby-ness” which seems to directly contradict the strength of her gaze, which also appears, in following the outwards arc of her selfie-taking arm, to reach beyond the image frame and address her viewer directly. It seems to say – to paraphrase Frosh – see me here, now, showing you me. The ambivalent origins of the image are also key to how it is read and distributed here. The image in question can be found on the media site Woman’s World, which offers an untraceable credit to Instagram for its original source. The image has also, since, spread itself, appearing across a range of other multilingual sites and feeds, depicting the child at the centre of its frame as somewhat entangled in a further labour of self-duplication. The baby selfie in circulation says not only “‘see this, here, now,’” and “‘see me showing you me’,” but ‘see all of this here, and again, here and again, here.’John Berger writes of two related image genres that connect histories of vernacular depiction to histories of the evolution of the publicity image as a medium and sign of capital exchange. Writing on oil painting, he notes how the materiality of the medium signified the “thingness” of its depiction: “if you buy a painting you also buy a look of the thing that it represents” (83). He finds, therein, an “analogy between possessing and a way of seeing which is incorporated in oil painting” (83) and which, as he later explains, becomes tied to “the tangibility, the texture, the lustre, the solidity of what it depicts” (88). The textural qualities of oil painting, which for Berger construe the “real” as that which can be materially conveyed or indexed as commodity, might be compared to the gestural residue that is contained within the selfie. While oil painting construed the materiality of things – and hence, the commodifiable nature of any particular relation – the selfie might be seen to depict the self in the process of its own self-labour: the material gesture of taking the image necessitates that the self becomes an agent who then becomes the immaterial self of transmission. The selfie is in this way a depiction of the self in a form of capital relation to itself.While the selfie – as a digital composition – is not materially “real” in the same way that oil painting is, the indexical nature of the arm that reaches out beyond the image frame to point to the inherent transmissibility – and hence capital value – of the image, might be. While the baby selfie imitates these capacities, I suggest here that it also traces a compositional logic that further complicates that which Frosh charts. This is because in the very moment that the spectator of the image is confronted with the baby selfie’s call to “see me showing you me” (1609-10), the spectator is also confronted with the figure of the infant as an autonomous agent capable of their own image-constitution. In essence, the baby selfie posits a question around the baby’s innate ability to knowingly generate its image-frame, even as that very image-frame is what casts the infant into the spreadable contexts within which it will then operate – or, indeed, become ‘knowable’.In its heightened self-referentiality but tenuously depicted sense of rhetorical agency, the baby selfie then faces us with what we think we know, or do not know, about the figure of the child. This central ambivalence inherent to the compositional makeup of the baby selfie in this way both depicts and disrupts the economics of circulation that are intrinsic to selfies more broadly, pointing to a decomposing of the parameters by which a selfie is interpreted and understood. Further, it enables us to question relationships between ways of seeing and ways of being – how does the baby selfie envision the figure of the chid? What sort of human does it become? While there are valid discussions to be had around the absence of “direct self-representational agency” (Leaver) and moral rights or wrongs of the parental management of children’s image-work in online spaces, the baby selfie also opens up questions around how we understand the very contours of infantile agency, how we perceive rhetorical knowingness, and what we mean to mean by the relentless circulation of this imagery of the viral child. Indeed, as Wendy S. Hesford writes, it can be helpful to shift an understanding of agency from being an “individual enterprise” to being understood as that which is “enabled and constrained by cultural discourses and material forces” that compel it into material circulation (156).Here, I am not aiming to foreclose debates about the role of infants (or children more broadly) living with and in digital cultures. Neither do I aim to cast judgement upon on those image practices which enfold child subjects within them. I rather aim to circumvent those important debates to find – following Berger – a trace of how the image cultures that co-constitute digital infancies operate to formulate as well as depict a new field of vision that is predicated upon a seemingly impossible but nonetheless compelling logic of the contradictory impulses of the viral child. That is, it challenges us to think more carefully about what we think we know about children as well as about how we come to know them.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor.” Social Media + Society (Apr.-June 2017): 1–15.Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Trans. Robert Baldick. 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I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vaginal, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/clitorial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated clitoris, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. Indeed, in the intersection of my theoretical, creative, psychological, and somatic praxis, the heat (read hot and messy, insightful and insistent signage) of my body’s knowledges perhaps intensifies – with a ripe bouquet – the inevitably ongoing odour/aroma of the reproductive world. ReferencesAngel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “On Moving and Being Moved: The Corporeality of Writing in Literary Fiction and New Media Art.” Literature and Sensation, eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephan McLaren. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009: 162-172. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Brodzinsky, David. “Adjustment to Adoption: A Psychosocial Perspective.” Clinical Psychology Review 7 (1987): 25-47. doi: 10.1016/0272-7358(87)90003-1.Brodzinsky, David, Daniel Smith, and Anne Brodzinsky. Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues. 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In this article I discuss a story told by the South Australian Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal elder, Aunty Hilda Wilson (nee Varcoe), about the time when, at not quite sixteen, she was sent from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Station to work in the Adelaide Hills, some 500 kilometres away, as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”. Her secondment was part of a widespread practice in early and mid-twentieth century Australia of placing young Aboriginal women “of marriageable age” from missions and government reserves into domestic service. Consciously deploying Indigenous storytelling practices as pedagogy, Hilda Wilson recounted this episode in a number of distinct ways during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Across these iterations, each building on the other, she exhibited a personal resilience in her subjectivity, embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems of relationality, kin and work, which informed her agency and determination in a challenging situation in which she was both caring for a white socially-privileged family of five, while simultaneously grappling with the injustices of a state system of segregated indentured labour. Kirmayer and colleagues propose that “notions of resilience emerging from developmental psychology and psychiatry in recent years address the distinctive cultures, geographic and social settings, and histories of adversity of indigenous peoples”. Resilience is understood here as an ability to actively engage with traumatic change, involving the capacity to absorb stress and to transform in order to cope with it (Luthar et al.). Further to this, in an Indigenous context, Marion Kickett has found the capacity for resilience to be supported by three key factors: family connections, culture and belonging as well as notions of identity and history. In exploring the layers of this autobiographical story, I employ this extended psychological notion of resilience in both a domestic ambit as well as the broader social context for Indigenous people surviving a system of external domination. Additionally I consider the resilience Aunty Hilda demonstrates at a pivotal interlude between girlhood and womanhood within the trajectory of her overall long and productive life, and within an intergenerational history of resistance and accommodation. What is especially important about her storytelling is its refusal to be contained by the imaginary of the settler nation and its generic Aboriginal-female subject. She refuses victimhood while at the same time illuminating the mechanisms of injustice, hinting also at possibilities for alternative and more equitable relationships of family and work across cultural divides. Considered through this prism, resilience is, I suggest, also a quality firmly connected to ideas of Aboriginal cultural-sovereignty and standpoint and to, what Victoria Grieves has identified as, the Aboriginal knowledge value of sharing (25, 28, 45). Storytelling as Pedagogy The story I discuss was verbally recounted in a manner that Westphalen describes as “a continuation of Dreaming Stories”, functioning to educate and connect people and country (13-14). As MacGill et al. note, “the critical and transformative aspects of decolonising pedagogies emerge from storytelling and involve the gift of narrative and the enactment of reciprocity that occurs between the listener and the storyteller.” Hilda told me that as a child she was taught not to ask questions when listening to the stories of an Elder, and her own children were raised in this manner. Hilda's oldest daughter described this as a process involving patience, intrigue and surprise (Elva Wanganeen). Narratives unfold through nuance and repetition in a complexity of layers that can generate multiple levels of meaning over time. Circularity and recursivity underlie this pedagogy through which mnemonic devices are built so that stories become re-membered and inscribed on the body of the listener. When a perceived level of knowledge-transference has occurred, a narrator may elect to elaborate further, adding another detail that will often transform the story’s social, cultural, moral or political context. Such carefully chosen additional detail, however, might re-contextualise all that has gone before. As well as being embodied, stories are also emplaced, and thus most appropriately told in the Country where events occurred. (Here I use the Aboriginal English term “Country” which encompasses home, clan estate, and the powerful complex of spiritual, animate and inanimate forces that bind people and place.) Hilda Wilson’s following account of her first job as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”, Dr Frank Swann, provides an illustration of how she expertly uses traditional narrative forms of incrementally structured knowledge transmission within a cross-cultural setting to tell a story that expresses practices of resilience as resistance and transformation at its core. A “White Doctor” Story: The First Layer Aunty Hilda first told me this story when we were winding along the South Eastern Freeway through the Adelaide hills between Murray Bridge and Mount Barker, in 1997, on our way home to Adelaide from a trip to Camp Coorong, the Ngarrindjeri cultural education centre co-founded by her granddaughter. She was then 86 years old. Ahead of us, the profile of Mt Lofty rose out of the plains and into view. The highest peak in the Mount Lofty ranges, Yurrebilla, as it is known to Kaurna Aboriginal people, or Mt Lofty, has been an affluent enclave of white settlement for Adelaide’s moneyed elite since early colonial times. Being in place, or in view of place, provided the appropriate opportunity for her to tell me the story. It belongs to a group of stories that during our initial period of working together changed little over time until one day two years later she an added contextual detail which turned it inside out. Hilda described the doctor’s spacious hill-top residence, and her responsibilities of caring for Dr Swann’s invalid wife (“an hysteric who couldn't do anything for herself”), their twin teenage boys (who attended private college in the city) along with another son and younger daughter living at home (pers. com. Hilda Wilson). Recalling the exhilaration of looking down over the sparkling lights of Adelaide at night from this position of apparent “privilege” on the summit, she related this undeniably as a success story, justifiably taking great pride in her achievements as a teenager, capable of stepping into the place of the non-Indigenous doctor's wife in running the large and demanding household. Successfully undertaking a wide range of duties employed in the care of a family, including the disabled mother, she is an active participant crucial to the lives of all in the household, including to the work of the doctor and the twin boys in private education. Hilda recalled that Mrs Swann was unable to eat without her assistance. As the oldest daughter of a large family Hilda had previously assisted in caring for her younger siblings. Told in this way, her account collapses social distinctions, delineating a shared social and physical space, drawing its analytic frame from an Indigenous ethos of subjectivity, relationality, reciprocity and care. Moreover Hilda’s narrative of domestic service demonstrates an assertion of agency that resists colonial and patriarchal hegemony and inverts the master/mistress-servant relationship, one she firmly eschews in favour of the self-affirming role of the lady of the house. (It stands in contrast to the abuse found in other accounts for example Read, Tucker, Kartinyeri. Often the key difference was a continuity of family connections and ongoing family support.) Indeed the home transformed into a largely feminised and cross-culturalised space in which she had considerable agency and responsibility when the doctor was absent. Hilda told me this story several times in much the same way during our frequent encounters over the next two years. Each telling revealed further details that fleshed a perspective gained from what Patricia Hill Collins terms an “epistemic privilege” via her “outsider-within status” of working within a white household, lending an understanding of its social mechanisms (12-15). She also stressed the extent of her duty of care in upholding the family’s well-being, despite the work at times being too burdensome. The Second Version: Coming to Terms with Intersecting Oppressions Later, as our relationship developed and deepened, when I began to record her life-narrative as part of my doctoral work, she added an unexpected detail that altered its context completely: It was all right except I slept outside in a tin shed and it was very cold at night. Mount Lofty, by far the coldest part of Adelaide, frequently experiences winter maximum temperatures of two or three degrees and often light snowfalls. This skilful reframing draws on Indigenous storytelling pedagogy and is expressly used to invite reflexivity, opening questions that move the listener from the personal to the public realm in which domestic service and the hegemony of the home are pivotal in coming to terms with the overlapping historical oppressions of class, gender, race and nation. Suddenly we witness her subjectivity starkly shift from one self-defined and allied with an equal power relationship – or even of dependency reversal cast as “de-facto doctor's wife” – to one diminished by inequity and power imbalance in the outsider-defined role of “mistreated servant”. The latter was signalled by the dramatic addition of a single signifying detail as a decoding device to a deeper layer of meaning. In this parallel stratum of the story, Hilda purposefully brings into relief the politics in which “the private domain of women's housework intersected with the public domain of governmental social engineering policies” (Haskins 4). As Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out, what for White Australia was cheap labour and a civilising mission, for Indigenous women constituted stolen children and slavery. Protection and then assimilation were government policies under which Indigenous women grew up. (96) Hilda was sent away from her family to work in 1927 by the universally-feared Sister Pearl McKenzie, a nurse who too-zealously (Katinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Calling, 23) oversaw the Chief Protector’s policies of “training” Aboriginal children from the South Australian missions in white homes once