Journal articles on the topic 'Land speculation – Australia'

Pseudonaja textilis is a widespread and common snake in eastern parts of Australia, but its distribution in New Guinea is poorly understood, and the origin of the New Guinea populations and its timing have been the subject of much speculation. Phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA sequences from three New Guinea populations of P. textilis indicates that New Guinea was colonised from two independent eastern and western migration routes most likely in the Pleistocene. One dispersal event from northern Queensland led to the populations in eastern New Guinea (Milne Bay, Oro and Central Provinces, Papua New Guinea), whereas another, from Arnhem Land to central southern New Guinea, led to the populations from the Merauke area, Indonesian Papua. The results are consistent with the effects of Pleistocene sea level changes on the physical geography of Australasia, and are thus suggestive of a natural rather than anthropogenic origin of the New Guinea populations. The taxonomic status of the New Guinean populations is discussed.

Land-use and management practices on limed acidic and carbonate-bearing soils can fundamentally alter carbon (C) dynamics, creating an important feedback to atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations. Transformation of carbonates in such soils and its implication for C sequestration with climate change are largely unknown and there is much speculation about inorganic C sequestration via bicarbonates. Soil carbonate equilibrium is complicated, and all reactants and reaction products need to be accounted for fully to assess whether specific processes lead to a net removal of atmospheric CO2. Data are scarce on the estimates of CaCO3 stocks and the effect of land-use management practices on these stocks, and there is a lack of understanding on the fate of CO2 released from carbonates. We estimated carbonate stocks from four major soil types in Australia (Calcarosols, Vertosols, Kandosols and Chromosols). In >200-mm rainfall zone, which is important for Australian agriculture, the CaCO3-C stocks ranged from 60.7 to 2542 Mt at 0–0.3 m depth (dissolution zone), and from 260 to 15 660 Mt at 0–1.0 m depth. The combined CaCO3-C stocks in Vertosols, Kandosols and Chromosols were about 30% of those in Calcarosols. Total average CaCO3-C stocks in the dissolution zone represented 11–23% of the stocks present at 0–1.0 m depth, across the four soil types. These estimates provide a realistic picture of the current variation of CaCO3-C stocks in Australia while offering a baseline to estimate potential CO2 emission–sequestration through land-use changes for these soil types. In addition, we provide an overview of the uncertainties in accounting for CO2 emission from soil carbonate dissolution and major inorganic C transformations in soils as affected by land-use change and management practices, including liming of acidic soils and its secondary effects on the mobility of dissolved organic C. We also consider impacts of liming on mineralisation of the native soil C, and when these transformations should be considered a net atmospheric CO2 source or sink.

The notion that Australia’s large, terrestrial carnivore faunas of the middle Tertiary to Pleistocene were dominated by reptiles has gained wide acceptance in recent decades. Simple but sweeping hypotheses have been developed seeking to explain this perceived ecological phenomenon. However, a review of the literature does not support these interpretations, which are based on largely speculative and, in many cases, clearly erroneous assumptions. Few size estimates of fossil reptilian taxa are based on quantitative methodology and, regardless of method, most are restricted to maximum dimensions. For species of indeterminate growth, this practice generates misleading perceptions of biological significance. In addition to misconceptions with respect to size, much speculation concerning the lifestyles of large extinct reptiles has been represented as fact. In reality, it has yet to be demonstrated that the majority of fossil reptiles underpinning the story of reptilian domination were actually terrestrial. No postcranial evidence suggests that any Australian mekosuchine crocodylian was less aquatic than extant species, while a semi-aquatic habitus has been posited for madtsoiid snakes and even the giant varanid, Megalania. Taphonomic data equivocally supports the hypothesis that some Australian mekosuchines were better adapted to life on land than are most extant crocodylians, but still semi-aquatic and restricted to the near vicinity of major watercourses. On the other hand, the accelerating pace of discovery of new large mammalian carnivore species has undermined any prima facie case for reptilian supremacy regarding pre-Pleistocene Australia (that is, if species richness is to be used as a gauge of overall impact). However, species abundance and consumption, not richness, are the real measures. On this basis, even in Pleistocene Australia, where species richness of large mammalian carnivores was relatively low, available data expose the uncommon and geographically restricted large contemporaneous reptiles as bit players. In short, the parable of a continent subject to a Mesozoic rerun, wherein diminutive mammals trembled under the footfalls of a menagerie of gigantic ectotherms, appears to be a castle in the air. However, there may be substance to some assertions. Traditionally, erratic climate and soil-nutrient deficiency have been invoked to explain the perception of low numbers or relatively small sizes of fossil mammalian carnivore taxa in Australia. But these arguments assume a simple and positive relationship between productivity, species richness and maximum body mass and either fail to recognise, or inappropriately exclude, other factors. Productivity has undoubtedly played a role, but mono-factorial paradigms cannot account for varying species richness and body mass among Australia’s fossil faunas. Nor can they explain differences between Australian fossil faunas and those of other landmasses. Other factors that have contributed include sampling bias, a lack of internal geographic barriers, competition with large terrestrial birds and aspects of island biogeography unique to Australia, such as landmass area and isolation, both temporal and geographic.

The distribution pattern of the bizarre Australasian giant, horned, fossil turtles of the clade Meiolaniidae has puzzled biogeographers since their discovery late in the nineteenth century. While their distribution suggests a Gondwanan origin, the lack of fossil evidence from key times and places has inhibited a better understanding of their dispersal pathways to Australia and the south-west Pacific islands in which their fossils have been found. Much palaeoecological speculation related to their dispersal capabilities, ranging from purely terrestrial to freshwater, estuarine, and saltwater lifestyles, has been proposed to explain their enigmatic presence across a wide swath of Oceania. Various lines of fossil, anatomical and ecological evidence now strongly suggest a highly terrestrial lifestyle, and we believe these traits, reinforced by an abundance of marine predators and ever-widening saltwater gaps between land areas during the Late Mesozoic and Tertiary, minimise the importance of saltwater dispersal as an explanation for the observed meiolaniid distribution pattern. Here we propose that the fragmentation of Gondwana provided the main dispersal vehicle for the meiolaniids and that land connections were also used to access suitable habitats and expand their range. The recently recognised continent of Zealandia, along with Australia, South America, and probably Antarctica, transported all known meiolaniid turtles to their present locations. However, ice cover on Antarctica, and the nearly total submergence of Zealandia in essence preclude the current likelihood of fossil discovery in these critical locations. The islands of New Caledonia, Tiga (in the Loyalty Islands), Walpole, and Lord Howe served as refugia for Zealandia meiolaniids as the continent submerged.

In Australia the impact of European settlement on the indigenous human population and on flora and fauna is inevitably the subject of ongoing speculation. Major changes have occurred as a result of urban and rural developments and the introduction of agricultural practices which collectively impact on the environment and ecosystems especially through land clearing, water use and modification of water courses and water catchments. From both a human and animal health perspective, the changes as viewed by the general public are perhaps not always apparent but the impacts are no less significant. A range of microbial pathogens, parasites and other pests have been introduced to populations that often have not encountered these challenges before. Our indigenous wildlife populations have not been immune from these threats. And, if we include aquatic as well as terrestrial species of ?wildlife?, and venture to our immediate coastline, in recent years there has been profound evidence of the impact that follows the introduction of an exotic pathogen.

The Swan Book (pub. 2013) by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright is an eco-dystopian epic about the Indigenous people’s tough struggle to regain the environmental balance of the Australian continent and recover their former habitat. The book envisions a dire future in which all Australian flora and fauna—humans included—are under threat, suffering, displaced, and dying out as the result of Western colonization and its exploitative treatment of natural resources. The Swan Book goes beyond the geographical and epistemological scope of Wright’s previous two novels, Plains of Promise (pub. 1997) and Carpentaria (pub. 2006) to imagine what the Australian continent at large will look like under the ongoing pressure of the Western, exploitative production mode in a foreseeable future. The occupation of Aboriginal land in Australia’s Northern Territory since 2007 has allowed the federal government to intervene dramatically in what they term the dysfunctional remote Aboriginal communities; these are afflicted by transgenerational trauma, endemic domestic violence, alcoholism, and child sexual and substance abuse—in themselves the results of the marginal status of Indigeneity in Australian society—and continued control over valuable resources. This essay will discuss how Wright’s dystopian novel exemplifies an Indigenous turn to speculative fiction as a more successful way to address the trials and tribulations of Indigenous Australia and project a better future—an enabling songline rather than a disabling swansong.

The invasive Red-eared Slider Trachemys scripta elegans has spread extensively, forming naturalised populations on all continents except Antarctica. Ranked among the 100 worst invasive species, there are biosecurity concerns that native turtles become outcompeted and displaced, as well as other speculative impacts. The actual ecological impacts in Australia have not been properly studied, however impacts shown in other countries are concerning. Incursions have presented in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory. A number of sightings have been reported from southern Sydney, including six sites where more than one slider has persisted. The incursions at Yeramba Lagoon in the Georges River National Park and the Centennial Parklands have been the most documented, whereas incursions in the Lime Kiln Bay Wetland, Rockdale Wetlands Corridor and Audley in the Royal National Park appear to have occurred recently. To date, breeding in southern Sydney has only been confirmed at Yeramba Lagoon. A range of removal techniques have been successfully applied to eradicate isolated incursions in Brisbane and Melbourne. However, these options are difficult to implement in southern Sydney sites where incursions occur in high visitation public lands.

Northern Australian pastoral land prices have become higher and more volatile over the last twenty years, raising concerns about the potential implications of the financialization of the industry. These prices are not inevitable results of market forces, but mediated and co-constructed by a range of actors using two valuation devices: the ‘Beast Area Value’, a ‘rule of thumb’ which emerged during the early development of the industry, and the ‘Return on Investment’, a tool widely used to compare financial ventures. The Beast Area Value treats land as a commodity whose value is derived from its physical characteristics, while the Return on Investment treats land as an asset whose value is based on its future income generation potential. This article describes how some pastoral companies are strategically combining these devices to earn capital gains through ‘speculative development’ of properties in ways that do not necessarily increase their productivity. It argues that pastoral land is often developed in ways more reflective of the valuation devices used in the region than of the realities of station management, representing a shift from competing in the sphere of production to competing in the sphere of valuation and implicating these devices in the financialization of Northern Australian land.

In both the New and Old Worlds, the railways were invariably the largest business enterprises of the nineteenth century in terms of both employment and capitalisation. This article explores whether Australia’s railroads were also seminal institutions for the employment of accountants and the advance of their discipline, through a consideration of the effects of commonalities and differences with the American experience. Commonalities exist in the similar roles played by American and Australian railways in the global economy, while differences principally relate to ownership structure – the former being privately owned and the latter state-owned. State ownership is found to have had a more significant influence than economic commonalities. Financial accounting was retarded due to (1) dealings with investment markets being the responsibility of Parliamentarians and (2) the abstinence of Australian railways from financial endeavours such as land speculation. The domination of cost accounting by professional engineers also left little room for qualified accountants.

Recent Exchanges have focused on economic geography’s purported ‘decline’ and its patriarchal and generational privilege, asking ‘who speaks’ for the subdiscipline. This Exchanges piece asks another kind of existential question: what ends does economic geography serve? And how is economic geographical expertise marshalled and performed towards such ends – especially beyond the British context, where much of the debate has focused? Drawing briefly upon collaborative research experiences in Sydney, Australia, I offer thoughts on progressive contributions arising from grounded empirical research within cities subject to profound transformation from speculative real estate, and hypercharged by global finance. Amid unsolicited plans for massive rezoning of industrial spaces and accompanying displacement of manufacturing, repair and cultural industries, credible economic geographical data assisted activists and sympathetic local decisionmakers by bringing to light the significance of existing spaces of work (especially in industrially zoned land) subject to rezoning plans. Contestation over massive real estate proposals continues in Sydney, but empirical research targeted at public debate has nevertheless already shifted the narrative. While academic privilege and expert status warrants intra-disciplinary critique, what also matters is whether, how and where economic geographers deploy expertise productively towards progressive ends. Hence, critically engaged economic geography flourishes in different forms beyond the discipline's imagined ‘core’ places, even via quite ‘dry’ empirical studies that on the surface do not declare radical intents. Economic geographers are key intermediaries circulating knowledges, active agents in making concrete manifestations of the economy known. And that is a crucial point of intervention.

Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he? - Habakkuk 1:13 Australia's official national anthem since 1984 has been a song entitled 'Advance Australia Fair'1. This paper asks, very simply, what is the meaning of the word fair in the title and the song. The song is about a collective effort, not so much at being a nation as at being seen to be one, being worthy of the name. The claim is justified on two grounds: possession and intention. We have golden soil, wealth, youth, the ability to toil, freedom, a beautiful country possessed of nature's gifts, boundless plains and so on. We make no particular claim to have done anything as yet but we have good intentions, specifically to toil with hearts and hands to make our nation famous as such. The setting of the song then is temporally ambiguous: we have x and we're about to y. The question naturally enough is: who are we? The song is naturally enough, as an anthem, about answering and not answering that question. Note that the hymn-like qualities of 'God save the Queen' are absent from the new anthem. And yet the song begins as if it were a hymn or a prayer, with the formula: 'Let us (pray/sing?)'. A pseudo-hymn. Who is addressed? We are. The temporal setting of the hymn is substituted with the imminence of an imperative: 'Let us rejoice.' Rejoicing is something we should all do for a long list of reasons. That being the case, 'let us sing'. In 'Advance Australia Fair' it is the imminent future to which voices attend in their act of unison. Whose act of unison? Who is the we? Anthems are always coy about this question which touches on their function and their efficacy. The unspoken answer which the song implies is however that the we addressing and addressed the self-identifying we of the song is fair and going to be fair, and will get there by being fair. That kind of fairness I would argue is characteristic of the we of white man's burden. 'Advance Australia Fair' is eat your cake and have it too stuff: we want to be a young nation about to play on the world's stage but at the same time we want to pretend that what is ours has an eternal quality. We want to borrow the timeless land myth; we don't want to acknowledge the time before our coming. We don't anymore even want to acknowledge our coming. We want to have always been here; but in an ahistoric way. The past should be irrelevant to the way we are now. This consciousness of an identity of pretended eternal rights is only achieved by multiple erasure: of time before the historic, of our historic consciousness of time. It is achieved by means of the terra nullius myth, the myth of an empty land prior to our coming. The song as it stands, the anthem as it is, is the perfect representative of that myth. The explanation of 'the historic facts' in the original version has been removed as an embarrassment. The emptiness posited by 'Advance Australia Fair' is deeply ironic. It represents a refusal of the ethical question which must lie under European presence in Australia. The land is empty because we emptied it. We have land to share because we took land. We only get to look generous because of a theft for which we do not wish to acknowledge responsibility. We sing from an emptiness wrought on ourselves in the act of emptying; the emptying of the land and at once the popular consciousness: emptying it of the fact of the emptying. Emptying ourselves of truth is the reflective act of nation: the basis of the collectivity on which a polity is claimed. It is a making colourless. How fair would that be? The 'Australians all...' update leaves untouched two serious problems with the song, these being the ways in which it might be unsatisfactory from the point of view of indigenous Australians (i.e. their erasure) and, linked with this, the serious ambiguity of the title and the chorus: the problem with the word 'fair'. The word-order inversion in the title/chorus is a kind of pseudo-archaism which tilts the song in the direction of the unintelligible. The inscrutable sign of identity becomes a kind of rite of passage; something which needs to be explained to children and migrants alike. Perfect form of mystification to express as collective sentiment the sentiment of collectivity; no one can definitively know what these words mean. The unknowable privileges a teachers' grasp of the archaic as originary lore: the teacher says it means 'Let's all work together to make Australia a beautiful country, a great country' or 'We should all be proud of Australia because it's such a great country, so we should pull together to make it even better.' Fair enough. Who could object? The central ambiguity means that when we sing the song we don't know whether we are describing how things are or how they should be. Advance Australia because it is fair or so that it will be fair or both reasons: to keep the fair fair? Of course this speculation begs the question about the meaning of the word 'fair'. Of all the various dictionary entries for the word fair the three which seem to coalesce in this usage are: fair as in beautiful, fair as in just and fair as in white. I would argue that these three uses coalesce likewise in the use of fair equally in that typically Australian expression, fair enough: characteristic expression of a country seriously worried for most of its European history about the risk of racial impurity even from 'other' Europeans. In the song the line is emphatic because it is actually repeated in each rendition of the chorus. It is the point the song is making. Or we could say it is the question the song asks: how should Australia be advanced? But this form of the question implies an adverbial construction. An adverb in this position would imply process and therefore a future orientation toward the quality of that process: how Australia ought to be advanced. But if the 'fair' of the chorus is really an adjective then the implication is that Australia is already a 'fair' entity; in advancing Australia one advances its already attained quality of fairness. The beautiful inhabit a just polity. A just polity is a white polity. This is the advance, in the song, that is happening, or has happened, in Australia. In fact this is the advance which the European word (Latin made English down here) constitutes for the continent formerly known to Europe as New Holland: Australia is becoming a white man's country. This song is specifically about the civilising process, about the white man's burden, as it applied to this particular far-flung reach of empire. The advance of the title concerns the progress of civilisation; it assigns to this process a very specific metaphor, that of a military movement. The progress of the white race over the continent is an advance. What appears to be an external motion (promote Australia abroad) belies an internal one: the still ongoing process of conquest and likewise the encouragement to get that done without miscegenation. That Aborigines are given no specific role in this song becomes less mysterious in this light: it is not their country or nationality which is being described here; rather the advance of fair Australia, an advance which takes place at the expense of an unmentioned (unmentionable?) non-polity. The non-inclusion of Aboriginal people in the Australian polity prior to the 1967 referendum shocks many today. And it shocks as unjust, unfair, unreasonable. That it did not seem so for long stretches of white Australia's memory indicates that a different logic was then in force. The convergence of moral value or integrity with race, with language, with tribal membership, is certainly a widespread human phenomenon and one with plenty of Old Testament backing (and plenty of Old Testament caveat as well). And it is familiar to anyone over the age of about thirty in Australia today, to anyone who ever sang the hymn 'All things white and wonderful'. That it is a sentiment unacceptable today in a world dominated by human rights consciousness indicates that the ethics of the last couple of decades have evolved radically from those which preceded them. The British Empire may have carted a lot of white man's burden about the globe but it is fairly hard to claim that it did not primarily exist for the benefit of white men. To argue otherwise now is to acquiesce in a rhetoric which those of us who accept universal human rights have no choice but to reject as racist. Today the civilising mission of the white man and the personal gain it brought white men remain spectacularly successful even and perhaps especially as the colour has been drained from the map. The sun sets on one kind of empire but only because that empire has been succeeded by one more lucrative, and, like the words of the successful anthem, harder to pin down than those in the one that preceded it. As to the event of singing ourselves into the 'fair' future: three connotations just, beautiful, white conflate in an ambiguity where through repetition, through emphasis, and through the dignifying effect of an anthem setting, they come to imply each other. The unspoken terms of the song suffice to imply the conflation: the white man (now all the people) toil to make the land beautiful and just. Whether this is an accomplished fact or an uphill battle, regardless of who is now included in this mission, there is no doubt that this notion of progress as 'Australia-making' is owing to the coming of the white man. Should the question be asked of this chorus then: if this is not blatant racism, is it something subtler? Is it a kind of deep-seated racism which survives the bowdlerizing of those for whom white supremacist rhetoric might be a little close to the bone? One can go further: this polysemy, on which nothing can be pinned, might be a closet racist's gift, because it generates paranoia. It accumulates the force of an exclusion without resorting to any culpable act of exclusion as such. Is this racism at the inscrutable and unconscious core of the nation's sense of itself? Is this the taunting of those whom the nation defines itself as excluding? Is this song taunting them to sing themselves out of the picture? If so then note that they would have two ways to go: they could be assimilated (fair enough?) or they could see themselves excluded. If the effect of this chorus is to say that Australia should go forward under the stewardship of the fair=inter alia white race2, then it is not a question of a particular idea of progress being conveyed despite the erasure of a previous story. The erasure of a particular past, which we are too polite to mention, enables the new story. The other past is erased together with the others who inhabited it. In the world outside of the song however, the others, whom we might be too polite to see, do still inhabit. They inhabit the new story, not as flies on the wall but as flies in the ointment. Should the song be scrapped? Should the lyrics be scrapped? The project of dismantling empires and their signs is, as the eastern bloc has been learning, not as straightforward as it may seem. Cutting the star out of the flag may leave a star-shaped hole for all to see. Advance Australia Fair, its evolution, its status, its popular reading, taboo readings (e.g. this one), the suppression of its earlier version, the fact that what it says and fails to say is officially accepted by Australians to represent Australians: all these things are living reminders of where Australians come from, of the thinking that brought us, of what we possess and how we come to possess it. Fostering awareness of these is of great value to Australians both in understanding ourselves and in deciding where we should go with that knowledge. Thanks to my mother, Sylvia Kelen, for help with research on this paper. Notes 1 It first succeeded 'God Save the Queen' in that role in 1974 following a national opinion poll conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics for the then Labor government. Incoming Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, reinstated 'God Save the Queen' in 1976. 'Advance Australia Fair' was politically corrected (not a phrase in use at the time) when re-instated as national anthem in 1984, with a view to giving the girls a fair go. The original opening line of Peter Dodds McCormick's nineteenth century song was: 'Australian sons let us rejoice/for we are young and free'. The 'correction' of the present version of the song is noteworthy given the emphasis which the song, and particularly the chorus, places on historical consciousness, more specifically on the self-consciousness of an effort at nationhood. 2 Note that there is plenty of evidence for this in the evolution of the song, especially in the second stanza of the original version: When gallant Cook from Albion sail'd, To trace wide oceans o'er, True British courage bore him onTill he landed on our shore. Then here he raised old England's flag, The standard of the brave; With all her faults we love her still, 'Britannia rules the wave'In joyful, etc The fourth and fifth stanzas of the original version of Peter Dodds McCormick's song describe who would be acceptable as a migrant and what this new political entity would be defending itself from in the case of war:While other nations of the globe Behold us from afar, We'll rise to high renown and shineLike our glorious southern star;From England, Scotia, Erin's Isle, Who come our lot to share, Let all combine with heart and handTo advance and etc.Should foreign foe e'er sight our coast,Or dare a foot to land, We'll rise to arms like sires of yoreTo guard our native strand; Britannia then shall surely know, Beyond wide ocean's roll, Her son's in fair Australia's landStill keep a British soul, In joyful strains and etc. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kelen, Christopher. "How fair is fair? " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/fairisfair.php>. Chicago Style Kelen, Christopher, "How fair is fair? " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/fairisfair.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Kelen, Christopher. (2002) How fair is fair? . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/fairisfair.php> ([your date of access]).

