Journal articles on the topic 'Kimberly Broughton'

Many partisans of Alfred Jarry's work have discovered Ubu roi and the ‘science’ of pataphysics via a study of the Parisian avant-garde, and the play has been discussed for a hundred years in this context. Kimberly Jannarone also assesses Jarry in the context of the world of rural puppetry – for, like many other avant-garde artists at the fin de siècle, Jarry came to Paris from a small town, and brought with him such formative experiences as the makeshift puppet shows he saw as a child. Bringing the rural puppet into focus in a discussion of the Ubu cycle, Kimberly Jannarone exposes Père Ubu's identity as a class hybrid, whose maddening and elusive nature stems from the fusion of popular and elite forms. Further, she reveals that Jarry's use of puppet forms is radically different from that of the Symbolists, who conceived puppets as theoretical figures within a fully formed aesthetic doctrine. By contrast, Jarry used puppets for their very incompleteness – their makeshift nature making them ideal catalysts for the audience's imaginations. She sees Pataphysics as a model of the avant-garde itself: a system that focuses less on products than on effects. Kimberly Jannarone has taught at the University of Washington School of Drama, and is about to take up an appointment as Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her MFA and DFA from the Yale School of Drama, where her dissertation examined the historical avant-garde through the works of Jarry and Antonin Artaud.

Rock-art researchers have long acknowledged the importance of discerning superimposition sequences as a means for exploring chronology. Despite their potential for reconstructing painting events and thus informing on a site's production sequences, the social significance of superimpositions and their associated meanings have been little explored. In the Kimberley Region of northwestern Australia, interpretations of superimpositions as an analytical lens have often lingered on the ‘negative’ connotations of this practice (e.g. to destroy supernatural power embedded in previous paintings and/or to show cultural dominance). As a result, it has been proposed that the overpainting of previous images was tantamount to defacing, leading to the proposition that new images constituted a form of vandalism of older art. In this paper, a sample of rock-art sites from the northwestern and northeastern Kimberley is analysed with the aim of grounding the study of superimpositions in more nuanced practices, leading researchers to contemplate the role they played among populations within the same area. It is argued here that superimpositions brought together past and present experiences that served to reinforce the links between contemporary art production and the inherited landscape.

The Artist Brigade is an exciting artist-activist project to “stay with the trouble” of global warming and changing climates. Since August 2020, four ‘lilypad’ gatherings co-convened by Kendra Fanconi (The Only Animal), the BC Alliance for Arts + Culture, Sherry Yano (the David Suzuki Foundation), Marie Lopes (Vancouver Park Board), Sue Biely (Story Money Impact), and Lolehawk (Stό:lō Nation) have brought together artists with other stakeholders on the land to discover how we can collaboratively respond to the needs for climate action around the Vedder River, Dakota Valley, Heather Lands, and Howe Sound. Drawing on Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte’s distinction between an “epistemology of crisis” and an “epistemology of coordination,” Kimberly Skye Richards discusses the strategies deployed by the Artist Brigade for responding responsibly to our situation of living amid the earth’s sixth great extinction event.

Abstract The appropriateness of the standard practical orthographies for Australian languages, recommended by e.g. Dixon (1980:xxi-xxii), and used in languages such as Warlpiri and Walmajarri, has recently been called to question by linguists and Aboriginal users. A non-phonemic English based orthography has been developed for at least one language (Gooniyandi). However, the issues surrounding orthography design have not been fully brought out and evaluated. My main aim in this paper is to remedy this situation, identify as many relevant issues as possible, and discuss them in the sociolinguistic context of the Kimberley Aboriginal speech communities. The paper is intended to provoke discussion and elicit feedback from others involved in orthography design, rather than make recommendations.

This commentary responds to Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg’s new provocation, ‘The ocean in excess: Towards a more-than-wet ontology’, and suggests a further contribution can be made by consideration of bodies that are other than human, and of worlds beyond our own. The Southern Ocean and its increasingly autonomous underwater drone intelligences are examined for their potential to flex the many multiplicities and possibilities that emerge from Peters and Steinberg’s arguments, and to reveal potentially destructive processes within a very much more-than-wet ocean. Thinly veiled intentions to export such actions beyond our own planet are also brought to bear on this discussion. Here, the imagined ocean reveals planetary and extra-planetary excesses often masked from human experience and oversight, and signals the scale of radical transformation required to make sense of both our own ocean-world and an increasingly fluid universe of multiple worlds.

In this chapter, we unpack intersectionality as an analytical framework. First, we cite Black Lives Matter as an impetus for discussing intersectionality’s current traction. Second, we review the genealogy of “intersectionality” beginning with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s formulation, which brought a Black Studies provocation into legal discourse in order to challenge existing antidiscrimination doctrine and single-axis theorizing. The third, and most central, task of the chapter is our account of intersectionality’s utility for social analysis. We examine some of the issues raised by the metaphor of the intersection and some of the debates surrounding the concept, such as the tension between fragmenting and universalizing perspectives mediated by the notion of “strategic essentialism.” Fourth, we review how education researchers have explained race and gender subordination in education since Ladson-Billings and Tate’s Teachers College Record article. We conclude with some remarks concerning future research on intersectionality.

This article analyses the role of the EU in the negotiations of the Kimberley Process (KP) regarding the Marange diamonds from Zimbabwe. As these gems did not comply with the requirements of the KP, they were banned from trading in 2009. The subsequent discussions between proponents of a hard line towards Zimbabwe and advocates of a rapid readmission of these diamonds brought the KP on the brink of collapse and it was not before the end of 2011 that an EU-brokered compromise ended this crisis. At the same time these diamonds remained on the EU-sanctions list until 2013.The article explains how the EU tried to find a balance between its normative policies regarding human rights violations and being a 'force for good', and aimed to preserve the KP as a tool of 'effective multilateralism'. It argues that these two objectives are sometimes hard to reconcile in a multipolar world.

A series of photographs, mostly taken between 1952 and 1990 at three sites on the lower Ord River, Kimberley Region, Western Australia, was used to demonstrate that photographs can be used to describe environmental change in situations where there are no documented records. This study examined changes to riparian vegetation caused by the construction of two dams. The study has important implications for development of water allocation plans. In the post-dam era, relative hydrological stability brought about by curtailment of large floods and provision of perpetual flow in a once-seasonal river has allowed extensive development of emergent aquatic and fringing woodland communities throughout the study reach. The emergent aquatic communities and most of their component species were previously absent but the tree component of fringing woodland communities comprises species that were present before the dams were constructed, albeit in isolated, sheltered pockets. Limitations to the use of photographs included absence of any images through the first 50 years of pastoral use of the area, limited number of sites that attracted photographers and limits to the discernible detail (e.g. identity of species, even most trees, in landscape images).

This article investigates an intermediary period in the Cape colony when the largely unknown convergence of British social and industrial capital around coal mining occurred in the Stormberg Mountains of the North Eastern Cape. Within the context of a triangular nexus of mining and its two major clients, the diamond mines at Kimberley and the newly arrived Cape Government Railway, a social coalescence of mainly British immigrants arose in the town of Molteno, exhibiting an distinctly British Victorian culture. This paper also shows how the town became a colonial enclave on the remote periphery of the Cape Colony, utilising a racialised class system, and the ways in which the singularity of Victorian society was emphasised by two surrounding cultures which were alien to the British. After the South African War ended, one of these cultures had begun to take root within the town. When the coal mines were brought to an end by the erratic orders of the Cape Government Railway and its access to superior and cheaper coal from Lewis and Marks at Viljoensdrift in the ZAR and the greater economic pull of the Rand gold mines which diverted labour to the north, this ‘colonial moment’ in the Stormberg was over.

Abstract This paper examines the mining industry of British Columbia, the province's leading staple during the period when the region was brought within the network of world trade. Specifically, it describes the emergence of zinc production as the most profitable sector of the industry, from the early 1900s through to the mid-1920s. A good deal of importance was attached to discovering some means of treating zinc ore in the early 1900s. Increasing amounts of zinc were being found in the silver-lead ore of eastern British Columbia. Zinc was seen as a contaminant, and smelters penalised mine-owners who shipped ore that was over 10 per cent zinc. The presence of zinc rendered relatively valuable ore (in terms of its silver and lead content) uneconomical. Concern over “the zinc problem” was such that, by 1905, the federal government, responding to the lobbying efforts of mine-owners, appointed a commission “to Investigate the Zinc Resources of British Columbia and the Conditions Affecting Their Exploitation”. During the next twenty years, mining companies in the Kootenays explored a number of different ways to overcome zinc's unfortunate impact upon the mining industry. These efforts to discover an adequate means to treat zinc ore illustrate the way in which technology and capital became the key ingredients of a distinctively new mining industry. The paper argues that the emergence of zinc mining reflected a fundamental restructuring of the industry, as the focus shifted from the discovery and exploitation of bonanza deposits of gold and silver to the less spectacular production of copper, lead, and zinc. Technology, economies of scale, and substantial capital investment were the hallmarks of the new industry. Not only was the industry profoundly altered — experiencing what other scholars have described as the second industrial revolution — but new vertically integrated companies displaced the traditional mining company. The paper describes the clearest example of this trend, outlining the early career of the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada [Cominco], a subsidiary of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Cominco was able to put in place the necessary technology to tap its enormous lead-zinc deposit at Kimberley, and successfully treat zinc at its Trail refinery. Within two decades, and largely as a result of its ability to treat zinc, Cominco became the most profitable mining company ever to operate in British Columbia. The conclusion suggests some consequences of Cominco's ascendancy.

Abstract In this essay, I write about the initiative of engaged legal anthropology that led to the formation of the Observatory of Justice for Afrodescendants in Latin America (OJALA), housed in the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center (KG-LACC) at Florida International University (FIU). I have been delighted to serve as OJALA’s main coordinator and founding director since February 2018. This piece’s intent is to explain the foundation of OJALA, out of an interest for understanding how the Latin American multiculturalist state “functions” in the concrete relations it threads with its Afrodescendant citizens, and particularly and most importantly, what the state’s justice system does, or doesn’t do, in the courts of law, with the legal instruments the “new Latin American constitutionalism” brought, when the time comes to defend Afrodescendants’ rights. This led us to engage in careful comparative ethnographic work on specific litigations filed by Afrodescendants in the justice systems of various Latin American countries. Ultimately, the ethnographic knowledge of Latin American justice systems “at work” will be useful for the enhancement of the public acknowledgement, protection, and defense of Afrodescendants’ rights.