they reached fourteen (Haebich, 316—20). Indeed many prominent Adelaide hills’ families benefited from Aboriginal labour under this arrangement. Hilda explained her struggle with the immense cultural dislocation that removal into domestic service entailed, a removal her grandfather William Rankine had travelled from Raukkan to Government House to protest against less than a decade earlier (The Register December 21, 1923). This additional layer of story also illuminates Hilda’s capacity for resilience and persistence in finding a way forward through the challenge of her circumstances (Luthar et al.), drawing on her family networks and sense of personhood (Kickett). Hilda related that her father visited her at Mount Lofty twice, though briefly, on his way to shearing jobs in the south-east of the state. “He said it was no good me living like this,” she stated. Through his active intervention, reinforcement was requested and another teenager from Point Pearce, Hilda’s future husband’s cousin, Annie Sansbury, soon arrived to share the workload. But, Hilda explained, the onerous expectations coupled with the cultural segregation of retiring to the tin shed quickly became too much for Annie, who stayed only three months, leaving Hilda coping again alone, until her father applied additional pressure for a more suitable placement to be found for his daughter. In her next position, working for the family of a racehorse trainer, Hilda contentedly shared the bedroom with the small boy for whom she cared, and not long after returned to Point Pearce where she married Robert Wilson and began a family of her own. Gendered Resilience across Cultural Divides Hilda explicitly speaks into these spaces to educate me, because all but a few white women involved have remained silent about their complicity with state sanctioned practices which exploited Indigenous labour and removed children from their families through the policies of protection and assimilation. For Indigenous women, speaking out was often fraught with the danger of a deeper removal from family and Country, even of disappearance. Victoria Haskins writes extensively of two cases in New South Wales where young Aboriginal women whose protests concerning their brutal treatment at the hands of white employers, resulted in their wrongful and prolonged committal to mental health and other institutions (147-52, 228-39). In the indentured service of Indigenous women it is possible to see oppression operating through Eurocentric ideologies of race, class and gender, in which Indigenous women were assumed to take on, through displacement, the more oppressed role of white women in pre-second world war non-Aboriginal Australian society. The troubling silent shadow-figure of the “doctor’s wife” indeed provides a haunting symbol of - and also a forceful rebellion against – the docile upper middle-class white femininity of the inter-war era. Susan Bordo has argued that that “the hysteric” is archetypal of a discourse of ‘pathology as embodied protest’ in which the body may […] be viewed as a surface on which conventional constructions of femininity are exposed starkly to view in extreme or hyperliteral form. (20) Mrs Swann’s vulnerability contrasts markedly with the strength Hilda expresses in coping with a large family, emanating from a history of equitable gender relations characteristic of Ngarrindjeri society (Bell). The intersection of race and gender, as Marcia Langton contends “continues to require deconstruction to allow us to decolonise our consciousness” (54). From Hilda’s brief description one grasps a relationship resonant with that between the protagonists in Tracy Moffat's Night Cries, (a response to the overt maternalism in the film Jedda) in which the white mother finds herself utterly reliant on her “adopted” Aboriginal daughter at the end of her life (46-7). Resilience and Survival The different versions of story Hilda deploys, provide a pedagogical basis to understanding the broader socio-political framework of her overall life narrative in which an ability to draw on the cultural continuity of the past to transform the future forms an underlying dynamic. This demonstrated capacity to meet the challenging conditions thrown up by the settler-colonial state has its foundations in the connectivity and cultural strength sustained generationally in her family. Resilience moves from being individually to socially determined, as in Kickett’s model. During the onslaught of dispossession, following South Australia’s 1836 colonial invasion, Ngarrindjeri were left near-starving and decimated from introduced diseases. Pullume (c1808-1888), the rupuli (elected leader of the Ngarrindjeri Tendi, or parliament), Hilda’s third generation great-grandfather, decisively steered his people through the traumatic changes, eventually negotiating a middle-path after the Point McLeay Mission was established on Ngarrindjeri country in 1859 (Jenkin, 59). Pullume’s granddaughter, the accomplished, independent-thinking Ellen Sumner (1842—1925), played an influential educative role during Hilda’s youth. Like other Ngarrindjeri women in her lineage, Ellen Sumner was skilled in putari practice (female doctor) and midwifery culture that extended to a duty of care concerning women and children (teaching her “what to do and what not to do”), which I suggest is something Hilda herself drew from when working with the Swann family. Hilda’s mother and aunties continued aspects of the putari tradition, attending births and giving instruction to women in the community (Bell, 171, Hughes Grandmother, 52-4). As mentioned earlier, when the South Australian government moved to introduce The Training of Children Act (SA) Hilda’s maternal grandfather William Rankine campaigned vigorously against this, taking a petition to the SA Governor in December 1923 (Haebich, 315-19). As with Aunty Hilda, William Rankine used storytelling as a method to draw public attention to the inequities of his times in an interview with The Register which drew on his life-narrative (Hughes, My Grandmother, 61). Hilda’s father Wilfred Varcoe, a Barngarrla-Wirrungu man, almost a thousand kilometres away from his Poonindie birthplace, resisted assimilation by actively pursuing traditional knowledge networks using his mobility as a highly sought after shearer to link up with related Elders in the shearing camps, (and as we saw to inspect the conditions his daughter was working under at Mt Lofty). The period Hilda spent as a servant to white families to be trained in white ways was in fact only a brief interlude in a long life in which family connections, culture and belonging (Kickett) served as the backbone of her resilience and resistance. On returning to the Point Pearce Mission, Hilda successfully raised a large family and activated a range of community initiatives that fostered well-being. In the 1960s she moved to Adelaide, initially as the sole provider of her family (her husband later followed), to give her younger children better educational opportunities. Working with Aunty Gladys Elphick OBE through the Council of Aboriginal Women, she played a foundational role in assisting other Aboriginal women establish their families in the city (Mattingly et al., 154, Fisher). In Adelaide, Aunty Hilda became an influential, much loved Elder, living in good health to the age of ninety-six years. The ability to survive changing circumstances, to extend care over and over to her children and Elders along with qualities of leadership, determination, agency and resilience have passed down through her family, several of whom have become successful in public life. These include her great-grandson and former AFL football player, Michael O’Loughlin, her great-nephew Adam Goodes and her-grand-daughter, the cultural weaver Aunty Ellen Trevorrow. Arguably, resilience contributes to physical as well as cultural longevity, through caring for the self and others. Conclusion This story demonstrates how sociocultural dimensions of resilience are contextualised in practices of everyday lives. We see this in the way that Aunty Hilda Wilson’s self-narrated story resolutely defies attempts to know, subjugate and categorise, operating instead in accord with distinctively Aboriginal expressions of gender and kinship relations that constitute an Aboriginal sovereignty. Her storytelling activates a revision of collective history in ways that valorise Indigenous identity (Kirmayer et al.). Her narrative of agency and personal achievement, one that has sustained her through life, interacts with the larger narrative of state-endorsed exploitation, diffusing its power and exposing it to wider moral scrutiny. Resilience in this context is inextricably entwined with practices of cultural survival and resistance developed in response to the introduction of government policies and the encroachment of settlers and their world. We see resilience too operating across Hilda Wilson’s family history, and throughout her long life. The agency and strategies displayed suggest alternative realities and imagine other, usually more equitable, possible worlds. References Bell, Diane. Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was and Will Be. Melbourne: Spinifex, 1998. Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 90-110. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. Fisher, Elizabeth M. "Elphick, Gladys (1904–1988)." Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 29 Sep. 2013. ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/elphick-gladys-12460/text22411>. Grieves, Victoria. Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy, The Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing, Melbourne University: Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009. Haebich, Anna. Broken Circles: The Fragmenting of Indigenous Families. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Press, 2000. Haskins, Victoria. My One Bright Spot. London: Palgrave, 2005. Hughes, Karen. "My Grandmother on the Other Side of the Lake." PhD thesis, Department of Australian Studies and Department of History, Flinders University. Adelaide, 2009. ———. “Microhistories and Things That Matter.” Australian Feminist Studies 27.73 (2012): 269-278. ———. “I’d Grown Up as a Child amongst Natives.” Outskirts: Feminisms along the Edge 28 (2013). 29 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-28/karen-hughes>. Jenkin, Graham. Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri. Adelaide: Rigby, 1979. Kartinyeri, Doris. Kick the Tin. Melbourne: Spinifex, 2000. Kartinyeri, Doreen. My Ngarrindjeri Calling, Adelaide: Wakefield, 2007. Kickett, Marion. “Examination of How a Culturally Appropriate Definition of Resilience Affects the Physical and Mental Health of Aboriginal People.” PhD thesis, Curtin University, 2012. Kirmayer, L.J., S. Dandeneau, E. Marshall, M.K. Phillips, K. Jenssen Williamson. “Rethinking Resilience from Indigenous Perspectives.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 56.2 (2011): 84-91. Luthar, S., D. Cicchetti, and B. Becker. “The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work.” Child Development 71.3 (2000): 543-62. MacGill, Bindi, Julie Mathews, Ellen Trevorrow, Alice Abdulla, and Deb Rankine. “Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong,” M/C Journal 15.3 (2012). Mattingly, Christobel, and Ken Hampton. Survival in Our Own Land, Adelaide: Wakefield, 1988. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman. St Lucia: UQP, 2000. Night Cries, A Rural Tragedy. Dir. Tracy Moffatt. Chili Films, 1990. Read, Peter. A Rape of the Soul So Profound. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Tucker, Margaret. If Everyone Cared. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1977. Wanganeen, Elva. Personal Communication, 2000. Westphalen, Linda. An Anthropological and Literary Study of Two Aboriginal Women's Life Histories: The Impacts of Enforced Child Removal and Policies of Assimilation. New York: Mellen Press, 2011.

(In memory of Chris Newell)With its title 'able', this issue called for articles and essays which explore ability from a disability perspective, rather than disability from an able-ist perspective. One take on the title 'able', is that it invites a fresh perspective on disability, with a focus on abilities and productivities (defined differently, in non-able-ist terms), rather than lack and aberrance. This affirmation of abilities is characteristic of many of the articles and essays in this issue, particularly in the narrative accounts of lived experience. Another take on 'able' evident in these articles is the critique of able-ist assumptions and discourses. Some writers, such as Campbell, Goggin and Wolbring, overtly address the value of insights offered through disability to deconstruct the ‘able-ist’ perspectives which dominate and limit our social worlds, even within disability studies. Campbell provides an overview of scholarship on disablism and able-ism: ‘Disablism’ works as "a set of assumptions (conscious or unconscious) and practices that promote the differential or unequal treatment of people because of actual or presumed disabilities". While Campbell acknowledges the importance of disability studies with its various critiques of the practices and production of disablism, "specifically … examining those attitudes and barriers that contribute to the subordination of people with disabilities in liberal society", she also identifies an ‘able-ist project’ within disability studies, which can serve to reinscribe the able-ist perspective and assumptions. Campbell argues: "the challenge then is to reverse, to invert this traditional approach, to shift our gaze and concentrate on what the study of disability tells us about the production, operation and maintenance of ableism."Goggin also calls for this inverted approach, with scrutiny of the under-examined category ‘able’: If we think of the impact and significance of “whiteness”, as a way to open up space for how to critically think about and change concepts of race; or of “masculinity” as a project for thinking about gender and sexuality — we can see that this interrogation of the unmarked category of “able” and “ability” is much needed. Goggin notes that while disability has been subject to critique and examination (like the all too conspicuous and scrutinised disabled bodies), there has been surprisingly little critique of ability: "nor have we witnessed a thoroughgoing recognition of unmarked, yet powerful operations of ability in our lives and thought". Wolbring also contends that “there is a pressing need for society to deal with ableism in all of its forms and its consequences”. Through his discussion of categories of ‘able’ and ‘ableism’, he identifies a dominant discourse around ‘species-typical’ versus ‘sub-species-typical, defined from the dominant ‘able-ist’ perspective. This discourse has a long history and is linked to the discourse around health, disease and medicine. This is … a model that classifies disabled people as having an intrinsic defect, an impairment that leads to ‘subnormal’ functioning. He insists on the importance of work within Disability Studies which questions that medical model and explores the issue of ‘who defines whom’ as sub-species typical. Many of the articles published here recognise the interdependence of such categories of ‘abled’ and ‘disabled’, drawing attention to the work they perform – usually naturalised and invisible – in producing ‘common sense’ understandings of human value and performance. The able-ist perspective produces disability in terms of lack and deviance from the human norm (which Wolbring calls ‘species typical’). This able-ist production of disability – with its sense of lack and revulsion for the aberrant body/mind – is a powerful undercurrent informing our understanding of human agency. It underpins legitimising discourses which define humanity, particularly modernist discourses of medicine and technology which address the ‘improvement’ of human lives and promise to eradicate disability. It is also crucial to the meaning of so many media narratives, since such narratives, whether in news, documentary or film/tv drama, are predominantly about dilemmas of human agency, of people’s ability or failure to act, to overcome setbacks and limitations. The notion of agency – which drives or impedes the narrative and its resolution – is just as prevalent in media narratives which include people with disability, even those narratives which celebrate their outstanding achievements (in spite of disability). The disability becomes the impediment that must be overcome or be transcended. This more general pattern is represented in emblematic form in many Hollywood action narratives: sometimes the ‘villain’ who impedes the hero’s path is ‘disabled’, or the hero must overcome some disability within themselves (often figured as a temporary disability – such as Superman’s disablement with exposure to kryptonite). While such media stories offer extremes of the ability/disability paradigm, the categories inform our wider debates and understandings of human performance and value. Human agency and the improvement or enablement of this agency – configured in conventional ‘able-ist’ terms – is