The term “coffee palace” was primarily used in Australia to describe the temperance hotels that were built in the last decades of the 19th century, although there are references to the term also being used to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom (Denby 174). Built in response to the worldwide temperance movement, which reached its pinnacle in the 1880s in Australia, coffee palaces were hotels that did not serve alcohol. This was a unique time in Australia’s architectural development as the economic boom fuelled by the gold rush in the 1850s, and the demand for ostentatious display that gathered momentum during the following years, afforded the use of richly ornamental High Victorian architecture and resulted in very majestic structures; hence the term “palace” (Freeland 121). The often multi-storied coffee palaces were found in every capital city as well as regional areas such as Geelong and Broken Hill, and locales as remote as Maria Island on the east coast of Tasmania. Presented as upholding family values and discouraging drunkenness, the coffee palaces were most popular in seaside resorts such as Barwon Heads in Victoria, where they catered to families. Coffee palaces were also constructed on a grand scale to provide accommodation for international and interstate visitors attending the international exhibitions held in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880 and 1888). While the temperance movement lasted well over 100 years, the life of coffee palaces was relatively short-lived. Nevertheless, coffee palaces were very much part of Australia’s cultural landscape. In this article, I examine the rise and demise of coffee palaces associated with the temperance movement and argue that coffee palaces established in the name of abstinence were modelled on the coffee houses that spread throughout Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Enlightenment—a time when the human mind could be said to have been liberated from inebriation and the dogmatic state of ignorance. The Temperance Movement At a time when newspapers are full of lurid stories about binge-drinking and the alleged ill-effects of the liberalisation of licensing laws, as well as concerns over the growing trend of marketing easy-to-drink products (such as the so-called “alcopops”) to teenagers, it is difficult to think of a period when the total suppression of the alcohol trade was seriously debated in Australia. The cause of temperance has almost completely vanished from view, yet for well over a century—from 1830 to the outbreak of the Second World War—the control or even total abolition of the liquor trade was a major political issue—one that split the country, brought thousands onto the streets in demonstrations, and influenced the outcome of elections. Between 1911 and 1925 referenda to either limit or prohibit the sale of alcohol were held in most States. While moves to bring about abolition failed, Fitzgerald notes that almost one in three Australian voters expressed their support for prohibition of alcohol in their State (145). Today, the temperance movement’s platform has largely been forgotten, killed off by the practical example of the United States, where prohibition of the legal sale of alcohol served only to hand control of the liquor traffic to organised crime. Coffee Houses and the Enlightenment Although tea has long been considered the beverage of sobriety, it was coffee that came to be regarded as the very antithesis of alcohol. When the first coffee house opened in London in the early 1650s, customers were bewildered by this strange new drink from the Middle East—hot, bitter, and black as soot. But those who tried coffee were, reports Ellis, soon won over, and coffee houses were opened across London, Oxford, and Cambridge and, in the following decades, Europe and North America. Tea, equally exotic, entered the English market slightly later than coffee (in 1664), but was more expensive and remained a rarity long after coffee had become ubiquitous in London (Ellis 123-24). The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine. Both were safer to drink than water, which was liable to be contaminated. Coffee, like beer, was made using boiled water and, therefore, provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. There was also the added benefit that those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert rather than mildly inebriated (Standage 135). It was also thought that coffee had a stimulating effect upon the “nervous system,” so much so that the French called coffee une boisson intellectuelle (an intellectual beverage), because of its stimulating effect on the brain (Muskett 71). In Oxford, the British called their coffee houses “penny universities,” a penny then being the price of a cup of coffee (Standage 158). Coffee houses were, moreover, more than places that sold coffee. Unlike other institutions of the period, rank and birth had no place (Ellis 59). The coffee house became the centre of urban life, creating a distinctive social culture by treating all customers as equals. Egalitarianism, however, did not extend to women—at least not in London. Around its egalitarian (but male) tables, merchants discussed and conducted business, writers and poets held discussions, scientists demonstrated experiments, and philosophers deliberated ideas and reforms. For the price of a cup (or “dish” as it was then known) of coffee, a man could read the latest pamphlets and newsletters, chat with other patrons, strike business deals, keep up with the latest political gossip, find out what other people thought of a new book, or take part in literary or philosophical discussions. Like today’s Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, Europe’s coffee houses functioned as an information network where ideas circulated and spread from coffee house to coffee house. In this way, drinking coffee in the coffee house became a metaphor for people getting together to share ideas in a sober environment, a concept that remains today. According to Standage, this information network fuelled the Enlightenment (133), prompting an explosion of creativity. Coffee houses provided an entirely new environment for political, financial, scientific, and literary change, as people gathered, discussed, and debated issues within their walls. Entrepreneurs and scientists teamed up to form companies to exploit new inventions and discoveries in manufacturing and mining, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution (Standage 163). The stock market and insurance companies also had their birth in the coffee house. As a result, coffee was seen to be the epitome of modernity and progress and, as such, was the ideal beverage for the Age of Reason. By the 19th century, however, the era of coffee houses had passed. Most of them had evolved into exclusive men’s clubs, each geared towards a certain segment of society. Tea was now more affordable and fashionable, and teahouses, which drew clientele from both sexes, began to grow in popularity. Tea, however, had always been Australia’s most popular non-alcoholic drink. Tea (and coffee) along with other alien plants had been part of the cargo unloaded onto Australian shores with the First Fleet in 1788. Coffee, mainly from Brazil and Jamaica, remained a constant import but was taxed more heavily than tea and was, therefore, more expensive. Furthermore, tea was much easier to make than coffee. To brew tea, all that is needed is to add boiling water, coffee, in contrast, required roasting, grinding and brewing. According to Symons, until the 1930s, Australians were the largest consumers of tea in the world (19). In spite of this, and as coffee, since its introduction into Europe, was regarded as the antidote to alcohol, the temperance movement established coffee palaces. In the early 1870s in Britain, the temperance movement had revived the coffee house to provide an alternative to the gin taverns that were so attractive to the working classes of the Industrial Age (Clarke 5). Unlike the earlier coffee house, this revived incarnation provided accommodation and was open to men, women and children. “Cheap and wholesome food,” was available as well as reading rooms supplied with newspapers and periodicals, and games and smoking rooms (Clarke 20). In Australia, coffee palaces did not seek the working classes, as clientele: at least in the cities they were largely for the nouveau riche. Coffee Palaces The discovery of gold in 1851 changed the direction of the Australian economy. An investment boom followed, with an influx of foreign funds and English banks lending freely to colonial speculators. By the 1880s, the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy boomed and land prices were highly inflated. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Spurred on by these positive economic conditions and the newly extended inter-colonial rail network, international exhibitions were held in both Sydney and Melbourne. To celebrate modern technology and design in an industrial age, international exhibitions were phenomena that had spread throughout Europe and much of the world from the mid-19th century. According to Davison, exhibitions were “integral to the culture of nineteenth century industrialising societies” (158). In particular, these exhibitions provided the colonies with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world their economic power and achievements in the sciences, the arts and education, as well as to promote their commerce and industry. Massive purpose-built buildings were constructed to house the exhibition halls. In Sydney, the Garden Palace was erected in the Botanic Gardens for the 1879 Exhibition (it burnt down in 1882). In Melbourne, the Royal Exhibition Building, now a World Heritage site, was built in the Carlton Gardens for the 1880 Exhibition and extended for the 1888 Centennial Exhibition. Accommodation was required for the some one million interstate and international visitors who were to pass through the gates of the Garden Palace in Sydney. To meet this need, the temperance movement, keen to provide alternative accommodation to licensed hotels, backed the establishment of Sydney’s coffee palaces. The Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company was formed in 1878 to operate and manage a number of coffee palaces constructed during the 1870s. These were designed to compete with hotels by “offering all the ordinary advantages of those establishments without the allurements of the drink” (Murdoch). Coffee palaces were much more than ordinary hotels—they were often multi-purpose or mixed-use buildings that included a large number of rooms for accommodation as well as ballrooms and other leisure facilities to attract people away from pubs. As the Australian Town and Country Journal reveals, their services included the supply of affordable, wholesome food, either in the form of regular meals or occasional refreshments, cooked in kitchens fitted with the latest in culinary accoutrements. These “culinary temples” also provided smoking rooms, chess and billiard rooms, and rooms where people could read books, periodicals and all the local and national papers for free (121). Similar to the coffee houses of the Enlightenment, the coffee palaces brought businessmen, artists, writers, engineers, and scientists attending the exhibitions together to eat and drink (non-alcoholic), socialise and conduct business. The Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace located in York Street in Sydney produced a practical guide for potential investors and businessmen titled International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney. It included information on the location of government departments, educational institutions, hospitals, charitable organisations, and embassies, as well as a list of the tariffs on goods from food to opium (1–17). Women, particularly the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were a formidable force in the temperance movement (intemperance was generally regarded as a male problem and, more specifically, a husband problem). Murdoch argues, however, that much of the success of the push to establish coffee palaces was due to male politicians with business interests, such as the one-time Victorian premiere James Munro. Considered a stern, moral church-going leader, Munro expanded the temperance movement into a fanatical force with extraordinary power, which is perhaps why the temperance movement had its greatest following in Victoria (Murdoch). Several prestigious hotels were constructed to provide accommodation for visitors to the international exhibitions in Melbourne. Munro was responsible for building many of the city’s coffee palaces, including the Victoria (1880) and the Federal Coffee Palace (1888) in Collins Street. After establishing the Grand Coffee Palace Company, Munro took over the Grand Hotel (now the Windsor) in 1886. Munro expanded the hotel to accommodate some of the two million visitors who were to attend the Centenary Exhibition, renamed it the Grand Coffee Palace, and ceremoniously burnt its liquor licence at the official opening (Murdoch). By 1888 there were more than 50 coffee palaces in the city of Melbourne alone and Munro held thousands of shares in coffee palaces, including those in Geelong and Broken Hill. With its opening planned to commemorate the centenary of the founding of Australia and the 1888 International Exhibition, the construction of the Federal Coffee Palace, one of the largest hotels in Australia, was perhaps the greatest monument to the temperance movement. Designed in the French Renaissance style, the façade was embellished with statues, griffins and Venus in a chariot drawn by four seahorses. The building was crowned with an iron-framed domed tower. New passenger elevators—first demonstrated at the Sydney Exhibition—allowed the building to soar to seven storeys. According to the Federal Coffee Palace Visitor’s Guide, which was presented to every visitor, there were three lifts for passengers and others for luggage. Bedrooms were located on the top five floors, while the stately ground and first floors contained majestic dining, lounge, sitting, smoking, writing, and billiard rooms. There were electric service bells, gaslights, and kitchens “fitted with the most approved inventions for aiding proficients [sic] in the culinary arts,” while the luxury brand Pears soap was used in the lavatories and bathrooms (16–17). In 1891, a spectacular financial crash brought the economic boom to an abrupt end. The British economy was in crisis and to meet the predicament, English banks withdrew their funds in Australia. There was a wholesale collapse of building companies, mortgage banks and other financial institutions during 1891 and 1892 and much of the banking system was halted during 1893 (Attard). Meanwhile, however, while the eastern States were in the economic doldrums, gold was discovered in 1892 at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and, within two years, the west of the continent was transformed. As gold poured back to the capital city of Perth, the long dormant settlement hurriedly caught up and began to emulate the rest of Australia, including the construction of ornately detailed coffee palaces (Freeman 130). By 1904, Perth had 20 coffee palaces. When the No. 2 Coffee Palace opened in Pitt Street, Sydney, in 1880, the Australian Town and Country Journal reported that coffee palaces were “not only fashionable, but appear to have acquired a permanent footing in Sydney” (121). The coffee palace era, however, was relatively short-lived. Driven more by reformist and economic zeal than by good business sense, many were in financial trouble when the 1890’s Depression hit. Leading figures in the temperance movement were also involved in land speculation and building societies and when these schemes collapsed, many, including Munro, were financially ruined. Many of the palaces closed or were forced to apply for liquor licences in order to stay afloat. Others developed another life after the temperance movement’s influence waned and the coffee palace fad faded, and many were later demolished to make way for more modern buildings. The Federal was licensed in 1923 and traded as the Federal Hotel until its demolition in 1973. The Victoria, however, did not succumb to a liquor licence until 1967. The Sydney Coffee Palace in Woolloomooloo became the Sydney Eye Hospital and, more recently, smart apartments. Some fine examples still survive as reminders of Australia’s social and cultural heritage. The Windsor in Melbourne’s Spring Street and the Broken Hill Hotel, a massive three-story iconic pub in the outback now called simply “The Palace,” are some examples. Tea remained the beverage of choice in Australia until the 1950s when the lifting of government controls on the importation of coffee and the influence of American foodways coincided with the arrival of espresso-loving immigrants. As Australians were introduced to the espresso machine, the short black, the cappuccino, and the café latte and (reminiscent of the Enlightenment), the post-war malaise was shed in favour of the energy and vigour of modernist thought and creativity, fuelled in at least a small part by caffeine and the emergent café culture (Teffer). Although the temperance movement’s attempt to provide an alternative to the ubiquitous pubs failed, coffee has now outstripped the consumption of tea and today’s café culture ensures that wherever coffee is consumed, there is the possibility of a continuation of the Enlightenment’s lively discussions, exchange of news, and dissemination of ideas and information in a sober environment. References Attard, Bernard. “The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction.” EH.net Encyclopedia. 5 Feb. (2012) ‹http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/attard.australia›. Blainey, Anna. “The Prohibition and Total Abstinence Movement in Australia 1880–1910.” Food, Power and Community: Essays in the History of Food and Drink. Ed. Robert Dare. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1999. 142–52. Boyce, Francis Bertie. “Shall I Vote for No License?” An address delivered at the Convention of the Parramatta Branch of New South Wales Alliance, 3 September 1906. 3rd ed. Parramatta: New South Wales Alliance, 1907. Clarke, James Freeman. Coffee Houses and Coffee Palaces in England. Boston: George H. Ellis, 1882. “Coffee Palace, No. 2.” Australian Town and Country Journal. 17 Jul. 1880: 121. Davison, Graeme. “Festivals of Nationhood: The International Exhibitions.” Australian Cultural History. Eds. S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 158–77. Denby, Elaine. Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. Federal Coffee Palace. The Federal Coffee Palace Visitors’ Guide to Melbourne, Its Suburbs, and Other Parts of the Colony of Victoria: Views of the Principal Public and Commercial Buildings in Melbourne, With a Bird’s Eye View of the City; and History of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, etc. Melbourne: Federal Coffee House Company, 1888. Fitzgerald, Ross, and Trevor Jordan. Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2009. Freeland, John. The Australian Pub. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1977. Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace. International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney, Restaurant and Temperance Hotel. Sydney: Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace, 1879. Mitchell, Ann M. “Munro, James (1832–1908).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National U, 2006-12. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/munro-james-4271/text6905›. Murdoch, Sally. “Coffee Palaces.” Encyclopaedia of Melbourne. Eds. Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00371b.htm›. Muskett, Philip E. The Art of Living in Australia. New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1987. Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. New York: Walker & Company, 2005. Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company Limited. Memorandum of Association of the Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company, Ltd. Sydney: Samuel Edward Lees, 1879. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Teffer, Nicola. Coffee Customs. Exhibition Catalogue. Sydney: Customs House, 2005.