Purpose There is a high prevalence of trauma among mental health clients, with risk of re-traumatisation when admitted to a Department of Psychiatry (DoP) (Kimberg and Wheeler, 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic poses challenges to therapy service operations in DoPs, with infection control measures impacting opportunities for therapeutic and social engagement. A trauma-informed care (TIC) lens was used when adapting services in Tallaght University Hospital DoP in response to COVID-19. Design/methodology/approach An interdisciplinary approach was taken to adapt therapy services during early stages of the pandemic. Changes were informed by TIC principles to minimise re-traumatisation while maintaining high-quality services. Changes included expansion of the therapeutic activity programme, changes to groups, addition of COVID-19-specific groups and increased awareness of communication support needs. Findings The early response to the pandemic, combined with the focus on TIC, resulted in continued, effective therapy services and positive client feedback. With clients’ involvement in their care enhanced, Individual Care Planning goals were achieved through group interventions. Originality/value The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented changes to mental health services. This paper highlights a response to unique challenges brought by COVID-19 on a DoP.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) (Patient Protection Affordable Care Act, 2010) remains law in the United States despite challenges and politically charged debate about its purpose in healthcare. Most agree the top three problematic areas in US healthcare are high cost, access, and equity (Kimberlin, 2022; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine [NASEM], 2021; Ritz, 2016; Kaiser Family Foundation [KFF], 2013). The ACA aims to address these issues in complex and varied ways. Nurses can capitalize on the purpose of the ACA to leverage their power to improve quality, create efficient delivery systems, and pioneer innovations in healthcare while advocating for equity for patients (Cleveland et al., 2019). The purpose of this article is to discuss how nurses are powerfully addressing issues of cost, quality, and equitable care, pioneering the future of patient centered care, and preparing the workforce to meet the challenges brought about by the financial, political, and structural challenges 12 years after the ACA.

Background: Emergency neuroimaging of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive patients with generalised new onset seizures (NOS) and a normal post-ictal neurological examination remains controversial, with the general impression being that emergency imaging is necessary because immunosuppression may blur clinical indicators of acute intracranial pathology. The objectives of our study were to establish whether cranial computed tomography (CT) affects the emergency management of HIV-positive patients with generalised NOS and a normal post-ictal neurological examination.Method: We conducted a prospective descriptive observational study. Consecutive HIVpositive patients of 18 years and older, who presented to the Kimberley Hospital Complex’s Emergency Department within 24 hours of their first generalised seizures and who had undergone normal post-ictal neurological examinations, were included. Emergency CT results as well as CD4-count levels were evaluated.Results: A total of 25 HIV-positive patients were included in the study. The results of cranial CT brought about a change in emergency care management in 12% of patients, all of them with CD4 counts below 200 cells/mm3 .Conclusion: We suggest that emergency cranial CT be performed on all HIV-positive patients presenting with generalised NOS and a normal post-ictal neurological examination, particularly if the CD4 count is below 200 cells/mm3.Keywords: HIV; Seizures; CT Brain

On 4 May 1988 a sub-adult (50 mm snout-vent length, 42 mm tail) Jones' girdled lizard Cordylus tropidosternum jonesi was collected in a pile of wood being off-loaded at the new restcamp in the Karoo National Park, Beaufort West. The wood had been transported by lorry from the Kruger National Park. The specimen is deposited in the herpetological collection of the Port Elizabeth Museum (PEM R 4584). Jones' girdled lizard is a small, arboreal cordylid that shelters under tree bark and in hollow logs. It is common and widely-distributed in the Kruger National Park (Pienaar, Haacke & Jacobsen 1983, The Reptiles of the Kruger National Park, 3rd edition. Pretoria: National Parks Board) and adjacent lowveld, being replaced in northern Zimbabwe and East Africa by the nominate race. Hewitt & Power (1913, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 3: 147-176, 1913) reported a similar translocation of the species to Kimberley in association with timber brought to the diamond mining camps. One of us noted recently the ease and danger of the unwitting spread of commensal reptile species into conservation areas (Branch 1978, Koedoe 30: 165), and this is confirmed by this additional example. We recommend that should similar shipments of wood be considered essential, then they be fumigated to prevent the translocation of other alien organisms that may potentially have more dangerous consequences.

Panelists: James Macklin, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada; Anne Thessen, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus; Robbie Burger, University of Kentucky; Ben Norton, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences Organizers: Kimberly Cook, University of Kentucky; Inna Kouper, Indiana University As research incentives become increasingly focused on collaborative work, addressing the challenges of curating interdisciplinary data becomes a priority. A panel convened at the TDWG 2021 virtual conference on October 19 discussed these issues and provided the space where people with a variety of experience curating interdisciplinary biodiversity data shared their knowledge and expertise. The panel started with a brief introduction to the challenges of interdisciplinary and highly collaborative research (IHCR), which the panel organizers have previously observed (Kouper et al. 2021). In addition to varying definitions that focus on crossing the disciplinary boundaries or synthesizing knowledge, IHCR is characterized by an increasing emphasis on computation, integration of heterogeneous data sources, and work with multiple stakeholders. As such, IHCR data does not fit with traditional lifecycle models as it requires more iterations, coordination, and shared language. Narrowing the scope to biodiversity data, the panelists acknowledged that biodiversity is a truly interdisciplinary domain where researchers and practitioners bring their diverse expertise to take care of data. The domain has a variety of contributors, including data producers, users, and curators. While they share common goals, these contributors are often fragmented in separate projects that prioritize academic disciplines or public engagement. Lack of knowledge and awareness about contributors and their projects and expertise as well as a certain vulnerability in branching out into new areas, are among the factors that make it difficult to tear down silos. As James Macklin put it, “... you're crossing a boundary into a place you don't maybe know a lot about, and for some people, that's hard to do. Right? It takes a lot of listening and thinking.” Due to their complex and interactive nature, IHCR projects almost always have a higher overhead in terms of communication, coordination, and management. Panelists agreed that for such projects there needs to be a collaboration handbook that assigns roles and responsibilities and establishes rules for various aspects of collaboration, including authorship and handling disagreements. Successful IHCR projects create such handbooks at the beginning and revisit them regularly. Another useful strategy mentioned was to hold debriefing sessions that evaluate what went well and what didn’t. Strong leadership that takes IHCR complexities into account and builds a network of capable facilitators and “bridge-builders” or “translators” is a big factor that makes projects succeed. Recognizing and encouraging the role of facilitators from the onset of the project helps to develop productive relationships across disciplines and areas of expertise. It also enables everyone to focus on their strengths and build trust. Data and metadata integration is one of the big challenges in biodiversity, although it is not unique to it. Biodiversity brings together many disciplines and each of them identifies its own problems and collects data to address them. Data silos stem from disciplinary silos, and it will take a different, more integrated, kind of cyberinfrastructure and modeling to bring these pieces together. Creating such infrastructures and standards around interdisciplinary data and metadata are serious needs, although they are not valued and rewarded enough compared to, say publishing academic papers. Lack of standardization and infrastructure also stands in the way of improving the quality of data in biodiversity. To evaluate the quality of data and to trust its creators, data users need to know who gathered and processed the data and how. When the data is re-used within a collaborative project, there is an opportunity to ask questions and find out why, for example, someone had certain naming conventions or processing and analytical approaches. Long-term data such as species’ life history traits, however, can be collected over long periods of time. Improving the quality of biodiversity data requires going beyond interpersonal communication and addressing the issues of metadata and standards more systematically. Panelists also discussed the issue of openness in connection to biodiversity data. Openness contributes to the improved quality of data and an increased return on public investment in science and research. Panelists’ positions diverged in the degree to which biodiversity data should be open and approaches to address competitiveness and sensitivity in research. On one hand, they acknowledged the need for some form of embargo on data sharing to allow data originators to benefit from their effort; on the other, they argued that lack of openness promotes silos and diminishes the quality of research and its reproducibility. Panelists briefly discussed the COVID pandemic data as an example of how lack of openness and silos can be detrimental to finding solutions: “COVID has given us the best example we have of how silos do damage to things that could have gone better. ... the data wasn't available, if it had been open or not even necessarily open but had anybody had any idea that it existed somewhere, that would have helped a lot. … We are learning those lessons, governments are changing the way they do business because of it. And so for us, I mean, our community, I think this has been one of the best things that could have happened to us in some ways, simply because it forced a change of mindset. And it has forced citizens to get engaged.” [James Macklin] The panelists, who brought a wide range of expertise to the discussion, including semantic and digitization technologies, agricultural data, evolutionary biology, and mineralogy among others, discussed projects they work on, which engaged the audience and stimulated a discussion among all participants about the role of end users in biodiversity data curation, non-traditional careers in biodiversity, and approaches to reviewing data similar to traditional research publications. Panelists and the audience also discussed the differences between “cleaning” and “annotating” data, making annotations part of the biodiversity record and data reviews. These productive discussions provide a foundation for further developments in the research and practice of curating biodiversity data and building strong interdisciplinary communities.