key to narratives in medical science, technology and innovation, education, as well as in literature and culture, and media narratives which define and interact with our understandings of human activities and performance. Several articles in this issue examine the relationship between technology and innovation, and the able-ist project of modernity and its positioning of people with disability. Goggin addresses the relationship between technology, innovation and disability, calling for a reversal of mainstream logic which sees technology as something which ameliorates disability and improves the lives of people with disability. He points to the work of writers who demonstrate the vital role of people with disability as users of technology, to inform design in the innovation process, and improve the lives of all users of technology. In this context the 'disability perspective' helps break through the limitations of the able-ist perspective. In their article “iTunes Is Pretty (Useless) When You’re Blind”, Kate Ellis and Mike Kent critically examine the promise of digital technology “to open up the world to people with disabilities”, showing the limitations of iPods and iTunes for many people with disabilities (in particular the difficulties for users of screen readers and Braille tablets). They focus on the way that technologies and innovations designed to improve access for people with disabilities “actually enhance access for all users”. They draw on the example of the Lectopia lecture recording and distribution system which has enhanced the educational outcomes for all students where it has been adopted. This resonates with Goggin’s piece on technology and innovation, and the benefits of converging the perspective of the disabled user, with the ‘user’ as considered in technology design. In her article on photographer William Yang’s photographic portraits of his friend Allen dying of AIDS, Catalina Florescu addresses the history of medicine and its role in perpetuating ‘able-ist’ evaluations of disability. In the nineteenth century, how much was medicine responsible for defining ugly as ill, deformed, and getting old, versus beautiful as healthy, and then, for the sake of the community’s health, firmly promoting these ideas? Furthermore, with the rise of photographic art, medicine was able to manipulate and control these ideas even more efficiently. She quotes Deborah Lupton, “the new technology of photography that developed from the mid-nineteenth century became a valuable strategy in the documentation of patterns of disease and illness, and the construction of the sites of dirtiness and contagion”. This emphasis on the historical role of technology in managing and defining, and potentially redefining, understandings of ability and disability, is similar to the scrutiny of technologies that occurs throughout other articles and essays in this issue, including those essays by McDonald, Wain and Place, which address the lived experience of disability. Human agency is also a central theme in cultural and media studies: the modern impulse to bring about social change through critique, depends on a belief in human agency and in the ability to generate change and address social inequalities. The recognition of the role of culture, language and representation, in the contested domain of (unequal) social relations, is vital to critical practice within cultural and media studies. Given this belief in human agency, the assumption that human subjects are able to change the social order, it is vital for practitioners of cultural and media studies, to question the nature of those assumptions, aware that human agency is so often defined in ‘able-ist’ terms. As such the writings in this issue bring a valuable perspective to cultural and media studies more generally, through their critique of the able-ist assumptions that underpin conventional understandings of human agency. Several articles in this issue examine media representations, some drawing attention to those that produce different perspectives on ability and disability. Much has been written about the power of filmic, theatrical and literary representation of disability to engage with, reflect, influence and challenge dominant (able-ist) cultural and social attitudes and narratives (Garland-Thomson, Darke, Shakespeare). Bruno Starrs’ piece on Dance Me to My Song (1997) reveals that while that film is listed in Rolf de Heer’s oeuvre, its primary author is Heather Rose Slattery, a woman with cerebral palsy who wrote, co-directed and played Julie, the lead character. Starrs asserts that in the film Julie is not held up as an object of pity, rather is a fully embodied character, thus defying the “normality drama” (Darke) of disability which aims to "reinforce the able-bodied audience’s self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other". In his article “Disability, Heroism and Australian National Identity”, Martin Mantle analyses Chris Lilley’s 2005 television mocumentary We Can be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year. Mantle claims that while disabled characters have been included in Australian national identity narratives, it is questionable whether they have been identified as contributing significantly to "what it means to be Australian". Lilley’s satiric multiple portrayals of disabled and non-disabled characters challenge the assumptions that are made about what kinds of bodies qualify for inclusion in the "development and maintenance of a national character". The ‘ableist’ view of disability as impairment, rendering people passive burdens on society awaiting a ‘cure’, is strongly challenged in the field of disability performance art. Bree Hadley mobilises Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s comments about the ‘extraordinary’ body of the ‘freak’ and the “stare-and-tell ritual” (337) deployed by disabled performers to examine the ways in which they "negotiate the complexities of the terrain". Hadley considers the theatrical performance of Mat Fraser as Sealo the Sealboy (based on the 1940’s freakshow entertainer Stanley Berent ), arguing that Fraser’s stage strategies deliberately confront an audience, especially a ‘politically correct’ one, with its own ambiguities about and fascination with disabled bodies. A number of the articles in this issue draw directly on the experience and the socially shaped understandings of disability in the ‘everyday lives’ that Campbell and others speak of. Nicole Matthews writes about her charity-funded project, In the Picture which aimed to “generate exemplary inclusive” storylines and illustrations of disabled children in books for young readers by "drawing on the experience of disabled people and families of disabled children". Matthews’ article focuses on the ways in which the label ‘disabled’ is mobilised in an analysis of the variety of responses she received to her project from both disabled and non-disabled stakeholders. She observes with some irony that the pity and charity view of disability is still socially paramount, and one that is often flexed to attract much needed funding for projects such as hers. Donna Mc Donald’s piece “Shattering the Hearing Wall” reveals that one of her aims in writing a series of memoirs about being a ‘deaf woman’ is to produce something that rises above the “stock symbolic scripts”, challenging their tendency to ascribe a singularity of identity to disabled people. Fiona Place candidly records her experiences of being the mother of a child with Down syndrome facing and transcending the “disability as suffering paradigm” proffered by the medical establishment, and generally endorsed by a non-disabled society. She notes that disability is "to be avoided if at all possible and women are expected to take advantage of the advances in reproductive medicine - to choose a genetically correct pregnancy". She questions the promises of genetic screening tests to improve lives: "how safe is it to assume lives are being improved? Could it be… that some lives are now harder rather than easier?" The mother of a child with Down syndrome is seen to have "brought the suffering on herself – of having had choices – tests such as amniocentesis and CVS – but of having failed to take control, failed to prevent the suffering of her child". There is little comprehension that a mother might decide not to submit to the pre-natal genetic test, with its associated risks and consequences – the elimination of the child who is deemed to be a less than ideal choice. Filmmaker Veronica Wain also writes of her experiences as the mother of a child with a “genetic abnormality” – 18q23 deletion. Wain, like Place, confronts the social stigma attached to disability, but finds empowerment in a supportive community, discovering in the process of making the film, what Margrit Shildrick identifies as the vulnerability shared by all human beings. Drawing on the work of Lacan, Schildrick points to the sustaining ‘fantasy’ of the fully realised subject in control of self – a fantasy that is one held dearly by those who identify as able-bodied: the ideal self is phantasmatic, fissured by misidentification, and deeply threatened in its discursively constructed security by the materiality of the anomalous body, in whom signs of disorder and dependency evoke intimations of what has been disavowed. (342) It is the vulnerability of the able- body that is often masked/disavowed by the disabled/abled dichotomy, something which we are reminded of in Catalina Florescu’s account of photographer William Yang’s portraits of Allen who is dying of AIDS. Yang’s series of images starkly intone the body’s "mortal, gradually disabling fabric". Fiona Kumari Campbell’s exhorts us to refuse “ableist normalising dialogue”, to construct a different kind of landscape, a “disability imaginary” based on the “nuances and complexities” of being in and of the world; one which eschews the fixity of absolutes. To address this is to go beyond able/disable dichotomies, to interrogate the ableist- centred narratives of the medico, social, and personal tragedy models of disability presently available, and to refuse disability as a “negative ontology”. Likewise Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare advocate that it is time to move beyond limited ways of thinking about and understanding disability. They assert that both the "medical model and the social model seek to explain disability universally, and end up creating totalising, meta-historical narratives that exclude important dimensions of disabled people’s lives and (of ) their knowledge" (15). There can be no unitary or coherent model that fully represents the complexity of either disabled or non-disabled people’s lives; the articles in this issue of M/C Journal go some way towards capturing that complexity. References Corker, Mairian, and Tom Shakespeare, eds. Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. London: Continuum, 2002. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Staring Back: Self-Representation of Disabled Performance Artists.” American Quarterly 52.2 (2000): 334-338. Schildrick, Margaret. “Unreformed Bodies: Normative Anxiety and the Denial of Pleasure.” Women’s Studies 34 (2004): 327-344.

Fig. 1: Photo by Miguel Orós, from unsplash.comFeminism has stalled at the bedroom door. In the post-#metoo era, more than ever, we need intimate civil rights in our relationships to counter the worrisome prevailing trends: Intimate partner violence. Interpersonal abuse. Date rape. Sexual harassment. Online harassment. Bullying. Rage. Sexual Assault. Abusive relationships. Revenge porn. There’s a lot of damage done when we get up close and personal. In the 21st century, we have come far in terms of equality and respect between the genders, so there’s a lot to celebrate. We also note that the Australian government has stepped in recently with the theme ‘Keeping Australians safe and secure’, by pledging $78 million to combat domestic violence, much of which takes place behind closed doors (Morrison 2019). Herein lies the issue: while governments legislate to protect victims of domestic violence — out of the public eye, private behaviours cannot be closely monitored, and the lack of social enforcement of these laws threatens the safety of intimate relationships. Rather, individuals are left to their own devices. We outline here a guideline for intimate civility, an individually-embraced code of conduct that could guide interpersonal dynamics within the intimate space of relationships. Civility does not traditionally ‘belong’ in our most intimate relationships. Rather, it’s been presumed, even idealised, that intimacy in our personal lives transcends the need for public values to govern relationships between/among men and women (i.e., that romantic love is all you need). Civility developed as a public, gendered concept. Historically, a man’s home – and indeed, his partner – became his dominion, promoting hegemonic constructions of masculinity, and values that reflect competition, conquest, entitlement and ownership. Moreover, intimate relationships located in the private domain can also be considered for/by both men and women a retreat, a bastion against, or excluded from the controls and demands of the public or ‘polis’ - thus from the public requirement for civility, further enabling its breakdown. The feminist political theorist Carole Pateman situated this historical separation as an inheritance of Hegel’s double dilemma: first, a class division between civil society and the state (between the economic man/woman, or private enterprise and public power) and second, a patriarchal division between the private family (and intimate relationships) and civil society/the state. The private location, she argues, is “an association constituted by ties of love, blood … subjection and particularity” rather than the public sphere, “an association of free and equal individuals” (225). In Hegel’s dilemma, personal liberty is a dualism, only constructed in relation to a governed, public (patriarchal) state. Alternately, Carter depicts civility as a shared moral good, where civility arises not only because of concern over consequences, but also demonstrates our intrinsic moral obligation to respect people in general. This approach subsequently challenges our freedom to carry out private, uncivil acts within a truly civil society.Challenges to Gender EthicsHow can we respond to this challenge in gender ethics? Intimate civility is a term coined by Elizabeth Reid Boyd and Abigail Bray. It came out of their discussions proposing “a new poetics of romance” which called for rewritten codes of interpersonal conduct, an “entente cordiale; a cordial truce to end the sex wars”. Reid Boyd and Bray go further:Politeness is personal and political. We reclaim courtesy as applied sexual and social ethics, an interpersonal, intimate ethics, respectful and tolerant of difference. Gender ethics must be addressed, for they have global social and cultural ramifications that we should not underestimate. (xx)As researchers, we started to explore the idea of intimate civility in interpersonal violence, developing an analysis using social construction and attachment theory simultaneously. In defining the term, we soon realised the concept had wider applications that could change how we think about our most intimate relationships – and how we behave in them. Conceptualising intimate civility involves imagining rights and responsibilities within the private sphere, whether or not loving, familial and natural. Intimate civility can operate through an individually embraced code of conduct to guide interpersonal dynamics within the intimate space of relationships.Gringart, Grobbelaar, and Bender explored the concept of intimate civility by investigating women’s perspectives on what may harmonise their intimate relationships. Women’s most basic desires included safety, equality and respect in the bedroom. In other words, intimate civility is an enactment of human-rights, the embodiment of regard for another human being, insofar as it is a form of ensuring physical and mental integrity, life, safety and protection of all beings. Thus, if intimate civility existed as a core facet of each individual’s self-concept, the manifestation of intimate partner violence ideally would not occur. Rage, from an intimate civility perspective, rips through any civil response and generates misconduct towards another. When we hold respect for others as equal moral beings, civility is key to contain conflicts, which prevents the escalation of disagreements into rage. Intimate civility proposes that civility becomes the baseline behaviour that would be reciprocated between two individuals within the private domain of intimate relationships. Following this notion, intimate civility is the foremost casualty in many relationships characterised by intimate partner violence. The current criminalisation of intimate partner violence leaves unexplored the previously privatised property of the relational – including the inheritance of centuries of control of women’s bodies and sexuality – and how far, in this domain, notions of civility might liberate and/or oppress. The feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray argues that these kinds of ‘sexuate rights’ must apply to both men and women and the reality of their needs and desires. Equality, she argued, could not be achieved without a rewriting of the rights and obligations of each sex, qua different, in social rights and obligations (Yan).Synonyms for intimacy include, amongst others, closeness, attachment, togetherness, warmth, mutual affection, familiarity and privacy. Indirectly, sexual relations are also often synonymous with intimate relationships. However, sex is not intimacy, as both sex and intimacy both exist without the other. Bowlby proposed that throughout our lives we are attentive to the responsiveness and the availability of those that we are attached to, and suggested that “intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s life revolves, not only when he is an infant or a toddler, but throughout his adolescence and his years of maturity as well, and on into old age” (442). Although love is not by nature reciprocal, in intimacy we seek reciprocity – to love one another at the same time in a shared form of commitment. Kierkegaard hypothesised that genuine love is witnessed by one continuing to love another after their death as it obviates any doubt that the beloved was loved and was not merely instrumental (Soble).Intimate Civility as a Starting PointCivility includes qualities such as trust, duty, morality, sacrifice, self-restraint, respect, and fairness; a common standard allowing individuals to work, live and associate together. Intimacy encourages caring, loyalty, empathy, honesty, and self-knowledge. Thus, intimate civility should begin with those closest to us; being civil in our most intimate relationships. It advocates the genuine use of terms of endearment, not terms of abuse. We can only develop qualities such as morality and empathy, crucial for intimate relationships, if we have experienced secure, intimate relationships. Individuals reared in homes devoid of intimate civility will be challenged to identify and promote the interest or wellbeing of their intimate counterparts, and have to seek outside help to learn these skills: it is a learnt behaviour, both at an interpersonal and societal level. Individuals whose parents were insensitive to their childhood needs, and were unable to perceive, interpret and respond appropriately to their subtle communications, signals, wishes and mood will be flailing in this interpersonal skill (Holmes and Slade). Similarly, the individual’s inclusion in a civil society will only be achieved if their surrounding environment promotes and values virtues such as compassion, fairness and cooperation. This may be a challenging task. We envisage intimate civility as a starting point. It provides a focus to discuss and explore civil rights, obligations and responsibilities, between and among women and men in their personal relationships. As stated above, intimate civility begins with one's relationship with oneself and the closest relationships in the home, and hopefully reaches outwards to all kinds of relationships, including same sex, transgender, and other roles within non-specific gender assignment. Therefore, exploring the concept of intimate civility has applications in personal therapy, family counselling centres and relationship counselling environments, or schools in sexual education, or in universities promoting student safety. For example, the 2019 “Change the Course” report was recently released to augment Universities Australia’s 2016 campaign that raised awareness on sexual assault on campus. While it is still under development, we envision that intimate civility decalogue outlined here could become a checklist to assist in promoting awareness regarding abuse of power and gender roles. A recent example of cultural reframing of gender and power in intimate relationships is the Australian Government’s 2018 Respect campaign against gender violence. These recent campaigns promote awareness that intimate civility is integrated with a more functional society.These campaigns, as the images demonstrate, aim at quantifying connections between interactions on an intimate scale in individual lives, and their impacts in shaping civil society in the arena of gender violence. They highlight the elasticity of the bonds between intimate life and civil society and our collective responsibility as citizens for reworking both the gendered and personal civility. Fig. 2: Photo by Tyler Nix: Hands Spelling Out LOVE, from unsplash.comThe Decalogue of Intimate Civility Overall, police reports of domestic violence are heavily skewed towards male on female, but this is not always the case. The Australian government recently reported that “1 in 6 Australian women and 1 in 16 men have been subjected, since the age of 15, to physical and/or sexual violence by a current or previous cohabiting partner” (Australian Institutes of Health and Welfare). Rather than reiterating the numbers, we envisage the decalogue (below) as a checklist of concepts designed to discuss and explore rights, obligations and responsibilities, between and among both partners in their intimate relationships. As such, this decalogue forms a basis for conversation. Intimate civility involves a relationship with these ten qualities, with ourselves, and each other.1) Intimate civility is personal and political. Conceptualising intimate civility involves imagining rights and responsibilities within the private sphere. It is not an impingement on individual liberty or privacy but a guarantor of it. Civil society requires us not to defend private infringements of inter-personal respect. Private behaviours are both intimate in their performance and the springboard for social norms. In Geoffrey Rush’s recent defamation case his defence relied not on denying claims he repeatedly touched his fellow actor’s genitalia during their stage performance in a specific scene, despite her requests to him that he stop, but rather on how newspaper reporting of her statements made him out to be a “sexual pervert”, reflecting the complex link between this ‘private’ interaction between two people and its very public exposé (Wells). 2) Intimate civility is an enactment of a civil right, insofar as it is a form of ensuring physical and mental integrity, life, safety and protection. Intimate civility should begin with those closest to us. An example of this ethic at work is the widening scope of criminalisation of intimate partner abuse to include all forms of abusive interactions between people. Stalking and the pre-cursors to physical violence such as controlling behaviours, online bullying or any actions used to instil fear or insecurity in a partner, are accorded legal sanctions. 3) Intimate civility is polite. Politeness is more than manners. It relates to our public codes of conduct, to behaviours and laws befitting every civilian of the ‘polis’. It includes the many acts of politeness that are required behind closed doors and the recognition that this is the place from which public civility emerges. For example, the modern parent may hope that what they sanction as “polite” behaviour between siblings at home might then become generalised by the child into their public habits and later moral expectations as adults. In an ideal society, the micro-politics of family life become the blueprint for moral development for adult expectations about personal conduct in intimate and public life.4) Intimate civility is equitable. It follows Luce Irigaray’s call for ‘sexuate rights’ designed to apply to men and women and the reality of their needs and desires, in a rewriting of the social rights and obligations of each sex (Yan and Irigaray). Intimate civility extends this notion of rights to include all those involved in personal relations. This principle is alive within systemic family therapy which assumes that while not all members of the family system are always able to exert equal impacts or influence, they each in principle are interdependent participants influencing the system as a whole (Dallos and Draper). 5) Intimate civility is dialectical. The separation of intimacy and civility in Western society and thought is itself a dualism that rests upon other dualisms: public/private, constructed/natural, male/female, rational/emotional, civil/criminal, individual/social, victim/oppressor. Romantic love is not a natural state or concept, and does not help us to develop safe governance in the world of intimate relationships. Instead, we envisage intimate civility – and our relationships – as dynamic, dialectical, discursive and interactive, above and beyond dualism. Just as individuals do not assume that consent for sexual activity negotiated in one partnership under a set of particular conditions, is consent to sexual activity in all partnerships in any conditions. So, dialectics of intimate civility raises the expectation that what occurs in interpersonal relationships is worked out incrementally, between people over time and particular to their situation and experiences. 6) Intimate civility is humane. It can be situated in what Julia Kristeva refers to as the new humanism, emerging (and much needed) today. “This new humanism, interaction with others – all the others – socially marginalised, racially discriminated, politically, sexually, biologically or psychically persecuted others” (Kristeva, 2016: 64) is only possible if we immerse ourselves in the imaginary, in the experience of ‘the other’. Intimate civility takes on a global meaning when human rights action groups such as Amnesty International address the concerns of individuals to make a social difference. Such organisations develop globally-based digital platforms for interested individuals to become active about shared social concerns, understanding that the new humanism ethic works within and between individuals and can be harnessed for change.7) Intimate civility is empathic. It invites us to create not-yet-said, not-yet-imagined relationships. The creative space for intimate civility is not bound by gender, race or sexuality – only by our imaginations. “The great instrument of moral good is the imagination,” wrote the poet Shelley in 1840. Moral imagination (Reid Boyd) helps us to create better ways of being. It is a form of empathy that encourages us to be kinder and more loving to ourselves and each other, when we imagine how others might feel. The use of empathic imagination for real world relational benefits is common in traditional therapeutic practices, such as mindfulness, that encourages those struggling with self compassion to imagine the presence of a kind friend or ally to support them at times of hardship. 8) Intimate civility is respectful. Intimate civility is the foremost casualty in many relationships characterised by forms of abuse and intimate partner violence. “Respect”, wrote Simone Weil, “is due to the human being as such, and is not a matter of degree” (171). In the intimate civility ethic this quality of respect accorded as a right of beings is mutual, including ourselves with the other. When respect is eroded, much is lost. Respect arises from empathy through attuned listening. The RESPECT! Campaign originating from the Futures without Violence organisation assumes healthy relationships begin with listening between people. They promote the understanding that the core foundation of human wellbeing is relational, requiring inter-personal understanding and respect.9) Intimate civility is a form of highest regard. When we regard another we truly see them. To hold someone in high regard is to esteem them, to hold them above others, not putting them on a pedestal, or insisting they are superior, but to value them for who they are. To be esteemed for our interior, for our character, rather than what we display or what we own. It connects with the humanistic psychological concept of unconditional positive regard. The highest regard holds each other in arms and in mind. It is to see/look at, to have consideration for, and to pay attention to, recently epitomised by the campaign against human trafficking, “Can You See Me?” (Human Trafficking), whose purpose is to foster public awareness of the non-verbal signs and signals between individuals that indicate human trafficking may be taking place. In essence, teaching communal awareness towards the victimisation of individuals. 10) Intimate civility is intergenerational. We can only develop qualities such as morality and empathy, crucial for intimate relationships, if we have experienced (or imagined) intimate relationships where these qualities exist. Individuals reared in homes devoid of intimate civility could be challenged to identify and promote the interest or wellbeing of their intimate counterparts; it is a learnt behaviour, both at an interpersonal and societal level. Childhood developmental trauma research (Spinazzola and Ford) reminds us that the interaction of experiences, relational interactions, contexts and even our genetic amkeup makes individuals both vulnerable to repeating the behaviour of past generations. However, treatment of the condition and surrounding individuals with people in their intimate world who have different life experiences and personal histories, i.e., those who have acquired respectful relationship habits, can have a positive impact on the individuals’ capacity to change their learned negative behaviours. In conclusion, the work on intimate civility as a potential concept to alleviate rage in human relationships has hardly begun. The decalogue provides a checklist that indicates the necessity of ‘intersectionality’ — where the concepts of intimate civility connect to many points within the public/private and personal/political domains. Any analysis of intimacy must reach further than prepositions tied to social construction and attachment theory (Fonagy), to include current understandings of trauma and inter-generational violence and the way these influence people’s ability to act in healthy and balanced interpersonal relationships. While not condoning violent acts, locating the challenges to intimate civility on both personal and societal levels may leverage a compassionate view of those caught up in interpersonal violence. The human condition demands that we continue the struggle to meet the challenges of intimate civility in our personal actions with others as well as the need to replicate civil behaviour throughout all societies. ReferencesBowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. Vol. 3. New York: Basic Books, 1980.Carter, Stephen. Civility: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy. New York: Basic Books, 1998.Dallos, Rudi, and Ros Draper. An Introduction to Family Therapy: Systemic Theory and Practice. 2nd ed. Open University Press: Berkshire, 2005.Australian Institutes of Health and Welfare, Australian Government. Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence in Australia. 2018. 6 Feb. 2019 <https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/domestic-violence/family-domestic-sexual-violence-in-australia-2018/contents/summary>. Fonagy, Peter. Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis. New York: Other Press, 2001.Gringart, Eyal, Madalena Grobbelaar, and Alise Bender. Intimate Civility: The Perceptions and Experiences of Women on Harmonising Intimate Relationships. Honours thesis, 2018.Holmes, Jeremy, and Arietta Slade. Attachment in Therapeutic Practice. Los Angeles: Sage, 2018. Human Trafficking, Jan. 2019. 14 Feb. 2019 <https://www.a21.org/content/can-you-see-me/gnsqqg?permcode=gnsqqg&site=true>.Kristeva, Julia. Teresa My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila. New York: Columbia UP, 2016.Morrison, Scott. “National Press Club Address.” 11 Feb. 2019. 26 Feb. 2019 <https://www.pm.gov.au/media/national-press-club-address-our-plan-keeping-australians-safe-and-secure>.Pateman, Carole. “The Patriarchal Welfare State.” Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender Divisions. Eds. Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle. London: Polity Press, 1994. 223-45.Reid Boyd, Elizabeth. “How Creativity Can Help Us Cultivate Moral Imagination.” The Conversation, 30 Jan. 2019. 11 Feb. 2019 <http://theconversation.com/how-creativity-can-help-us-cultivate-moral-imagination-101968>.Reid Boyd, Elizabeth, and Abigail Bray. Ladies and Gentlemen: Sex, Love and 21st Century Courtesy. Unpublished book proposal, 2005.Commonwealth of Australia. Respect Campaign. 2018, 9 Jan. 2019 <http://www.respect.gov.au/the-campaign/campaign-materials/>.Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry. London: Ginn and Company, 1840.Soble, Alan. Philosophy of Sex and Love. St Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1998.Weil, Simone. Waiting on God. London: Fontana Collins, 1968.Wells, Jamelle. “Geoffrey Rush, Erin Norvill and the Daily Telegraph: The Stakes Are High in This Defamation Trial.” ABC News 12 Nov. 2018. 23 Feb. 2019 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-10/geoffrey-rush-defamation-trial-a-drama-with-final-act-to-come/10483944>.Yan, Liu, and Luce Irigaray. “Feminism, Sexuate Rights and the Ethics of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Luce Irigaray.” Foreign Literature Studies (2010): 1-9.