Special Care Notice This paper discusses trauma and violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania through the process of colonisation. Content within this paper may be distressing to some readers. Introduction The decimation of the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) was systematic and swift. First Contact was an emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually confronting series of encounters for the Indigenous inhabitants. There were, according to some early records, a few examples of peaceful interactions (Morris 84). Yet, the inevitable competition over resources, and the intensity with which colonists pursued their “claims” for food, land, and water, quickly transformed amicable relationships into hostile rivalries. Jennifer Gall has written that, as “European settlement expanded in the late 1820s, violent exchanges between settlers and Aboriginal people were frequent, brutal and unchecked” (58). Indeed, the near-annihilation of the original custodians of the land was, if viewed through the lens of time, a process that could be described as one that was especially efficient. As John Morris notes: in 1803, when the first settlers arrived in Van Diemen’s Land, the Aborigines had already inhabited the island for some 25,000 years and the population has been estimated at 4,000. Seventy-three years later, Truganinni, [often cited as] the last Tasmanian of full Aboriginal descent, was dead. (84) Against a backdrop of extreme violence, often referred to as the Black War (Clements 1), there were some, admittedly dubious, efforts to contain the bloodshed. One such effort, in the late 1820s, was the production, and subsequent distribution, of a set of Proclamation Boards. Approximately 100 Proclamation Boards (the Board) were introduced by the Lieutenant Governor of the day, George Arthur (after whom Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula is named). The purpose of these Boards was to communicate, via a four-strip pictogram, to the Indigenous peoples of the island colony that all people—black and white—were considered equal under the law. “British Justice would protect” everyone (Morris 84). This is reflected in the narrative of the Boards. The first image presents Indigenous peoples and colonists living peacefully together. The second, and central, image shows “a conciliatory handshake between the British governor and an Aboriginal ‘chief’, highly reminiscent of images found in North America on treaty medals and anti-slavery tokens” (Darian-Smith and Edmonds 4). The third and fourth images depict the repercussions for committing murder, with an Indigenous man hanged for spearing a colonist and a European man also hanged for shooting an Aborigine. Both men executed under “gubernatorial supervision” (Turnbull 53). Image 1: Governor Davey's [sic - actually Governor Arthur's] Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816 [sic - actually c. 1828-30]. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (Call Number: SAFE / R 247). The Board is an interesting re-imagining of one of the traditional methods of communication for Indigenous peoples; the leaving of images on the bark of trees. Such trees, often referred to as scarred trees, are rare in modern-day Tasmania as “the expansion of settlements, and the impact of bush fires and other environmental factors” resulted in many of these trees being destroyed (Aboriginal Heritage Tasmania online). Similarly, only a few of the Boards, inspired by these trees, survive today. The Proclamation Board was, in the 1860s, re-imagined as the output of a different Governor: Lieutenant Governor Davey (after whom Port Davey, on the south-west coast of Tasmania is named). This re-imagining of the Board’s creator was so effective that the Board, today, is popularly known as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines. This paper outlines several other re-imaginings of this Board. In addition, this paper offers another, new, re-imagining of the Board, positing that this is an early “pamphlet” on crime, justice and punishment which actually presents as a pre-cursor to the modern Australian true crime tale. In doing so this work connects the Proclamation Board to the larger genre of crime fiction. One Proclamation Board: Two Governors Labelled Van Diemen’s Land and settled as a colony of New South Wales in 1803, this island state would secede from the administration of mainland Australia in 1825. Another change would follow in 1856 when Van Diemen’s Land was, in another process of re-imagining, officially re-named Tasmania. This change in nomenclature was an initiative to, symbolically at least, separate the contemporary state from a criminal and violent past (Newman online). Tasmania’s violent history was, perhaps, inevitable. The island was claimed by Philip Gidley King, the Governor of New South Wales, in the name of His Majesty, not for the purpose of building a community, but to “prevent the French from gaining a footing on the east side of that island” and also to procure “timber and other natural products, as well as to raise grain and to promote the seal industry” (Clark 36). Another rationale for this land claim was to “divide the convicts” (Clark 36) which re-fashioned the island into a gaol. It was this penal element of the British colonisation of Australia that saw the worst of the British Empire forced upon the Aboriginal peoples. As historian Clive Turnbull explains: the brutish state of England was reproduced in the English colonies, and that in many ways its brutishness was increased, for now there came to Australia not the humanitarians or the indifferent, but the men who had vested interests in the systems of restraint; among those who suffered restraint were not only a vast number who were merely unfortunate and poverty-stricken—the victims of a ‘depression’—but brutalised persons, child-slaughterers and even potential cannibals. (Turnbull 25) As noted above the Black War of Tasmania saw unprecedented aggression against the rightful occupants of the land. Yet, the Aboriginal peoples were “promised the white man’s justice, the people [were] exhorted to live in amity with them, the wrongs which they suffer [were] deplored” (Turnbull 23). The administrators purported an egalitarian society, one of integration and peace but Van Diemen’s Land was colonised as a prison and as a place of profit. So, “like many apologists whose material benefit is bound up with the systems which they defend” (Turnbull 23), assertions of care for the health and welfare of the Aboriginal peoples were made but were not supported by sufficient policies, or sufficient will, and the Black War continued. Colonel Thomas Davey (1758-1823) was the second person to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land; a term of office that began in 1813 and concluded in 1817. The fourth Lieutenant Governor of the island was Colonel Sir George Arthur (1784-1854); his term of office, significantly longer than Davey’s, being from 1824 to 1836. The two men were very different but are connected through this intriguing artefact, the Proclamation Board. One of the efforts made to assert the principle of equality under the law in Van Diemen’s Land was an outcome of work undertaken by Surveyor General George Frankland (1800-1838). Frankland wrote to Arthur in early 1829 and suggested the Proclamation Board (Morris 84), sometimes referred to as a Picture Board or the Tasmanian Hieroglyphics, as a tool to support Arthur’s various Proclamations. The Proclamation, signed on 15 April 1828 and promulgated in the The Hobart Town Courier on 19 April 1828 (Arthur 1), was one of several notices attempting to reduce the increasing levels of violence between Indigenous peoples and colonists. The date on Frankland’s correspondence clearly situates the Proclamation Board within Arthur’s tenure as Lieutenant Governor. The Board was, however, in the 1860s, re-imagined as the output of Davey. The Clerk of the Tasmanian House of Assembly, Hugh M. Hull, asserted that the Board was the work of Davey and not Arthur. Hull’s rationale for this, despite archival evidence connecting the Board to Frankland and, by extension, to Arthur, is predominantly anecdotal. In a letter to the editor of The Hobart Mercury, published 26 November 1874, Hull wrote: this curiosity was shown by me to the late Mrs Bateman, neé Pitt, a lady who arrived here in 1804, and with whom I went to school in 1822. She at once recognised it as one of a number prepared in 1816, under Governor Davey’s orders; and said she had seen one hanging on a gum tree at Cottage Green—now Battery Point. (3) Hull went on to assert that “if any old gentleman will look at the picture and remember the style of military and civil dress of 1810-15, he will find that Mrs Bateman was right” (3). Interestingly, Hull relies upon the recollections of a deceased school friend and the dress codes depicted by the artist to date the Proclamation Board as a product of 1816, in lieu of documentary evidence dating the Board as a product of 1828-1830. Curiously, the citation of dress can serve to undermine Hull’s argument. An early 1840s watercolour by Thomas Bock, of Mathinna, an Aboriginal child of Flinders Island adopted by Lieutenant Governor John Franklin (Felton online), features the young girl wearing a brightly coloured, high-waisted dress. This dress is very similar to the dresses worn by the children on the Proclamation Board (the difference being that Mathinna wears a red dress with a contrasting waistband, the children on the Board wear plain yellow dresses) (Bock). Acknowledging the simplicity of children's clothing during the colonial era, it could still be argued that it would have been unlikely the Governor of the day would have placed a child, enjoying at that time a life of privilege, in a situation where she sat for a portrait wearing an old-fashioned garment. So effective was Hull’s re-imagining of the Board’s creator that the Board was, for many years, popularly known as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines with even the date modified, to 1816, to fit Davey’s term of office. Further, it is worth noting that catalogue records acknowledge the error of attribution and list both Davey and Arthur as men connected to the creation of the Proclamation Board. A Surviving Board: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales One of the surviving Proclamation Boards is held by the Mitchell Library. The Boards, oil on Huon pine, were painted by “convict artists incarcerated in the island penal colony” (Carroll 73). The work was mass produced (by the standards of mass production of the day) by pouncing, “a technique [of the Italian Renaissance] of pricking the contours of a drawing with a pin. Charcoal was then dusted on to the drawing” (Carroll 75-76). The images, once outlined, were painted in oil. Of approximately 100 Boards made, several survive today. There are seven known Boards within public collections (Gall 58): five in Australia (Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney; Museum Victoria, Melbourne; National Library of Australia, Canberra; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; and Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston); and two overseas (The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University and the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, University of Cambridge). The catalogue record, for the Board held by the Mitchell Library, offers the following details:Paintings: 1 oil painting on Huon pine board, rectangular in shape with rounded corners and hole at top centre for suspension ; 35.7 x 22.6 x 1 cm. 4 scenes are depicted:Aborigines and white settlers in European dress mingling harmoniouslyAboriginal men and women, and an Aboriginal child approach Governor Arthur to shake hands while peaceful soldiers look onA hostile Aboriginal man spears a male white settler and is hanged by the military as Governor Arthur looks onA hostile white settler shoots an Aboriginal man and is hanged by the military as Governor Arthur looks on. (SAFE / R 247) The Mitchell Library Board was purchased from J.W. Beattie in May 1919 for £30 (Morris 86), which is approximately $2,200 today. Importantly, the title of the record notes both the popular attribution of the Board and the man who actually instigated the Board’s production: “Governor Davey’s [sic – actually Governor Arthur] Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816 [sic – actually c. 1828-30].” The date of the Board is still a cause of some speculation. The earlier date, 1828, marks the declaration of martial law (Turnbull 94) and 1830 marks the Black Line (Edmonds 215); the attempt to form a human line of white men to force many Tasmanian Aboriginals, four of the nine nations, onto the Tasman Peninsula (Ryan 3). Frankland’s suggestion for the Board was put forward on 4 February 1829, with Arthur’s official Conciliator to the Aborigines, G.A. Robinson, recording his first sighting of a Board on 24 December 1829 (Morris 84-85). Thus, the conception of the Board may have been in 1828 but the Proclamation project was not fully realised until 1830. Indeed, a news item on the Proclamation Board did appear in the popular press, but not until 5 March 1830: We are informed that the Government have given directions for the painting of a large number of pictures to be placed in the bush for the contemplation of the Aboriginal Inhabitants. […] However […] the causes of their hostility must be more deeply probed, or their taste as connoisseurs in paintings more clearly established, ere we can look for any beneficial result from this measure. (Colonial Times 2) The remark made in relation to becoming a connoisseur of painting, though intended to be derogatory, makes some sense. There was an assumption that the Indigenous peoples could easily translate a European-styled execution by hanging, as a visual metaphor for all forms of punishment. It has long been understood that Indigenous “social organisation and religious and ceremonial life were often as complex as those of the white invaders” (McCulloch 261). However, the Proclamation Board was, in every sense, Eurocentric and made no attempt to acknowledge the complexities of Aboriginal culture. It was, quite simply, never going to be an effective tool of communication, nor achieve its socio-legal aims. The Board Re-imagined: Popular Media The re-imagining of the Proclamation Board as a construct of Governor Davey, instead of Governor Arthur, is just one of many re-imaginings of this curious object. There are, of course, the various imaginings of the purpose of the Board. On the surface these images are a tool for reconciliation but as “the story of these paintings unfolds […] it becomes clear that the proclamations were in effect envoys sent back to Britain to exhibit the ingenious attempts being applied to civilise Australia” (Carroll 76). In this way the Board was re-imagined by the Administration that funded the exercise, even before the project was completed, from a mechanism to assist in the bringing about of peace into an object that would impress colonial superiors. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll has recently written about the Boards in the context of their “transnational circulation” and how “objects become subjects and speak of their past through the ventriloquism of contemporary art history” (75). Carroll argues the Board is an item that couples “military strategy with a fine arts propaganda campaign” (Carroll 78). Critically the Boards never achieved their advertised purpose for, as Carroll explains, there were “elaborate rituals Aboriginal Australians had for the dead” and, therefore, “the display of a dead, hanging body is unthinkable. […] being exposed to the sight of a hanged man must have been experienced as an unimaginable act of disrespect” (92). The Proclamation Board would, in sharp contrast to feelings of unimaginable disrespect, inspire feelings of pride across the colonial population. An example of this pride being revealed in the selection of the Board as an object worthy of reproduction, as a lithograph, for an Intercolonial Exhibition, held in Melbourne in 1866 (Morris 84). The lithograph, which identifies the Board as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines and dated 1816, was listed as item 572, of 738 items submitted by Tasmania, for the event (The Commissioners 69-85). This type of reproduction, or re-imagining, of the Board would not be an isolated event. Penelope Edmonds has described the Board as producing a “visual vernacular” through a range of derivatives including lantern slides, lithographs, and postcards. These types of tourist ephemera are in addition to efforts to produce unique re-workings of the Board as seen in Violet Mace’s Proclamation glazed earthernware, which includes a jug (1928) and a pottery cup (1934) (Edmonds online). The Board Re-imagined: A True Crime Tale The Proclamation Board offers numerous narratives. There is the story that the Board was designed and deployed to communicate. There is the story behind the Board. There is also the story of the credit for the initiative which was transferred from Governor Arthur to Governor Davey and subsequently returned to Arthur. There are, too, the provenance stories of individual Boards. There is another story the Proclamation Board offers. The story of true crime in colonial Australia. The Board, as noted, presents through a four-strip pictogram an idea that all are equal under the rule of law (Arthur 1). Advocating for a society of equals was a duplicitous practice, for while Aborigines were hanged for allegedly murdering settlers, “there is no record of whites being charged, let alone punished, for murdering Aborigines” (Morris 84). It would not be until 1838 that white men would be punished for the murder of Aboriginal people (on the mainland) in the wake of the Myall Creek Massacre, in northern New South Wales. There were other examples of attempts to bring about a greater equity under the rule of law but, as Amanda Nettelbeck explains, there was wide-spread resistance to the investigation and charging of colonists for crimes against the Indigenous population with cases regularly not going to trial, or, if making a courtroom, resulting in an acquittal (355-59). That such cases rested on “legally inadmissible Aboriginal testimony” (Reece in Nettelbeck 358) propped up a justice system that was, inherently, unjust in the nineteenth century. It is important to note that commentators at the time did allude to the crime narrative of the Board: when in the most civilized country in the world it has been found ineffective as example to hang murderers in chains, it is not to be expected a savage race will be influenced by the milder exhibition of effigy and caricature. (Colonial Times 2) It is argued here that the Board was much more than an offering of effigy and caricature. The Proclamation Board presents, in striking detail, the formula for the modern true crime tale: a peace disturbed by the act of murder; and the ensuing search for, and delivery of, justice. Reinforcing this point, are the ideas of justice seen within crime fiction, a genre that focuses on the restoration of order out of chaos (James 174), are made visible here as aspirational. The true crime tale does not, consistently, offer the reassurances found within crime fiction. In the real world, particularly one as violent as colonial Australia, we are forced to acknowledge that, below the surface of the official rhetoric on justice and crime, the guilty often go free and the innocent are sometimes hanged. Another point of note is that, if the latter date offered here, of 1830, is taken as the official date of the production of these Boards, then the significance of the Proclamation Board as a true crime tale is even more pronounced through a connection to crime fiction (both genres sharing a common literary heritage). The year 1830 marks the release of Australia’s first novel, Quintus Servinton written by convicted forger Henry Savery, a crime novel (produced in three volumes) published by Henry Melville of Hobart Town. Thus, this paper suggests, 1830 can be posited as a year that witnessed the production of two significant cultural artefacts, the Proclamation Board and the nation’s first full-length literary work, as also being the year that established the, now indomitable, traditions of true crime and crime fiction in Australia. Conclusion During the late 1820s in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) a set of approximately 100 Proclamation Boards were produced by the Lieutenant Governor of the day, George Arthur. The official purpose of these items was to communicate, to the Indigenous peoples of the island colony, that all—black and white—were equal under the law. Murderers, be they Aboriginal or colonist, would be punished. The Board is a re-imagining of one of the traditional methods of communication for Indigenous peoples; the leaving of drawings on the bark of trees. The Board was, in the 1860s, in time for an Intercolonial Exhibition, re-imagined as the output of Lieutenant Governor Davey. This re-imagining of the Board was so effective that surviving artefacts, today, are popularly known as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines with the date modified, to 1816, to fit the new narrative. The Proclamation Board was also reimagined, by its creators and consumers, in a variety of ways: as peace offering; military propaganda; exhibition object; tourism ephemera; and contemporary art. This paper has also, briefly, offered another re-imagining of the Board, positing that this early “pamphlet” on justice and punishment actually presents a pre-cursor to the modern Australian true crime tale. The Proclamation Board tells many stories but, at the core of this curious object, is a crime story: the story of mass murder. Acknowledgements The author acknowledges the Palawa peoples: the traditional custodians of the lands known today as Tasmania. The author acknowledges, too, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation upon whose lands this paper was researched and written. The author extends thanks to Richard Neville, Margot Riley, Kirsten Thorpe, and Justine Wilson of the State Library of New South Wales for sharing their knowledge and offering their support. The author is also grateful to the reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and for making valuable suggestions. ReferencesAboriginal Heritage Tasmania. “Scarred Trees.” Aboriginal Cultural Heritage, 2012. 12 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.aboriginalheritage.tas.gov.au/aboriginal-cultural-heritage/archaeological-site-types/scarred-trees›.Arthur, George. “Proclamation.” The Hobart Town Courier 19 Apr. 1828: 1.———. Governor Davey’s [sic – actually Governor Arthur’s] Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816 [sic – actually c. 1828-30]. Graphic Materials. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, c. 1828-30.Bock, Thomas. Mathinna. Watercolour and Gouache on Paper. 23 x 19 cm (oval), c. 1840.Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg. Art in the Time of Colony: Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-2000. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2014.Clark, Manning. History of Australia. Abridged by Michael Cathcart. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997 [1993]. Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia, Qld.: U of Queensland P, 2014.Colonial Times. “Hobart Town.” Colonial Times 5 Mar. 1830: 2.The Commissioners. Intercolonial Exhibition Official Catalogue. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Blundell & Ford, 1866.Darian-Smith, Kate, and Penelope Edmonds. “Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers.” Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim. Eds. Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds. New York: Routledge, 2015. 1–14. Edmonds, Penelope. “‘Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate’: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections.” Journal of Australian Studies 35.2 (2011): 201–18.———. “The Proclamation Cup: Tasmanian Potter Violet Mace and Colonial Quotations.” reCollections 5.2 (2010). 20 May 2015 ‹http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_5_no_2/papers/the_proclamation_cup_›.Felton, Heather. “Mathinna.” Companion to Tasmanian History. Hobart: Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, 2006. 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/M/Mathinna.htm›.Gall, Jennifer. Library of Dreams: Treasures from the National Library of Australia. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2011.Hull, Hugh M. “Tasmanian Hieroglyphics.” The Hobart Mercury 26 Nov. 1874: 3.James, P.D. Talking about Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.Mace, Violet. Violet Mace’s Proclamation Jug. Glazed Earthernware. Launceston: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, 1928.———. Violet Mace’s Proclamation Cup. Glazed Earthernware. Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 1934.McCulloch, Samuel Clyde. “Sir George Gipps and Eastern Australia’s Policy toward the Aborigine, 1838-46.” The Journal of Modern History 33.3 (1961): 261–69.Morris, John. “Notes on a Message to the Tasmanian Aborigines in 1829, popularly called ‘Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816’.” Australiana 10.3 (1988): 84–7.Nettelbeck, Amanda. “‘Equals of the White Man’: Prosecution of Settlers for Violence against Aboriginal Subjects of the Crown, Colonial Western Australia.” Law and History Review 31.2 (2013): 355–90.Newman, Terry. “Tasmania, the Name.” Companion to Tasmanian History, 2006. 16 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/T/Tasmania%20name.htm›.Reece, Robert H.W., in Amanda Nettelbeck. “‘Equals of the White Man’: Prosecution of Settlers for Violence against Aboriginal Subjects of the Crown, Colonial Western Australia.” Law and History Review 31.2 (2013): 355–90.Ryan, Lyndall. “The Black Line in Van Diemen’s Land: Success or Failure?” Journal of Australian Studies 37.1 (2013): 3–18.Savery, Henry. Quintus Servinton: A Tale Founded upon Events of Real Occurrence. Hobart Town: Henry Melville, 1830.Turnbull, Clive. Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1974 [1948].

Urban development and land release policies in the city fringes are criticised because they often fail to achieve their objectives such as providing affordable housing for low to moderate-income groups as well as provision of infrastructure and transportation. From a Marxian point of view, urban development plans fail because of the inherent contradictions of capital, and consequently, maximisation of surplus-value becomes the main objectives of land supply policies. In this paper, I draw on the Lacanian concept of drive and use the homology between Marxian surplus-value and Lacanian surplus-enjoyment to explain how the market rationality of neoliberalism (late-capitalism) deflects the desired objectives of urban development plans (UDPs); that is, the desire to provide affordable housing and urban services and infrastructure instead facilitates speculative activities on land in the suburban areas of a metropolis, such as Perth, Western Australia. In particular, the paper focuses on the neoliberal intuitional and financial dimensions of UDPs. In conclusion, I suggest how planners may deal with the pressure of the lack in the hegemonic discourse of neoliberalism in order to avoid the stuckness of the logic of drive materialised in the operation of planning institutions.