The following article is in response to a research project that took the form of a road trip from Perth to Lombadina re-enacting the journey undertaken by the characters in the play Bran Nue Dae by playwright Jimmy Chi and Broome band Kuckles. This project was facilitated by the assistance of a Creative and Research Publication Grant from the Faculty of Communications and Creative Industries, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. The project was carried out by researchers Kara Jacob and Margaret Hair. One thing is plainly clear. Aboriginal art expresses the possibility of human intimacy with landscapes. This is the key to its power: it makes available a rich tradition of human ethics and relationships with place and other species to a worldwide audience. For the settler Australian audience, caught ambiguously between old and new lands, their appreciation of this art embodies at least a striving for the kind of citizenship that republicans wanted: to belong to this place rather than to another (Marcia Langton in Watson 191). Marcia Langton is talking here about painting. My question is whether this “kind of citizenship” can also be accessed through appreciation of indigenous theatre, and specifically through the play Bran Nue Dae, by playwright Jimmy Chi and Broome band Kuckles, a play closely linked to the Western Australian landscape through its appropriation of the road trip genre. The physical journey taken by the characters metaphorically takes them also through the contact history of black and white Australians in Western Australia. Significantly, the non-indigenous characters experience the redemptive power of “human intimacy with landscapes” through travelling to the traditional country of their road trip companions. The road trip genre typically places its characters on a quest for knowledge. American poet Gary Snyder says that the two sources of human knowledge are symbols and sense-impressions (vii). Bran Nue Dae abounds with symbols, from the priest’s cassock and mitre to Roebourne prison; however, the sense impressions, which are so strong in the performance of the play, are missing from the written text, apart from ironic comments on the weather. In my efforts to understand Bran Nue Dae, I undertook the road trip from Perth to the Kimberley myself in order to discover those missing sense-impressions, as they form part of the “back story” of the play. In the play there is a void between the time the characters leave Perth and reach first Roebourne, where they are locked up, and then Roebuck Plains, not far from Broome, yet in the “real world” they would have travelled more than two thousand kilometres. What would they have seen and experienced on this journey? I took note of Krim Benterrak, Paddy Roe and Stephen Muecke’s Reading the Country, a cross-cultural and cross-textual study on Roebuck Plains, near Broome. Muecke talks about “stories being contingent upon place … Aboriginal storytellers have a similar policy. If one is not prepared to take the trouble to go to the place, then its story can only be given as a short version” (72). In preparing for the trip, I collected tourist brochures and maps. The use of maps, seemingly essential on any road trip as guides to “having a look at” country (Muecke ibid.), was instantly problematic in itself, in that maps represent country as colonised space. In Saltwater People, Nonie Sharp discusses the “distinction between mapping and personal journeying”: Maps and mapping describe space in a way that depersonalises it. Mapping removes the footprints of named creatures – animal, human, ancestral – who belong to this place or that place. A map can be anywhere. ‘Itineraries’, however, are actions and movements within a named and footprinted land (Sharp 199-200). The country journeyed through in Bran Nue Dae, which privileges indigenous experience, could be designated as the potentially dangerous liminal space between the “map” and the “itinerary”. This “space between” resonates with untold stories, with invisibilities. One of the most telling discoveries on the research trip was the thoroughness with which indigenous people have been made to disappear from the “mapped” zones through various colonial policies. It was very evident that indigenous people are still relegated to the fringes of town, as in Onslow and Port Hedland, in housing situations closely resembling the old missions and reserves. Although my travelling companion and I made an effort in every place we visited to pay our respects by at least finding out the language group of the traditional owners, it became clear that a major challenge in travelling through post-colonial space is in avoiding becoming complicit in the disappearance of indigenous people. We wanted our focus to be “on the people whose bodies, territories, beliefs and values have been travelled though” (Tuhiwai Smith 78) but our experience was that finding even written guides into the “footprinted land” is not easy when few tourist pamphlets acknowledge the traditional owners of the country. Even when “local Aboriginal” words are quoted, as in the CALM brochure for Nambung National Park (i.e., the Pinnacles), the actual language or language group is not mentioned. In many interpretive brochures and facilities, traditional owners are represented as absent, as victims or as prisoners. The fate of the “original inhabitants of the Greenough Flats”, the Yabbaroo people, is alluded to in the Greenough River Nature Walk Trail Guide, under the title, “A short history of Greenough River from the Rivermouth to Westbank Road”: The Gregory brothers, exploring for pastoral land in 1848, peacefully met with a large group of Aborigines camped beside a freshwater spring in a dense Melaleuca thicket. They named the spring Bootenal, from the Nyungar word Boolungal, meaning pelican. Gregory’s glowing reports of good grazing prompted pastoralists to move their flocks to Greenough, and by 1852 William Criddle was watering cattle for the Cattle Company at the Bootenal Spring. The Aborigines soon resented this intrusion and in 1854, large numbers with many from surrounding tribes, gathered in the relative safety of the Bootenal thicket. Making forays at night, they killed cattle and sheep and attacked homesteads. The pastoralists retaliated by forming a posse at Glengarry under the command of the Resident Magistrate. On the night of the 4th/5th July they rode to Bootenal and drove the Aborigines from the thicket. No arrests were made and no official report given of casualties. Aboriginal resistance in the area was finished. The fact that the extract actually describes a massacre while purporting to be a “history of Greenough River” subverts the notion that the land can ever really be “depersonalised”. At the very heart of the difference lie different ways of being human: in Aboriginal classical tradition the person dwells within a personified landscape which is alive, named, inscribed by spiritual and human agents. It is a ‘Thou’ not an ‘It’, and I and Thou belong together (Sharp 199-200). Peter Read’s book Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership contains a section titled “The Past Embedded in the Landscape” in which Read discusses whether the land holds the memory of events enacted upon it, so forming a tangible link between the dispossessed and the possessors. While discussing Judith Wright’s poem Bora Ring, Read states: “The unlaid violence of dispossession lingers at the sites of evil or old magic”, bringing to mind Wright’s notion of Australia as “a haunted country” (14). It is not surprising that the “unlaid violence of dispossession lingers” at the sites of old prisons and lock-ups, since it is built into the very architecture. The visitor pamphlet states that the 1890s design by George Temple Poole of the third Roebourne gaol, further up the great Northern Highway from Greenough and beautifully constructed from stone, “represents a way in which the state ideology of control of a remote and potentially dangerous population could be expressed in buildings”. The current Roebourne prison, still holding a majority of Aboriginal inmates, does away with any pretence of architectural elegance but expresses the same state ideology with its fence topped with razor wire. Without a guide like Bran Nue Dae’s Uncle Tadpole to keep us “off the track”, non-indigenous visitors to these old gaols, now largely museums, may be quickly led by the interpretation into the “mapped zone” – the narrative of imperialist expansion. However, we can follow Paul Carter’s injunction to “deepen grooves” and start with John Pat’s story at the Roebourne police lock-up, or the story of any indigenous inmate of the present Roebuck prison, spiralling back a century to the first Roebuck prison in settler John Withnell’s woolshed (Weightman 4). Then we gain a sense of the contact experience of the local indigenous peoples. John Withnell and his wife Emma are represented as particularly resourceful by the interpretation at the old Roebourne gaol (now Roebourne Visitors Centre and Museum). The museum has a replica of a whalebone armchair that John Withnell built for his wife with vertebrae as the seat and other bones as the back and armrests. The family also invented the canvas waterbag. The interpretation fails to mention that the same John Withnell beat an Aboriginal woman named Talarong so severely for refusing to care for sheep at Withnell’s Hillside Station that “she retreated into the bush and died of her injuries two days later”. No charges were brought against Withnell because, according to the Acting Government Resident, of the “great provocation” by Talarong in the incident (Hunt 99-100). Such omissions and silences in the official record force indigenous people into a parallel “invisible country” and leave us stranded on the highways of the “mapped zone”, bereft of our rights and responsibilities to connect either to the country or to its traditional owners. Roebourne, and its coastal port Cossack, stand on the hauntingly beautiful country of the Ngarluma and seaside Yapurarra peoples. Settlers first arrived in the 1860s and Aboriginal people began to be officially imprisoned soon after, primarily as a result of their resistance to being “blackbirded” and exploited as labour for the pearling and pastoral industries. Prisoners were chained by the neck, day and night, and forced to build roads and tramlines, ostensibly a “civilising” practice. As the history pamphlet for The Old Roebourne Gaol reads: “It was widely believed that the Roebourne Gaol was where the ‘benefit’ of white civilisation could be shown to the ‘savage’ Aboriginal” (Weightman 2). The “back story” I discovered on this research trip was one of disappearance – indigenous people being made to disappear from their countries, from non-indigenous view and from the written record. The symbols I surprisingly most engaged with and which most affected me were the gaols and prisons which the imperialists used as tools of their trade in disappearance. The sense impressions I experienced – extreme beauty, isolation, heat and sandflies – reinforced the complexity of Western Australian contact history. I began to see the central achievement of Bran Nue Dae as being the return of indigenous people to country and to story. This return, so beautifully realised in when the characters finally reach Lombadina and a state of acceptance, is critical to healing the country and to the attainment of an equitable “kind of citizenship” that denotes belonging for all. References Aboriginal Tourism Australia. Welcome to Country: Respecting Indigenous Culture for Travellers in Australia. 2004. Benterrak, Krim, Stephen Muecke, and Paddy Roe. Reading the Country. Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984. Carter, Paul. The Lie of the Land. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. Dalton, Peter. “Broome: A Multiracial Community. A Study of Social and Cultural Relationships in a Town in the West Kimberleys, Western Australia”. Thesis for Master of Arts in Anthropology. Perth: University of Western Australia, 1964. Hunt, Susan Jane. Spinifex and Hessian: Women’s Lives in North-Western Australia 1860–1900. Nedlands, WA: U of Western Australia P, 1986. Read, Peter. Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership. UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. Reynolds, Henry. North of Capricorn: The Untold History of Australia’s North. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003. Reynolds, Henry. Why Weren’t We Told? Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia, 1999. Sharp, Nonie. Saltwater People: The Waves of Memory. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Shire of Greenough. Greenough River Nature Walk Trail Guide. 2005. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies. Dunedin, New Zealand: U of Otago P, 1999. Watson, Christine. Piercing the Ground. Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre P, 2003. Weightman, Llyrus. The Old Roebourne Gaol: A History. Pilbara Classies & Printing Service. Wright, Judith. The Cry for the Dead. 1981. 277-80. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hair, Margaret. "Invisible Country." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/09-hair.php>. APA Style Hair, M. (Dec. 2005) "Invisible Country," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/09-hair.php>.