1909–22: Turkey exterminated over 1.5 million of its ethnically Armenian, and hundreds of thousands of its ethnically Greek and Assyrian, citizens. Most died in 1915. This period of decimation in now widely called the Armenian Genocide (Balakian 179-80).1910: Siamanto first published his poem, The Dance: “The corpses were piled as trees, / and from the springs, from the streams and the road, / the blood was a stubborn murmur.” When springs run red, when the dead are stacked tree-high, when “everything that could happen has already happened,” then time is nothing: “there is no future [and] the language of civilised humanity is not our language” (Nichanian 142).2007: In my novel The Edge of the World a ceramic bowl, luminous blue, recurs as motif. Imagine you are tiny: the bowl is broken but you don’t remember breaking it. You’re awash with tears. You sit on the floor, gather shards but, no matter how you try, you can’t fix it. Imagine, now, that the bowl is the sky, huge and upturned above your head. You have always known, through every wash of your blood, that life is shockingly precarious. Silence—between heartbeats, between the words your parents speak—tells you: something inside you is terribly wrong; home is not home but there is no other home; you “can never be fully grounded in a community which does not share or empathise with the experience of persecution” (Wajnryb 130). This is the stubborn murmur of your body.Because time is nothing, this essay is fragmented, non-linear. Its main characters: my mother, grandmother (Hovsanna), grandfather (Benyamin), some of my mother’s older siblings (Krikor, Maree, Hovsep, Arusiak), and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Ottoman military officer, Young Turk leader, first president of Turkey). 1915–2013: Turkey invests much energy in genocide denial, minimisation and deflection of responsibility. 24 April 2012: Barack Obama refers to the Medz Yeghern (Great Calamity). The use of this term is decried as appeasement, privileging political alliance with Turkey over human rights. 2003: Between Genocide and Catastrophe, letters between Armenian-American theorist David Kazanjian and Armenian-French theorist Marc Nichanian, contest the naming of the “event” (126). Nichanian says those who call it the Genocide are:repeating every day, everywhere, in all places, the original denial of the Catastrophe. But this is part of the catastrophic structure of the survivor. By using the word “Genocide”, we survivors are only repeating […] the denial of the loss. We probably cannot help it. We are doing what the executioner wanted us to do […] we claim all over the world that we have been “genocided;” we relentlessly need to prove our own death. We are still in the claws of the executioner. We still belong to the logic of the executioner. (127)1992: In Revolution and Genocide, historian Robert Melson identifies the Armenian Genocide as “total” because it was public policy intended to exterminate a large fraction of Armenian society, “including the families of its members, and the destruction of its social and cultural identity in most or all aspects” (26).1986: Boyajian and Grigorian assert that the Genocide “is still operative” because, without full acknowledgement, “the ghosts won’t go away” (qtd. in Hovannisian 183). They rise up from earth, silence, water, dreams: Armenian literature, Armenian homes haunted by them. 2013: My heart pounds: Medz Yeghern, Aksor (Exile), Anashmaneli (Indefinable), Darakrutiun (Deportation), Chart (Massacre), Brnagaght (Forced migration), Aghed (Catastrophe), Genocide. I am awash. Time is nothing.1909–15: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was both a serving Ottoman officer and a leader of the revolutionary Young Turks. He led Ottoman troops in the repulsion of the Allied invasion before dawn on 25 April at Gallipoli and other sites. Many troops died in a series of battles that eventually saw the Ottomans triumph. Out of this was born one of Australia’s founding myths: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs), courageous in the face of certain defeat. They are commemorated yearly on 25 April, ANZAC Day. To question this myth is to risk being labelled traitor.1919–23: Ataturk began a nationalist revolution against the occupying Allies, the nascent neighbouring Republic of Armenia, and others. The Allies withdrew two years later. Ataturk was installed as unofficial leader, becoming President in 1923. 1920–1922: The last waves of the Genocide. 2007: Robert Manne published A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide, calling for a recontextualisation of the cultural view of the Gallipoli landings in light of the concurrence of the Armenian Genocide, which had taken place just over the rise, had been witnessed by many military personnel and widely reported by international media at the time. Armenian networks across Australia were abuzz. There were media discussions. I listened, stared out of my office window at the horizon, imagined Armenian communities in Sydney and Melbourne. Did they feel like me—like they were holding their breath?Then it all went quiet. Manne wrote: “It is a wonderful thing when, at the end of warfare, hatred dies. But I struggle to understand why Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide continue to exist for Australians in parallel moral universes.” 1992: I bought an old house to make a home for me and my two small children. The rooms were large, the ceilings high, and behind it was a jacaranda with a sturdy tree house built high up in its fork. One of my mother’s Armenian friends kindly offered to help with repairs. He and my mother would spend Saturdays with us, working, looking after the kids. Mum would stay the night; her friend would go home. But one night he took a sleeping bag up the ladder to the tree house, saying it reminded him of growing up in Lebanon. The following morning he was subdued; I suspect there were not as many mosquitoes in Lebanon as we had in our garden. But at dinner the previous night he had been in high spirits. The conversation had turned, as always, to politics. He and my mother had argued about Turkey and Russia, Britain’s role in the development of the Middle East conflict, the USA’s roughshod foreign policy and its effect on the world—and, of course, the Armenian Genocide, and the killingof Turkish governmental representatives by Armenians, in Australia and across the world, during the 1980s. He had intimated he knew the attackers and had materially supported them. But surely it was the beer talking. Later, when I asked my mother, she looked at me with round eyes and shrugged, uncharacteristically silent. 2002: Greek-American diva Diamanda Galas performed Dexifiones: Will and Testament at the Perth Concert Hall, her operatic work for “the forgotten victims of the Armenian and Anatolian Greek Genocide” (Galas).Her voice is so powerful it alters me.1925: My grandmother, Hovsanna, and my grandfather, Benyamin, had twice been separated in the Genocide (1915 and 1922) and twice reunited. But in early 1925, she had buried him, once a prosperous businessman, in a swamp. Armenians were not permitted burial in cemeteries. Once they had lived together in a big house with their dozen children; now there were only three with her. Maree, half-mad and 18 years old, and quiet Hovsep, aged seven,walked. Then five-year-old aunt, Arusiak—small, hungry, tired—had been carried by Hovsanna for months. They were walking from Cilicia to Jerusalem and its Armenian Quarter. Someone had said they had seen Krikor, her eldest son, there. Hovsanna was pregnant for the last time. Together the four reached Aleppo in Syria, found a Christian orphanage for girls, and Hovsanna, her pregnancy near its end, could carry Arusiak no further. She left her, promising to return. Hovsanna’s pains began in Beirut’s busy streets. She found privacy in the only place she could, under a house, crawled in. Whenever my mother spoke of her birth she described it like this: I was born under a stranger’s house like a dog.1975: My friend and I travelled to Albany by bus. After six hours we were looking down York Street, between Mount Clarence and Mount Melville, and beyond to Princess Royal Harbour, sapphire blue, and against which the town’s prosperous life—its shopfronts, hotels, cars, tourists, historic buildings—played out. It took away my breath: the deep harbour, whaling history, fishing boats. Rain and sun and scudding cloud; cliffs and swells; rocky points and the white curves of bays. It was from Albany that young Western Australian men, volunteers for World War I, embarked on ships for the Middle East, Gallipoli, sailing out of Princess Royal Harbour.1985: The Australian Government announced that Turkey had agreed to have the site of the 1915 Gallipoli landings renamed Anzac Cove. Commentators and politicians acknowledged it as historic praised Turkey for her generosity, expressed satisfaction that, 70 years on, former foes were able to embrace the shared human experience of war. We were justifiably proud of ourselves.2005: Turkey made her own requests. The entrance to Albany’s Princess Royal Harbour was renamed Ataturk Channel. A large bronze statue of Ataturk was erected on the headland overlooking the Harbour entrance. 24 April 1915: In the town of Hasan Beyli, in Cilicia, southwest Turkey, my great grandfather, a successful and respected businessman in his 50s, was asleep in his bed beside his wife. He had been born in that house, as had his father, grandfather, and all his children. His brother, my great uncle, had bought the house next door as a young man, brought his bride home to it, lived there ever since; between the two households there had been one child after another. All the cousins grew up together. My great grandfather and great uncle had gone to work that morning, despite their wives’ concerns, but had returned home early. The women had been relieved to see them. They made coffee, talked. Everyone had heard the rumours. Enemy ships were massing off the coast. 1978: The second time in Albany was my honeymoon. We had driven into the Goldfields then headed south. Such distance, such beautiful strangeness: red earth, red rocks; scant forests of low trees, thin arms outstretched; the dry, pale, flat land of Norseman. Shimmering heat. Then the big, wild coast.On our second morning—a cool, overcast day—we took our handline to a jetty. The ocean was mercury; a line of cormorants settled and bobbed. Suddenly fish bit; we reeled them in. I leaned over the jetty’s side, looked down into the deep. The water was clear and undisturbed save the twirling of a pike that looked like it had reversed gravity and was shooting straight up to me. Its scales flashed silver as itbroke the surface.1982: How could I concentrate on splicing a film with this story in my head? Besides the desk, the only other furniture in the editing suite was a whiteboard. I took a marker and divided the board into three columns for the three generations: my grandparents, Hovsanna and Benyamin; my mother; someone like me. There was a lot in the first column, some in the second, nothing in the third. I stared at the blankness of my then-young life.A teacher came in to check my editing. I tried to explain what I had been doing. “I think,” he said, stony-faced, “that should be your third film, not your first.”When he had gone I stared at the reels of film, the white board blankness, the wall. It took 25 years to find the form, the words to say it: a novel not a film, prose not pictures.2007: Ten minutes before the launch of The Edge of the World, the venue was empty. I made myself busy, told myself: what do you expect? Your research has shown, over and over, this is a story about which few know or very much care, an inconvenient, unfashionable story; it is perfectly in keeping that no-one will come. When I stepped onto the rostrum to speak, there were so many people that they crowded the doorway, spilled onto the pavement. “I want to thank my mother,” I said, “who, pretending to do her homework, listened instead to the story her mother told other Armenian survivor-women, kept that story for 50 years, and then passed it on to me.” 2013: There is a section of The Edge of the World I needed to find because it had really happened and, when it happened, I knew, there in my living room, that Boyajian and Grigorian (183) were right about the Armenian Genocide being “still operative.” But I knew even more than that: I knew that the Diaspora triggered by genocide is both rescue and weapon, the new life in this host nation both sanctuary and betrayal. I picked up a copy, paced, flicked, followed my nose, found it:On 25 April, the day after Genocide memorial-day, I am watching television. The Prime Minister stands at the ANZAC memorial in western Turkey and delivers a poetic and moving speech. My eyes fill with tears, and I moan a little and cover them. In his speech he talks about the heroism of the Turkish soldiers in their defence of their homeland, about the extent of their losses – sixty thousand men. I glance at my son. He raises his eyebrows at me. I lose count of how many times Kemal Ataturk is mentioned as the Father of Modern Turkey. I think of my grandmother and grandfather, and all my baby aunts and uncles […] I curl over like a mollusc; the ache in my chest draws me in. I feel small and very tired; I feel like I need to wash.Is it true that if we repeat something often enough and loud enough it becomes the truth? The Prime Minister quotes Kemal Ataturk: the ANZACS who died and are buried on that western coast are deemed ‘sons of Turkey’. My son turns my grandfather’s, my mother’s, my eyes to me and says, It is amazing they can be so friendly after we attacked them.I draw up my knees to my chest, lay my head and arms down. My limbs feel weak and useless. My throat hurts. I look at my Australian son with his Armenian face (325-6).24 April 1915 cont: There had been trouble all my great grandfather’s life: pogrom here, massacre there. But this land was accustomed to colonisers: the Mongols, the Persians, latterly the Ottomans. They invade, conquer, rise, fall; Armenians stay. This had been Armenian homeland for thousands of years.No-one masses ships off a coast unless planning an invasion. So be it. These Europeans could not be worse than the Ottomans. That night, were my great grandfather and great uncle awoken by the pounding at each door, or by the horses and gendarmes’ boots? They were seized, each family herded at gunpoint into its garden, and made to watch. Hanging is slow. There could be no mistakes. The gendarmes used the stoutest branches, stayed until they were sure the men weredead. This happened to hundreds of prominent Armenian men all over Turkey that night.Before dawn, the Allies made landfall.Each year those lost in the Genocide are remembered on 24 April, the day before ANZAC Day.1969: I asked my mother if she had any brothers and sisters. She froze, her hands in the sink. I stared at her, then slipped from the room.1915: The Ottoman government decreed: all Armenians were to surrender their documents and report to authorities. Able-bodied men were taken away, my grandfather among them. Women and children, the elderly and disabled, were told to prepare to walk to a safe camp where they would stay for the duration of the war. They would be accompanied by armed soldiers for their protection. They were permitted to take with them what they could carry (Bryce 1916).It began immediately, pretty young women and children first. There are so many ways to kill. Months later, a few dazed, starved survivors stumbled into the Syrian desert, were driven into lakes, or herded into churches and set alight.Most husbands and fathers were never seen again. 2003: I arrived early at my son’s school, parked in the shade, opened The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, and began to read. Soon I was annotating furiously. Ruth Wajnryb writes of “growing up among innocent peers in an innocent landscape” and also that the notion of “freedom of speech” in Australia “seems often, to derive from that innocent landscape where reside people who have no personal scars or who have little relevant historical knowledge” (141).1984: I travelled to Vancouver, Canada, and knocked on Arusiak’s door. Afraid she would not agree to meet me, I hadn’t told her I was coming. She was welcoming and gracious. This was my first experience of extended family and I felt loved in a new and important way, a way I had read about, had observed in my friends, had longed for. One afternoon she said, “You know our mother left me in an orphanage…When I saw her again, it was too late. I didn’t know who they were, what a family was. I felt nothing.” “Yes, I know,” I replied, my heart full and hurting. The next morning, over breakfast, she quietly asked me to leave. 1926: When my mother was a baby, her 18 year-old sister, Maree, tried to drown her in the sea. My mother clearly recalled Maree’s face had been disfigured by a sword. Hovsanna, would ask my mother to forgive Maree’s constant abuse and bad behaviour, saying, “She is only half a person.”1930: Someone gave Hovsanna the money to travel to Aleppo and reclaim Arusiak, by then 10 years old. My mother was intrigued by the appearance of this sister but Arusiak was watchful and withdrawn. When she finally did speak to my then five-year-old mother, she hissed: “Why did she leave me behind and keep you?”Soon after Arusiak appeared, Maree, “only half a person,” disappeared. My mother was happy about that.1935: At 15, Arusiak found a live-in job and left. My mother was 10 years old; her brother Hovsep, who cared for her before and after school every day while their mother worked, and always had, was seventeen. She adored him. He had just finished high school and was going to study medicine. One day he fell ill. He died within a week.1980: My mother told me she never saw her mother laugh or, once Hovsep died, in anything other than black. Two or three times before Hovsep died, she saw her smile a little, and twice she heard her singing when she thought she was alone: “A very sad song,” my mother would say, “that made me cry.”1942: At seventeen, my mother had been working as a live-in nanny for three years. Every week on her only half-day off she had caught the bus home. But now Hovsanna was in hospital, so my mother had been visiting her there. One day her employer told her she must go to the hospital immediately. She ran. Hovsanna was lying alone and very still. Something wasn’t right. My mother searched the hospital corridors but found no-one. She picked up a phone. When someone answered she told them to send help. Then she ran all the way home, grabbed Arusiak’s photograph and ran all the way back. She laid it on her mother’s chest, said, “It’s all right, Mama, Arusiak’s here.”1976: My mother said she didn’t like my boyfriend; I was not to go out with him. She said she never disobeyed her own mother because she really loved her mother. I went out with my boyfriend. When I came home, my belongings were on the front porch. The door was bolted. I was seventeen.2003: I read Wajnryb who identifies violent eruptions of anger and frozen silences as some of the behaviours consistent in families with a genocidal history (126). 1970: My father had been dead over a year. My brothers and I were, all under 12, made too much noise. My mother picked up the phone: she can’t stand us, she screamed; she will call an orphanage to take us away. We begged.I fled to my room. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t keep still. I paced, pressed my face into a corner; shook and cried, knowing (because she had always told us so) that she didn’t make idle threats, knowing that this was what I had sometimes glimpsed on her face when she looked at us.2012: The Internet reveals images of Ataturk’s bronze statue overlooking Princess Royal Harbour. Of course, it’s outsized, imposing. The inscription on its plinth reads: "Peace at Home/ Peace in the World." He wears a suit, looks like a scholar, is moving towards us, a scroll in his hand. The look in his eyes is all intensity. Something distant has arrested him – a receding or re-emerging vision. Perhaps a murmur that builds, subsides, builds again. (Medz Yeghern, Aksor, Aghed, Genocide). And what is written on that scroll?2013: My partner suggested we go to Albany, escape Perth’s brutal summer. I tried to explain why it’s impossible. There is no memorial in Albany, or anywhere else in Western Australia, to the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide. ReferencesAkcam, Taner. “The Politics of Genocide.” Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 11 Dec. 2011. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watchv=OxAJaaw81eU&noredirect=1genocide›.Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigress: The Armenian Genocide. London: William Heinemann, 2004.BBC. “Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938).” BBC History. 2013. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/ataturk_kemal.shtml›.Boyajian, Levon, and Haigaz Grigorian. “Psychological Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide.”The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. Ed. Richard Hovannisian. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987. 177–85.Bryce, Viscount. The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916.Galas, Diamanda. Program Notes. Dexifiones: Will and Testament. Perth Concert Hall, Perth, Australia. 2001.———.“Dexifiones: Will and Testament FULL Live Lisboa 2001 Part 1.” Online Video Clip. YouTube, 5 Nov. 2011. Web. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvVnYbxWArM›.Kazanjian, David, and Marc Nichanian. “Between Genocide and Catastrophe.” Loss. Eds. David Eng and David Kazanjian. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003. 125–47.Manne, Robert. “A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide.” The Monthly Feb. 2007. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/turkish-tale-gallipoli-and-armenian-genocide-robert-manne-459›.Matiossian, Vartan. “When Dictionaries Are Left Unopened: How ‘Medz Yeghern’ Turned into a Terminology of Denial.” The Armenian Weekly 27 Nov. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/11/27/when-dictionaries-are-left-unopened-how-medz-yeghern-turned-into-terminology-of-denial/›.Melson, Robert. Revolution and Genocide. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Nicholson, Brendan. “ASIO Detected Bomb Plot by Armenian Terrorists.” The Australian 2 Jan. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/cabinet-papers/asio-detected-bomb-plot-by-armenian-terrorists/story-fnbkqb54-1226234411154›.“President Obama Issues Statement on Armenian Remembrance Day.” The Armenian Weekly 24 Apr. 2012. 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/04/24/president-obama-issues-statement-on-armenian-remembrance-day/›.Polain, Marcella. The Edge of the World. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2007.Siamanto. “The Dance.” Trans. Peter Balakian and Nervart Yaghlian. Adonias Dalgas Memorial Page 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.terezakis.com/dalgas.html›.Stockings, Craig. “Let’s Have a Truce in the Battle of the Anzac Myth.” The Australian 25 Apr. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/lets-have-a-truce-in-the-battle-of-the-anzac-myth/story-e6frgd0x-1226337486382›.Wajnryb, Ruth. The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2001.