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

IntroductionI work at a regional campus of La Trobe University, Australia. More precisely, I work at the Bendigo campus of La Trobe University. At Bendigo, we are often annoyed when referred to and addressed as ‘regional’ students and staff. Really, we should not be. After all, Bendigo campus is an outpost of La Trobe’s metropolitan base. It is funded, run, and directed from Bundoora (Melbourne). The word ‘regional’ simply describes the situation. A region is an “administrative division of a city or a district [… or …] a country” (Brown 2528). And the Latin etymology of region (regio, regere) includes “direction, line”, and “rule” (Kidd 208, 589). Just as the Bendigo campus of La Trobe is a satellite of the metropolitan campus, the town of Bendigo is an outpost of Melbourne. So, when we are addressed and interpellated (Althusser 48) as regional, it is a reminder of the ongoing fact that Australia is (still) a colony, an outpost of empire, a country organised on the colonial model. From central administrative hubs, spokes of communication, and transportation spread to the outposts. When Bendigo students and staff are addressed as regional, in a way we are also being addressed as colonial.In this article, the terms ‘region’ and ‘regional’ are deployed as inextricably associated with the Australian version of colonialism. In Australia, in the central metropolitan hubs, where the colonial project is at its most comprehensive, it is hard to see what remains, to see what has escaped that project. The aim of this article is to explore how different aspects of the country escape the totalising project of Australian colonialism. This exploration is undertaken primarily through a discussion of the ways in which some places on this continent remain not regional (and thus, not colonial) how they keep the metropolis at bay, and how they, thus, keep Europe at bay. This discussion includes a general overview of the Australian colonial project, particularly as it pertains to First Nations Peoples, their knowledge and philosophies, and the continent’s unique ecologies. Then the article becomes more speculative, imagining different ways of seeing and experiencing time and place in this country, ways of seeing the remains and refuges of pre-1788, not-regional, and not-colonial Australia. In these remains and refuges, there persist the flourishing and radical difference of this continent’s ecologies and, not surprisingly, the radical suitedness of tens of thousands of years of First Nations Peoples’ culture and thinking to that ecology, as Country. In what remains not regional, I argue, are answers to the question: How will we live here in the Anthropocene?A Totalising ProjectSince 1788, in the face of the ongoing presence and resistance of First Nations cultures, and the continent’s radically unique ecologies, the Australian colonial project has been to convert the continent into a region of Europe. As such, the imposed political, administrative, scientific, and economic institutions are largely European. This is also so, to a lesser extent, of social and cultural institutions. While the continent is not Europe geologically, the notion of the Anthropocene suggests that this is changing (Crutzen and Stoermer). This article does not resummarise the vast body of scholarship on the effects of colonisation, from genocide to missionary charity, to the creation of bureaucratic and comprador classes, and so on. Suffice to say that the different valences of colonisation—from outright malevolence to misguided benevolence–produce similar and common effects. As such, what we experience in metropolitan and regional Australia, is chillingly similar to what people experience in London. Chilling, because this experience demonstrates how the effects of the project tend towards the total.To clarify, when I use the name ‘Australia’ I understand it as the continent’s European name. When I use the term ‘Europe’ or ‘European’, I refer to both the European continent and to the reach and scope of the various colonial and imperial projects of European nations. I take this approach because I think it is necessary to recognise their global effects and loads. In Australia, this load has been evident and present for more than two centuries. On one hand, it is evident in the social, cultural, and political institutions that come with colonisation. On another, it is evident in the environmental impacts of colonisation: impacts that are severely compounded in Australia. In relation to this, there is vital, ongoing scholarship that explores the fact that, ecologically, Australia is a radically different place, and which discusses the ways in which European scientific, aesthetic, and agricultural assumptions, and the associated naturalised and generic understandings of ‘nature’, have grounded activities that have radically transformed the continent’s biosphere. To name but a few, Tim Flannery (Eaters, “Ecosystems”) and Stephen Pyne, respectively, examine the radical difference of this continent’s ecology, geology, climate, and fire regimes. Sylvia Hallam, Bill Gammage, and Bruce Pascoe (“Bolt”, Emu) explore the relationships of First Nations Peoples with that ecology, climate, and fire before 1788, and the European blindness to the complexity of these relationships. For instance, William Lines quotes the strikingly contradictory observations of the colonial surveyor, Thomas Mitchell, where the land is simultaneously “populous” and “without inhabitants” and “ready for the immediate reception of civilised man” and European pastoralism (Mitchell qtd. in Lines 71). Flannery (Eaters) and Tim Low (Feral, New) discuss the impacts of introduced agricultural practices, exotic animals, and plants. Tom Griffiths tells the story of ‘Improving’ and ‘Acclimatisation Societies’, whose explicit aims were to convert Australian lands into European lands (32–48). The notion of ‘keeping Europe at bay’ is a response to the colonial assumptions, practices, and impositions highlighted by these writers.The project of converting this continent and hundreds of First Nations Countries into a region of Europe, ‘Australia’, is, in ambition, a totalising one. From the strange flag-plantings, invocations and incantations claiming ownership and dominion, to legalistic conceptions such as terra nullius, the aim has been to speak, to declare, to interpellate the country as European. What is not European, must be made European. What cannot be made European is either (un)seen in a way which diminishes or denies its existence, or must be made not to exist. These are difficult things to do: to not see, to unsee, or to eradicate.One of the first acts of administrative division (direction and rule) in the Port Phillip colony (now known as Victoria) was that of designating four regional Aboriginal Protectorates. Edward Stone Parker was appointed Assistant Protector of Aborigines for the Loddon District, a district which persists today for many state and local government instrumentalities as the Loddon-Mallee region. In the 1840s, Parker experienced the difficulty described above, in attempting to ‘make European’ the Dja Dja Wurrung people. As part of Parker’s goal of Christianising Dja Dja Wurrung people, he sought to learn their language. Bain Attwood records his frustration:[Parker] remarked in July 1842. ‘For physical objects and their attributes, the language readily supplies equivalent terms, but for the metaphysical, so far I have been able to discover scarcely any’. A few years later Parker simply despaired that this work of translation could be undertaken. ‘What can be done’, he complained, ‘with a people whose language knows no such terms as holiness, justice, righteousness, sin, guilt, repentance, redemption, pardon, peace, and c., and to whose minds the ideas conveyed by those words are utterly foreign and inexplicable?’ (Attwood 125)The assumption here is that values and concepts that are ‘untranslatable’ into European understandings mark an absence of such value and concept. Such assumptions are evident in attempts to convince, cajole, or coerce First Nations Peoples into abandoning traditional cultural and custodial relationships with Country in favour of individual private property ownership. The desire to maintain relationships with Country are described by conservative political figures such as Tony Abbott as “lifestyle choices” (Medhora), effectively declaring them non-existent. In addition, processes designed to recognise First Nations relationships to Country are procedurally frustrated. Examples of this are the bizarre decisions made in 2018 and 2019 by Nigel Scullion, the then Indigenous Affairs Minister, to fund objections to land claims from funds designated to alleviate Indigenous disadvantage and to refuse to grant land rights claims even when procedural obstacles have been cleared (Allam). In Australia, given that First Nations social, cultural, and political life is seamlessly interwoven with the environment, ecology, the land–Country, and that the colonial project has always been, and still is, a totalising one, it is a project which aims to sever the connections to place of First Nations Peoples. Concomitantly, when the connections cannot be severed, the people must be either converted, dismissed, or erased.This project, no matter how brutal and relentless, however, has not achieved totality.What Remains Not Regional? If colonisation is a totalising project, and regional Australia stands as evidence of this project’s ongoing push, then what remains not regional, or untouched by the colonial? What escapes the administrative, the institutional, the ecological, the incantatory, and the interpellative reach of the regional? I think that despite this reach, there are such remains. The frustration, the anger, and antipathy of Parker, Abbott, and Scullion bear this out. Their project is unfinished and the resistance to it infuriates. I think that, in Australia, the different ways in which pre-1788 modes of life persist are modes of life which can be said to be ‘keeping Europe at bay’.In Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, Deborah Bird Rose compares Western/European conceptualisations of time, with those of the people living in the communities around the Victoria River in the Northern Territory. Rose describes Western constructions of time as characterised by disjunction (for example, the ‘birth’ of philosophy, the beginnings of Christianity) and by irreversible sequence (for example, concepts of telos, apocalypse, and progress). These constructions have become so naturalised as to carry a “seemingly commonsensical orientation toward the future” (15). Orientation, in an Australian society “built on destruction, enables regimes of violence to continue their work while claiming the moral ground of making a better future” (15). Such an orientation “enables us to turn our backs on the current social facts of pain, damage, destruction and despair which exist in the present, but which we will only acknowledge as our past” (17).In contrast to this ‘future vision’, Rose describes what she calls the ‘canonical’ time-space conceptualisation of the Victoria River people (55). Here, rather than a temporal extension into an empty future, orientation is towards living, peopled, and grounded origins, with the emphasis on the plural, rather than a single point of origin or disjunction:We here now, meaning we here in a shared present, are distinct from the people of the early days by the fact that they preceded us and made our lives possible. We are the ‘behind mob’—those who come after. The future is the domain of those who come after us. They are referred to as […] those ‘behind us’. (55)By way of illustration, when we walk into a sheep paddock, even if we are going somewhere (even the future), we are also irrevocably walking behind ancestors, predecessor ecologies, previous effects. The paddock, is how it is, after about 65,000 years of occupation, custodianship, and management, after European surveyors, squatters, frontier conflict and violence, the radical transformation of the country, the destruction of the systems that came before. Everything there, as Freya Mathews would put it, is of “the given” (“Becoming” 254, “Old” 127). We are coming up behind. That paddock is the past and present, and what happens next is irrevocably shaped by it. We cannot walk away from it.What remains not regional is there in front of us. Country, language, and knowledge remain in the sheep paddock, coexisting with everyone and everything else that everyone in this country follows (including the colonial and the regional). It is not gone. We have to learn how to see it.By the Fox or the Little EagleFigure 1: A Scatter of Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo Feathers at Wehla. Image Credit: Terry Eyssens.As a way of elaborating on this, I will tell you about a small, eight hectare, patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Depending on the day, or the season, or your reason, it could take fifteen minutes to walk from one end to the other or it might take four hours, from the time you start walking, to the time when you get back to where you started. At this place, I found a scatter of White Cockatoo feathers (Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo—Cacatua galerita). There was no body, just the feathers, but it was clear that the Cockatoo had died, had been caught by something, for food. The scatter was beautiful. The feathers, their sulphur highlights, were lying on yellow-brown, creamy, dry grass. I dwelled on the scatter. I looked. I looked around. I walked around. I scanned the horizon and squinted at the sky. And I wondered, what happened.This small patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country is in an area now known as Wehla. In the Dja Dja Wurrung and many other Victorian languages, ‘Wehla’ (and variants of this word) is a name for the Brushtail Possum (Trichosurus vulpecula). In the time I spend there/here, I see all kinds of animals. Of these, two are particularly involved in this story. One is the Fox (Vulpes vulpes), which I usually see just the back of, going away. They are never surprised. They know, or seem to know, where everyone is. They have a trot, a purposeful, cocky trot, whether they are going away because of me or whether they are going somewhere for their own good reasons. Another animal I see often is the Little Eagle (Hieraaetus morphnoides). It is a half to two-thirds the size of a Wedge-tailed Eagle (Aquila audax). It soars impressively. Sometimes I mistake a Little Eagle for a Wedge-tail, until I get a better look and realise that it is not quite that big. I am not sure where the Little Eagle’s nest is but it must be close by.I wondered about this scatter of White Cockatoo feathers. I wondered, was the scatter of White Cockatoo feathers by the Fox or by the Little Eagle? This could be just a cute thought experiment. But I think the question matters because it provokes thinking about what is regional and what remains not regional. The Fox is absolutely imperial. It is introduced and widespread. Low describes it as among Australia’s “greatest agent[s] of extinction” (124). It is part of the colonisation of this place, down to this small patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Where the Fox is, colonisation, and everything that goes with it, remains, and maintains. So, that scatter of feathers could be a colonial, regional happening. Or maybe it is something that remains not regional, not colonial. Maybe the scatter is something that escapes the regional. The Little Eagles and the Cockatoos, who were here before colonisation, and their dance (a dance of death for the Cockatoo, a dance of life for the Little Eagle), is maybe something that remains not regional.But, so what if the scatter of White Cockatoo feathers, this few square metres of wind-blown matter, is not regional? Well, if it is ‘not regional’, then, if Australia is to become something other than a colony, we have to look for these things that are not regional, that are not colonial, that are not imperial. Maybe if we start with a scatter of White Cockatoo feathers that was by the Little Eagle, and then build outwards again, we might start to notice more things that are not regional, that still somehow escape. For example, the persistence of First Nations modes of land custodianship and First Nations understandings of time. Then, taking care not to fetishise First Nations philosophies and cultures, take the time and care to recognise the associations of all of those things with simply, the places themselves, like a patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country, which is now known as Wehla. Instead of understanding that place as something that is just part of the former Aboriginal Protectorate of Loddon or of the Loddon Mallee region of Victoria, it is Wehla.The beginning of decolonisation is deregionalisation. Every time we recognise the not regional (which is hopefully, eventually, articulated in a more positive sense than ‘not regional’), and just say something like ‘Wehla’, we can start to keep Europe at bay. Europe’s done enough.seeing and SeeingChina Miéville’s The City and The City (2009) is set in a place, in which the citizens of two cities live. The cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, occupy the same space, are culturally and politically different. Their relationship to each other is similar to that of border-sharing Cold War states. Citizens of the two cities are forbidden to interact with each other. This prohibition is radically policed. Even though the citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma live in adjoining buildings, share roads, and walk the same streets, they are forbidden to see each other. The populations of each city grow up learning how to see what is permitted and to not see, or unsee, the forbidden other (14).I think that seeing a scatter of White Cockatoo feathers and wondering if it was by the Fox or by the Little Eagle is akin to the different practices of seeing and not seeing in Besźel and Ul Qoma. The scatter of feathers is regional and colonial and, equally, it is not. Two countries occupy the same space. Australia and a continent with its hundreds of Countries. What remains not regional is what is given and Seen as such. Understanding ourselves as walking behind everything that has gone before us enables this. As such, it is possible to see the scatter of White Cockatoo feathers as by the Fox, as happening in ‘regional Australia’, as thus characterised by around 200 years of carnage, where the success of one species comes at the expense of countless others. On the other hand, it is possible to See the feathers as by the Little Eagles, and as happening on a small patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country, as a dance that has been happening for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. It is a way of keeping Europe at bay.I think these Cockatoo feathers are a form of address. They are capable of interpellating something other than the regional, the colonial, and the imperial. A story of feathers, Foxes, and Little Eagles can remind us of our ‘behindness’, and evoke, and invoke, and exemplify ways of seeing and engaging with where we live that are tens of thousands of years old. This is both an act of the imagination and a practice of Seeing what is really there. When we learn to see the remains and refuges, the persistence of the not regional, we might also begin to learn how to live here in the Anthropocene. But, Anthropocene or no Anthropocene, we have to learn how to live here anyway.References Allam, Lorena. “Aboriginal Land Rights Claims Unresolved Despite All-Clear from Independent Review.” The Guardian 29 Mar. 2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/29/aboriginal-land-rights-claims-unresolved-despite-all-clear-from-independent-review>.Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” On Ideology. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, [1971] 2008.Attwood, Bain. The Good Country: The Djadja Wurrung, the Settlers and the Protectors. Clayton: Monash UP, 2017.Brown, Lesley. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: On Historical Principles: Volume 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.Crutzen, Paul, J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18.Flannery, Timothy F. “The Fate of Empire in Low- and High-Energy Ecosystems.” Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies. Eds. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin. Edinburgh: Keele UP, 1997. 46–59.———. The Future Eaters. Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1994.Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012.Griffiths, Tom. Forests of Ash. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.Hallam, Sylvia. Fire and Hearth: A Study of Aboriginal Usage and European Usurpation in South-Western Australia. Rev. ed. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2014.Kidd, D.A. Collins Gem Latin-English, English-Latin Dictionary. London: Collins, 1980.Lines, William. Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1991.Low, Tim. The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia. Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2003.———. Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia’s Exotic Invaders. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1999.Mathews, Freya. “Becoming Native: An Ethos of Countermodernity II.” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 3 (1999): 243–71.———. “Letting the World Grow Old: An Ethos of Countermodernity.” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 3 (1999): 119–37.Medhora, Shalailah. “Remote Communities Are Lifestyle Choices, Says Tony Abbott.” The Guardian 10 Mar. 2015. <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/mar/10/remote-communities-are-lifestyle-choices-says-tony-abbott>.Miéville, China. The City and the City. London: Pan MacMillan, 2009.Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome: Magabala Books, 2014.———. “Andrew Bolt’s Disappointment.” Griffith Review 36 (Winter 2012): 226–33.Pyne, Stephen. Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia. North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992.Rose, Deborah Bird. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2004.

IntroductionThe walking tour is an enduring feature of cities. Fuelled by a desire to learn more about the hidden and unknown spaces of the city, the walking tour has moved beyond its historical role as tourist attraction to play a key role in the transformation of urban space through gentrification. Conversely, the walking tour has a counter-history as part of a critical urban praxis. This article reflects on historical examples, as well as our own experience of conducting Field Trip, a critical geographical walking tour through an industrial precinct in Marrickville, a suburb of Sydney that is set to undergo rapid change as a result of high-rise residential apartment construction (Gibson et al.). This precinct, known as Carrington Road, is located on the unceded land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation who call the area Bulanaming.Drawing on a long history of philosophical walking, many contemporary writers (Solnit; Gros; Bendiner-Viani) have described walking as a practice that can open different ways of thinking, observing and being in the world. Some have focused on the value of walking to the study of place (Hall; Philips; Heddon), and have underscored its relationship to established research methods, such as sensory ethnography (Springgay and Truman). The work of Michel de Certeau pays particular attention to the relationship between walking and the city. In particular, the concepts of tactics and strategy have been applied in a variety of ways across cultural studies, cultural geography, and urban studies (Morris). In line with de Certeau’s thinking, we view walking as an example of a tactic – a routine and often unconscious practice that can become a form of creative resistance.In this sense, walking can be a way to engage in and design the city by opposing its structures, or strategies. For example, walking in a city such as Sydney that is designed for cars requires choosing alternative paths, redirecting flows of people and traffic, and creating custom shortcuts. Choosing pedestrianism in Sydney can certainly feel like a form of resistance, and we make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a way of doing this collectively, firstly by moving in opposite directions, and secondly, at incongruent speeds to those for whom the scale and style of strategic urban development is inevitable. How such tactical walking relates to the design of cities, however, is less clear. Walking is a generally described in the literature as an individual act, while the design of cities is, at its best participatory, and always involving multiple stakeholders. This reveals a tension between the practice of walking as a détournement or appropriation of urban space, and its relationship to existing built form. Field Trip, as an example of collective walking, is one such appropriation of urban space – one designed to lead to more democratic decision making around the planning and design of cities. Given the anti-democratic, “post-political” nature of contemporary “consultation” processes, this is a seemingly huge task (Legacy et al.; Ruming). We make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a form of collective resistance to top-down urban planning.By using an open-source wiki in combination with the Internet Archive, Field Trip also seeks to collectively document and make public the local knowledge generated by walking at the frontier of gentrification. We discuss these digital choices as oppositional practice, and consider the idea of tactical media (Lovink and Garcia; Raley) in order to connect knowledge sharing with the practice of walking.This article is structured in four parts. Firstly, we provide a historical introduction to the relationship between walking tours and gentrification of global cities. Secondly, we examine the significance of walking tours in Sydney and then specifically within Marrickville. Thirdly, we discuss the Field Trip project as a citizen-led walking tour and, finally, elaborate on its role as tactical media project and offer some conclusions.The Walking Tour and Gentrification From the outset, people have been walking the city in their own ways and creating their own systems of navigation, often in spite of the plans of officialdom. The rapid expansion of cities following the Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of “imaginative geographies”, where mediated representations of different urban conditions became a stand-in for lived experience (Steinbrink 219). The urban walking tour as mediated political tactic was utilised as far back as Victorian England, for reasons including the celebration of public works like the sewer system (Garrett), and the “othering” of the working class through upper- and middle-class “slum tourism” in London’s East End (Steinbrink 220). The influence of the Situationist theory of dérive has been immense upon those interested in walking the city, and we borrow from the dérive a desire to report on the under-reported spaces of the city, and to articulate alternative voices within the city in this project. It should be noted, however, that as Field Trip was developed for general public participation, and was organised with institutional support, some aspects of the dérive – particularly its disregard for formal structure – were unable to be incorporated into the project. Our responsibility to the participants of Field Trip, moreover, required the imposition of structure and timetable upon the walk. However, our individual and collective preparation for Field Trip, as well as our collective understanding of the area to be examined, has been heavily informed by psychogeographic methods that focus on quotidian and informal urban practices (Crosby and Searle; Iveson et al).In post-war American cities, walking tours were utilised in the service of gentrification. Many tours were organised by real estate agents with the express purpose of selling devalorised inner-city real estate to urban “pioneers” for renovation, including in Boston’s South End (Tissot) and Brooklyn’s Park Slope, among others (Lees et al 25). These tours focused on a symbolic revalorisation of “slum neighbourhoods” through a focus on “high culture”, with architectural and design heritage featuring prominently. At the same time, urban socio-economic and cultural issues – poverty, homelessness, income disparity, displacement – were downplayed or overlooked. These tours contributed to a climate in which property speculation and displacement through gentrification practices were normalised. To this day, “ghetto tours” operate in minority neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, serving as a beachhead for gentrification.Elsewhere in the world, walking tours are often voyeuristic, featuring “locals” guiding well-meaning tourists through the neighbourhoods of some of the world’s most impoverished communities. Examples include the long runningKlong Toei Private Tour, through “Bangkok’s oldest and largest slum”, or the now-ceased Jakarta Hidden Tours, which took tourists to the riverbanks of Jakarta to see the city’s poorest before they were displaced by gentrification.More recently, all over the world activists have engaged in walking tours to provide their own perspective on urban change, attempting to direct the gentrifier’s gaze inward. Whilst the most confrontational of these might be the Yuppie Gazing Tour of Vancouver’s historically marginalised Downtown Eastside, other tours have highlighted the deleterious effects of gentrification in Williamsburg, San Francisco, Oakland, and Surabaya, among others. In smaller towns, walking tours have been utilised to highlight the erasure of marginalised scenes and subcultures, including underground creative spaces, migrant enclaves, alternative and queer spaces. Walking Sydney, Walking Marrickville In many cities, there are now both walking tours that intend to scaffold urban renewal, and those that resist gentrification with alternative narratives. There are also some that unwittingly do both simultaneously. Marrickville is a historically working-class and migrant suburb with sizeable populations of Greek and Vietnamese migrants (Graham and Connell), as well as a strong history of manufacturing (Castles et al.), which has been undergoing gentrification for some time, with the arts playing an often contradictory role in its transformation (Gibson and Homan). More recently, as the suburb experiences rampant, financialised property development driven by global flows of capital, property developers have organised their own self-guided walking tours, deployed to facilitate the familiarisation of potential purchasers of dwellings with local amenities and ‘character’ in precincts where redevelopment is set to occur. Mirvac, Marrickville’s most active developer, has designed its own self-guided walking tour Hit the Marrickville Pavement to “explore what’s on offer” and “chat to locals”: just 7km from the CBD, Marrickville is fast becoming one of Sydney’s most iconic suburbs – a melting pot of cuisines, creative arts and characters founded on a rich multicultural heritage.The perfect introduction, this self-guided walking tour explores Marrickville’s historical architecture at a leisurely pace, finishing up at the pub.So, strap on your walking shoes; you're in for a treat.Other walking tours in the area seek to highlight political, ecological, and architectural dimension of Marrickville. For example, Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance provides a series of plant-led walks in the suburb; The Warren Walk is a tour organised by local Australian Labor Party MP Anthony Albanese highlighting “the influence of early settlers such as the Schwebel family on the area’s history” whilst presenting a “political snapshot” of ALP history in the area. The Australian Ugliness, in contrast, was a walking tour organised by Thomas Lee in 2016 that offered an insight into the relationships between the visual amenity of the streetscape, aesthetic judgments of an ambiguous nature, and the discursive and archival potentialities afforded by camera-equipped smartphones and photo-sharing services like Instagram. Figure 1: Thomas Lee points out canals under the street of Marrickville during The Australian Ugliness, 2016.Sydney is a city adept at erasing its past through poorly designed mega-projects like freeways and office towers, and memorialisation of lost landscapes has tended towards the literary (Berry; Mudie). Resistance to redevelopment, however, has often taken the form of spectacular public intervention, in which public knowledge sharing was a key goal. The Green Bans of the 1970s were partially spurred by redevelopment plans for places like the Rocks and Woolloomooloo (Cook; Iveson), while the remaking of Sydney around the 2000 Olympics led to anti-gentrification actions such as SquatSpace and the Tour of Beauty, an “aesthetic activist” tour of sites in the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo threatened with “revitalisation.” Figure 2: "Tour of Beauty", Redfern-Waterloo 2016. What marks the Tour of Beauty as significant in this context is the participatory nature of knowledge production: participants in the tours were addressed by representatives of the local community – the Aboriginal Housing Company, the local Indigenous Women’s Centre, REDWatch activist group, architects, designers and more. Each speaker presented their perspective on the rapidly gentrifying suburb, demonstrating how urban space is made an remade through processes of contestation. This differentiation is particularly relevant when considering the basis for Sydney-centric walking tours. Mirvac’s self-guided tour focuses on the easy-to-see historical “high culture” of Marrickville, and encourages participants to “chat to locals” at the pub. It is a highly filtered approach that does not consider broader relations of class, race and gender that constitute Marrickville. A more intense exploration of the social fabric of the city – providing a glimpse of the hidden or unknown spaces – uncovers the layers of social, cultural, and economic history that produce urban space, and fosters a deeper engagement with questions of urban socio-spatial justice.Solnit argues that walking can allow us to encounter “new thoughts and possibilities.” To walk, she writes, is to take a “subversive detour… the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences” (13). In this way, tactical activist walking tours aim to make visible what cannot be seen, in a way that considers the polysemic nature of place, and in doing so, they make visible the hidden relations of power that produce the contemporary city. In contrast, developer-led walking tours are singularly focussed, seeking to attract inflows of capital to neighbourhoods undergoing “renewal.” These tours encourage participants to adopt the position of urban voyeur, whilst activist-led walking tours encourage collaboration and participation in urban struggles to protect and preserve the contested spaces of the city. It is in this context that we sought to devise our own walking tour – Field Trip – to encourage active participation in issues of urban renewal.In organising this walking tour, however, we acknowledge our own entanglements within processes of gentrification. As designers, musicians, writers, academics, researchers, venue managers, artists, and activists, in organising Field Trip, we could easily be identified as “creatives”, implicated in Marrickville’s ongoing transformation. All of us have ongoing and deep-rooted connections to various Sydney subcultures – the same subcultures so routinely splashed across developer advertising material. This project was borne out of Frontyard – a community not-just-art space, and has been supported by the local Inner West Council. As such, Field Trip cannot be divorced from the highly contentious processes of redevelopment and gentrification that are always simmering in the background of discussions about Marrickville. We hope, however, that in this project we have started to highlight alternative voices in those redevelopment processes – and that this may contribute towards a “method of equality” for an ongoing democratisation of those processes (Davidson and Iveson).Field Trip: Urban Geographical Enquiry as Activism Given this context, Field Trip was designed as a public knowledge project that would connect local residents, workers, researchers, and decision-makers to share their experiences living and working in various parts of Sydney that are undergoing rapid change. The site of our project – Carrington Road, Marrickville in Sydney’s inner-west – has been earmarked for major redevelopment in coming years and is quickly becoming a flashpoint for the debates that permeate throughout the whole of Sydney: housing affordability, employment accessibility, gentrification and displacement. To date, public engagement and consultation regarding proposed development at Carrington Road has been limited. A major landholder in the area has engaged a consultancy firm to establish a community reference group (CRG) the help guide the project. The CRG arose after public outcry at an original $1.3 billion proposal to build 2,616 units in twenty towers of up to 105m in height (up to thirty-five storeys) in a predominantly low-rise residential suburb. Save Marrickville, a community group created in response to the proposal, has representatives on this reference group, and has endeavoured to make this process public. Ruming (181) has described these forms of consultation as “post-political,” stating thatin a universe of consensual decision-making among diverse interests, spaces for democratic contest and antagonistic politics are downplayed and technocratic policy development is deployed to support market and development outcomes.Given the notable deficit of spaces for democratic contest, Field Trip was devised as a way to reframe the debate outside of State- and developer-led consultation regimes that guide participants towards accepting the supposed inevitability of redevelopment. We invited a number of people affected by the proposed plans to speak during the walking tour at a location of their choosing, to discuss the work they do, the effect that redevelopment would have on their work, and their hopes and plans for the future. The walking tour was advertised publicly and the talks were recorded, edited and released as freely available podcasts. The proposed redevelopment of Carrington Road provided us with a unique opportunity to develop and operate our own walking tour. The linear street created an obvious “circuit” to the tour – up one side of the road, and down the other. We selected speakers based on pre-existing relationships, some formed during prior rounds of research (Gibson et al.). Speakers included a local Aboriginal elder, a representative from the Marrickville Historical Society, two workers (who also gave tours of their workplaces), the Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, who gave us a tour of the Carrington Road pumping station, and a representative from the Save Marrickville residents’ group. Whilst this provided a number of perspectives on the day, regrettably some groups were unrepresented, most notably the perspective of migrant groups who have a long-standing association with industrial precincts in Marrickville. It is hoped that further community input and collaboration in future iterations of Field Trip will address these issues of representation in community-led walking tours.A number of new understandings became apparent during the walking tour. For instance, the heritage-listed Carrington Road sewage pumping station, which is of “historic and aesthetic significance”, is unable to cope with the proposed level of residential development. According to Philip Bennett, Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, the best way to maintain this piece of heritage infrastructure is to keep it running. While this issue had been discussed in private meetings between Sydney Water and the developer, there is no formal mechanism to make this expert knowledge public or accessible. Similarly, through the Acknowledgement of Country for Field Trip, undertaken by Donna Ingram, Cultural Representative and a member of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, it became clear that the local Indigenous community had not been consulted in the development proposals for Carrington Road. This information, while not necessary secret, had also not been made public. Finally, the inclusion of knowledgeable local workers whose businesses are located on Carrington Road provided an insight into the “everyday.” They talked of community and collaboration, of site-specificity, the importance of clustering within their niche industries, and their fears for of displacement should redevelopment proceed.Via a community-led, participatory walking tour like Field Trip, threads of knowledge and new information are uncovered. These help create new spatial stories and readings of the landscape, broadening the scope of possibility for democratic participation in cities. Figure 3: Donna Ingram at Field Trip 2018.Tactical Walking, Tactical Media Stories connected to walking provide an opportunity for people to read the landscape differently (Mitchell). One of the goals of Field Trip was to begin a public knowledge exchange about Carrington Road so that spatial stories could be shared, and new readings of urban development could spread beyond the confines of the self-contained tour. Once shared, this knowledge becomes a story, and once remixed into existing stories and integrated into the way we understand the neighbourhood, a collective spatial practice is generated. “Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice”, says de Certeau in “Spatial Stories”. “In reality, they organise walks” (72). As well as taking a tactical approach to walking, we took a tactical approach to the mediation of the knowledge, by recording and broadcasting the voices on the walk and feeding information to a publicly accessible wiki. The term “tactical media” is an extension of de Certeau’s concept of tactics. David Garcia and Geert Lovink applied de Certeau’s concept of tactics to the field of media activism in their manifesto of tactical media, identifying a class of producers who amplify temporary reversals in the flow of power by exploiting the spaces, channels and platforms necessary for their practices. Tactical media has been used since the late nineties to help explain a range of open-source practices that appropriate technological tools for political purposes. While pointing out the many material distinctions between different types of tactical media projects within the arts, Rita Raley describes them as “forms of critical intervention, dissent and resistance” (6). The term has also been adopted by media activists engaged in a range of practices all over the world, including the Tactical Technology Collective. For Field Trip, tactical media is a way of creating representations that help navigate neighbourhoods as well as alternative political processes that shape them. In this sense, tactical representations do not “offer the omniscient point of view we associate with Cartesian cartographic practice” (Raley 2). Rather these representations are politically subjective systems of navigation that make visible hidden information and connect people to the decisions affecting their lives. Conclusion We have shown that the walking tour can be a tourist attraction, a catalyst to the transformation of urban space through gentrification, and an activist intervention into processes of urban renewal that exclude people and alternative ways of being in the city. This article presents practice-led research through the design of Field Trip. By walking collectively, we have focused on tactical ways of opening up participation in the future of neighbourhoods, and more broadly in designing the city. 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Sydney: Giramondo, 2017.Castles, Stephen, Jock Collins, Katherine Gibson, David Tait, and Caroline Alorsco. “The Global Milkbar and the Local Sweatshop: Ethnic Small Business and the Economic Restructuring of Sydney.” Centre for Multicultural Studies, University of Wollongong, Working Paper 2 (1991).Crosby, Alexandra, and Kirsten Seale. “Counting on Carrington Road: Street Numbers as Metonyms of the Urban.” Visual Communication 17.4 (2018): 1-18. Crosby, Alexandra. “Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance.” Mapping Edges, 2018. 25 Jun. 2018 <http://www.mappingedges.org/news/marrickville-maps-tropical-imaginaries-abundance/>.Cook, Nicole. “Performing Housing Affordability: The Case of Sydney’s Green Bans.” Housing and Home Unbound: Intersections in Economics, Environment and Politics in Australia. Eds. Nicole Cook, Aidan Davidson, and Louise Crabtree. 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Heddon, Dierdre, and Misha Myers. “Stories from the Walking Library.” Cultural Geographies 21.4 (2014): 1-17. Iveson, Kurt. “Building a City for ‘The People’: The Politics of Alliance-Building in the Sydney Green Ban Movement.” Antipode 46.4 (2014): 992-1013. Iveson, Kurt, Craig Lyons, Stephanie Clark, and Sara Weir. “The Informal Australian City.” Australian Geographer (2018): 1-17. Jones, Phil, and James Evans. “Rescue Geography: Place Making, Affect and Regeneration.” Urban Studies 49.11 (2011): 2315-30. Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater, and Elvin Wyly. Gentrification. New York: Routledge, 2008.Legacy, Crystal, Nicole Cook, Dallas Rogers, and Kristian Ruming. “Planning the Post‐Political City: Exploring Public Participation in the Contemporary Australian City.” Geographical Research 56.2 (2018): 176-80. Lovink, Geert, and David Garcia. “The ABC of Tactical Media.” Nettime, 1997. 3 Oct. 2018 <http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html>.Mitchell, Don. “New Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Paying Attention to Political Economy and Social Justice.” Political Economies of Landscape Change. Eds. James L. Wescoat Jr. and Douglas M. Johnson. Dordrecht: Springer, 2008. 29-50.Morris, Brian. “What We Talk about When We Talk about ‘Walking in the City.’” Cultural Studies 18.5 (2004): 675-97. Mudie, Ella. “Unbuilding the City: Writing Demolition.” M/C Journal 20.2 (2017).Phillips, Andrea. “Cultural Geographies in Practice: Walking and Looking.” Cultural Geographies 12.4 (2005): 507-13. Pink, Sarah. “An Urban Tour: The Sensory Sociality of Ethnographic Place-Making.”Ethnography 9.2 (2008): 175-96. Pink, Sarah, Phil Hubbard, Maggie O’Neill, and Alan Radley. “Walking across Disciplines: From Ethnography to Arts Practice.” Visual Studies 25.1 (2010): 1-7. Quiggin, John. “Blogs, Wikis and Creative Innovation.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.4 (2006): 481-96. Raley, Rita. Tactical Media. Vol. 28. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.Ruming, Kristian. “Post-Political Planning and Community Opposition: Asserting and Challenging Consensus in Planning Urban Regeneration in Newcastle, New South Wales.” Geographical Research 56.2 (2018): 181-95. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.Steinbrink, Malte. “‘We Did the Slum!’ – Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective.” Tourism Geographies 14.2 (2012): 213-34. Tissot, Sylvie. Good Neighbours: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End. London: Verso, 2015.