IntroductionCatastrophe surrounds us perpetually: from the Queensland floods, Christchurch earthquake, global warming, and Global Financial Crisis to social conflicts, psychological breaking points, relationship failures, and crises of understanding. As a consequence of the pervasiveness of catastrophe, its representation saturates our everyday awareness. On a daily basis we encounter stories of people impacted by and coping with natural, economic, ecological, and emotional disasters of all kinds.But what is the relationship between culture, catastrophe, and creativity? Can catastrophe be an impetus for the creative transformation of societies and individuals? Conversely, how can culture moderate, transform, and re-imagine catastrophe? And in the final analysis, how should we conceive of catastrophe; does catastrophe have a bad name? These questions and others have guided us in editing the “catastrophe” issue of M/C Journal. The word catastrophe has been associated with extreme disaster only since the 1700s. In an earlier etymological sense, catastrophe simply connoted “a reversal of what is expected” or, in Western literary history, a defining turn in a drama (Harper). Catastrophe derives from the Greek katastrophe for “an overturning; a sudden end.” As this issue clearly demonstrates, whilst catastrophes vary in scale, context, and meaning, their outcomes are life-changing inversions of the interpersonal, social, or environmental norm. In The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon echoes this definition and argues that catastrophe “can be a source of immense creativity—a shock that opens up political, social, and psychological space for fresh ideas, actions, institutions, and technologies that weren't possible before” (23). According to Homer-Dixon and on a hopeful note, “in any complex adaptive system, breakdown, if limited, can be a key part of that system's long-term resilience and renewal” (308). Indeed, many of the articles in this issue sound a note of hope. Catastrophe and Creativity The impetus for this issue comes from the Catastrophe and Creativity symposium convened at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, in 2012. The symposium brought together artists and researchers from around Australia to engage with the theme “catastrophe.” The organisers encouraged participants to conceptualise catastrophe broadly and creatively: from natural disasters to personal turning points, and from debilitating meltdowns to regenerative solutions. As a result, the topics explored in this issue stretch deeply and widely, and demonstrate the different forms and scales of catastrophe. Many of the 24 articles submitted for possible inclusion in this issue emerged as responses to the symposium theme. Distinct moods and meanings of catastrophe reverberate in the final selection of 12. The articles that shape the issue are intimate, collective, and geographical engagements with and reflections upon cataclysm that move from the highly personal to the global and speak of countries, communities, networks, friends, families, and colleagues. As a collection, the articles re-envision catastrophe as a pathway for creative interventions, artistic responses, community solidarities, social innovations, individual modes of survival and resilience, and environmental justices. In thinking through the relationship between catastrophe and culture, the authors challenge existing discourses and ways of knowing trauma, and offer fresh interpretations and hope. Catastrophe leads to metanoia: a change of perception after a significant crisis. The editors appreciate that there are no hierarchies between interpretations of catastrophe. Instead, the articles represent a dialogue between diverse experiences of pain, disaster, and abuse, as well as different theories about the nature of catastrophe—from the catastrophic loss of millions through genocide to the impact of trauma on an individual’s body and psyche. Part of the challenge of crafting this issue of M/C Journal has been in delineating what constitutes catastrophe. Admittedly we end up with more questions than we started with. Is catastrophe the same as trauma? Is it disaster? When is it apocalypse? Can catastrophe entail all these things? Who is silenced, and who can tell the narratives of catastrophe? How? Despite these unanswerable questions, we can be certain that catastrophe, as described by the authors, foundationally changes the fabric of human and non-human being in the world. The authors leave us with the lingering reverberations and resonances of catastrophe, revealing at the same time how catastrophic events can “reverse the expected” in the true sense of the word. The transformative potential of catastrophe is prominent in the issue. Some authors call for justice, support, inspiration, and resilience—on personal and community levels. The contributions remind us that, after catastrophe, the person, society, or planet will never be the same. Responses to Catastrophe The issue opens with the intimate nature of catastrophes. A feature article by esteemed Canadian academic and poet Lorri Neilsen Glenn takes the form of a lyric essay originally presented as the keynote address at the symposium. Composed of extracts from her book Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry (published here with kind permission of the author and Hagios Press) and reflective interludes, Neilsen combines her acute academic insights with personal experiences of loss to create evocative prose and poetry that, as she says, “grounds our grief in form […] connects us to one another and the worlds.” Her work opens for the reader “complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief.” In this piece, Neilsen speaks of personal catastrophe through lyric inquiry, a method she has described eloquently in the Sage Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. The second feature article is a commentary on Neilsen’s work by the equally esteemed feminist scholar Lekkie Hopkins. In her article, Hopkins explains Neilsen’s journey from literacy researcher to arts-based social science researcher to poet and lyric inquirer. Hopkins uses her reflections on the work of Neilsen in order to draw attention, not only to Neilsen’s “ground-breaking uses of lyric inquiry,” but also to another kind of communal catastrophe which Hopkins calls “the catastrophe of the methodological divide between humanities and the social sciences that runs the risk of creating, for the social sciences, a limiting and limited approach to research.” In her article “Casualties on the Road to Ethical Authenticity,” Kate Rice applies a powerful narrative inquiry to the relationship between catastrophe and ethics. As a playwright experienced in projects dealing with personal catastrophe, Rice nevertheless finds her usual research and writing practice challenged by the specific content of her current project—a play about the murder of innocents—and its focus on the real-life perpetrator. Ambivalent regarding the fascinated human response such catastrophe draws, Rice suggests that spectacle creates “comfort” associated with “processing sympathy into a feeling of self-importance at having felt pain that isn’t yours.” She also argues against a hierarchy of grief, noting that, “when you strip away the circumstances, the essence of loss is the same, whether your loved one dies of cancer, in a car accident, or a natural disaster.” In an article tracing the reverberation of catastrophe over the course of 100 years, Marcella Polain explores the impact of the Armenian Genocide’s 1.5 million deaths. Through a purposefully fragmented, non-linear narrative, Polain evokes with exquisite sensitivity the utter devastation the Genocide wreaked upon one family—her own: “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).The potentiality that can be generated in the aftermath of catastrophe also resonates in an article co-authored by Brenda Downing and Alice Cummins. (A photograph of Downing’s performance aperture is the issue’s cover image.) In their visceral evocation, the catastrophe of childhood rape is explored and enfleshed with a deft and generous touch. Downing, embodying for the reader her experience as researcher, writer, and performer, and Cummins, as Body-Mind Centering® practitioner and artistic director, explore the reciprocity of their collaboration and the performance aperture that they created together. Their collaboration made possible the realisation that “a performance […] could act as a physical, emotional, and intellectual bridge of communication between those who have experienced sexual violence and those who have not.” Maggie Phillips evokes the authoritative yet approachable voice of her 2012 symposium presentation in “Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown’s Play;” her meditation on clowns and clowning as not only a discipline and practice, but also “a state of being.” In response to large-scale catastrophe, and the catastrophic awareness of “the utter meaninglessness of human existence,” the clown offers “a tiny gesture.” As Phillips argues, however, “those fingers brushing dust off a threadbare jacket may speak volumes.” By inducing “miniscule shifts of consciousness” as they “wander across territories designated as sacred and profane with a certain insouciance and privilege,” clowns offer “glimpses of the ineffable.” In “Creativity in an Online Community as a Response to the Chaos of a Breast Cancer Diagnosis,” Cynthia Witney, Lelia Green, Leesa Costello, and Vanessa Bradshaw explore the role of online communities, such as the “Click” website, in providing support and information for women with breast cancer. Importantly, the authors show how these communities can provide a forum for the expression of creativity. Through Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” (53), the authors suggest that “becoming totally involved in the creative moment, so as to lose all track of time” allows women temporary space to “forget the trials and worries of breast cancer.” By providing a forum for women and their supporters to reach out to others in similar situations, online communities, inspired by notions of creativity and flow, can offer “some remedy for catastrophe.” A different impulse pervades Ella Mudie’s insightful examination of the Surrealist city novel. Mudie argues against the elision of historical catastrophe through contemporary practices; specifically, the current reading in the field of psychogeography of Surrealist city dérives (drifts) as playful city walks, or “an intriguing yet ultimately benign method of urban research.” Mudie revisits the Surrealist city novel, evoking the original “praxis of shock” deployed through innovative experiments in novelistic form and content. Binding the theory and practice of Surrealism to the catastrophic event from which it sprang—the Great War—Mudie argues against “domesticating movements” which “dull the awakening power” of such imaginative and desperate revolts against an increasingly mechanised society. Through discussions of natural disasters, the next three articles bring a distinctive architectural, geographical, and ecological stream to the issue. Michael Levine and William Taylor invoke Susan Sontag’s essay “The Imagination of Disaster” in conceptualising approaches to urban recovery and renewal after catastrophic events, as exemplified by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The authors are interested explicitly in the “imagination of disaster” and the “psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding,” which they find absent in Sontag’s account of the representation of urban cataclysms in 1950s and 60s science fiction films. Levine and Taylor’s article points to community ethics and social justice issues that—as they outline through different examples from film—should be at the centre of urban reconstruction initiatives. Interpretations of what is meant by reconstruction will vary substantially and, hence, so should community responses be wide-ranging. Extending the geo-spatial emphasis of Levine and Taylor’s article, Rod Giblett theorises the historical and environmental context of Hurricane Katrina using Walter Benjamin’s productive notion of the “Angel of History.” However, Giblett offers the analogous metaphor of the “Angel of Geography” as a useful way to locate catastrophe in both time (history) and space (geography). In particular, Giblett’s reading of the New Orleans disaster addresses the disruption of the city’s ecologically vital habitats over time. As such, according to Giblett, Katrina was the culmination of a series of smaller environmental catastrophes throughout the history of the city, namely the obliteration of its wetlands. Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” thereby, recognises the unity of temporal events and “sees a single, catastrophic history, not just of New Orleans but preceding and post-dating it.” Giblett’s archaeology of the Hurricane Katrina disaster provides a novel framework for reconceptualising the origins of catastrophes. Continuing the sub-theme of natural disasters, Dale Dominey-Howes returns our attention to Australia, arguing that the tsunami is poised to become the “new Australian catastrophe.” Through an analysis of Australian media coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Dominey-Howes asks provocatively: “Has extensive media coverage resulted in an improved awareness of the catastrophic potential of tsunami for Australians?” After speaking with more than 800 Australians in order to understand popular attitudes towards tsunami, the author responds with a definitive “no.” In his view, Australians are “avoiding or disallowing the reality; they normalise and dramaticise the event. Thus in Australia, to date, a cultural transformation about the catastrophic nature of tsunami has not occurred for reasons that are not entirely clear.” As the final article in the issue, “FireWatch: Creative Responses to Bushfire Catastrophe” gives insights into the real-world experience of managing catastrophes as they occur, in this case, bushfires in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia. Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, and Danielle Brady detail an Australian Research Council funded project that creatively engages with Kimberley residents who “improvise in a creative and intuitive manner” when responding to catastrophe. The authors capture responses from residents in order to redesign an interface that will provide real-time, highly useable information for the management of bushfires in Western Australia. Conclusion This “catastophe” issue of M/C Journal explores, by way of the broad reach of the articles, the relationship between culture, creativity, and catastrophe. Readers will have encountered collective creative responses to bushfire or breast cancer, individual responses to catastrophe, such as childhood rape or genocide, and cultural conceptualisations of catastrophe, for example, in relation to New Orlean’s Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The editors hope that, just like the metanoia that catastrophe can bring about (demonstrated so articulately by Downing and Cummins), readers too will experience a change of their perception of catastrophe, and will come to see catastrophe in its many fascinating iterations. References Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Harper, Douglas. “catastrophe.” Online Etymology Dictionary. 22 Mar. 2013 . Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Melbourne : Text Publishing, 2007. 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. Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light. Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Neilsen, Lorri. “Lyric Inquiry.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98.