In 2013, the Capricornia Arts Mob (CAM), an Indigenous collective of artists situated in Rockhampton, central Queensland, Australia, successfully tendered for one of three public art projects that were grouped under the title Flood Markers (Roberts; Roberts and Mackay; Robinson and Mackay). Commissioned as part of the Queensland Government's Community Development and Engagement Initiative, Flood Markers aims to increase awareness of Rockhampton’s history, with particular focus on the Fitzroy River and the phenomena of flooding. Honouring Land Connections is CAM’s contribution to the project and consists of several “memory poles” that stand alongside the Fitzroy River in Toonooba Park. Rockhampton lies on Dharumbal Country with Toonooba being the Dharumbal name for the Fitzroy River and the inspiration for the work due to its cultural significance to the Aboriginal people of that region. The name Toonooba, as well as other images and icons including boomerangs, spears, nets, water lily, and frogs, amongst others, are carved, burnt, painted and embedded into the large ironbark poles. These stand with the river on one side and the colonial infrastructure of Rockhampton on the other (see fig. 1, 2 and 3).Figure 1 Figure 2Figure 3Within this article, we discuss Honouring Land Connections as having two main functions which contribute to its significance as Indigenous cultural expression and identity affirmation. Firstly, the memory poles (as well as the process of sourcing materials and producing the final product) are a manifestation of Country and a representation of its stories and lived memories. Honouring Land Connections provides a means for Aboriginal people to revel in Country and maintain connections to a vital component of their being as Indigenous. Secondly, by revealing Indigenous stories, experiences, and memories, Honouring Land Connections emphasises Indigenous voices and perspectives within a place dominated by Eurocentric outlooks and knowledges. Toonooba provides the backdrop on which the complexities of cultural and identity formation within settler-colonial spaces are highlighted whilst revelling in continuous Indigenous presence.Flood Markers as ArtArtists throughout the world have used flood markers as a means of visual expression through which to explore and reveal local histories, events, environments, and socio-cultural understandings of the relationships between persons, places, and the phenomena of flooding. Geertz describes art as a social text embedded within wider socio-cultural systems; providing insight into cultural, social, political, economic, gendered, religious, ethnic, environmental, and biographical contexts. Flood markers are not merely metric tools used for measuring the height of a river, but rather serve as culture artefacts or indexes (Gell Art and Agency; Gell "Technology of Enchantment") that are products and producers of socio-culture contexts and the memories and experiences embedded within them. Through different methods, mediums, and images, artists have created experiential and intellectual spaces where those who encounter their work are encouraged to engage their surroundings in thought provoking and often-new ways.In some cases, flood markers have brought attention to the “character and natural history” of a particular place, where artists such as Louise Lavarack have sought to provoke consciousness of the movement of water across flood plains (Lavarack). In other works, flood markers have served as memorials to individuals such as Gilbert White whose daughter honoured his life and research through installing a glass spire at Boulder Creek, Colorado in 2011 (White). Tragedies such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 have also been commemorated through flood markers. Artist Christopher Saucedo carved 1,836 waves into a freestanding granite block; each wave representing a life lost (University of New Orleans). The weight of the granite symbolises the endurance and resilience of those who faced, and will continue to face, similar forces of nature. The Pillar of Courage erected in 2011 in Ipswich, Queensland, similarly contains the words “resilience, community, strength, heroes, caring and unity” with each word printed on six separate sections of the pillar, representing the six major floods that have hit the region (Chudleigh).Whilst these flood markers provide valuable insights into local histories, specific to each environmental and socio-cultural context, works such as the Pillar of Courage fail to address Indigenous relationships to Country. By framing flooding as a “natural disaster” to be overcome, rather than an expression of Country to be listened to and understood, Euro and human-centric perspectives are prioritised over Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Indigenous knowledges however encourages a reorientation of Eurocentric responses and relationships to Country, and in doing so challenge compartmentalised views of “nature” where flooding is separated from land and Country (Ingold Perception; Seton and Bradley; Singer). Honouring Land Connections symbolises the voice and eternal presence of Toonooba and counters presentations of flooding that depict it as historian Heather Goodall (36) once saw “as unusual events of disorder in which the river leaves its proper place with catastrophic results.”Country To understand flooding from Indigenous perspectives it is first necessary to discuss Country and apprehend what it means for Indigenous peoples. Country refers to the physical, cosmological, geographical, relational, and emotional setting upon which Indigenous identities and connections to place and kin are embedded. Far from a passive geographic location upon which interactions take place, Country is an active and responsive agent that shapes and contextualises social interactions between and amongst all living beings. Bob Morgan writes of how “Country is more than issues of land and geography; it is about spirituality and identity, knowing who we are and who we are connected to; and it helps us understand how all living things are connected.” Country is also an epistemological frame that is filled with knowledge that may be known and familiarised whilst being knowledge itself (Langton "Sacred"; Rose Dingo; Yunupingu).Central to understanding Country is the fact that it refers to a living being’s spiritual homeland which is the ontological place where relationships are formed and maintained (Yunupingu). As Country nurtures and provides the necessities for survival and prosperity, Indigenous people (but also non-Indigenous populations) have moral obligations to care for Country as kin (Rose Nourishing Terrains). Country is epistemic, relational, and ontological and refers to both physical locations as well as modes of “being” (Heidegger), meaning it is carried from place to place as an embodiment within a person’s consciousness. Sally Morgan (263) describes how “our country is alive, and no matter where we go, our country never leaves us.” Country therefore is fluid and mobile for it is ontologically inseparable to one’s personhood, reflected through phrases such as “I am country” (B. Morgan 204).Country is in continuous dialogue with its surroundings and provides the setting upon which human and non-human beings; topographical features such as mountains and rivers; ancestral beings and spirits such as the Rainbow Snake; and ecological phenomena such as winds, tides, and floods, interact and mutually inform each other’s existence (Rose Nourishing Terrains). For Aboriginal people, understanding Country requires “deep listening” (Atkinson; Ungunmerr), a responsive awareness that moves beyond monological and human-centric understandings of the world and calls for deeper understandings of the mutual and co-dependant relationships that exist within it. The awareness of such mutuality has been discussed through terms such as “kincentrism” (Salmón), “meshworks” (Ingold Lines), “webs of connection” (Hokari), “nesting” (Malpas), and “native science” (Cajete). Such concepts are ways of theorising “place” as relational, physical, and mental locations made up of numerous smaller interactions, each of which contribute to the identity and meaning of place. Whilst each individual agent or object retains its own autonomy, such autonomy is dependent on its wider relation to others, meaning that place is a location where “objectivity, subjectivity and inter-subjectivity converge” (Malpas 35) and where the very essence of place is revealed.Flooding as DialogueWhen positioned within Indigenous frameworks, flooding is both an agent and expression of Toonooba and Country. For the phenomenon to occur however, numerous elements come into play such as the fall of rain; the layout of the surrounding terrain; human interference through built weirs and dams; and the actions and intervention of ancestral beings and spirits. Furthermore, flooding has a direct impact on Country and all life within it. This is highlighted by Dharumbal Elder Uncle Billy Mann (Fitzroy Basin Association "Billy Mann") who speaks of the importance of flooding in bringing water to inland lagoons which provide food sources for Dharumbal people, especially at times when the water in Toonooba is low. Such lagoons remain important places for fishing, hunting, recreational activities, and cultural practices but are reliant on the flow of water caused by the flowing, and at times flooding river, which Uncle Mann describes as the “lifeblood” of Dharumbal people and Country (Fitzroy Basin Association "Billy Mann"). Through her research in the Murray-Darling region of New South Wales, Weir writes of how flooding sustains life though cycles that contribute to ecological balance, providing nourishment and food sources for all beings (see also Cullen and Cullen 98). Water’s movement across land provokes the movement of animals such as mice and lizards, providing food for snakes. Frogs emerge from dry clay plains, finding newly made waterholes. Small aquatic organisms flourish and provide food sources for birds. Golden and silver perch spawn, and receding waters promote germination and growth. Aboriginal artist Ron Hurley depicts a similar cycle in a screen-print titled Waterlily–Darambal Totem. In this work Hurley shows floodwaters washing away old water lily roots that have been cooked in ant bed ovens as part of Dharumbal ceremonies (UQ Anthropology Museum). The cooking of the water lily exposes new seeds, which rains carry to nearby creeks and lagoons. The seeds take root and provide food sources for the following year. Cooking water lily during Dharumbal ceremonies contributes to securing and maintaining a sustainable food source as well as being part of Dharumbal cultural practice. Culture, ecological management, and everyday activity are mutually connected, along with being revealed and revelled in. Aboriginal Elder and ranger Uncle Fred Conway explains how Country teaches Aboriginal people to live in balance with their surroundings (Fitzroy Basin Association "Fred Conway"). As Country is in constant communication, numerous signifiers can be observed on land and waterscapes, indicating the most productive and sustainable time to pursue certain actions, source particular foods, or move to particular locations. The best time for fishing in central Queensland for example is when Wattles are in bloom, indicating a time when fish are “fatter and sweeter” (Fitzroy Basin Association "Fred Conway"). In this case, the Wattle is 1) autonomous, having its own life cycle; 2) mutually dependant, coming into being because of seasonal weather patterns; and 3) an agent of Country that teaches those with awareness how to respond and benefit from its lessons.Dialogue with Country As Country is sentient and responsive, it is vital that a person remains contextually aware of their actions on and towards their surroundings. Indigenous peoples seek familiarity with Country but also ensure that they themselves are known and familiarised by it (Rose Dingo). In a practice likened to “baptism”, Langton ("Earth") describes how Aboriginal Elders in Cape York pour water over the head of newcomers as a way of introducing them to Country, and ensuring that Country knows those who walk upon it. These introductions are done out of respect for Country and are a way of protecting outsiders from the potentially harmful powers of ancestral beings. Toussaint et al. similarly note how during mortuary rites, parents of the deceased take water from rivers and spit it back into the land, symbolising the spirit’s return to Country.Dharumbal man Robin Hatfield demonstrates the importance of not interfering with the dialogue of Country through recalling being told as a child not to disturb Barraru or green frogs. Memmott (78) writes that frogs share a relationship with the rain and flooding caused by Munda-gadda, the Rainbow Snake. Uncle Dougie Hatfield explains the significance of Munda-gadda to his Country stating how “our Aboriginal culture tells us that all the waterways, lagoons, creeks, rivers etc. and many landforms were created by and still are protected by the Moonda-Ngutta, what white people call the Rainbow Snake” (Memmott 79).In the case of Robin Hatfield, to interfere with Barraru’s “business” is to threaten its dialogue with Munda-gadda and in turn the dialogue of Country in form of rain. In addition to disrupting the relational balance between the frog and Munda-gadda, such actions potentially have far-reaching social and cosmological consequences. The rain’s disruption affects the flood plains, which has direct consequences for local flora and transportation and germination of water lily seeds; fauna, affecting the spawning of fish and their movement into lagoons; and ancestral beings such as Munda-gadda who continue to reside within Toonooba.Honouring Land Connections provided artists with a means to enter their own dialogue with Country and explore, discuss, engage, negotiate, and affirm aspects of their indigeneity. The artists wanted the artwork to remain organic to demonstrate honour and respect for Dharumbal connections with Country (Roberts). This meant that materials were sourced from the surrounding Country and the poles placed in a wave-like pattern resembling Munda-gadda. Alongside the designs and symbols painted and carved into the poles, fish skins, birds, nests, and frogs are embalmed within cavities that are cut into the wood, acting as windows that allow viewers to witness components of Country that are often overlooked (see fig. 4). Country therefore is an equal participant within the artwork’s creation and continuing memories and stories. More than a representation of Country, Honouring Land Connections is a literal manifestation of it.Figure 4Opening Dialogue with Non-Indigenous AustraliaHonouring Land Connections is an artistic and cultural expression that revels in Indigenous understandings of place. The installation however remains positioned within a contested “hybrid” setting that is informed by both Indigenous and settler-colonial outlooks (Bhabha). The installation for example is separated from the other two artworks of Flood Markers that explore Rockhampton’s colonial and industrial history. Whilst these are positioned within a landscaped area, Honouring Land Connections is placed where the grass is dying, seating is lacking, and is situated next to a dilapidated coast guard building. It is a location that is as quickly left behind as it is encountered. Its separation from the other two works is further emphasised through its depiction in the project brief as a representation of Rockhampton’s pre-colonial history. Presenting it in such a way has the effect of bookending Aboriginal culture in relation to European settlement, suggesting that its themes belong to a time past rather than an immediate present. Almost as if it is a revelation in and of itself. Within settler-colonial settings, place is heavily politicised and often contested. In what can be seen as an ongoing form of colonialism, Eurocentric epistemologies and understandings of place continue to dominate public thought, rhetoric, and action in ways that legitimise White positionality whilst questioning and/or subjugating other ways of knowing, being, and doing (K. Martin; Moreton-Robinson; Wolfe). This turns places such as Toonooba into agonistic locations of contrasting and competing interests (Bradfield). For many Aboriginal peoples, the memories and emotions attached to a particular place can render it as either comfortable and culturally safe, or as unsafe, unsuitable, unwelcoming, and exclusionary (Fredericks). Honouring Land Connections is one way of publicly asserting and recognising Toonooba as a culturally safe, welcoming, and deeply meaningful place for Indigenous peoples. Whilst the themes explored in Honouring Land Connections are not overtly political, its presence on colonised/invaded land unsettles Eurocentric falsities and colonial amnesia (B. Martin) of an uncontested place and history in which Indigenous voices and knowledges are silenced. The artwork is a physical reminder that encourages awareness—particularly for non-Indigenous populations—of Indigenous voices that are continuously demanding recognition of Aboriginal place within Country. Similar to the boomerangs carved into the poles representing flooding as a natural expression of Country that will return (see fig. 5), Indigenous peoples continue to demand that the wider non-Indigenous population acknowledge, respect, and morally responded to Aboriginal cultures and knowledges.Figure 5Conclusion Far from a historic account of the past, the artists of CAM have created an artwork that promotes awareness of an immediate and emerging Indigenous presence on Country. It creates a space that is welcoming to Indigenous people, allowing them to engage with and affirm aspects of their living histories and cultural identities. Through sharing stories and providing “windows” into Aboriginal culture, Country, and lived experiences (which like the frogs of Toonooba are so often overlooked), the memory poles invite and welcome an open dialogue with non-Indigenous Australians where all may consider their shared presence and mutual dependence on each other and their surroundings.The memory poles are mediatory agents that stand on Country, revealing and bearing witness to the survival, resistance, tenacity, and continuity of Aboriginal peoples within the Rockhampton region and along Toonooba. Honouring Land Connections is not simply a means of reclaiming the river as an Indigenous space, for reclamation signifies something regained after it has been lost. What the memory poles signify is something eternally present, i.e. Toonooba is and forever will be embedded in Aboriginal Country in which we all, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, human and non-human, share. The memory poles serve as lasting reminders of whose Country Rockhampton is on and describes the life ways of that Country, including times of flood. Through celebrating and revelling in the presence of Country, the artists of CAM are revealing the deep connection they have to Country to the wider non-Indigenous community.ReferencesAtkinson, Judy. Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia. Spinifex Press, 2002.Bhabha, Homi, K. The Location of Culture. Taylor and Francis, 2012.Bradfield, Abraham. "Decolonizing the Intercultural: A Call for Decolonizing Consciousness in Settler-Colonial Australia." Religions 10.8 (2019): 469.Cajete, Gregory. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. 1st ed. 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Saidin Salkić is a survivor of Bosnia’s 1995 Srebrenica genocide. Salkić was interviewed on the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Radio National in July 2007. The interviewer asked Salkić to tell him about the genocide: “What can you remember about that?” (ABC Radio National). Salkić cited memories of the smell of his father’s jumper and of the flowers growing in his mother’s garden. The interviewer interrupted him, asking for a more chronological description of the events of the genocide itself. Salkić responded that it was not possible to answer the question in such a concise, easily archivable manner, that “you can’t really bundle your memories like that” (ABC Radio National).Listening to this interview, I sat waiting for a neat ‘survivor sound-bite’ that I could neatly insert into this paper. It didn’t happen. I turned off the radio thinking that I had learned nothing of the genocide that took place in Srebrenica. In listening to a survivor—an eye witness—there is a sense that he, of all people, should be able to tell the chronology, the facts of the event; of who did what to whom and why. Yet what is learned—what Salkić’s testimony-without-testimony spoke of and explained—is the most important thing: loss. This is the lacuna in testimony. What happens to the loss when we attempt to testify to it? What is then lost? Salkić’s memory is unarchivable in the normative sense, and his refusal to testify in the accepted way ruptures the process (not a necessarily deliberate refusal, but a refusal borne out of an inability and an impossibility of containing such an event through language). Loss eludes testimony and is also loss as the loss of testimony. It is impossible to fully testify to loss, and that is testimonial, or testimony’s trace.Using Derrida's theories around the archive and the cinder, this article examines what survives an event such as genocide, what is left and, crucially, what is missing, what is not recoverable. What happens to the loss when we attempt to testify to it, to salvage something of it? What is disrupted? What is instead recovered in its place?Derrida’s archive (Derrida, Archive Fever), responds to these gaps and losses. This archive is not, it would seem, about the archive at all. Instead, Derrida provides a departure from the examination of the structure and institution of the archive. As Carolyn Steedman puts it in her reading of Archive Fever, “it turned out not to be about the archival turn. It is about dust.” (Steedman ix) This “dust”, this prelude to the ash, to the cinder, is the search for what is not there, for what is barely visible but at the same time, viscous and residual; the dust which coats and conceals no matter how well you have wielded the duster. For Derrida the dust he has found in the archive is both a meditation on beginnings and on the “fever”. He reflects not on the archive, then, but on that which drives (and destroys) the archive. Derrida’s description of prayer is a way of approaching an understanding of how a memory such as Salkić’s—at once unarchivable, yet crucial to our comprehension of the event, might fit into an understanding of the archive. Derrida writes,“My way of praying, if I pray, is absolutely secret. Even if [I were] in a synagogue praying with others, I know that my own prayer would be silent and secret, and interrupting something in the community” (On Religion). Is it impossible to archive memories such as Salkić’s because his is an impenetrable recollection that disrupts the broader archive? Why do we desire that the archive archives? Why do we desire that the archive recovers, documents and makes public these excruciatingly private moments? The ultimate secret, private and silent moment of death is made loud and public in the archives of genocide. The tendency is to want archives to show the individual, the human being amongst the tangle of anonymous bodies with whom we can identify. But in laying their death and their life bare (indeed in laying their death and life bare through the act of showing their death and life), their privacy and secret is disclosed. Their final privacy in a public death. This is death that is made public through its interconnectedness to the other simultaneous deaths around it. This is also a death that, through its place in a broader history, becomes disconnected from the individual. Finally, it is also a death that has come about through the choice made by someone else that this is your moment and mode of death. I wish to look again at Derrida when he writes that his prayer, though silent and secret, is “interrupting something in the community” (On Religion). Salkić’s memory, too, interrupts. It causes a rupture in what an archive is perceived to be and remains unarchivable. It interrupts our process, yet it cannot be disregarded. Salkić’s memory of his parents is at first seemingly of minor importance in establishing an historical truth as to what occurred in Srebrenica, yet what he has remembered is the loss, the impossibility of remembering, of salvaging this event intact for another audience. If Salkić had presented a readily archivable memory of Srebrenica—a logical and coherent sound bite—would it have a place in the archive? Is such a memory recoverable? Would it be a memory and experience hidden by the formulaic style of historical memory? As it is, Salkić’s memory ruptures the archive. It reveals those dusty spots of the event that our duster cannot reach. It is this dust that removes our certainty, our hope in the archive as a provider of answers and as a clean receptacle for the truth (this whole truth). “Suspension of certainty is part of the prayer” (Derrida, On Religion). We must suspend our certainty in the archive and it is this uncertainty that drives us to keep looking, to keep asking, to keep collecting. To know that we cannot know. To know that we can never have a complete archive. Derrida speaks of the “hopelessness of prayer” (On Religion). The hopelessness of the archive lies in its inability to ever provide a complete or conclusive story and it is this hopelessness that is also driving the archive. I think that the archive should contain these dusty spots that reveal rather than conceal.Still we, the archivists of other people’s memories, fear inconclusivity and complication in the archive. We do not wish to suspend our certainty. Still we assume that through an archive we can fully hold an event. The interviewer will always interrupt Salkić’s memory, demanding the full account, the complete archive, as though such a thing were possible. Still our archive privileges and still then, our archive is hopeless. Other genocides are ignored even as they occur, filed still further back, yet the dust is not going anywhere. Even when it fully coats and conceals an event, the dust lends the event and its memories form and marks their non/presence.Maybe, then, the archive in its presumed weight is no more than a skin, “the glosses on the edge of the abyss” (Derrida, The Politics of Friendship 143), giving a thin layer of protection and concealment. It is the losses and exclusions (those scarred and phantom limbs) that urge us to look further. To know, then, the archive as Foucault’s “unstable assemblage of faults, fissures and heterogeneous layers” (146). So what, then? How do we reconcile ourselves with or even begin our recovery of the scarred and phantom limbs? (Do they even want to be found? Are they even there?) This is Derrida’s dilemma of “How to watch over something that one can, however, neither watch over, nor assimilate, nor internalise, nor categorise” (For What Tomorrow…A Dialogue 138).Yet these testimonies (such as Salkić’s) are disallowed. They rupture with their silence. The archive cannot contain such testimony. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why testimony cannot be codified. The silence, after all, cannot in itself offer any hint or clue towards a complete testimony. The silence cannot provide an archiving system into which Salkić’s memory might be deposited or neatly filed. Instead the silent cinder marks an acknowledgment of the difficulty of representation and of defining an experience by way of collectivity or of representing trauma in a coherent survivor sound-bite.These are the Derridean cinders of the event. The cinders are not the event—the originary sound or moment—itself. They are the ashes of this. To try and contain, conclude and comprehend the event itself through its ashes—through the bare artefacts it leaves behind—is to try to comprehend something that is ungraspable and unknowable. Derrida writes, “The cinder is not, is not what is. It remains from what is not, in order to recall the delicate, charred bottom of itself only non-being or non-presence” (Derrida, Cinders 39). Yet he continues, “Cinders remain. Cinder there is.”This is the fragility of the cinder, smothering and concealing the secret before it reaches us, translating it from language into unreadable ash. Was it ever really with us or on its way to meet us? This is “not some sort of conditional secret that could be revealed, but the secret that there is no secret, that there never was one, not even one” (Caputo 109). Turning to Salkić’s memories, I wonder if there is anything there other than an amnesiac or uncooperative guest/ghost? Maybe I wrote his words down incorrectly in my initial dismissal? Or maybe the memories are, in their incompleteness, in the interrupted gaps, telling us a secret? That there is none. That it is ineffable, not some secret waiting to be whispered, intact, in our ear. That nothing is fully recoverable from such an event and that it is the very unrecoverability that tells all that is important to know of the event. The fire has burned and consumed its beginnings and its event, leaving only ash, cinder, behind as a trace. As it is a cindered trace, it differs from other traces in its unchartability. It is not possible to follow the flyaway cinders back to an event as the cinders are not markers, but remains: “the body of which cinders is the trace has totally disappeared, it has totally lost its contours, its form, its colours, its natural determination” (Derrida, Points 391). In genocide, people have been killed, raped, disappeared, removed, displaced. The cinders that remain are unidentifiable and undetermined, but it is this presence of non-presence that remains. This is the invisible presence of the loss. Unlike a footprint, the cinder cannot be followed, cannot be recovered. It is a trace which “remains without remaining, which is neither present nor absent, which destroys itself, which is totally consumed, which is a remainder without remainder. That is, something which is not” (Derrida, Points 208). So what light can Derrida’s dusty cinder possibly shed on the archival responses to genocide? In its marking and coating of the various impossibilities and losses within the archive, the cinder makes certain aspects more visible. If not visible, then perhaps sensed as one senses smoke. Let us consider the romantic imagining of a library and the role that dust plays in such an imagining. The dust swirls around, leaving shiny absences while also settling heavily on certain shelves. This is a revealing dust, a dust which marks time, marking the losses and forgettings, rendering the absences and difficulties within the archive not so much wholly visible, as visible through their invisibility. This is the invisible smoke that fogs the glass and sneaks under the velvet rope. We invoke the call to never again (“and again, and again, and again” echoes Homi K Bhabha), we mark remembrance days, we watch trials from behind the glass in polite institutionalised silence, we remember only the dead and the time, we build memorials and establish courts, we write dissertations and publish our articles, we cram the impossible nothing – what we imagine to be empty space – full of language and debate. But what do these lives and losses mean? What depth and weight is in the emptiness, the silence, the secret? Cinders persist. Cinders mark the lacuna and the space for the silence and silenced. The cinder, the burned remains of language, provides no way of telling or testifying. The cinders, in marking the difficulty of representation, also mark the exclusion and loss of certain voices within the archive. To see the cinder as a provision of a lens through which to view absences is a fragile vision. Yet, within the cinder is an impression of a figure (the hints and remains of a burned moment; that which was but no longer is). In the cinder’s very presence, in its non-presence, this entails and implies an absence. The event “immediately incinerates itself, in front of your eyes: an impossible mission” (Derrida, Cinders 35). This impossible mission, though, contains a possibility in the gap, the space that is left. There is no longer the physical support of the form; we are left with a grey shapeless ash, as “everything is annihilated in the cinders” (Derrida, Points 391). While the event has totally lost the trace of itself in its incineration, what rises (dare I say phoenix-like) from the ash is the choking shapelessness of a loss. A loss that defies and confounds the archive. Yet how can the cinder, the ash marking the gaps, the silence, the ghostly secret, be incorporated into testimony and the testimonial gathering modes? Can such testimonies be codified? Agamben’s thoughts, through ‘Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive’ are crucial in this respect in contemplating the im/possibility of gaining a complete testimony and of the necessity of the lacuna in all testimony. Agamben writes of the absence of the complete witness to the event through analogy: “Just as in the expanding universe, the furthest galaxies move away from us at a speed greater than that of their light, which cannot reach us, such that the darkness we see in the sky is nothing but the invisibility of the light of unknown stars, so that the complete witness […] is the one we cannot see.” (161 – 162). It is precisely the one who cannot testify, who is silent and silenced, who is the complete witness. And it precisely because of this that the incorporation of the cinder—the act of pinning down the ash—is perhaps impossible to approach within the archive. I borrow here Primo Levi’s example cited by Agamben. Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz amongst other things, writes of a child in Auschwitz called Hurbinek who repeats the word mass-klo or perhaps matisklo to himself, but the meaning of the word remains secret. Levi writes of the child that, “nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine” (38). The word becomes the cinders of the lacuna represented in Levi’s archive—in his testimony. Agamben writes that, “this means that testimony is the disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness; it means that language, in order to bear witness, must give way to a non-language in order to show the impossibility of bearing witness” (39). In order to give this sound to the event—to see its shadow and hear its silence, we must remove our reliance on the “sun”—on having the remembering done for us through didactic monuments and museums. This brings to mind, in this impossible incorporation, the designated “Void Space” at the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin. The Jüdisches Museum in Berlin is something of a perfect archive. The “Void Space” is where the missing elements might be felt. Standing in the void, I felt something of the loss and the claustrophobia that is only possible in a large, dark, empty space shut in by a heavy handle-less door. However, if I had walked through the door and into this void without knowing what it was, I would most likely have backed out, thinking that I had made a mistake; that this space wasn’t part of the museum. Instead, it is a designated void. It is an incredibly effective and affective space, but it is still an ordered, designated, planned space. I can almost hear the planning meeting: “over here in the South Wing, that’s where we’ll put the loss.” Here, the cinder element, that missing part, is given space. Yet, in its provision here in this museum space, the ash is cooled. In its designation as such a space—its permanence and uniformity—something of the cinder is extinguished and its fragility is lost: “if you entrust it to paper, it is all the better to inflame you with” (Derrida, Cinders 53).The cinder should instead reconfigure the very structures of our responses; the way we consider the structure of the archive itself. The cinder marks the impossibility. It must be external to the current representation. It cannot be incorporated. Nothing can be built from the cinder; no Phoenix can rise from it, nothing recognisable in it or from it. To sanction it and offer it “space” would remove its purpose, strip it of its ashes, it “remains unpronounceable in order to make saying possible although it is nothing” (Derrida, Cinders 73).However, in these cinders and their draughts, we are left with crucial refutations. There is a something here that defies the archive, which defies the reductions and exclusions, which defies those attempts to “burn everything” (holos caustos), to destroy all through the act of genocide itself. This is a haunting. In the cinderless archive, in the interrupting and limiting of Salkić’s testimony, we “have gone so fast as to be unaware of its existence” (Derrida, The Politics of Friendship 194). We rush to conclude, comprehend and contain, and in our rush, we miss the patient cinder and we do not feel its haunting. However, should we show our own patience (the patience of a cinder), we would find the (necessarily) unending task of comprehending genocide, and find there something “troubling enough to become unforgettable to the point of obsession” (Derrida, The Politics of Friendship 194).This is the hope in and for the archive as a means of wrestling with the crises of response presented by genocide, and brings my call for openness and dialogue with and of the archive. The cinder recovered from the event, rather than being a philosophical whimsy, marks that which has been lost or silenced or forgotten through the archive in its current structure. The archive as it stands has become, to borrow Zournazi’s thoughts on hope, “self enclosed and the exchange becomes a kind of monologue, a type of depression and narcissism where territories are defended and the stakes raised are already known” (Zournazi 12). Cinders are the hope in the archive. They are also a dangerous, gamblers hope in which the outcomes remain unknown. They are that which has been burned, which can no longer exist in (or bear any resemblance to) the original form, but which persist nonetheless, disrupting the known entities of the archive with dust, the promise of a secret. A secret which can never be told, but that is hope. This is a hope which, as the unearthed remains of a skeleton described by Linda Marie Walker, haunts, just as a cinder might: “The remains, in their haunting, were giving, or opening, a space for thought and a dreaming of past presence.” Hope caught in a cinder, made airborne. Hope that is recovered intact from the event. Hope that these spaces and gaps in the archive, marked by the cinder, might not descend into either a hopeless disengagement nor a retreat into useless and futile rage in the face of genocide and its informing debates. Hope instead that the archive might be turned from a monologue of certainty into an engagement, an exchange, a constant uncertain questioning. A sense that there is no cool remove from genocide and that to attempt to contain it is to do damage to the memory. I end with a quote from Primo Levi in his short story on the element of carbon, which comes at the end of The Periodic Table. This atom of carbon that Levi attempts to describe, and of which “every verbal description must be inadequate” (227), is also the cinder. It is invisible to the eye, it is unpronounceable, but it coats everything. And without its presence we are and we have recovered nothing: “So it happens that every element says something to someone (something different to each) like the mountain valleys or beaches visited in youth. One must perhaps make an exception for carbon, because it says everything to everyone” (Levi 225).The dependence on and domination of archives which have at their core an aim of concluding, comprehending and containing an event, denies the necessary complexity and incomprehensibility of stories such as Salkic’s. There is a risk here of forgetting that such complex stories, such incomplete memories—like carbon itself—speak to the essence of what it is to be human and what it is to have lost. ReferencesABC Radio National. “Kasedevah Blues.” Life Matters. 26 July 2007.Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 2002.Bhabha, Homi K. “Keynote Speech: On Global Memory, Reflections on Barbaric Traditions.” Reimagining Asia Conference and Exhibition, Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Berlin, 14 March 2008.Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Press, 1997.Derrida, Jacques and Elisabeth Roudinesco. For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004.———. On Religion. Toronto: Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, 2002.———. The Politics of Friendship. London, New York: Verso, 1997.———. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.———. Points...Interviews, 1974-1994. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995.———. Cinders. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Ed. D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.Levi, Primo. The Periodic Table. London: Abacus Books, 1986.Walker, Linda Marie. “The Archaeology of Surfaces, or What Is Left Moment to Moment, or I Can’t Get over It.” An Archaeology of Surface(s). (2003). 20 Dec. 2007 ‹http://ensemble.va.com.au/lmw/surface/surfacenotes.html›.Zournazi, Mary. Hope: New Philosophies for Change. Australia: Pluto Press, 2002.

To sin by silence, when we should protest,Makes cowards out of men.— Ella Wheeler WilcoxProtest is culturally entwined in historical and juro-political realities and is a fundamental element of the exercise of individual and collective rights. As our title notes, while there are currently many ‘protests in progress’ around the world, there is also a great deal of ‘progress in protest’ in terms of what protests look like, their scale and number, how they are formed and conducted, their goals, how they can be studied, as well as the varying responses formed in relation to protest. The etymology of protest associates two important dynamics pertaining to the topic. Firstly, a protest is something that is put forward, forth, or toward the front (from the Latin pro); essentially, it is in one manner or another, made publically. Secondly, it suggests that a person or persons have beared witness (testis) and instead of remaining silent, have made a declaration or assertion (testari). In other words, someone has made public their disapproval or objection. The nine articles that comprise this issue of M/C Journal on ‘protest’ reminds us of these salient elements of protest. Each, in their own way, highlight the importance of not remaining silent when faced with an injustice or in order to promote social change. As Bill McKibben (7) outlines in his foreword to an excellent collection of protest documents, ‘voices of protest ... are often precisely what propels human civilisation forward and allows it to become unstuck’. However, not all forms of contemporary protest shares ideological or progressive aims. Here, we might consider the emergence of contentious formations such as the alt-right and antifa, what is considered ‘fake’ or ‘real’, and ongoing conflicts between notions of individual and collective rights and state sovereignty.This modest but insightful collection demonstrates the broad scope of this field of inquiry. This issue explores the intersections among social justice, identity and communications technology, as well as the convergences and divergences in the form, function and substance of protest. Through an analysis of protest’s relationship to media, the author’s highlight the possibilities of protest to effect social change. The issue begins with Lakota screenwriter and activist Floris White Bull’s (Floris Ptesáŋ Huŋká) discussion of the documentary AWAKE, a Dream from Standing Rock (2017) and the #NODAPL protest. The film, split into three parts, takes a poignant and quite personal look at the native-led peaceful resistance at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016. This protest involved tens of thousands of activists from all over the world who opposed the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) which was to transport fracked oil directly underneath the Missouri River and through sovereign Lakota land (see Image 1). However, the events at Standing Rock were not a single-issue protest and brought activists together over a range of interrelated issues including environmental protection, human rights, water security, community health and Native American sovereignty. The Water Protectors were also forced to contest racist and disparaging media representations. As such, Standing Rock remains a site of cultural exchange and learning. These protests are not historical, but instead, are an ongoing struggle. The film AWAKE is important as testimony to the injustices at Standing Rock. A short description of the film is first provided in order to provide some additional context to perspectives addressed in the film. From there, White Bull has been invited to respond to questions posed by the editors regarding the Standing Rock Protests and documentary films such as AWAKE. As an Indigenous person fighting for justice, White Bull reminds readers that ‘[t]he path forward is the same as it has always been – holding on to our goals, values and dignity with resilience’.Image 1: Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters, 2016. Photo credit: Indigenous Environmental Network.Cat Pausé and Sandra Grey use an example of fat shaming to investigate how media impacts body politics and determines who is enfranchised to voice public dissent. Media becomes a mechanism for policing and governing bodily norms and gendered identities. As well as outlining a brief history of feminist body activism, the authors draw on personal experience and interview material with activists to reflect on fat embodiment and politics. Also informed by intersectional approaches, their work alerts us to the diverse vectors by which injustice and oppression fall on some bodies differently as well as the diverse bodies assembled in any crowd.Greg Watson suggests that “[c]ontemporary societies are increasingly becoming sites in which it is more difficult for people to respectfully negotiate disagreements about human diversity”. Drawing on his experiences organising Human Libraries throughout Australia, Watson argues these spaces create opportunities for engaging with difference. In this sense Human Libraries can be considered sites which protest the micropublics’ “codes of civility” which produce everyday marginalisations of difference.Micropolitics and creative forms of protest are also central to Ella Cutler, Jacqueline Gothe, and Alexandra Crosby’s article. The author’s consider three design projects which seek to facilitate ethical communication with diverse communities. Drawing on Guy Julier’s tactics for activist design, each project demonstrates the value of slowing down in order to pay attention to experience. In this way, research through design offers a reflexive means for engaging social change.Research practices are also central to making visible community resistance. Anthony McCosker and Timothy Graham consider the role of social networking in urban protests through the campaign to save the iconic Melbourne music venue The Palace (see Image 2). Their article considers the value of social media data and analytics in relation to the court proceedings and trial processes. Given the centrality of social media to activist campaigns their reflections provide a timely evaluation of how data publics are constituted and their ongoing legacy.Image 2: Melbourne’s Palace Theatre before demolition. Photo Credit: Melbourne Heritage Action.For Marcelina Piotrowski pleasure is central to understanding data production and protest. She draws on a Deleuze and Guattarian framework in order to consider protests against oil pipelines in British Columbia. Importantly, through this theoretical framework of ‘data desires’, pleasure is not something owned by the individual subject but rather holds the potential to construct generative social collectivities. This is traced through three different practices: deliberation in online forums; citizen science and social media campaigns. This has important implications for understanding environmental issues and our own enfolding within them. Nadine Kozak takes a look at how Online Service Providers (OSPs) have historically used internet ‘blackouts’ in order to protest United States government regulations. Kozak points to protests against the Communications Decency Act (1996) which sought to regulate online pornographic material and the Stop Online Piracy Act (2011) which proposed increased federal government power to take action against online copyright infringement. Recently, the United States Congress recently passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), which hold OSPs liable for third-party content including advertising for prostitution. However, despite condemnation from the Department of Justice and trafficking victims, OSPs did not utilise blackouts as a means to protest these new measures. Kozak concludes that the decision to whether or not to utilise blackout protests is dependent on the interests of technology companies and large OSPs. It is evident that most especially since Donald Trump popularised the term, ‘fake news’ has taken a centre stage in discussions concerning media. In fact, the lines between what is fake and what is official have become blurred. Most recently, QAnon proponents have been attending Trump rallies and speeches giving further visibility to various conspiracy narratives stemming from online message boards (see Image 3). Marc Tuters, Emilija Jokubauskaitė, and Daniel Bach establishe a clear timeline of events in order to trace the origins of ‘#Pizzagate’; a 2016 conspiracy theory that falsely claimed that several U.S. restaurants and high-ranking officials of the Democratic Party were connected with human trafficking and an alleged child-sex ring. The authors investigate the affordances of 4chan to unpack how the site’s anonymity, rapid temporality and user collectivisation were instrumental in creating ‘bullshit’; a usage which the authors suggest is a “technical term for persuasive speech unconcerned with veracity”. This provides an understanding of how alt-right communities are assembled and motivated in a post-truth society. Image 3: QAnon proponents at Trump rally in Tampa, 31 July 2018. Photo credit: Kirby Wilson, Tampa Bay Times.Finally, Colin Salter analyses protests for animal rights as a lens to critique notions of national identity and belonging. Protests on whaling in the Southern Ocean (see Image 4) and live export trade from Australia continue to be highly contested political issues. Salter reflects on the ABC’s 2011 exposé into Australian live animal exports to Indonesia and the 2014 hearings at the International Court of Justice into Japanese whaling. Salter then traces the common elements between animal rights campaigns in order to demonstrate the manner in which the physical bodies of animals, their treatment, and the debate surrounding that treatment become sites for mapping cultural identity, nationhood, and sovereignty. Here, Salter suggests that such inquiry is useful for promoting broader consideration of efficacious approaches to animal advocacy and social change.Image 4: The ship Bob Barker, rammed by the Japanese whaling vessel Nishin Maru. Photo credit: Sea Shepherd Facebook Page. As indicated in the opening paragraphs, it is crucial for people committed to social justice to publically raise their voices in protest. As such, we would like to thank each of the authors for their important contributions to this issue on ‘protest’. In its own way, each contribution serves doubly as a form of protest and a means to understand the topic more clearly. There is solidarity evidenced in this issue. Taken as a whole, these articles attest to the importance of understanding protest and social change.ReferencesMcKibben, B. "Foreword." Voices of Protest: Documents of Courage and Dissent. Eds. Frank Lowenstein, Sheryl Lechner, and Erik Bruun. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2007. 7-8.Wilcox, E.W. "Protest." Poems of Problems. Chicago: W.B. Conkey Company, 1914.