“People live here, they die here so they must leave traces.” (Read 140) “Whatever colonialism was and is, it has made this place unsettling and unsettled.” (Gibson, Badland 2) Introduction What does it mean for [a] country to be haunted? In much theoretical work in film and Cultural Studies since the 1990s, the Australian continent, more often than not, bears traces of long suppressed traumas which inevitably resurface to haunt the present (Gelder and Jacobs; Gibson; Read; Collins and Davis). Felicity Collins and Therese Davis illuminate the ways Australian cinema acts as a public sphere, or “vernacular modernity,” for rethinking settler/indigenous relations. Their term “backtracking” serves as a mode of “collective mourning” in numerous films of the last decade which render unspoken colonial violence meaningful in contemporary Australia, and account for the “aftershocks” of the Mabo decision that overturned the founding fiction of terra nullius (7). Ray Lawrence’s 2006 film Jindabyne is another after-Mabo film in this sense; its focus on conflict within settler/indigenous relations in a small local town in the alpine region explores a traumatised ecology and drowned country. More than this, in our paper’s investigation of country and its attendant politics, Jindabyne country is the space of excessive haunting and resurfacing - engaging in the hard work of what Gibson (Transformations) has termed “historical backfill”, imaginative speculations “that make manifest an urge to account for the disconnected fragments” of country. Based on an adaptation by Beatrix Christian of the Raymond Carver story, So Much Water, So Close to Home, Jindabyne centres on the ethical dilemma produced when a group of fishermen find the floating, murdered body of a beautiful indigenous woman on a weekend trip, but decide to stay on and continue fishing. In Jindabyne, “'country' […] is made to do much discursive work” (Gorman-Murray). In this paper, we use the word as a metonym for the nation, where macro-political issues are played out and fought over. But we also use ‘country’ to signal the ‘wilderness’ alpine areas that appear in Jindabyne, where country is “a notion encompassing nature and human obligation that white Australia has learned slowly from indigenous Australia” (Gibson, Badland 178). This meaning enables a slippage between ‘land’ and ‘country’. Our discussion of country draws heavily on concepts from Ross Gibson’s theorisation of badlands. Gibson claims that originally, ‘badland’ was a term used by Europeans in North America when they came across “a tract of country that would not succumb to colonial ambition” (Badland 14). Using Collins and Davis’s “vernacular modernity” as a starting point, a film such as Jindabyne invites us to work through the productive possibilities of postcolonial haunting; to move from backtracking (going over old ground) to imaginative backfill (where holes and gaps in the ground are refilled in unconventional and creative returns to the past). Jindabyne (as place and filmic space) signifies “the special place that the Australian Alps occupy for so many Australians”, and the film engages in the discursive work of promoting “shared understanding” and the possibility of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal being “in country” (Baird, Egloff and Lebehan 35). We argue specifically that Jindabyne is a product of “aftermath culture” (Gibson Transformations); a culture living within the ongoing effects of the past, where various levels of filmic haunting make manifest multiple levels of habitation, in turn the product of numerous historical and physical aftermaths. Colonial history, environmental change, expanding wire towers and overflowing dams all lend meaning in the film to personal dilemmas, communal conflict and horrific recent crimes. The discovery of a murdered indigenous woman in water high in the mountains lays bare the fragility of a relocated community founded in the drowning of the town of old Jindabyne which created Lake Jindabyne. Beatrix Christian (in Trbic 61), the film’s writer, explains “everybody in the story is haunted by something. […] There is this group of haunted people, and then you have the serial killer who emerges in his season to create havoc.” “What’s in this compulsion to know the negative space?” asks Gibson (Badland 14). It’s the desire to better know and more deeply understand where we live. And haunting gives us cause to investigate further. Drowned, Murderous Country Jindabyne rewrites “the iconic wilderness of Australia’s High Country” (McHugh online) and replaces it with “a vast, historical crime scene” (Gibson, Badland 2). Along with nearby Adaminaby, the township of Old Jindabyne was drowned and its inhabitants relocated to the new town in the 1960s as part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. When Jindabyne was made in 2006 the scheme no longer represented an uncontested example of Western technological progress ‘taming’ the vast mountainous country. Early on in the film a teacher shows a short documentary about the town’s history in which Old Jindabyne locals lament the houses that will soon be sacrificed to the Snowy River’s torrents. These sentiments sit in opposition to Manning Clark’s grand vision of the scheme as “an inspiration to all who dream dreams about Australia” (McHugh online). With a 100,000-strong workforce, mostly migrated from war-ravaged Europe, the post-war Snowy project took 25 years and was completed in 1974. Such was this engineering feat that 121 workmen “died for the dream, of turning the rivers back through the mountains, to irrigate the dry inland” (McHugh online). Jindabyne re-presents this romantic narrative of progress as nothing less than an environmental crime. The high-tension wires scar the ‘pristine’ high country and the lake haunts every aspect of the characters’ interactions, hinting at the high country’s intractability that will “not succumb to colonial ambition” (Gibson, Badland 14). Describing his critical excavation of places haunted, out-of-balance or simply badlands, Gibson explains: Rummaging in Australia's aftermath cultures, I try to re-dress the disintegration in our story-systems, in our traditional knowledge caches, our landscapes and ecologies […] recuperate scenes and collections […] torn by landgrabbing, let's say, or by accidents, or exploitation that ignores rituals of preservation and restoration (Transformations). Tourism is now the predominant focus of Lake Jindabyne and the surrounding areas but in the film, as in history, the area does not “succumb to the temptations of pictorialism” (McFarlane 10), that is, it cannot be framed solely by the picture postcard qualities that resort towns often engender and promote. Jindabyne’s sense of menace signals the transformation of the landscape that has taken place – from ‘untouched’ to country town, and from drowned old town to the relocated, damned and electrified new one. Soon after the opening of the film, a moment of fishing offers a reminder that a town once existed beneath the waters of the eerily still Lake Jindabyne. Hooking a rusty old alarm clock out of the lake, Stuart explains to Tom, his suitably puzzled young son: underneath the water is the town where all the old men sit in rocking chairs and there’s houses and shops. […] There was a night […] I heard this noise — boing, boing, boing. And it was a bell coming from under the water. ‘Cause the old church is still down there and sometimes when the water’s really low, you can see the tip of the spire. Jindabyne’s lake thus functions as “a revelation of horrors past” (Gibson Badland 2). It’s not the first time this man-made lake is filmically positioned as a place where “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson, Badland 13). Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2004) also uses Lake Jindabyne and its surrounds to create a bleak and menacing ambience that heightens young Heidi’s sense of alienation (Simpson, ‘Reconfiguring rusticity’). In Somersault, the male-dominated Jindabyne is far from welcoming for the emotionally vulnerable out-of-towner, who is threatened by her friend’s father beside the Lake, then menaced again by boys she meets at a local pub. These scenes undermine the alpine region’s touristic image, inundated in the summer with tourists coming to fish and water ski, and likewise, with snow skiers in the winter. Even away from the Lake, there is no fleeing its spectre. “The high-tension wires marching down the hillside from the hydro-station” hum to such an extent that in one scene, “reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)”, a member of the fishing party is spooked (Ryan 52). This violence wrought upon the landscape contextualises the murder of the young indigenous woman, Susan, by Greg, an electrician who after murdering Susan, seems to hover in the background of several scenes of the film. Close to the opening of Jindabyne, through binoculars from his rocky ridge, Greg spots Susan’s lone car coursing along the plain; he chases her in his vehicle, and forces her to stop. Before (we are lead to assume) he drags her from the vehicle and murders her, he rants madly through her window, “It all comes down from the power station, the electricity!” That the murder/murderer is connected with the hydro-electric project is emphasised by the location scout in the film’s pre-production: We had one location in the scene where Greg dumps the body in some water and Ray [Lawrence] had his heart set on filming that next to some huge pipelines on a dam near Talbingo but Snowy Hydro didn’t […] like that negative content […] in association with their facility and […] said ‘no’ they wouldn’t let us do it.” (Jindabyne DVD extras) “Tales of murder and itinerancy in wild country are as old as the story of Cain in the killing fields of Eden” (Badlands 14). In Jindabyne we never really get to meet Greg but he is a familiar figure in Australian film and culture. Like many before him, he is the lone Road Warrior, a ubiquitous white male presence roaming the de-populated country where the road constantly produces acts of (accidental and intentional) violence (Simpson, ‘Antipodean Automobility’). And after a litany of murders in recent films such as Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and Gone (Ringan Ledwidge, 2007) the “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson Transformations 13) in the isolating landscape. The murderer in Jindabyne, unlike those who have migrated here as adults (the Irish Stuart and his American wife, Claire), is autochthonous in a landscape familiar with a trauma that cannot remain hidden or submerged. Contested High Country The unsinkability of Susan’s body, now an ‘indigenous murdered body’, holds further metaphorical value for resurfacing as a necessary component of aftermath culture. Such movement is not always intelligible within non-indigenous relations to country, though the men’s initial response to the body frames its drifting in terms of ascension: they question whether they have “broken her journey by tying her up”. The film reconfigures terra nullius as the ultimate badland, one that can never truly suppress continuing forms of physical, spiritual, historical and cultural engagement with country, and the alpine areas of Jindabyne and the Snowy River in particular. Lennon (14) points to “the legacy of biased recording and analysis” that “constitutes a threat to the cultural significance of Aboriginal heritage in alpine areas” (15). This significance is central to the film, prompting Lawrence to state that “mountains in any country have a spiritual quality about them […] in Aboriginal culture the highest point in the landscape is the most significant and this is the highest point of our country” (in Cordaiy 40). So whilst the Jindabyne area is contested country, it is the surfacing, upward mobility and unsinkable quality of Aboriginal memory that Brewster argues “is unsettling the past in post-invasion Australia” (in Lambert, Balayi 7). As the agent of backfill, the indigenous body (Susan) unsettles Jindabyne country by offering both evidence of immediate violence and reigniting the memory of it, before the film can find even the smallest possibility of its characters being ‘in country’. Claire illustrates her understanding of this in a conversation with her young son, as she attempts to contact the dead girls’ family. “When a bad thing happens,” she says, “we all have to do a good thing, no matter how small, alright? Otherwise the bad things, they just pile up and up and up.” Her persistent yet clumsy enactment of the cross-cultural go-between illuminates the ways “the small town community move through the terms of recent debate: shame and denial, repressed grief and paternalism” (Ryan 53). It is the movement of backfill within the aftermath: The movement of a foreign non-Aboriginal woman into Aboriginal space intertextually re-animates the processes of ‘settlement’, resolution and environmental assimilation for its still ‘unsettled’ white protagonists. […] Claire attempts an apology to the woman’s family and the Aboriginal community – in an Australia before Kevin Rudd where official apologies for the travesties of Australian/colonial history had not been forthcoming […] her movement towards reconciliation here is reflective of the ‘moral failure’ of a disconnection from Aboriginal history. (Lambert, Diasporas) The shift from dead white girl in Carver’s story to young Aboriginal woman speaks of a political focus on the ‘significance’ of the alpine region at a given moment in time. The corpse functions “as the trigger for crisis and panic in an Australia after native title, the stolen generation and the war-on-terror” (Lambert, Diasporas). The process of reconnecting with country and history must confront its ghosts if the community is to move forward. Gibson (Transformations) argues that “if we continue to close our imaginations to the aberrations and insufficiencies in our historical records. […] It’s likely we won’t dwell in the joy till we get real about the darkness.” In the post-colonial, multicultural but still divided geographies and cultures of Jindabyne, “genocidal displacement” comes face to face with the “irreconciled relation” to land “that refuses to remain half-seen […] a measure of non-indigenous failure to move from being on the land to being in country” (Ryan 52), evidenced by water harvesting in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and the more recent crises in water and land management. Aftermath Country Haunted by historical, cultural and environmental change, Jindabyne constitutes a post-traumatic screen space. In aftermath culture, bodies and landscapes offer the “traces” (Gibson, Transformations) of “the social consequences” of a “heritage of catastrophe” that people “suffer, witness, or even perpetrate” so that “the legacy of trauma is bequeathed” (Walker i). The youth of Jindabyne are charged with traumatic heritage. The young Susan’s body predictably bears the semiotic weight of colonial atrocity and non-indigenous environmental development. Evidence of witnesses, perpetrators and sufferers is still being revealed after the corpse is taken to the town morgue, where Claire (in a culturally improper viewing) is horrified by Susan’s marks from being secured in the water by Stuart and the other men. Other young characters are likewise haunted by a past that is environmental and tragically personal. Claire and Stuart’s young son, Tom (left by his mother for a period in early infancy and the witness of his parents strained marital relations), has an intense fear of drowning. This personal/historical fear is played with by his seven year old friend, Caylin-Calandria, who expresses her own grief from the death of her young mother environmentally - by escaping into the surrounding nature at night, by dabbling in the dark arts and sacrificing small animals. The two characters “have a lot to believe in and a lot of things to express – belief in zombies and ghosts, ritual death, drowning” (Cordaiy 42). As Boris Trbic (64) observes of the film’s characters, “communal and familial harmony is closely related to their intense perceptions of the natural world and their often distorted understanding of the ways their partners, friends and children cope with the grieving process.” Hence the legacy of trauma in Jindabyne is not limited to the young but pervades a community that must deal with unresolved ecologies no longer concealed by watery artifice. Backfilling works through unsettled aspects of country by moving, however unsteadily, toward healing and reconciliation. Within the aftermath of colonialism, 9/11 and the final years of the Howard era, Jindabyne uses race and place to foreground the “fallout” of an indigenous “condemnation to invisibility” and the “long years of neglect by the state” (Ryan 52). Claire’s unrelenting need to apologise to the indigenous family and Stuart’s final admission of impropriety are key gestures in the film’s “microcosm of reconciliation” (53), when “the notion of reconciliation, if it had occupied any substantial space in the public imagination, was largely gone” (Rundell 44). Likewise, the invisibility of Aboriginal significance has specificity in the Jindabyne area – indigeneity is absent from narratives recounting the Snowy Mountains Scheme which “recruited some 60,000 Europeans,” providing “a basis for Australia’s postwar multicultural society” (Lennon 15); both ‘schemes’ evidencing some of the “unrecognised implications” of colonialism for indigenous people (Curthoys 36). The fading of Aboriginal issues from public view and political discourse in the Howard era was serviced by the then governmental focus on “practical reconciliation” (Rundell 44), and post 9/11 by “the broad brushstrokes of western coalition and domestic political compliance” (Lambert, CMC 252), with its renewed focus on border control, and increased suspicion of non-Western, non-Anglo-European difference. Aftermath culture grapples with the country’s complicated multicultural and globalised self-understanding in and beyond Howard’s Australia and Jindabyne is one of a series of texts, along with “refugee plays” and Australian 9/11 novels, “that mobilised themselves against the Howard government” (Rundell 43-44). Although the film may well be seen as a “profoundly embarrassing” display of left-liberal “emotional politics” (44-45), it is precisely these politics that foreground aftermath: local neglect and invisibility, terror without and within, suspect American leadership and shaky Australian-American relations, the return of history through marked bodies and landscapes. Aftermath country is simultaneously local and global – both the disappearance and the ‘problem’ of Aboriginality post-Mabo and post-9/11 are backfilled by the traces and fragments of a hidden country that rises to the surface. Conclusion What can be made of this place now? What can we know about its piecemeal ecology, its choppy geomorphics and scarified townscapes? […] What can we make of the documents that have been generated in response to this country? (Gibson, Transformations). Amidst the apologies and potentialities of settler-indigenous recognition, the murdering electrician Gregory is left to roam the haunted alpine wilderness in Jindabyne. His allegorical presence in the landscape means there is work to be done before this badland can truly become something more. Gibson (Badland 178) suggests country gets “called bad […] partly because the law needs the outlaw for reassuring citizens that the unruly and the unknown can be named and contained even if they cannot be annihilated.” In Jindabyne the movement from backtracking to backfilling (as a speculative and fragmental approach to the bodies and landscapes of aftermath culture) undermines the institutional framing of country that still seeks to conceal shared historical, environmental and global trauma. The haunting of Jindabyne country undoes the ‘official’ production of outlaw/negative space and its discursively good double by realising the complexity of resurfacing – electricity is everywhere and the land is “uncanny” not in the least because “the town of Jindabyne itself is the living double of the drowned original” (Ryan 53). The imaginative backfill of Jindabyne reorients a confused, purgatorial Australia toward the “small light of home” (53) – the hope of one day being “in country,” and as Gibson (Badland 3) suggests, the “remembering,” that is “something good we can do in response to the bad in our lands.” References Baird, Warwick, Brian Egloff and Rachel Lenehan. “Sharing the mountains: joint management of Australia’s alpine region with Aboriginal people.” historic environment 17.2 (2003): 32-36. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema after Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Cordaiy, Hunter. “Man, Woman and Death: Ray Lawrence on Jindabyne.” Metro 149 (2006): 38-42. Curthoys, Anne. “An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous.” Race Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer. Sydney, UNSW P, 2000. 21-36. Gelder, Ken and Jane M. Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness an Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1998. Gibson, Ross. Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. Gibson, Ross. “Places, Past, Disappearance.” Transformations 13 (2006). Aug. 11 2008 transformations.cqu.edu.au/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Country.” M/C Journal 11.5 (this issue). Kitson, Michael. “Carver Country: Adapting Raymond Carver in Australia.” Metro150 (2006): 54-60. Lambert, Anthony. “Movement within a Filmic terra nullius: Woman, Land and Identity in Australian Cinema.” Balayi, Culture, Law and Colonialism 1.2 (2001): 7-17. Lambert, Anthony. “White Aborigines: Women, Mimicry, Mobility and Space.” Diasporas of Australian Cinema. Eds. Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, and Anthony Lambert. UK: Intellectbooks, 2009. Forthcoming. Lambert, Anthony. “Mediating Crime, Mediating Culture.” Crime, Media, Culture 4.2 (2008): 237-255. Lennon, Jane. “The cultural significance of Australian alpine areas.” Historic environment 17.2 (2003): 14-17. McFarlane, Brian. “Locations and Relocations: Jindabyne & MacBeth.” Metro Magazine 150 (Spring 2006): 10-15. McHugh, Siobhan. The Snowy: The People Behind the Power. William Heinemann Australia, 1999. http://www.mchugh.org/books/snowy.html. Read, Peter. Haunted Earth. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Rundle, Guy. “Goodbye to all that: The end of Australian left-liberalism and the revival of a radical politics.” Arena Magazine 88 (2007): 40-46. Ryan, Matthew. “On the treatment of non-indigenous belonging.” Arena Magazine 84 (2006): 52-53. Simpson, Catherine. “Reconfiguring Rusticity: feminizing Australian Cinema’s country towns’. Studies in Australasian Cinemas 2.1 (2008): forthcoming. Simpson, Catherine. “Antipodean Automobility & Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road.” Australian Humanities Review 39-40 (2006). http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2006/simpson.html. Trbic, Boris. “Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne: So Much Pain, So Close to Home.” Screen Education 44 (2006): 58–64. Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 2005.

Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. 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The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective” (2). This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity” (14). The demand for social justice in cities has, in recent years, taken the form of “Right to the City” movements. The “Right to the City” movement draws upon the long tradition of radical urbanism in which the Paris Commune of 1871 features prominently, and which has both its Marxist and anarchist variants, as well as the geographer Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) arguments that capitalism was fundamentally driven by the production of space, and that the citizens of a city possessed fundamental rights by virtue of being in a city, meaning that political struggle in capitalist societies would take an increasingly urban form. Manifestations of contemporary “Right to the City” movements have been seen in the development of a World Charter for the Right to the City, Right to the City alliances among progressive urban planners as well as urban activists, forums that bring together artists, architects, activists and urban geographers, and a variety of essays on the subject by radical geographers including David Harvey, whose work I wish to focus upon here. In his 2008 essay "The Right to the City," Harvey presents a manifesto for 21st century radical politics that asserts that the struggle for collective control over cities marks the nodal point of anti-capitalist movements today. It draws together a range of strands of arguments recognizable to those familiar with Harvey’s work, including Marxist political economy, the critique of neoliberalism, the growth of social inequality in the U.S. in particular, and concerns about the rise of speculative finance capital and its broader socio-economic consequences. My interest in Harvey’s manifesto here arises not so much from his prognosis for urban radicalism, but from how he understands the suburban in relation to this urban class struggle. It is an important point to consider because, in many parts of the world, growing urbanisation is in fact growing suburbanisation. This is the case for U.S. cities (Cox), and it is also apparent in Australian cities, with the rise in particular of outer suburban Master Planned Communities as a feature of the “New Prosperity” Australia has been experiencing since the mid 1990s (Flew; Infrastructure Australia). What we find in Harvey’s essay is that the suburban is clearly sub-urban, or an inferior form of city living. Suburbs are variously identified by Harvey as being:Sites for the expenditure of surplus capital, as a safety valve for overheated finance capitalism (Harvey 27);Places where working class militancy is pacified through the promotion of mortgage debt, which turns suburbanites into political conservatives primarily concerned with maintaining their property values;Places where “the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action” are actively promoted through the proliferation of shopping malls, multiplexes, franchise stores and fast-food outlets, leading to “pacification by cappuccino” (32);Places where women are actively oppressed, so that “leading feminists … [would] proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents” (28);A source of anti-capitalist struggle, as “the soulless qualities of suburban living … played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the US [as] discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism” (28).Given these negative associations, one could hardly imagine citizens demanding the right to the suburb, in the same way as Harvey projects the right to the city as a rallying cry for a more democratic social order. Instead, from an Australian perspective, one is reminded of the critiques of suburbia that have been a staple of radical theory from the turn of the 20th century to the present day (Collis et. al.). Demanding the “right to the suburb” would appear here as an inherently contradictory demand, that could only be desired by those who the Australian radical psychoanalytic theorist Douglas Kirsner described as living an alienated existence where:Watching television, cleaning the car, unnecessary housework and spectator sports are instances of general life-patterns in our society: by adopting these patterns the individual submits to a uniform life fashioned from outside, a pseudo-life in which the question of individual self-realisation does not even figure. People live conditioned, unconscious lives, reproducing the values of the system as a whole (Kirsner 23). The problem with this tradition of radical critique, which is perhaps reflective of the estrangement of a section of the Australian critical intelligentsia more generally, is that most Australians live in suburbs, and indeed seem (not surprisingly!) to like living in them. Indeed, each successive wave of migration to Australia has been marked by families seeking a home in the suburbs, regardless of the housing conditions of the place they came from: the demand among Singaporeans for large houses in Perth, or what has been termed “Singaperth,” is one of many manifestations of this desire (Lee). Australian suburban development has therefore been characterized by a recurring tension between the desire of large sections of the population to own their own home (the fabled quarter-acre block) in the suburbs, and the condemnation of suburban life from an assortment of intellectuals, political radicals and cultural critics. This was the point succinctly made by the economist and urban planner Hugh Stretton in his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, where he observed that “Most Australians choose to live in suburbs, in reach of city centres and also of beaches or countryside. Many writers condemn this choice, and with especial anger or gloom they condemn the suburbs” (Stretton 7). Sue Turnbull has observed that “suburbia has come to constitute a cultural fault-line in Australia over the last 100 years” (19), while Ian Craven has described suburbia as “a term of contention and a focus for fundamentally conflicting beliefs” in the Australian national imaginary “whose connotations continue to oscillate between dream and suburban nightmare” (48). The tensions between celebration and critique of suburban life play themselves out routinely in the Australian media, from the sun-lit suburbanism of Australia’s longest running television serial dramas, Neighbours and Home and Away, to the pointed observational critiques found in Australian comedy from Barry Humphries to Kath and Kim, to the dark visions of films such as The Boys and Animal Kingdom (Craven; Turnbull). Much as we may feel that the diagnosis of suburban life as a kind of neurotic condition had gone the way of the concept album or the tie-dye shirt, newspaper feature writers such as Catherine Deveny, writing in The Age, have offered the following as a description of the Chadstone shopping centre in Melbourne’s eastern suburbChadstone is a metastasised tumour of offensive proportions that's easy to find. You simply follow the line of dead-eyed wage slaves attracted to this cynical, hermetically sealed weatherless biosphere by the promise a new phone will fix their punctured soul and homewares and jumbo caramel mugachinos will fill their gaping cavern of disappointment … No one looks happy. Everyone looks anaesthetised. A day spent at Chadstone made me understand why they call these shopping centres complexes. Complex as in a psychological problem that's difficult to analyse, understand or solve. (Deveny) Suburbanism has been actively promoted throughout Australia’s history since European settlement. Graeme Davison has observed that “Australia’s founders anticipated a sprawl of homes and gardens rather than a clumping of terraces and alleys,” and quotes Governor Arthur Phillip’s instructions to the first urban developers of the Sydney Cove colony in 1790 that streets shall be “laid out in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and where the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment” (Davison 43). Louise Johnson (2006) argued that the main features of 20th century Australian suburbanisation were very much in place by the 1920s, particularly land-based capitalism and the bucolic ideal of home as a retreat from the dirt, dangers and density of the city. At the same time, anti-suburbanism has been a significant influence in Australian public thought. Alan Gilbert (1988) drew attention to the argument that Australia’s suburbs combined the worst elements of the city and country, with the absence of both the grounded community associated with small towns, and the mental stimuli and personal freedom associated with the city. Australian suburbs have been associated with spiritual emptiness, the promotion of an ersatz, one-dimensional consumer culture, the embourgeoisment of the working-class, and more generally criticised for being “too pleasant, too trivial, too domestic and far too insulated from … ‘real’ life” (Gilbert 41). There is also an extensive feminist literature critiquing suburbanization, seeing it as promoting the alienation of women and the unequal sexual division of labour (Game and Pringle). More recently, critiques of suburbanization have focused on the large outer-suburban homes developed on new housing estates—colloquially known as McMansions—that are seen as being environmentally unsustainable and emblematic of middle-class over-consumption. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss’s Affluenza (2005) is a locus classicus of this type of argument, and organizations such as the Australia Institute—which Hamilton and Denniss have both headed—have regularly published papers making such arguments. Can the Suburbs Make You Creative?In such a context, championing the Australian suburb can feel somewhat like being an advocate for Dan Brown novels, David Williamson plays, Will Ferrell comedies, or TV shows such as Two and a Half Men. While it may put you on the side of majority opinion, you can certainly hear the critical axe grinding and possibly aimed at your head, not least because of the association of such cultural forms with mass popular culture, or the pseudo-life of an alienated existence. The art of a program such as Kath and Kim is that, as Sue Turnbull so astutely notes, it walks both sides of the street, both laughing with and laughing at Australian suburban culture, with its celebrity gossip magazines, gourmet butcher shops, McManisons and sales at Officeworks. Gina Riley and Jane Turner’s inspirations for the show can be seen with the presence of such suburban icons as Shane Warne, Kylie Minogue and Barry Humphries as guests on the program. Others are less nuanced in their satire. The website Things Bogans Like relentlessly pillories those who live in McMansions, wear Ed Hardy t-shirts and watch early evening current affairs television, making much of the lack of self-awareness of those who would simultaneously acquire Buddhist statues for their homes and take budget holidays in Bali and Phuket while denouncing immigration and multiculturalism. It also jokes about the propensity of “bogans” to loudly proclaim that those who question their views on such matters are demonstrating “political correctness gone mad,” appealing to the intellectual and moral authority of writers such as the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. There is also the “company you keep” question. Critics of over-consuming middle-class suburbia such as Clive Hamilton are strongly associated with the Greens, whose political stocks have been soaring in Australia’s inner cities, where the majority of Australia’s cultural and intellectual critics live and work. By contrast, the Liberal party under John Howard and now Tony Abbott has taken strongly to what could be termed suburban realism over the 1990s and 2000s. Examples of suburban realism during the Howard years included the former Member for Lindsay Jackie Kelly proclaiming that the voters of her electorate were not concerned with funding for their local university (University of Western Sydney) as the electorate was “pram city” and “no one in my electorate goes to uni” (Gibson and Brennan-Horley), and the former Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Garry Hardgrave, holding citizenship ceremonies at Bunnings hardware stores, so that allegiance to the Australian nation could co-exist with a sausage sizzle (Gleeson). Academically, a focus on the suburbs is at odds with Richard Florida’s highly influential creative class thesis, which stresses inner urban cultural amenity and “buzz” as the drivers of a creative economy. Unfortunately, it is also at odds with many of Florida’s critics, who champion inner city activism as the antidote to the ersatz culture of “hipsterisation” that they associate with Florida (Peck; Slater). A championing of suburban life and culture is associated with writers such as Joel Kotkin and the New Geography group, who also tend to be suspicious of claims made about the creative industries and the creative economy. It is worth noting, however, that there has been a rich vein of work on Australian suburbs among cultural geographers, that has got past urban/suburban binaries and considered the extent to which critiques of suburban Australia are filtered through pre-existing discursive categories rather than empirical research findings (Dowling and Mee; McGuirk and Dowling; Davies (this volume). I have been part of a team engaged in a three-year study of creative industries workers in outer suburban areas, known as the Creative Suburbia project.[i] The project sought to understand how those working in creative industries who lived and worked in the outer suburbs maintained networks, interacted with clients and their peers, and made a success of their creative occupations: it focused on six suburbs in the cities of Brisbane (Redcliffe, Springfield, Forest Lake) and Melbourne (Frankston, Dandenong, Caroline Springs). It was premised upon what has been an inescapable empirical fact: however much talk there is about the “return to the city,” the fastest rates of population growth are in the outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities (Infrastructure Australia), and this is as true for those working in creative industries occupations as it is for those in virtually all other industry and occupational sectors (Flew; Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Davies). While there is a much rehearsed imagined geography of the creative industries that points to creative talents clustering in dense, highly agglomerated inner city precincts, incubating their unique networks of trust and sociality through random encounters in the city, it is actually at odds with the reality of where people in these sectors choose to live and work, which is as often as not in the suburbs, where the citizenry are as likely to meet in their cars at traffic intersections than walking in city boulevards.There is of course a “yes, but” response that one could have to such empirical findings, which is to accept that the creative workforce is more suburbanised than is commonly acknowledged, but to attribute this to people being driven out of the inner city by high house prices and rents, which may or may not be by-products of a Richard Florida-style strategy to attract the creative class. In other words, people live in the outer suburbs because they are driven out of the inner city. From our interviews with 130 people across these six suburban locations, the unequivocal finding was that this was not the case. While a fair number of our respondents had indeed moved from the inner city, just as many would—if given the choice—move even further away from the city towards a more rural setting as they would move closer to it. While there are clearly differences between suburbs, with creative people in Redcliffe being generally happier than those in Springfield, for example, it was quite clear that for many of these people a suburban location helped them in their creative practice, in ways that included: the aesthetic qualities of the location; the availability of “headspace” arising from having more time to devote to creative work rather than other activities such as travelling and meeting people; less pressure to conform to a stereotyped image of how one should look and act; financial savings from having access to lower-cost locations; and time saved by less commuting between locations.These creative workers generally did not see having access to the “buzz” associated with the inner city as being essential for pursuing work in their creative field, and they were just as likely to establish hardware stores and shopping centres as networking hubs as they were cafes and bars. While being located in the suburbs was disadvantageous in terms of access to markets and clients, but this was often seen in terms of a trade-off for better quality of life. Indeed, contrary to the presumptions of those such as Clive Hamilton and Catherine Deveny, they could draw creative inspiration from creative locations themselves, without feeling subjected to “pacification by cappuccino.” The bigger problem was that so many of the professional associations they dealt with would hold events in the inner city in the late afternoon or early evening, presuming people living close by and/or not having domestic or family responsibilities at such times. The role played by suburban locales such as hardware stores as sites for professional networking and as elements of creative industries value chains has also been documented in studies undertaken of Darwin as a creative city in Australia’s tropical north (Brennan-Horley and Gibson; Brennan-Horley et al.). Such a revised sequence in the cultural geography of the creative industries has potentially great implications for how urban cultural policy is being approached. The assumption that the creative industries are best developed in cities by investing heavily in inner urban cultural amenity runs the risk of simply bypassing those areas where the bulk of the nation’s artists, musicians, filmmakers and other cultural workers actually are, which is in the suburbs. Moreover, by further concentrating resources among already culturally rich sections of the urban population, such policies run the risk of further accentuating spatial inequalities in the cultural realm, and achieving the opposite of what is sought by those seeking spatial justice or the right to the city. An interest in broadband infrastructure or suburban university campuses is certainly far more prosaic than a battle for control of the nation’s cultural institutions or guerilla actions to reclaim the city’s streets. Indeed, it may suggest aspirations no higher than those displayed by Kath and Kim or by the characters of Barry Humphries’ satirical comedy. But however modest or utilitarian a focus on developing cultural resources in Australian suburbs may seem, it is in fact the most effective way of enabling the forms of spatial justice in the cultural sphere that many progressive people seek. ReferencesBrennan-Horley, Chris, and Chris Gibson. “Where Is Creativity in the City? Integrating Qualitative and GIS Methods.” Environment and Planning A 41.11 (2009): 2595–614. Brennan-Horley, Chris, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson, and J. Willoughby-Smith. “GIS, Ethnography and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 92–103.Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. “Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12.Cox, Wendell. “The Still Elusive ‘Return to the City’.” New Geography 28 February 2011. < http://www.newgeography.com/content/002070-the-still-elusive-return-city >.Craven, Ian. “Cinema, Postcolonialism and Australian Suburbia.” Australian Studies 1995: 45-69. Davies, Alan. “Are the Suburbs Dormitories?” The Melbourne Urbanist 21 Sep. 2010. < http://melbourneurbanist.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/are-the-suburbs-dormitories/ >.Davison, Graeme. "Australia: The First Suburban Nation?” Journal of Urban History 22.1 (1995): 40-75. Deveny, Catherine. “No One Out Alive.” The Age 29 Oct. 2009. < http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/no-one-gets-out-alive-20091020-h6yh.html >.Dowling, Robyn, and K. Mee. “Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the End of the Millennium.” Sydney: The Emergence of World City. Ed. John Connell. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000. 244–72.Flew, Terry. “Economic Prosperity, Suburbanization and the Creative Workforce: Findings from Australian Suburban Communities.” Spaces and Flows: Journal of Urban and Extra-Urban Studies 1.1 (2011, forthcoming).Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Sexuality and the Suburban Dream.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 15.2 (1979): 4–15.Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. “Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research.” Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Gilbert, A. “The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism.” Australian Cultural History. Ed. S. I. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 33–39. Gleeson, Brendan. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.Hamilton, Clive, and Richard Denniss. Affluenza. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40.Infrastructure Australia. State of Australian Cities 2010. Infrastructure Australia Major Cities Unit. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. 2010.Johnson, Lesley. “Style Wars: Revolution in the Suburbs?” Australian Geographer 37.2 (2006): 259–77. Kirsner, Douglas. “Domination and the Flight from Being.” Australian Capitalism: Towards a Socialist Critique. Eds. J. Playford and D. Kirsner. Melbourne: Penguin, 1972. 9–31.Kotkin, Joel. “Urban Legends.” Foreign Policy 181 (2010): 128–34. Lee, Terence. “The Singaporean Creative Suburb of Perth: Rethinking Cultural Globalization.” Globalization and Its Counter-Forces in South-East Asia. Ed. T. Chong. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2008. 359–78. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McGuirk, P., and Robyn Dowling. “Understanding Master-Planned Estates in Australian Cities: A Framework for Research.” Urban Policy and Research 25.1 (2007): 21–38Peck, Jamie. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.4 (2005): 740–70. Slater, Tom. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.4 (2006): 737–57. Soja, Ed. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.Stretton, Hugh. Ideas for Australian Cities. Melbourne: Penguin, 1970.Turnbull, Sue. “Mapping the Vast Suburban Tundra: Australian Comedy from Dame Edna to Kath and Kim.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 15–32.