This issue of M/C Journal asks what’s your vote worth? And what does citizenship mean now? These questions are pressing, not only for the authors and editors of this special issue, but for anyone who contends with the challenges and opportunities presented by the relationship of the individual to the modern state, the difficulty and necessity of effecting change in our polities, and the needs of individuals and communities within frameworks of unequally representative democracies. And we think that’s pretty well all of us. Talk of voting and citizenship also raise further questions about the relationship of macro-level power politics to the mundane sphere of our everyday lives. Voting is a decision that is decidedly personal, requiring the seclusion of the ballot-box, and in Australia at least, a personal inscription of one’s choice on the ballot paper. It’s an important externalisation of our private thoughts and concerns, and it links us, through our nominated representative, to the machinery of State. Citizenship is a matter of rights and duties, and describes all that we are able or expected to do in our relationship with the State and in our membership of communities, however these defined. Our level of activity as citizens is an expression of our affective relationship with State and community – the political volunteerism of small donations and envelope-stuffing, the assertions of protest, membership in unions, parties or community groups are all ways in which our mundane lives link up with tectonic shifts in national, even global governance. Ever since the debacle of the 2000 US presidential election, there has been intensified debate about the effects of apathy, spin and outright corruption on electoral politics. And since the events of the following September, citizens’ rights have been diminished and duties put on something of a war footing in Western democracies, as States militarise in the face of ‘terror’. (“Be alert, not alarmed”). Branches of cultural theory and political science have redoubled their critique of liberal democracy, and the communicative frameworks that are supposed to sustain it, with some scholars presenting voting as a false choice, political communication as lies, and discourses of citizenship as a disciplinary straightjacket. But recent events have made the editors, at least, a little more optimistic. During the time in which we were taking submissions for this special, double issue of M/C Journal, the citizens of Australia voted to change their Federal Government. After 11 years the John Howard-led Liberal Government came to an end on 23 November, swept aside in an election that cost the former PM his own seat. Within a few weeks the new Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd had, on behalf of the nation, ratified the Kyoto protocol on climate change, apologised to the indigenous ‘stolen generation’ who had been taken from their parents as part of a tragically misconceived project of assimilation, and was preparing to pull Australian combat troops out of Iraq. Australia’s long-delayed Kyoto decision was being tipped at the time of writing as an additional pressure the next US president could not possibly ignore. If the Americans sign up, pressure might in turn build on other big emitters like China to find new solutions to their energy needs. Pulling out of Iraq also left the US looking more isolated still in that seemingly interminable occupation. And the apology, though not enough on its own to overcome the terrible disadvantage of Aboriginal people, made front pages around the world, and will no doubt encourage indigenous peoples in their separate, but related struggles. After so many years of divisive intransigence on these and many other issues, after a decade in which the outgoing Government made the country a linchpin of an aggressive, US-led geopolitics of conflict, change was brought about by a succession of little things. Things like the effect on individuals’ relationships and happiness of a new, unfavourable balance in their workplace. Things like a person’s decision to renounce long-standing fears and reassurances. Things like the choices made by people holding stubby pencils in cardboard ballot boxes. These things cascaded, multiplied, and added up to some things that may become bigger than they already are. It was hard to spot these changes in the mundanity of Australia’s electoral rituals – the queue outside the local primary school, the eye-searing welter of bunting and how-to-vote cards, the floppy-hatted volunteers, and the customary fund-raising sausage-sizzle by the exit door. But they were there; they took place; and they matter. The Prime Minister before Howard, Paul Keating, had famously warned the voters off his successor during his losing campaign in 1996 by saying, at the last gasp, that ‘If you change the Prime Minister, you change the country’. For Keating, the choice embodied in a vote had consequences not just for the future of the Nation, but for its character, its being. Keating, famously, was to his bones a creature of electoral politics – he would say this, one might think, and there are many objections to be made to the claim that anything can change the country, any country, so quickly or decisively. Critical voices will say that liberal democracy really only grafts an illusion of choice onto what’s really a late-capitalist consensus – the apparent changes brought about by elections, and even the very idea of popular or national sovereignties are precisely ideological. Others will argue that democratic elections don’t qualify as a choice because there is evidence that the voters are irrational, making decisions on the basis of slender, or incorrect information, and as a result they often choose leaders that do not serve their interests. Others – like Judith Brett in her latest Quarterly Essay, “Exit Right” – argue that any talk of election results signifying a change in ‘national mood’ belies the fact that changes of government usually reflect quite small overall changes in the vote. In 2007, for example, over 46% of the Australian electorate voted for another Howard term, and only a little over 5% of us changed our minds. There is something to all of these arguments, but not enough to diminish the acts of engaged, mundane citizenship that underpinned Australia’s recent transformation. The Australian Council of Trade Unions’ ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign, which started in 2006, was a grassroots effort to build awareness about the import of the Howard Government’s neoliberal industrial relations reform. As well as bringing down the Government, this may have given Australia’s labour movement a new, independent lease of life. Organisations like GetUp also mobilised progressive grassroots activism in key electorates. Former ABC journalist Maxine McKew, the high profile Labor challenger in Howard’s seat of Bennelong, was assisted by an army of volunteer workers. They letterboxed, doorknocked and answered phones for weeks and were rewarded with the unseating of the Prime Minister. Perhaps what Keating should have said is, ‘by the time you change the Prime Minister, the country already has’. By the time the community at large starts flexing its muscles of citizenship, the big decisions have already been collectively made. In the media sphere too, there was heartening evidence of new forms of engagement. In the old media camp, Murdoch’s The Australian tried to fight a rear-guard campaign to maintain the mainstream media as the sole legitimate forum for public discussion. But its commentaries and editorials looked more than ever anachronistic, as Australia’s increasingly mature blogosphere carried debate and alternative forms of reporting on the election right throughout the year leading up to the long campaign. Politicians too made efforts to engage with participatory culture, with smart uses of Facebook, MySpace and blogs by some leading figures — and a much-derided intervention on YouTube by John Howard, whose video clip misguidedly beginning with the words ‘Good morning’ served as an emblem for a government whose moment had passed. There is evidence this year that America is changing, too, and even though the current rise of Barack Obama as a presidential contender may not result in victory, or even in his nomination, his early successes give more grounds for hope in citizenship. Although the enthusiastic reception for the speeches of this great political orator are described by cynics as ‘creepy’ or ‘cultish’, there are other ways of reading it. We could say that this is evidence of a euphoric affective reinvestment in the possibility of citizenship, and of voting as an agent for change — ‘Yes we can’ is his signature line. The enthusiasm for Obama could also simply be the relief of being able to throw off the defensive versions of citizenship that have prevailed in recent years. It could be that the greatest ‘hope’ Obama is offering is of democratic (and Democratic) renewal, a return to electoral politics, and citizenship, being conducted as if they mean something. The mechanics of Obama’s campaign suggest, too, that ordinary acts of citizenship can make a difference when it comes to institutions of great power, such as the US Presidency. Like Howard Dean before him, Obama’s campaign resourcing is powered by myriad, online gifts from small donors – ordinary men and women have ensured that Obama has more money than the Democrat-establishment Clinton campaign. If nothing else, this suggests that the ‘supply-chain’ of politics is reorienting itself to citizen engagement. Not all of the papers in this issue of M/C Journal are as optimistic as this introduction. Some of them talk about citizenship as a means of exclusion – as a way of defining ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups, as a locus of paranoia. Some see citizenship as heterogenous, and that unequal access to its benefits is a deficit in our democracy. The limits to citizenship, and to the forms of choice that liberal democracy allows need to be acknowledged. But we also need to see these mundane acts of participation as a locus of possibility, and a fulcrum for change. Everyday acts of democracy may not change the country, but they can change the framework in which our conversations about it take place. Indeed, democracy is both more popular and less popular than ever. In our feature article, Brian McNair explores the ‘democratic paradox’ that, on the one hand, democracy spread to 120 countries in the twentieth century while, on the other hand, voter participation in the more established democracies is falling. While rightly cautioning against drawing too neat an equivalence between X Factor and a general election, McNair considers the popularity of voting in participatory TV shows, noting that people will indeed vote when they are motivated enough. He asks whether the evident popularity of voting for play purposes can be harnessed into active citizenship. Melissa Bellanta questions the use of rhetoric of ‘democracy’ in relation to participatory media forms, such as voting in reality TV competitions or in online polls. Bellanta shows how audience interaction was central to late-nineteenth century popular theatre and draws provocative parallels between the ‘voting’ practices of Victorian theatre audiences and contemporary viewer-voting. She argues that the attendant rhetoric of ‘democracy’ in such interactions can divert our attention from the real characteristics of such behaviour. Digital artist xtine explores a ‘crisis of democracy’ created by tensions between participation and control. She draws upon, on the one hand, Guattari’s analysis of strategies for social change and, on the other, polemical discussions of culture jamming by Naomi Klein, and by Adbusters’ founder Kalle Lasn. Her paper introduces a number of Web projects which aim to enable new forms of local consumption and interaction. Kimberley Mullins surveys the shifting relationships between concepts of ‘public’ and ‘audience’. She discuses how these different perspectives blur and intertwine in contemporary political communication, with voters sometimes invoked as citizens and sometimes presented with entertainment spectacles in political discourse. Mark Hayward looks at the development of global television in Italy, specifically the public broadcaster RAI International, in light of the changing nature of political institutions. He links changes in the nature of the State broadcaster, RAI, with changes in national institutions made under the Berlusconi government. Hayward sees these changes as linked to a narrowing conception of citizenship used as a tool for increasingly ethno-centric forms of exclusion. Panizza Allmark considers one response to the 7 July 2005 bombings in London – the “We’re not afraid” Website, where Londoners posted images of life going on “as normal” in the face of the Tube attacks. As Allmark puts it, these photographs “promote the pleasures of western cultural values as a defense against the anxiety of terror.” Paradoxically, these “domestic snapshots” work to “arouse the collective memory of terrorism and violence”, only ambiguously resolving the impact of the 7 July events. This piece adds to the small but important literature on the relationship between photography, blogging and everyday life. James Arvanitakis’s piece, “The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average” opens out from a consideration of Australia’s Citizenship Test, introduced by the former government, into a typology of citizenship that allows for different versions of citizenship, and understandings of it “as a fluid and heterogenous phenomenon that can be in surplus, deficit, progressive and reactionary”. His typology seeks to open up new spaces for understanding citizenship as a practice, and as a relation to others, communities and the State. Anne Aly and Lelia Green’s piece, “Moderate Islam: Defining the Good Citizen”, thinks through the dilemmas Australian Muslims face in engaging with the broader community, and the heavy mediation of the state in defining the “good”, moderate Muslim identity in the age of terror. Their research is a result of a major project investigating Australian Muslim identity and citizenship, and finds that they are dealt with in media and political discourse through the lens of the “clash” between East and West embodied on the “war on terror”. For them, “religion has become the sole and only characteristic by which Muslims are recognised, denying them political citizenship and access to the public spaces of citizenship.” Alex Burns offers a critical assessment of claims made, and theories advanced about citizen media. He is skeptical about the definitions of citizenship and journalism that underpin optimistic new media theory. He notes the need for future research the reevaluates citizen journalism, and suggests an approach that builds on rich descriptions of journalistic experience, and “practice-based” approaches. Derek Barry’s “Wilde’s Evenings” offers a brief overview of the relationships between citizen journalism, the mainstream media and citizenship, through the lens of recent developments in Australia, and the 2007 Federal election, mentioned earlier in this introduction. As a practitioner and observer, Derek’s focus is on the status of citizen journalism as political activism, and whether the aim of citizen journalism, going forward, should be “payment or empowerment”. Finally, our cover image, by Drew, author of the successful Webcomic toothpastefordinner.com, offers a more sardonic take on the processes of voting and citizenship than we have in our introduction. The Web has not only provided a space for bloggers and citizen journalists, but also for a plethora of brilliant independent comic artists, who not only offer economical, mordant political commentary, but in some ways point the way towards sustainable practices in online independent media. Toothpastefordinner.com is not exclusively focused on political content, but it is flourishing on the basis of giving core content away, and subsisting largely on self-generated merchandise. This is one area for future research in online citizen media to explore. The tension between optimistic and pessimistic assessments of voting, citizenship, and the other apparatuses of liberal democracy will not be going anywhere soon, and nor will the need to “change the country” once in awhile. Meanwhile, the authors and editors of this special edition of M/C Journal hope to have explored these issues in a way that has provoked some further thought and debate among you, as voters, citizens and readers. References Brett, Judith. “Exit Right.” Quarterly Essay 28 (2008). Citation reference for this article MLA Style Meikle, Graham, Jason A. Wilson, and Barry Saunders. "Vote / Citizen." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Meikle, G., J. Wilson, and B. Saunders. (Apr. 2008) "Vote / Citizen," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/00-editorial.php>.

This issue of M/C Journal asks what’s your vote worth? And what does citizenship mean now? These questions are pressing, not only for the authors and editors of this special issue, but for anyone who contends with the challenges and opportunities presented by the relationship of the individual to the modern state, the difficulty and necessity of effecting change in our polities, and the needs of individuals and communities within frameworks of unequally representative democracies. And we think that’s pretty well all of us. Talk of voting and citizenship also raise further questions about the relationship of macro-level power politics to the mundane sphere of our everyday lives. Voting is a decision that is decidedly personal, requiring the seclusion of the ballot-box, and in Australia at least, a personal inscription of one’s choice on the ballot paper. It’s an important externalisation of our private thoughts and concerns, and it links us, through our nominated representative, to the machinery of State. Citizenship is a matter of rights and duties, and describes all that we are able or expected to do in our relationship with the State and in our membership of communities, however these defined. Our level of activity as citizens is an expression of our affective relationship with State and community – the political volunteerism of small donations and envelope-stuffing, the assertions of protest, membership in unions, parties or community groups are all ways in which our mundane lives link up with tectonic shifts in national, even global governance. Ever since the debacle of the 2000 US presidential election, there has been intensified debate about the effects of apathy, spin and outright corruption on electoral politics. And since the events of the following September, citizens’ rights have been diminished and duties put on something of a war footing in Western democracies, as States militarise in the face of ‘terror’. (“Be alert, not alarmed”). Branches of cultural theory and political science have redoubled their critique of liberal democracy, and the communicative frameworks that are supposed to sustain it, with some scholars presenting voting as a false choice, political communication as lies, and discourses of citizenship as a disciplinary straightjacket. But recent events have made the editors, at least, a little more optimistic. During the time in which we were taking submissions for this special, double issue of M/C Journal, the citizens of Australia voted to change their Federal Government. After 11 years the John Howard-led Liberal Government came to an end on 23 November, swept aside in an election that cost the former PM his own seat. Within a few weeks the new Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd had, on behalf of the nation, ratified the Kyoto protocol on climate change, apologised to the indigenous ‘stolen generation’ who had been taken from their parents as part of a tragically misconceived project of assimilation, and was preparing to pull Australian combat troops out of Iraq. Australia’s long-delayed Kyoto decision was being tipped at the time of writing as an additional pressure the next US president could not possibly ignore. If the Americans sign up, pressure might in turn build on other big emitters like China to find new solutions to their energy needs. Pulling out of Iraq also left the US looking more isolated still in that seemingly interminable occupation. And the apology, though not enough on its own to overcome the terrible disadvantage of Aboriginal people, made front pages around the world, and will no doubt encourage indigenous peoples in their separate, but related struggles. After so many years of divisive intransigence on these and many other issues, after a decade in which the outgoing Government made the country a linchpin of an aggressive, US-led geopolitics of conflict, change was brought about by a succession of little things. Things like the effect on individuals’ relationships and happiness of a new, unfavourable balance in their workplace. Things like a person’s decision to renounce long-standing fears and reassurances. Things like the choices made by people holding stubby pencils in cardboard ballot boxes. These things cascaded, multiplied, and added up to some things that may become bigger than they already are. It was hard to spot these changes in the mundanity of Australia’s electoral rituals – the queue outside the local primary school, the eye-searing welter of bunting and how-to-vote cards, the floppy-hatted volunteers, and the customary fund-raising sausage-sizzle by the exit door. But they were there; they took place; and they matter. The Prime Minister before Howard, Paul Keating, had famously warned the voters off his successor during his losing campaign in 1996 by saying, at the last gasp, that ‘If you change the Prime Minister, you change the country’. For Keating, the choice embodied in a vote had consequences not just for the future of the Nation, but for its character, its being. Keating, famously, was to his bones a creature of electoral politics – he would say this, one might think, and there are many objections to be made to the claim that anything can change the country, any country, so quickly or decisively. Critical voices will say that liberal democracy really only grafts an illusion of choice onto what’s really a late-capitalist consensus – the apparent changes brought about by elections, and even the very idea of popular or national sovereignties are precisely ideological. Others will argue that democratic elections don’t qualify as a choice because there is evidence that the voters are irrational, making decisions on the basis of slender, or incorrect information, and as a result they often choose leaders that do not serve their interests. Others – like Judith Brett in her latest Quarterly Essay, “Exit Right” – argue that any talk of election results signifying a change in ‘national mood’ belies the fact that changes of government usually reflect quite small overall changes in the vote. In 2007, for example, over 46% of the Australian electorate voted for another Howard term, and only a little over 5% of us changed our minds. There is something to all of these arguments, but not enough to diminish the acts of engaged, mundane citizenship that underpinned Australia’s recent transformation. The Australian Council of Trade Unions’ ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign, which started in 2006, was a grassroots effort to build awareness about the import of the Howard Government’s neoliberal industrial relations reform. As well as bringing down the Government, this may have given Australia’s labour movement a new, independent lease of life. Organisations like GetUp also mobilised progressive grassroots activism in key electorates. Former ABC journalist Maxine McKew, the high profile Labor challenger in Howard’s seat of Bennelong, was assisted by an army of volunteer workers. They letterboxed, doorknocked and answered phones for weeks and were rewarded with the unseating of the Prime Minister. Perhaps what Keating should have said is, ‘by the time you change the Prime Minister, the country already has’. By the time the community at large starts flexing its muscles of citizenship, the big decisions have already been collectively made. In the media sphere too, there was heartening evidence of new forms of engagement. In the old media camp, Murdoch’s The Australian tried to fight a rear-guard campaign to maintain the mainstream media as the sole legitimate forum for public discussion. But its commentaries and editorials looked more than ever anachronistic, as Australia’s increasingly mature blogosphere carried debate and alternative forms of reporting on the election right throughout the year leading up to the long campaign. Politicians too made efforts to engage with participatory culture, with smart uses of Facebook, MySpace and blogs by some leading figures — and a much-derided intervention on YouTube by John Howard, whose video clip misguidedly beginning with the words ‘Good morning’ served as an emblem for a government whose moment had passed. There is evidence this year that America is changing, too, and even though the current rise of Barack Obama as a presidential contender may not result in victory, or even in his nomination, his early successes give more grounds for hope in citizenship. Although the enthusiastic reception for the speeches of this great political orator are described by cynics as ‘creepy’ or ‘cultish’, there are other ways of reading it. We could say that this is evidence of a euphoric affective reinvestment in the possibility of citizenship, and of voting as an agent for change — ‘Yes we can’ is his signature line. The enthusiasm for Obama could also simply be the relief of being able to throw off the defensive versions of citizenship that have prevailed in recent years. It could be that the greatest ‘hope’ Obama is offering is of democratic (and Democratic) renewal, a return to electoral politics, and citizenship, being conducted as if they mean something. The mechanics of Obama’s campaign suggest, too, that ordinary acts of citizenship can make a difference when it comes to institutions of great power, such as the US Presidency. Like Howard Dean before him, Obama’s campaign resourcing is powered by myriad, online gifts from small donors – ordinary men and women have ensured that Obama has more money than the Democrat-establishment Clinton campaign. If nothing else, this suggests that the ‘supply-chain’ of politics is reorienting itself to citizen engagement. Not all of the papers in this issue of M/C Journal are as optimistic as this introduction. Some of them talk about citizenship as a means of exclusion – as a way of defining ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups, as a locus of paranoia. Some see citizenship as heterogenous, and that unequal access to its benefits is a deficit in our democracy. The limits to citizenship, and to the forms of choice that liberal democracy allows need to be acknowledged. But we also need to see these mundane acts of participation as a locus of possibility, and a fulcrum for change. Everyday acts of democracy may not change the country, but they can change the framework in which our conversations about it take place. Indeed, democracy is both more popular and less popular than ever. In our feature article, Brian McNair explores the ‘democratic paradox’ that, on the one hand, democracy spread to 120 countries in the twentieth century while, on the other hand, voter participation in the more established democracies is falling. While rightly cautioning against drawing too neat an equivalence between X Factor and a general election, McNair considers the popularity of voting in participatory TV shows, noting that people will indeed vote when they are motivated enough. He asks whether the evident popularity of voting for play purposes can be harnessed into active citizenship. Melissa Bellanta questions the use of rhetoric of ‘democracy’ in relation to participatory media forms, such as voting in reality TV competitions or in online polls. Bellanta shows how audience interaction was central to late-nineteenth century popular theatre and draws provocative parallels between the ‘voting’ practices of Victorian theatre audiences and contemporary viewer-voting. She argues that the attendant rhetoric of ‘democracy’ in such interactions can divert our attention from the real characteristics of such behaviour. Digital artist xtine explores a ‘crisis of democracy’ created by tensions between participation and control. She draws upon, on the one hand, Guattari’s analysis of strategies for social change and, on the other, polemical discussions of culture jamming by Naomi Klein, and by Adbusters’ founder Kalle Lasn. Her paper introduces a number of Web projects which aim to enable new forms of local consumption and interaction. Kimberley Mullins surveys the shifting relationships between concepts of ‘public’ and ‘audience’. She discuses how these different perspectives blur and intertwine in contemporary political communication, with voters sometimes invoked as citizens and sometimes presented with entertainment spectacles in political discourse. Mark Hayward looks at the development of global television in Italy, specifically the public broadcaster RAI International, in light of the changing nature of political institutions. He links changes in the nature of the State broadcaster, RAI, with changes in national institutions made under the Berlusconi government. Hayward sees these changes as linked to a narrowing conception of citizenship used as a tool for increasingly ethno-centric forms of exclusion. Panizza Allmark considers one response to the 7 July 2005 bombings in London – the “We’re not afraid” Website, where Londoners posted images of life going on “as normal” in the face of the Tube attacks. As Allmark puts it, these photographs “promote the pleasures of western cultural values as a defense against the anxiety of terror.” Paradoxically, these “domestic snapshots” work to “arouse the collective memory of terrorism and violence”, only ambiguously resolving the impact of the 7 July events. This piece adds to the small but important literature on the relationship between photography, blogging and everyday life. James Arvanitakis’s piece, “The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average” opens out from a consideration of Australia’s Citizenship Test, introduced by the former government, into a typology of citizenship that allows for different versions of citizenship, and understandings of it “as a fluid and heterogenous phenomenon that can be in surplus, deficit, progressive and reactionary”. His typology seeks to open up new spaces for understanding citizenship as a practice, and as a relation to others, communities and the State. Anne Aly and Lelia Green’s piece, “Moderate Islam: Defining the Good Citizen”, thinks through the dilemmas Australian Muslims face in engaging with the broader community, and the heavy mediation of the state in defining the “good”, moderate Muslim identity in the age of terror. Their research is a result of a major project investigating Australian Muslim identity and citizenship, and finds that they are dealt with in media and political discourse through the lens of the “clash” between East and West embodied on the “war on terror”. For them, “religion has become the sole and only characteristic by which Muslims are recognised, denying them political citizenship and access to the public spaces of citizenship.” Alex Burns offers a critical assessment of claims made, and theories advanced about citizen media. He is skeptical about the definitions of citizenship and journalism that underpin optimistic new media theory. He notes the need for future research the reevaluates citizen journalism, and suggests an approach that builds on rich descriptions of journalistic experience, and “practice-based” approaches. Derek Barry’s “Wilde’s Evenings” offers a brief overview of the relationships between citizen journalism, the mainstream media and citizenship, through the lens of recent developments in Australia, and the 2007 Federal election, mentioned earlier in this introduction. As a practitioner and observer, Derek’s focus is on the status of citizen journalism as political activism, and whether the aim of citizen journalism, going forward, should be “payment or empowerment”. Finally, our cover image, by Drew, author of the successful Webcomic toothpastefordinner.com, offers a more sardonic take on the processes of voting and citizenship than we have in our introduction. The Web has not only provided a space for bloggers and citizen journalists, but also for a plethora of brilliant independent comic artists, who not only offer economical, mordant political commentary, but in some ways point the way towards sustainable practices in online independent media. Toothpastefordinner.com is not exclusively focused on political content, but it is flourishing on the basis of giving core content away, and subsisting largely on self-generated merchandise. This is one area for future research in online citizen media to explore.The tension between optimistic and pessimistic assessments of voting, citizenship, and the other apparatuses of liberal democracy will not be going anywhere soon, and nor will the need to “change the country” once in awhile. Meanwhile, the authors and editors of this special edition of M/C Journal hope to have explored these issues in a way that has provoked some further thought and debate among you, as voters, citizens and readers. ReferencesBrett, Judith. “Exit Right.” Quarterly Essay 28 (2008).