In recent years a number of dramas focussing on Indigenous Australians and Australian history have appeared on the ABC, one of Australia's two public television channels. These dramas have different foci but all represent some aspects of Australian Indigenous history and how it interacts with 'mainstream' representations of Australian history. The four programs I will look at are Cleverman (Goalpost Pictures, 2016-ongoing), Glitch (Matchbox Films, 2015-ongoing), The Secret River (Ruby Entertainment, 2015) and Redfern Now (Blackfella Films, 2012), each of which engages with the past in a unique way.Clearly, different creators, working with different plots and in different genres will have different ways of representing the past. Redfern Now and Cleverman are both produced by Indigenous creators whereas the creators of The Secret River and Glitch are white Australians. Redfern Now and The Secret River are in a realist mode, whereas Glitch and Cleverman are speculative fiction. My argument proceeds on two axes: first, speculative genres allow for more creative ways of representing the past. They give more freedom for the creators to present affective representations of the historical past. Speculative genres also allow for more interesting intellectual examinations of what we consider to be history and its uncertainties. My second axis argues, because it is hard to avoid when looking at this group of texts, that Indigenous creators represent the past in different ways than non-Indigenous creators. Indigenous creators present a more elliptical vision. Non-Indigenous creators tend to address historical stories in more overt ways. It is apparent that even when dealing with the same histories and the same facts, the understanding of the past held by different groups is presented differently because it has different affective meanings.These television programs were all made in the 2010s but the roots of their interpretations go much further back, not only to the history they represent but also to the arguments about history that have raged in Australian intellectual and popular culture. Throughout most of the twentieth century, indigenous history was not discussed in Australia, until this was disturbed by WEH Stanner's reference in the Boyer lectures of 1968 to "our great Australian silence" (Clark 73). There was, through the 1970s and 80s, increased discussion of Indigenous history, and then in the 1990s there was a period of social and cultural argument known locally as the 'History Wars'. This long-running public disagreement took place in both academic and public arenas, and involved historians, other academics, politicians, journalists and social commentators on each side. One side argued that the arrival of white people in Australia led to frontier wars, massacre, attempted genocide and the ongoing oppression of Indigenous people (Reynolds). The other posited that when white people arrived they killed a few Aborigines but mostly Aboriginal people were killed by disease or failure to 'defend' their culture (Windschuttle). The first viewpoint was revisionist from the 1960s onwards and the second represented an attempt at counter-revision – to move the understanding of history back to what it was prior to the revision. The argument took place not only among historians, but was taken up by politicians with Paul Keating, prime minister 1993-1996, holding the first view and John Howard, prime minister 1996-2007, aggressively pursuing the second. The revisionist viewpoint was championed by historians such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan and academics and Aboriginal activists such as Tony Birch and Aileen Moreton Robinson; whereas the counter-revisionists had Keith Windschuttle and Geoffrey Blainey. By and large the revisionist viewpoint has become dominant and the historical work of the counter-revisionists is highly disputed and not accepted.This argument was prominent in Australian cultural discourse throughout the 1990s and has never entirely disappeared. The TV shows I am examining were not made in the 1990s, nor were they made in the 2000s - it took nearly twenty years for responses to the argument to make the jump from politicians' speeches and opinion pieces to television drama. John Ellis argues that the role of television in popular discourse is "working through," meaning contentious issues are first raised in news reports, then they move to current affairs, then talk shows and documentaries, then sketch comedy, then drama (Ellis). Australian Indigenous history was extensively discussed in the news, current affairs and talk shows in the 1990s, documentaries appeared somewhat later, notably First Australians in 2008, but sketch comedy and drama did not happen until in 2014, when Black Comedy's programme first aired, offering sketches engaging often and fiercely with indigenous history.The existence of this public discourse in the political and academic realms was reflected in film before television. Felicity Collins argues that the "Blak Wave" of Indigenous film came to exist in the context of, and as a response to, the history wars (Collins 232). This wave of film making by Indigenous film makers included the works of Rachel Perkins, Warwick Thornton and Ivan Sen – whose films chronicled the lives of Indigenous Australians. There was also what Collins calls "back-tracking films" such as Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and The Tracker (2010) made by white creators that presented arguments from the history wars for general audiences. Collins argues that both the "blak wave" and the "back track" created an alternative cultural sphere where past injustices are acknowledged. She says: "the films of the Blak Wave… cut across the history wars by turning an Indigenous gaze on the colonial past and its afterlife in the present" (Collins 232). This group of films sees Indigenous gazes relate the past and present whereas the white gaze represents specific history. In this article I examine a similar group of representations in television programs.History is not an innocent discourse. In western culture 'history' describes a certain way of looking at the past that was codified in the 19th century (Lloyd 375). It is however not the only way to look at the past, theorist Mark Day has described it as a type of relation with the past and argues that other understandings of the past such as popular memory and mythology are also available (Day). The codification of history in the 19th century involved an increased reliance on documentary evidence, a claim to objectivity, a focus on causation and, often though not always, a focus on national, political history. This sort of history became the academic understanding of history – which claims to be, if not objective, at least capable of disinterest; which bases its arguments on facts and which can establish its facts through reference to documentary records (Froeyman 219). Aileen Moreton-Robinson would call this "white patriarchal knowledge" that seeks to place the indigenous within its own type of knowledge production ("The White Man's Burden" 414). The western version of history tends to focus on causation and to present the past as a coherent narrative leading to the current point in time. This is not an undisputed conception of history in the western academy but it is common and often dominant.Post-colonialist analyses of history argue that western writing about non-western subjects is biased and forces non-westerners into categories used to oppress them (Anderson 44). These categories exist ahistorically and deny non-westerners the ability to act because if history cannot be perceived then it is difficult to see the future. That is to say, because non-western subjects in the past are not seen as historical actors, as people whose actions effected the future, then, in the present, they are unable to access to powerful arguments from history. Historians' usual methodology casts Indigenous people as the 'subjects' of history which is about them, not by them or for them (Tuhiwai Smith 7, 30-32, 144-5). Aboriginal people are characterised as prehistoric, ancient, timeless and dying (Birch 150). This way of thinking about Indigenous Australia removes all agency from Aboriginal actors and restoring agency has been a goal of Aboriginal activists and historians. Aileen Moreton Robinson discusses how Aboriginal resistance is embodied through "oral history (and) social memory," engaging with how Aboriginal actors represent themselves and are represented in relation to the past and historical settings is an important act ("Introduction" 127).Redfern Now and Cleverman were produced through the ABC's Indigenous Department and made by Indigenous filmmakers, whereas Glitch and The Secret River are from the ABC drama department and were made by white Australians. The different programs also have different generic backgrounds. Redfern Now and The Secret River are different forms of realist texts; social realism and historical realism. Cleverman and Glitch, however, are speculative fiction texts that can be argued to be in the mode of magical realism, they "denaturalise the real and naturalise the marvellous" they are also closely tied ideas of retelling colonial stories and "resignify(ing) colonial territories and pasts" (Siskind 834-5).Redfern Now was produced by Blackfella Films for the ABC. It was, with much fanfare, released as the first drama made for television, by Aboriginal people and about Aboriginal people (Blundell). The central concerns of the program are issues in the present, its plots and settings are entirely contemporary. In this way it circumvents the idea and standard representation of Indigenous Australians as ancient and timeless. It places the characters in the program very much in the present.However, one episode "Stand Up" does obliquely engage with historical concerns. In this episode a young boy, Joel Shields, gets a scholarship to an expensive private school. When he attends his first school assembly he does not sing the national anthem with the other students. This leads to a dispute with the school that forms the episode's plot. As punishment for not singing Joel is set an assignment to research the anthem, which he does and he finds the song off-putting – with the words 'boundless plains to share' particularly disconcerting. His father supports him saying "it's not our song" and compares Joel singing it to a "whitefella doing a corrobboree". The national anthem stands metaphorically for the white hegemony in Australia.The school itself is also a metaphor for hegemony. The camerawork lingers on the architecture which is intended to imply historical strength and imperviousness to challenge or change. The school stands for all the force of history white Australia can bring to bear, but in Australia, all architecture of this type is a lie, or at least an exaggeration – the school cannot be more than 200 years old and is probably much more recent.Many of the things the program says about history are conveyed in half sentences or single glances. Arguably this is because of its aesthetic mode – social realism – that prides itself on its mimicry of everyday life and in everyday life people are unlikely to set out arguments in organised dot-point form. At one point the English teacher quotes Orwell, "those who control the past control the future", which seems overt but it is stated off-screen as Joel walks into the room. This seeming aside is a statement about history and directly recalls central arguments of the history wars, which make strong political arguments about the effects of the past, and perceptions of the past, on the present and future. Despite its subtlety, this story takes place within the context of the history wars: it is about who controls the past. The subtlety of the discussion of history allows the film makers the freedom to comment on the content and effects of history and the history wars without appearing didactic. They discuss the how history has effected the present history without having to make explicit historical causes.The other recent television drama in the realist tradition is The Secret River. This was an adaptation of a novel by Kate Grenville. It deals with Aboriginal history from the perspective of white people, in this way it differs from Redfern Now which discusses the issues from the perspective of Aboriginal people. The plot concerns a man transported to Australia as a convict in the early 19th century. The man is later freed and, with his family, attempts to move to the Hawksbury river region. The land they try to settle is, of course, already in use by Aboriginal people. The show sets up the definitional conflict between the idea of settler and invader and suggests the difference between the two is a matter of perspective. Of the shows I am examining, it is the most direct in its representation of historical massacre and brutality. It represents what Felicity Collins described as a back-tracking text recapitulating the colonial past in the light of recovered knowledge. However, from an Indigenous perspective it is another settler tale implying Aboriginal people were wiped out at the time of colonisation (Godwin).The Secret River is told entirely from the perspective of the invaders. Even as it portrays their actions as wrong, it also suggests they were unavoidable or inevitable. Therefore it does what many western histories of Indigenous people do – it classifies and categorises. It sets limits on interpretation. It is also limited by its genre, as a straightforward historical drama and an adaptation, it can only tell its story in a certain way. The television series, like the book before it, prides itself on its 'accurate' rendition of an historical story. However, because it comes from such a very narrow perspective it falls into the trap of categorising histories that might have usefully been allowed to develop further.The program is based on a novel that attracted controversy of its own. It became part of ongoing historiographical debate about the relationship between fiction and history. The book's author Kate Grenville claimed to have written a kind of affectively accurate history that actual history can never convey because the emotions of the past are hidden from the present. The book was critiqued by historians including Inge Clendinnen, who argued that many of the claims made about its historical accuracy were largely overblown (Clendinnen). The book is not the same as the TV program, but the same limitations identified by Clendinnen are present in the television text. However, I would not agree with Clendinnen that formal history is any better. I argue that the limitation of both these mimetic genres can be escaped in speculative fiction.In Glitch, Yurana, a small town in rural Victoria becomes, for no apparent reason, the site of seven people rising from the dead. Each person is from a different historical period. None are Indigenous. They are not zombies but simply people who used to be dead. One of the first characters to appear in the series is an Aboriginal teenager, Beau, we see from his point of view the characters crawling from their graves. He becomes friendly with one of the risen characters, Patrick Fitzgerald, who had been the town's first mayor. At first Fitzgerald's story seems to be one of working class man made good in colonial Australia - a standard story of Australian myth and historiography. However, it emerges that Fitzgerald was in love with an Aboriginal woman called Kalinda and Beau is his descendant. Fitzgerald, once he becomes aware of how he has been remembered by history, decides to revise the history of the town – he wants to reclaim his property from his white descendants and give it to his Indigenous descendants. Over the course of the six episodes Fitzgerald moves from being represented as a violent, racist boor who had inexplicably become the town's mayor, to being a romantic whose racism was mostly a matter of vocabulary. Beau is important to the plot and he is a sympathetic character but he is not central and he is a child. Indigenous people in the past have no voice in this story – when flashbacks are shown they are silent, and in the present their voices are present but not privileged or central to the plot.The program demonstrates a profoundly metaphorical relationship with the past – the past has literally come to life bringing with it surprising buried histories. The program represents some dominant themes in Australian historiography – other formerly dead characters include a convict-turned-bush-ranger, a soldier who was at Gallipoli, two Italian migrants and a girl who died as a result of sexual violence – but it does not engage directly with Indigenous history. Indigenous people's stories are told only in relation to the stories of white people. The text's magical realism allows a less prescriptive relationship with the past than in The Secret River but it is still restricted in its point of view and allows only limited agency to Aboriginal actors.The text's magical realism allows for a thought-provoking representation of relationships with the past. The town of Yurana is represented as a place deeply committed to the representation and glorification of its past. Its main street contains statues of its white founders and war memorials, one of its main social institutions is the RSL, its library preserves relics of the past and its publican is a war history buff. All these indicate that the past is central to the town's identity. The risen dead however dispute and revise almost every aspect of this past. Even the history that is unmentioned in the town's apparent official discourse, such as the WWII internment camp and the history of crimes, is disputed by the different stories of the past that the risen dead have to tell. This indicates the uncertainty of the past, even when it seems literally set in stone it can still be revised. Nonetheless the history of Indigenous people is only revised in ways that re-engage with white history.Cleverman is a magical realist text profoundly based in allegory. The story concerns the emergence into a near future society of a group of people known as the "Hairies." It is never made clear where they came from or why but it seems they appeared recently and are unable to return. They are an allegory for refugees. Hairypeople are part of many Indigenous Australian stories, the show's creator, Ryan Griffen, stated that "there are different hairy stories throughout Australia and they differ in each country. You have some who are a tall, some are short, some are aggressive, some are friendly. We got to sort of pick which ones will fit for us and create the Hairies for our show" (Bizzaca).The Hairies are forced to live in an area called the Zone, which, prior to the arrival of the Hairy people, was a place where Aboriginal people lived. This place might be seen as a metaphor for Redfern but it is also an allegory for Australia's history of displacing Aboriginal people and moving and restricting them to missions and reserves. The Zone is becoming increasingly securitised and is also operating as a metaphor for Australia's immigration detention centres. The prison the Hairy characters, Djukura and Bunduu, are confined to is yet another metaphor, this time for both the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prison and the securitisation of immigration detention. These multiple allegorical movements place Australia's present refugee policies and historical treatment of Aboriginal people within the same lens. They also place the present, the past and the future within the same narrative space.Most of the cast is Aboriginal and much of the character interaction is between Aboriginal people and Hairies, with both groups played by Indigenous actors. The disadvantages suffered by Indigenous people are part of the story and clearly presented as affecting the behaviour of characters but within the story Aboriginal people are more advantaged than Hairies, as they have systems, relationships and structures that Hairy people lack. The fact that so much of the interaction in the story is between Indigenous people and Hairies is important: it can be seen to be an interaction between Aboriginal people and Aboriginal mythology or between Indigenous past and present. It demonstrates Aboriginal identities being created in relation to other Aboriginal identities and not in relation to white people, where in this narrative, Aboriginal people have an identity other than that allowed for in colonialist terms.Cleverman does not really engage with the history of white invasion. The character who speaks most about this part of Aboriginal history and whose stated understanding of himself is based on that identity is Waruu. But Waruu is also a villain whose self-identity is also presented as jealous and dishonest. However, despite only passing mentions of westernised history the show is deeply concerned with a relationship with the past. The program engages with Aboriginal traditions about the past that have nothing to do with white history. It presents a much longer view of history than that of white Australia. It engages with the Aboriginal tradition of the Cleverman - demonstrated in the character of Uncle Jimmy who passes a nulla nulla (knob-headed hardwood club), as a symbol of the past, to his nephew Koen and tells him he is the new Cleverman. Cleverman demonstrates a discussion of Australian history with the potential to ignore white people. It doesn't ignore them, it doesn't ignore the invasion but it presents the possibility that it could be ignored.There is a danger in this sort of representation of the past that Aboriginal people could be relegated to the type of ahistorical, metahistorical myths that comprise colonialist history's representation of Indigenous people (Birch). But Cleverman's magical realist, near future setting tends to undermine this. It grounds representation in history through text and metaphor and then expands the definition.The four programs have different relationships with the past but all of them engage with it. The programs are both restrained and freed by the genres they operate in. It is much easier to escape the bounds of formal history in the genre of magical realism and both Glitch and Cleverman do this but have significantly different ways of dealing with history. "Stand up" and The Secret River both operate within more formally realist structures. The Secret River gives us an emotional reading of the past and a very affective one. However, it cuts off avenues of interpretation by presenting a seemingly inevitable tragedy. Through use of metaphor and silence "Stand up" presents a much more productive relationship with the past – seeing it as an ongoing argument rather than a settled one. Glitch engages with the past as a topic that is not settled and that can therefore be changed whereas Cleverman expands our definition of past and understanding of the past through allegory.It is possible to draw further connections. Those stories created by Indigenous people do not engage with the specifics of traditional dominant Australian historiography. However, they work with the assumption that everyone already knows this historiography. They do not re-present the pain of the past, instead they deal with it in oblique terms with allegory. Whereas the programs made by non-Indigenous Australians are much more overt in their representation of the sins of the past, they overtly engage with the History Wars in specific historical arenas in which those wars were fought. The non-Indigenous shows align themselves with the revisionist view of history but they do so in a very different way than the Indigenous shows.ReferencesAnderson, Ian. "Introduction: The Aboriginal Critique of Colonial Knowing." Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.Birch, Tony. "'Nothing Has Changed': The Making and Unmaking of Koori Culture." Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.Bizzaca, Chris. "The World of Cleverman." Screen Australia 2016.Blundell, Graeme. "Redfern Now Delves into the Lives of Ordinary People." The Australian 26 Oct. 2013: News Review.Clark, Anna. History's Children: History Wars in the Classroom. Sydney: New South, 2008.Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” The Quarterly Essay. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006.Collins, Felicity. "After Dispossession: Blackfella Films and the Politics of Radical Hope." The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics. Eds. Yannis Tzioumakis and Claire Molloy. New York: Routledge, 2016.Day, Mark. "Our Relations with the Past." Philosophia 36.4 (2008): 417-27.Ellis, John. Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.Froeyman, Anton. "The Ideal of Objectivity and the Public Role of the Historian: Some Lessons from the Historikerstreit and the History Wars." Rethinking History 20.2 (2016): 217-34.Godwin, Carisssa Lee. "Shedding the 'Victim Narrative' for Tales of Magic, Myth and Superhero Pride." The Conversation 2016.Lloyd, Christopher. "Historiographic Schools." A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography Ed. Tucker, Aviezer. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. "Introduction: Resistance, Recovery and Revitalisation." Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.———. "The White Man's Burden." Australian Feminist Studies 26.70 (2011): 413-31.Reynolds, Henry. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. 2nd ed. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1995.Siskind, Mariano. "Magical Realism." The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature. Vol. 2. Ed. Ato Quayson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 833-68.Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. London: Zed Books, 2012.Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Paddington, NSW: Macleay Press, 2002.

Background: This paper examines the exclusion of public health from social license narratives within an increasingly financialised food system, through a case study of foreign ownership in the Australian sugar industry. As finance actors such as asset management firms, pension funds, private equity funds, state owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds engage in speculative farmland investment, commodity futures trading, and the conversion of farmland into a financial asset, power within agro-industrial food supply chains becomes increasingly concentrated. This has been associated with increased food prices and more processed food, contributing to obesogenic diets, hunger, and poorer health outcomes for many. The potential for negative social and environmental impacts has prompted awareness of the need for financial actors to demonstrate sustainability, responsibility and accountability in their farmland investments. Methods: This paper uses thematic analysis of qualitative interviews and key documents to assess four recent acquisitions of sugarcane land in North Queensland. We consider how companies’ efforts to establish or maintain a social license to operate (SLO) intersect with their capital accumulation strategies. Results: Our findings demonstrate that the link between the commodification of ‘unhealthy’ food inputs (such as sugar) and financialisation remains outside the purview of financiers. Instead, agribusiness firms use narratives centred on biofuels investment and energy/food security to justify their legitimacy in the sugar sector. We organise our findings according to two ‘narratives:’ constructing trust and credibility through ethical compliance; and, biofuels expansion as a legitimate response to climate change. The concept of social license is much stronger in the second narrative, but health is largely missing. Conclusion: The ‘distancing’ between responsibility and health outcomes highlights the limits to principles of responsible financial investment, and to the legitimacy of finance to claim an SLO – the ongoing approval and acceptance by society to conduct its activities.

When this theme of ‘revelation’ was first being conceived of in September of 2019, Greta Thunberg was addressing the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York, decrying the state of climate change. “I shouldn’t be up here”, she said. “I should be back in school … people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.” The warming trend proceeding at an unprecedented rate as a result of human activity. When this theme was being fleshed out and abstracts being fielded in January 2020, Australia was aflame. Bushfires devoured more than 12.6 million hectares of land. “It has been unprecedented, and hopefully it’s one that none of us here will ever have to experience again”, said Ben Shepherd from the New South Wales Rural Fire Service.As articles were being edited, this editorial being honed, the world is in the grip of a pandemic. “Unprecedented times”, the world is saying, “the kids should be in school, people are dying.” But ecosystems are improving with greenhouse emissions slowed as lockdowns are in place, the pace of industry momentarily relaxed. Unprecedented times. With unprecedented times inevitably come moments of revelation. This issue of ‘revelation’ became an instance of our own, a revelatory reckoning that this theme was timelier than we could have ever anticipated. Instances of revelation can be seen, heard, and experienced through a variety of lenses, be they personal or political, historical or speculative, social or cultural, ecological or technological. Anders Lidén (313-16) describes revelation as “moments that contain the seeds of new creations” and which in turn are “suited to provoking or awakening sensations of surprise and revelation.” Platforms that cultivate shared experiences of revelation are becoming increasingly varied, evidenced through the breadth of topical responses to the theme within this issue. The feature article from Renzo Filinich and Tamara Jesus Chibey is a heady engagement with the revelation process of individuation, the revealing intersection between natural and artificial systems. In ‘A Biometric Logic of Revelation: Zach Blas’s SANCTUM (2018)’, from authors C.L. Quinan and Hannah Pezzack, biometric scanning technologies are examined as constructed within normative perceptions of race and gender. Wes Hill’s article presents a critical reflection on the socio-political impacts of specific revelatory and revealing art works of Hans Haacke. A similar critical reflection on socio-political impacts through revelatory and revealing art comes from authors Bronwyn Fredericks and Abraham Bradfield in their article ‘Revealing and Revelling in the Floods on Country: Memory Poles within Toonooba’. Here the authors look at flood markers turned public art by Capricornia Arts Mob; revelation is found in ‘revelling’ in Country and the ‘revealing’ of Aboriginal survival and resistance. Sites of revelation exist also in the complex visual and narrative repetitions found in literature and film. We see this respectively in an exploration of gendered violence during moments of intimacy in Emma McNicol’s article on John le Carré’s The Night Manager, and whistleblowing as an act of revelation in Sasa Miletic’s article ‘“Everyone Has Secrets”: Revealing the Whistleblower in the Hollywood Film’. Gabi Mocatta and Erin Hawley’s article ‘Uncovering a Climate Catastrophe? Media Coverage of Australia’s Black Summer Bushfires and the Revelatory Extent of the Climate Blame Frame’ looks at the role of the media in prompting climate change revelations within public consciousness in the wake of 2020’s devastating bushfires in Australia. Finally, a call for a revised model of cross-cultural training designed to facilitate vital discussions on racism in Australia from an Indigenous perspective – revelations gained from looking back at past shortcomings – in Bronwyn Fredericks and Debbie Bargaille’s ‘Situating Race in Cultural Competency Training: A Site of Self-Revelation’. We are certainly in unprecedented times, and critical expression to spark enlightenment, a way through, is never more needed as now in the age of Covid-19. On this, Mary Mostafanezhad (641) writes:The current revelatory moment of the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to find hope in the rubble through the deconstruction of framings of crisis as “error” … This reframing of the pandemic as an "unnatural" disaster opens new debates … of hope in revelatory moments of crisis. (639)The contributions made to this issue are as diverse in their responses to the theme of ‘revelation’ as they are insightful, though all are connected by their investment in meaningful conversations, of togetherness, betterment, critical engagement and necessary change during a period of global unease. We hope this issue helps you find hope in the rubble. ReferencesMostafanezhad, Mary. “Covid-19 Is an Unnatural Disaster: Hope in Revelatory Moments of Crisis.” Tourism Geographies. Werner, Joel, and Suzannah Lyons. “The Size of Australia's Bushfire Crisis Captured in Five Big Numbers.” ABC News, 5 Mar. 2020. “Transcript: Greta Thunberg's Speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit.” NPR, 23 Sep. 2019. <https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit>.