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. 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Introduction The genealogy of Feminist Standpoint Theory in the 1970s prioritised “locationality”, particularly the recognition of social and historical locations as valuable contribution to knowledge production. Pioneering figures such as Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar, and Donna Haraway have argued that the oppressed must have some means (such as language, cultural practices) to enter the world of the oppressor in order to access some understanding of how the world works from the privileged perspective. In the essay “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale”, the Australian social scientist Raewyn Connell explains that the production of feminist theory almost always comes from the global North. Connell critiques the hegemony of mainstream Northern feminism in her pyramidal model (59), showing how theory/knowledge is produced at the apex (global North) of a pyramid structure and “trickles down” (59) to the global South. Connell refers to a second model called mosaic epistemology which shows that multiple feminist ideologies across global North/South are juxtaposed against each other like tiles, with each specific culture making its own claims to validity.However, Nigerian feminist Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s reflection on the fluidity of culture in her essay “Fabricating Identities” (5) suggests that fixing knowledge as Northern and Southern—disparate, discrete, and rigidly structured tiles—is also problematic. Connell proposes a third model called solidarity-based epistemology which involves mutual learning and critiquing with a focus on solidarity across differences. However, this is impractical in implementation especially given that feminist nomenclature relies on problematic terms such as “international”, “global North/South”, “transnational”, and “planetary” to categorise difference, spatiality, and temporality, often creating more distance than reciprocal exchange. Geographical specificity can be too limiting, but we also need to acknowledge that it is geographical locationality which becomes disadvantageous to overcome racial, cultural, and gender biases — and here are few examples.Nomenclatures: Global-North and Global South ParadigmThe global North/South terminology differentiating the two regions according to means of trade and relative wealth emerged from the Brandt Report’s delineation of the North as wealthy and South as impoverished in 1980s. Initially, these terms were a welcome repudiation of the hierarchical nomenclature of “developed” and “developing” nations. Nevertheless, the categories of North and South are problematic because of increased socio-economic heterogeneity causing erasure of local specificities without reflecting microscopic conflicts among feminists within the global North and the global South. Some feminist terms such as “Third World feminism” (Narayan), “global feminism” (Morgan), or “local feminisms” (Basu) aim to centre women's movements originating outside the West or in the postcolonial context, other labels attempt to making feminism more inclusive or reflective of cross-border linkages. These include “transnational feminism” (Grewal and Kaplan) and “feminism without borders” (Mohanty). In the 1980s, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality garnered attention in the US along with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which raised feminists’ awareness of educational, healthcare, and financial disparities among women and the experiences of marginalised people across the globe, leading to an interrogation of the aims and purposes of mainstream feminism. In general, global North feminism refers to white middle class feminist movements further expanded by concerns about civil rights and contemporary queer theory while global South feminism focusses on decolonisation, economic justice, and disarmament. However, the history of colonialism demonstrates that this paradigm is inadequate because the oppression and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and Queer activists have been avoided purposely in the homogenous models of women’s oppression depicted by white radical and liberal feminists. A poignant example is from Audre Lorde’s personal account:I wheeled my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!’ And your mother shushes you, but does not correct you, and so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. (Lorde)This exemplifies how the terminology global North/South is a problem because there are inequities within the North that are parallel to the division of power and resources between North and South. Additionally, Susan Friedman in Planetary Modernisms observes that although the terms “Global North” and “Global South” are “rhetorically spatial” they are “as geographically imprecise and ideologically weighted as East/West” because “Global North” signifies “modern global hegemony” and “Global South” signifies the “subaltern, … —a binary construction that continues to place the West at the controlling centre of the plot” (Friedman, 123).Focussing on research-activism debate among US feminists, Sondra Hale takes another tack, emphasising that feminism in the global South is more pragmatic than the theory-oriented feminist discourse of the North (Hale). Just as the research-scholarship binary implies myopic assumption that scholarship is a privileged activity, Hale’s observations reveal a reductive assumption in the global North and global South nomenclature that feminism at the margins is theoretically inadequate. In other words, recognising the “North” as the site of theoretical processing is a euphemism for Northern feminists’ intellectual supremacy and the inferiority of Southern feminist praxis. To wit, theories emanating from the South are often overlooked or rejected outright for not aligning with Eurocentric framings of knowledge production, thereby limiting the scope of feminist theories to those that originate in the North. For example, while discussing Indigenous women’s craft-autobiography, the standard feminist approach is to apply Susan Sontag’s theory of gender and photography to these artefacts even though it may not be applicable given the different cultural, social, and class contexts in which they are produced. Consequently, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s Islamic methodology (Mernissi), the discourse of land rights, gender equality, kinship, and rituals found in Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own, Marcia Langton’s “Grandmothers’ Law”, and the reflection on military intervention are missing from Northern feminist theoretical discussions. Moreover, “outsiders within” feminist scholars fit into Western feminist canonical requirements by publishing their works in leading Western journals or seeking higher degrees from Western institutions. In the process, Northern feminists’ intellectual hegemony is normalised and regularised. An example of the wealth of the materials outside of mainstream Western feminist theories may be found in the work of Girindrasekhar Bose, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and author of the book Concept of Repression (1921). Bose developed the “vagina envy theory” long before the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Karen Horney proposed it, but it is largely unknown in the West. Bose’s article “The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish” discarded Freud’s theory of castration and explained how in the Indian cultural context, men can cherish an unconscious desire to bear a child and to be castrated, implicitly overturning Freud’s correlative theory of “penis envy.” Indeed, the case of India shows that the birth of theory can be traced back to as early as eighth century when study of verbal ornamentation and literary semantics based on the notion of dbvani or suggestion, and the aesthetic theory of rasa or "sentiment" is developed. If theory means systematic reasoning and conceptualising the structure of thought, methods, and epistemology, it exists in all cultures but unfortunately non-Western theory is largely invisible in classroom courses.In the recent book Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dev shows that the theory is rooted in activism. Similarly, in her essay “Seed and Earth”, Leela Dube reveals how Eastern theories are distorted as they are Westernised. For instance, the “Purusha-Prakriti” concept in Hinduism where Purusha stands for pure consciousness and Prakriti stands for the entire phenomenal world is almost universally misinterpreted in terms of Western binary oppositions as masculine consciousness and feminine creative principle which has led to disastrous consequences including the legitimisation of male control over female sexuality. Dube argues how heteropatriarchy has twisted the Purusha-Prakriti philosophy to frame the reproductive metaphor of the male seed germinating in the female field for the advantage of patrilineal agrarian economies and to influence a homology between reproductive metaphors and cultural and institutional sexism (Dube 22-24). Attempting to reverse such distortions, ecofeminist Vandana Shiva rejects dualistic and exploitative “contemporary Western views of nature” (37) and employs the original Prakriti-Purusha cosmology to construct feminist vision and environmental ethics. Shiva argues that unlike Cartesian binaries where nature or Prakriti is inert and passive, in Hindu Philosophy, Purusha and Prakriti are inseparable and inviolable (Shiva 37-39). She refers to Kalika Purana where it is explained how rivers and mountains have a dual nature. “A river is a form of water, yet is has a distinct body … . We cannot know, when looking at a lifeless shell, that it contains a living being. Similarly, within the apparently inanimate rivers and mountains there dwells a hidden consciousness. Rivers and mountains take the forms they wish” (38).Scholars on the periphery who never migrated to the North find it difficult to achieve international audiences unless they colonise themselves, steeping their work in concepts and methods recognised by Western institutions and mimicking the style and format that western feminist journals follow. The best remedy for this would be to interpret border relations and economic flow between countries and across time through the prism of gender and race, an idea similar to what Sarah Radcliffe, Nina Laurie and Robert Andolina have called the “transnationalization of gender” (160).Migration between Global North and Global SouthReformulation of feminist epistemology might reasonably begin with a focus on migration and gender politics because international and interregional migration have played a crucial role in the production of feminist theories. While some white mainstream feminists acknowledge the long history of feminist imperialism, they need to be more assertive in centralising non-Western theories, scholarship, and institutions in order to resist economic inequalities and racist, patriarchal global hierarchies of military and organisational power. But these possibilities are stymied by migrants’ “de-skilling”, which maintains unequal power dynamics: when migrants move from the global South to global North, many end up in jobs for which they are overqualified because of their cultural, educational, racial, or religious alterity.In the face of a global trend of movement from South to North in search of a “better life”, visual artist Naiza Khan chose to return to Pakistan after spending her childhood in Lebanon before being trained at the University of Oxford. Living in Karachi over twenty years, Khan travels globally, researching, delivering lectures, and holding exhibitions on her art work. Auj Khan’s essay “Peripheries of Thought and Practise in Naiza Khan’s Work” argues: “Khan seems to be going through a perpetual diaspora within an ownership of her hybridity, without having really left any of her abodes. This agitated space of modern hybrid existence is a rich and ripe ground for resolution and understanding. This multiple consciousness is an edge for anyone in that space, which could be effectively made use of to establish new ground”. Naiza Khan’s works embrace loss or nostalgia and a sense of choice and autonomy within the context of unrestricted liminal geographical boundaries.Early work such as “Chastity Belt,” “Heavenly Ornaments”, “Dream”, and “The Skin She Wears” deal with the female body though Khan resists the “feminist artist” category, essentially because of limited Western associations and on account of her paradoxical, diasporic subjectivity: of “the self and the non-self, the doable and the undoable and the anxiety of possibility and choice” (Khan Webpage). Instead, Khan theorises “gender” as “personal sexuality”. The symbolic elements in her work such as corsets, skirts, and slips, though apparently Western, are purposely destabilised as she engages in re-constructing the cartography of the body in search of personal space. In “The Wardrobe”, Khan establishes a path for expressing women’s power that Western feminism barely acknowledges. Responding to the 2007 Islamabad Lal Masjid siege by militants, Khan reveals the power of the burqa to protect Muslim men by disguising their gender and sexuality; women escape the Orientalist gaze. For Khan, home is where her art is—beyond the global North and South dichotomy.In another example of de-centring Western feminist theory, the Indian-British sitar player Anoushka Shankar, who identifies as a radical pro-feminist, in her recent musical album “Land of Gold” produces what Chilla Bulbeck calls “braiding at the borderlands”. As a humanitarian response to the trauma of displacement and the plight of refugees, Shankar focusses on women giving birth during migration and the trauma of being unable to provide stability and security to their children. Grounded in maternal humility, Shankar’s album, composed by artists of diverse background as Akram Khan, singer Alev Lenz, and poet Pavana Reddy, attempts to dissolve boundaries in the midst of chaos—the dislocation, vulnerability and uncertainty experienced by migrants. The album is “a bit of this, and a bit of that” (borrowing Salman Rushdie’s definition of migration in Satanic Verses), both in terms of musical genre and cultural identities, which evokes emotion and subjective fluidity. An encouraging example of truly transnational feminist ethics, Shankar’s album reveals the chasm between global North and global South represented in the tension of a nascent friendship between a white, Western little girl and a migrant refugee child. Unlike mainstream feminism, where migration is often sympathetically feminised and exotified—or, to paraphrase bell hooks, difference is commodified (hooks 373) — Shankar’s album simultaneously exhibits regional, national, and transnational elements. The album inhabits multiple borderlands through musical genres, literature and politics, orality and text, and ethnographic and intercultural encounters. The message is: “the body is a continent / But may your heart always remain the sea" (Shankar). The human rights advocate and lawyer Randa Abdel-Fattah, in her autobiographical novel Does My Head Look Big in This?, depicts herself as “colourful adjectives” (such as “darkies”, “towel-heads”, or the “salami eaters”), painful identities imposed on her for being a Muslim woman of colour. These ultimately empower her to embrace her identity as a Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Muslim writer (Abdel-Fattah 359). In the process, Abdel-Fattah reveals how mainstream feminism participates in her marginalisation: “You’re constantly made to feel as you’re commenting as a Muslim, and somehow your views are a little bit inferior or you’re somehow a little bit more brainwashed” (Abdel-Fattah, interviewed in 2015).With her parental roots in the global South (Egyptian mother and Palestinian father), Abdel-Fattah was born and brought up in the global North, Australia (although geographically located in global South, Australia is categorised as global North for being above the world average GDP per capita) where she embraced her faith and religious identity apparently because of Islamophobia:I refuse to be an apologist, to minimise this appalling state of affairs… While I'm sick to death, as a Muslim woman, of the hypocrisy and nonsensical fatwas, I confess that I'm also tired of white women who think the answer is flashing a bit of breast so that those "poor," "infantilised" Muslim women can be "rescued" by the "enlightened" West - as if freedom was the sole preserve of secular feminists. (Abdel-Fattah, "Ending Oppression")Abdel-Fattah’s residency in the global North while advocating for justice and equality for Muslim women in both the global North and South is a classic example of the mutual dependency between the feminists in global North and global South, and the need to recognise and resist neoliberal policies applied in by the North to the South. In her novel, sixteen-year-old Amal Mohamed chooses to become a “full-time” hijab wearer in an elite school in Melbourne just after the 9/11 tragedy, the Bali bombings which killed 88 Australians, and the threat by Algerian-born Abdel Nacer Benbrika, who planned to attack popular places in Sydney and Melbourne. In such turmoil, Amal’s decision to wear the hijab amounts to more than resistance to Islamophobia: it is a passionate search for the true meaning of Islam, an attempt to embrace her hybridity as an Australian Muslim girl and above all a step towards seeking spiritual self-fulfilment. As the novel depicts Amal’s challenging journey amidst discouraging and painful, humiliating experiences, the socially constructed “bloody confusing identity hyphens” collapse (5). What remains is the beautiful veil that stands for Amal’s multi-valence subjectivity. The different shades of her hijab reflect different moods and multiple “selves” which are variously tentative, rebellious, romantic, argumentative, spiritual, and ambitious: “I am experiencing a new identity, a new expression of who I am on the inside” (25).In Griffith Review, Randa-Abdel Fattah strongly criticises the book Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks, a Wall-Street Journal reporter who travelled from global North to the South to cover Muslim women in the Middle East. Recognising the liberal feminist’s desire to explore the Orient, Randa-Abdel calls the book an example of feminist Orientalism because of the author’s inability to understand the nuanced diversity in the Muslim world, Muslim women’s purposeful downplay of agency, and, most importantly, Brooks’s inevitable veil fetishism in her trip to Gaza and lack of interest in human rights violations of Palestinian women or their lack of access to education and health services. Though Brooks travelled from Australia to the Middle East, she failed to develop partnerships with the women she met and distanced herself from them. This underscores the veracity of Amal’s observation in Abdel Fattah’s novel: “It’s mainly the migrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie” (340). 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