While Young Adult dystopian texts commonly manipulate expectations of time and space, it is largely in a linear sense—projecting futuristic scenarios, shifting the contemporary reader into a speculative space sometimes only slightly removed from contemporary social, political, or environmental concerns (Booker 3; McDonough and Wagner 157). These concerns are projected into the future, having followed their natural trajectory and come to a dystopian present. Authors write words and worlds of warning in a postapocalyptic landscape, drawing from and confirming established dystopian tropes, and affirming the activist power of teenage protagonists in cultivating change. This article examines the intersections between dystopian Young Adult literature and Indigenous Futurisms, and the possibilities for sharing or encoding Indigenous Knowledge through the disruption or revision of genre, where the act itself become a movement of activism and survival echoed in text. Lynette James acknowledges the “ruptures” (157) Indigenous authors have made in the genre through incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into story as an embedded element – not only of narrative, but of structure. Ambelin Kwaymullina, of the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, exemplifies this approach in her disruption or rupture of the dystopian genre in her embodiment of Indigenous Knowledge in the Young Adult (YA) text The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf. Kwaymullina centres Indigenous Knowledge throughout the trilogy, offering a powerful revision of key tropes of the dystopian YA genre, creating a perspective that privileges Indigenous Knowledge. This is most significantly identified through her depiction of time as a non-linear concept, at once realised narratively, conceptually, and structurally in the text. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, the first of a trilogy of novels in “The Tribe” series, presents a futuristic post-apocalyptic world, set 300 years after the Reckoning, a cataclysmic environmental disaster. The protagonist, Ashala Wolf, is one of a number of people with supernatural abilities that are outlawed by their government and labelled Illegals. As the novel begins, Ashala is being interrogated by the villainous Neville Rose, held in a detention centre as she plots to escape, free her fellow detainees, and return to the Tribe in the Firstwood. The plot draws from historical and contemporary parallels in Australia, yet part of the text’s subversive power is that these parallels and connections are never made explicit on the page. The reader is invited to become an active participant in coding meaning by applying their own understandings of the context and connections, creating an inter-subjective dialogue between reader and text, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowing. This article looks to the first novel in the trilogy as the key exemplifier of the disruption of genre and knowledge through the representation of time. It is in this novel that these concepts are established and realised most clearly, being predominantly from Ashala’s perspective as a direct descendant of Indigenous Australians, with the following two novels divided between Ashala, Georgie, and Ember as polyphonic narrative focalisers. Acting as an introduction to the series, The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf presents a foundation for readers to challenge their perceptions on both genre and knowledge. Kwaymullina entangles the two, imbuing knowledge throughout narrative and structure which in turn disrupts genre. In her revisioning of narrative through genre and structural focus of time as a non-linear concept, Kwaymullina puts into practice Conrad Scott’s argument that “the potential healing of moments or processes of crisis in Indigenous dystopias is never possible without a strategic engagement with narrative itself, and even the formal aspects of the text” (73).While the series fits the conventions of the dystopian genre, it has been more commonly identified as speculative fiction, or Indigenous futurism, as Kwaymullina herself defines her work. James notes the significance of acknowledging a text as Indigenous futurism, writing, “identifying a work as Indigenous futurism rather than simply as YA dystopia asks readers, critics, and scholars to adjust their orientation in ways that may radically alter both their perception and reception of it” (153). For the purposes of this article, I acknowledge the clear value and importance of identifying the text as Indigenous futurism, but also find value in the movements that define the shift from dystopian literature to Indigenous futurism, in its engagement with and recasting of dystopian conventions in the text. In embedding Indigenous Knowledge in her worldbuilding and narrative, Kwaymullina actively rewrites dystopian expectations and tropes. These notions would be expected or normalised when grounded in Indigenous futurism, but are regarded as a subversion and revision when read in dystopian fiction. The text engages directly with the specific tropes and expectations of dystopian genre—its significance in rewriting the spaces, narratives, and structures of the genre cannot be overstated. The employment of the dystopian genre as both framework and space of revision speaks to larger debates of the value of dystopian fiction in examining socio-cultural issues over other genres such as realism. Critics argue the speculative nature of dystopian fiction that remains linked to concerns of the present and past allows audiences to envision and experience their own transformative experience, effecting political change (Kennon; Mallan; Basu, Broad, and Hintz; Sypnowich). Balaka Basu, Katherine Broad, and Carrie Hintz argue that serious issues presented in fantastic futuristic scenarios “may provide young people with an entry point into real-world problems, encouraging them to think about social and political issues in new ways, or even for the first time” (4-5). Kerry Mallan notes the “ability of dystopian fiction to open up to readers a dystopian social elsewhere serves a double function: On the one hand, it offers readers an opportunity to reflect on their current existence to compare the similarities and differences between the real and the fictional; on the other, these stories implicitly exhort young people to take responsibility for their own lives and the future of society” (16). Drawing on these metanarrative structures with the interweaving of Indigenous knowledge increases the active responsibility for the reader. It invokes Nnedi Okorafor’s labelling of Indigenous Futurisms as “the most truthful way of telling the truth” (279), creating opportunities for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous reader to engage with narratives of a real apocalypse on invaded land. The dystopian setting and expectations form a buffer between reader and text (Basu, Broad, and Hintz 4), making the narrative more accessible to the reader without shying away from the embedded trauma, while drawing on dystopian fiction’s balance of despair and optimism (Basu, Broad, and Hintz 2).The stakes and value of dystopian fiction are heightened when engaging with Indigenous narratives and knowledge; as Claire Coleman (a Noongar woman from the south coast of Western Australia) notes, Indigenous Australians live in a post-apocalyptic state as “all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people alive today are the descendants of people who survived an apocalypse” (n.p.). James, quoting Uppinder Mehan, concurs, writing “these narrators are ‘survivors—or the descendants of survivors’ [162], not just of broken dystopian worlds or post-cataclysmic events but of the real historical legacies of slavery, conquest, and oppression” (157). Writing on Indigenous futurisms in dystopian and utopian fiction, Mary Morrison argues “people outside Western hegemonic power structures would likely be well-placed to transform the utopian imagination, to decolonize it” (11), acknowledging the significance in the intersection of genre and lived experience by author and character.Kwaymullina expands on this, noting that for Indigenous authors the tropes of speculative fiction are familiar lived experiences. She writes thatmany of the ideas that populate speculative-fiction books – notions of time travel, astral projection, speaking the languages of animals or trees – are part of Indigenous cultures. One of the aspects of my own novels that is regularly interpreted as being pure fantasy, that of an ancient creation spirit who sung the world into being, is for me simply part of my reality. (“Edges” 27)Kwaymullina affirms Coleman and James in her approach, writing “Indigenous people lived through the end of the world, but we did not end. We survived by holding on to our cultures, our kin, and our sense of what was right in a world gone terribly wrong” (“Edges” 29). The Tribe series demonstrates survivance, with Kwaymullina’s approach forming possibilities for intersubjective dialogues across genre. The concept is reinforced through Ashala’s repeated, joyful cries of hope throughout the text: “I live! We live! We survive!” (197, 200, 279, 391).Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz note dystopian literature considers possible futures from the outlook and failures of the present (8), arguing “the label ‘dystopia’ typically applies to works that simultaneously imagine futures and consider the present, essentially occupying a liminal space between these times” (Day, Green-Barteet, and Montz 9). This sense of liminality is heightened with the engagement of time from an Indigenous perspective; as Scott writes, “Indigenous dystopian fiction presents not only the crisis of the future but the ongoing crisis of the present time, and that which is still resonant from the past” (73). In “Respect, Relationships, Renewal: Aboriginal Perspectives on the Worlds of Tomorrow”, Kwaymullina notes that linear time can “become a tool of ideology, with colonial characterisations of Indigenous peoples as being of an earlier (less ‘advanced’) time through the use of terms such as ‘primitive’, ‘prehistoric’ and ‘prehistory’” (“Respect” 126).In shifting to a dystopian world where Australia as a colonised or invaded country is no longer recognised, but Country is still alive and read by those who live on it, Kwaymullina recasts the use of linear time as a tool of ideology to reaffirm Coleman’s argument that Indigenous Australians already exist in a post-apocalyptic state. She draws from the past and present and casts it into the future, while simultaneously recognising that all three are linked and circular—events are repeating and being relived. Kwaymullina depicts numerous parallels between the dystopian world and a post-invasion Australia, populating her world with references to detention centres; othering and distinct labelling of a vilified minority deemed a threat or aberrant to the majority colonising community; the name and title of the series’ central villain Chief Administrator Neville Rose in a clear reference to A.O. Neville, WA Chief Protector of Aborigines.At the outset, the government uses labels to separate and denigrate the Other—individuals with Abilities are called Illegals, distinct from Citizens, although they can apply for Exemptions if their Ability is deemed useful and passive. The terminology of Exemption draws deliberate connections to the Exemption Certificate Indigenous Australians could apply for from the Aborigines Protection (Amendment) Act 1943. The text consistently operates in modes of survivance, as Ashala and the Tribe redefine their world through a distinctly Indigenous perspective (Murphy 179). Ashala gains power through the tool used to suppress her by claiming and embracing this status, identifying her friends and herself as the Tribe and choosing a forest name emblematic of the totems that each Tribe member has a particular connection to (e.g. Georgie Spider, Ember Crow, Ashala Wolf). Continual parallels are drawn to Indigenous Knowledge: Ashala’s Ability is Sleepwalking, where she enters a state in dreaming where she can alter reality, a liminal space that suggests connections to the Dreamtime. While the land is no longer called or recognised as Australia, and the tectonic plates have shifted land mass, it remains Country, as recognised in Ashala’s relationship with the Firstwood. The Balance, the inherent harmony between all life, animate and inanimate, is a clear reflection of an Indigenous understanding, positioning it as the mainstream ideology.Kwaymullina weaves Indigenous knowledge through the text as demonstrated through narrative, key thematic concepts, and structure, disrupting the tropes of dystopian fiction in a manner that subverts genre and presents new possibilities for both reader and writer while presenting a shift to Indigenous Futurisms. As an organic by-product of this ideological framework, regressive or gendered tropes are re-envisioned as feminist and ecologically centred, ultimately conveying a sense of hope and survivance. Key tropes of YA dystopian fiction include a female teenager protagonist oppressed by her government, often initially unknowingly so embedded is she in the system, potentially profiting from it in some way. She is often introduced to the reader in a setting that the character initially reads as utopian, but is revealed to be dystopian and authoritarian in its construction. As identified by Ann M.M. Childs, a common dynamic in the genre that reinforces gender roles in heterosexual relationships see the protagonist introduced to the concept of rebellion or dissent through a male love interest already embedded in a resistance movement, at the cost of losing or betraying a female friend (188). Childs notes the protagonist may be resistant to the idea of rebellion, but after falling for the love interest, grows to genuinely care for the cause. Technology is depicted as advanced, alien or dehumanising, and both belongs to and represents the repressive society the protagonist seeks to escape and change. The natural environment is depicted in binary opposition, with characters finding resilience, freedom, and personal agency in a return to nature (McDonough and Wagner 157). Society will have attempted to restrict, destroy, or otherwise mine the natural world, but this attempt for control will inevitably fail or backfire. Initially the environment is displayed as a potentially antagonistic element, wild and dangerous; however, after the character escapes their confining world, it becomes an ally. In her employment of a perspective framed by Indigenous Knowledge, Kwaymullina subverts each of these established tropes, offering an alternative reading of conventions often embedded in the genre. Ashala is introduced as already entrenched in a rebellion that she is both leader and pivotal figure of. Inverting the dynamic outlined by Childs, she is love interest Connor’s motivation for rejecting the government and joining the Tribe: “You are the reason I came here, Ashala Wolf” (Kwaymullina 263). Kwaymullina dismisses Childs’ concern over the removal of female friendship in favour of heterosexual romance by centering Ashala’s relationships with Georgie and Ember as fundamental to Ashala’s well-being, where sistahood is a key paradigm of hope: “I carry my friends with me” (Kwaymullina 39). For Ashala and the Tribe, nature as exemplified through the Firstwood is Country, not only sanctuary but an animate being that Ashala speaks with, asks permission to live within, and offers protection and apology for the harm down to it by humans in the past. The privileging of environment, and reading all animate or inanimate beings as living, extends to challenging the nature/technology dichotomy. Even the static or sterile environments of the detention centres are recognised for their connection to nature in their construction from recycled materials: “Nothing ever truly ends, only transforms” (Kwaymullina 141). In “Learning to Read the Signs: Law in an Indigenous Reality”, Ambelin Kwaymullina and Blaze Kwaymullina write thatsince everything must interconnect and interrelate to survive, if a pattern is fixed in time, it loses its ability to dynamically connect with other patterns. To be temporally fixed is therefore to be isolated; frozen. In an Indigenous worldview, it is, in fact, an impossibility – for that which cannot move, cannot interact, and that which cannot interact is inanimate. And there is nothing inanimate in country. (200)This can be read as representative of Kwaymullina’s rupture or revision of dystopian tropes and genre. When tropes are read as static or absolute, they run the risk of freezing or limiting the knowledge encoded in these stories. By integrating Indigenous Knowledge, new patterns can emerge and interact, extending to the reader’s own understanding of genre, time, and epistemology. Kwaymullina’s revisioning of dystopian tropes through an embedded and celebrated Indigenous perspective culminates in the successful thematic, narrative, and structural expression of time as a non-linear concept. Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina acknowledge the division between the reductionist and linear perspective of time through a Western worldview in comparison to the non-linear perception from that of an Indigenous Australian worldview. They acknowledge that their expression of time is not to be read as representative of all Indigenous Australians’ perspective of time, but one informed by their own Country and upbringing. Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina write,in an Aboriginal worldview, time—to the extent that it exists at all—is neither linear nor absolute. There are patterns and systems of energy that create and transform, from the ageing process of the human body to the growth and decay of the broader universe. But these processes are not ‘measured’ or even framed in a strictly temporal sense, and certainly not in a linear sense. (199)This is enacted through the narrative structure of The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf. The text is set across four days, yet spans years, shifting through narrative in a non-linear manner and reflecting the Indigenous understanding of time as a circular, evolving concept. These four days act as the containers for the text, as Kwaymullina distinguishes the departure from linear time for the uninitiated reader by including headings and subheadings in chapter titles, marked as “Day One”, “Day Two”, “Day Three”, and “Day Four”, before the final section, “The Escape”. Within these containers, themselves marked linearly, narrative ebbs and flows across time and space, taking Ashala away from the Detention Centre to different moments from her past, spanning years. These ‘flashbacks’ are not presented in a linear fashion; the text revisits and repeats key moments of Ashala’s life out of sequence, providing an immediate focus on these seemingly past moments. This is key in shaping the reader’s understanding of “the patterns and systems of energy that create and transform” (Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina 199)—as Ashala revisits or rediscovers memory through time, perceptions of character, motive, relationships, and key plot points are changed and transformed. Meaning is formed through this relationship of narrative and time in a manner not possible through a linear structure. Over the course of the novel, Ashala and the reader find she’s chosen to give herself false memories to protect the Tribe and complete a master plan to defeat Neville Rose. As such, as the novel begins the reader, aligned with Ashala as narrative focaliser, is positioned to read key points through a flawed perspective. Connor is presented as an enemy and betrayer of the Tribe, while Ashala denies her feelings towards him. The reader is aligned with Ashala’s perspective—she has already fallen in love with Connor, but neither she nor the reader knows it due to the displacement of knowledge through narrative structure and memory. This also speaks to identity formation in the text—Ashala is herself, and not herself until the novel reaches full circle, and she and the reader have experienced multiple points of time. As Ember explains, “it’s not about losing small pieces of information. This stuff shapes your entire understanding of reality” (Kwaymullina 167). If the reader revisits the text with this knowledge, they find further value in exploring the non-linear, circular narrative, finding subtext in characters’ interactions and decisions. The disruption in the non-linear narrative structure is twofold: to reflect the representation of time in an Indigenous epistemology, further rewriting the genre; and to create an intersubjective dialogue. As such, the narrative structure creates a space of invitation to the reader. Rather than positioning Ashala as embedded and aware of her status as a custodian of Indigenous knowledge, the text places her as ingrained in Indigenous epistemology, but unaware of it. In this way, the text effectively invites the reader in, mirroring Ashala’s journey of (re)discovery. The non-Indigenous reader enters the text alongside Ashala, with Indigenous knowledge embedded subtly throughout the text echoed in Kwaymullina’s engagement with dystopian tropes, and integrated Indigenous epistemology. By the time Ashala meets the Serpent, her Grandfather, and has her ancestry explained to her, the reader has already been immersed in Ashala’s own way of thinking, an inherently Indigenous one; for instance, throughout the text, she acknowledges the value and interconnectedness of all beings, human and non-human, animate and inanimate. The text leaves space for the reader to be active in their own construction of meaning and knowledge by never using the terms “Indigenous” or “Aboriginal”, themselves colonial inventions employed to control and label. Instead, the reader is encouraged to engage in the metatextual intersubjective dialogue introduced by Kwaymullina to acknowledge Indigenous epistemology—but by way of her approach, Kwaymullina further encourages the reader to “forget Aborigines” (Healy 219) by centring knowledge in its own right, rather than in direct opposition to Western epistemologies. That is, Kwaymullina disrupts Western perspectives framing of Indigenous knowledge as “other”, altering expectations of the norm as non-Indigenous. As Kwaymullina writes, to conceive of time in a non-linear way is at once a great gift and a great responsibility. The responsibility is that our individual actions matter powerfully, radiating out across relationships and affecting all that might be thought of in a linear sense as past, present and future. But the gift is that the passage of linear time has never moved us so far that we cannot take meaningful action to heal the wounds of colonialism. (“Respect” 126-127)In The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, Kwaymullina realises this gift and responsibility. By framing structural, conceptual, and narrative time through an Indigenous epistemology, Kwaymullina privileges Indigenous Knowledge and effectively subverts and revises the genre through the rupture of dystopian conventions. Possibilities of hope and healing emerge in the text’s construction of time and genre as spaces of growth and change are emphasised; like Ashala, the reader finds themselves at the end and beginning of the world at once.ReferencesBasu, Balaka, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz, eds. Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. New York: Routledge, 2013. Booker, M. Keith. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1994. Bradford, Clare, et al. New World Orders in Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Childs, Ann M.M. “The Incompatibility of Female Friendships and Rebellion.” Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Eds. Sara K. Day et al. Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2014. 187-201.Coleman, Claire G. “Apocalypses Are More than the Stuff of Fiction — First Nations Australians Survived One.” ABC News 8 Dec. 2017. 30 Sep. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-08/first-nations-australians-survived-an-apocalypse-says-author/9224026>.Day, Sara K., Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz, eds. Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2014. Green-Barteet, Miranda A., and Meghan Gilbert-Hickey. “Black and Brown Boys in Young Adult Dystopias: Racialized Docility in ‘The Hunger Games Trilogy’ and ‘The Lunar Chronicles Feather Journal.’” Red Feather Journal 8.2 (2017). 30 Sep. 2019 <https://www.redfeatherjournal.org/volume-8-issue-2.html>.Harris, Anita. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2004. Healy, Chris. Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney: U of NSW P, 2008.Hintz, Carrie, and Elaine Ostry, eds. Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults. New York: Routledge, 2003.James, Lynette. “Children of Change, Not Doom: Indigenous Futurist Heroines in YA.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 57.1-2 (2016). 20 Sep. 2019 <https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/extr.2016.9>.Kennon, Patricia. “‘Belonging’ in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction: New Communities Created by Children.” Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 15.2 (2005). 28 Sep. 2019 <http://www.paperschildlit.com/pdfs/Papers_2005_v15no2_p40.pdf>.Kwaymullina, Ambelin. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf. Newtown: Walker Books Australia, 2012.———. “Edges, Centres and Futures: Reflections on Being an Indigenous Speculative-Fiction Writer.” Kill Your Darlings 18 (2014): 22-33.———. “Respect, Relationships, Renewal: Aboriginal Perspectives on the Worlds of Tomorrow.” Westerly 64.1 (2019): 121-134. Kwaymullina, Ambelin, and Blaze Kwaymullina. “Learning to Read the Signs: Law in an Indigenous Reality.” Journal of Australian Studies 34.2 (2010). 21 Sep. 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14443051003721189>.Mallan, Kerry. “Dystopian Fiction for Young People: Instructive Tales of Resilience.” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 37.1 (2017). 22 Sep. 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1080/07351690.2017.1250586>.McDonough, Megan, and Katherine A. Wagner. “Rebellious Natures: The Role of Nature in Young Adult Dystopian Female Protagonists’ Awakenings and Agency.” Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Eds. Sara K. Day et al. Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2014. 157-170.Montz, Amy L. “Rebels in Dresses: Distractions of Competitive Girlhood in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction.” Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Eds. Sara K. Day et al. Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2014. 107-121.Morrison, Mary. “Decolonizing Utopia: Indigenous Knowledge and Dystopian Speculative Fiction.” Dissertation. U of California, 2017.Murphy, Graham J. “For Love of Country: Apocalyptic Survivance in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Tribe Series.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 57.1-2 (2016). 20 Sep. 2019 <https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/extr.2016.10>.Okorafor, Nnedi. “Organic Fantasy.” African Identities 7.2 (2009). 22 Sep. 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14725840902808967>.Scott, Conrad. “(Indigenous) Place and Time as Formal Strategy: Healing Immanent Crisis in the Dystopias of Eden Robinson and Richard Van Camp.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 57.1-2 (2016). 20 Sep. 2019 <https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/extr.2016.6>.Sypnowich, Christine. “Lessons from Dystopia: Critique, Hope and Political Education.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 52.4 (2018). 22 Sep. 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12328>.

Introduction Utopia has always been countercultural, and ever since technological progress has allowed, utopia has been using alternative media to promote and strengthen its underpinning ideals. In this article, I am seeking to clarify the connections between counterculture and alternative media in utopian contexts to demonstrate their reciprocity, then draw together these threads through reference to a well-known figure of the Rainbow Region–Rusty Miller. His trajectory from iconic surfer and Aquarian reporter to mediator for utopian politics and ideals in the Rainbow Region encompasses in a single identity the three elements underpinning this study. In concluding, I will turn to Rusty’s Byron Guide, questioning its classification as alternative or mainstream media, and whether Byron Bay is represented as countercultural and utopian in this long-running and ongoing publication. Counterculture and Alternative Media in Utopian Contexts Counterculture is an umbrella that enfolds utopia, among many other genres and practices. It has been most often situated in the 1960s and 1970s as a new form of social movement embodying youth resistance to the technocratic mainstream and its norms of gender, sexuality, politics, music, and language (Roszak). Many scholars of counterculture underscore its utopian impulses both in the projection of better societies where the social goals are achieved, and in the withdrawal from mainstream society into intentional communities (Yinger 194-6; McKay 5; Berger). Before exploring further the connections between counterculture and alternative media, I want to define the scope of countercultural utopian contexts in general, and the Rainbow Region in particular. Utopia is a neologism created by Sir Thomas More almost 500 years ago to designate the island community that demonstrates order, harmony, justice, hope and desire in the right balance so that it seems like an ideal land. This imaginary place described in Utopia (1516) as a counterpoint to the social, political and religious shortcomings of contemporary 16th century British society, has attracted accusations of heresy (Molner), and been used as a pejorative term, an insult to denigrate political projects that seem farfetched or subversive, especially during the 19th century. Almost every study of utopian theory, literature and practice points to a dissatisfaction with the status quo, which inspires writers, politicians, architects, artists, individuals and communities to rail against it (see for example Davis, Moylan, Suvin, Levitas, Jameson). Kingsley Widmer’s book Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts reiterates what many scholars have stated when he writes that utopias should be understood in terms of what they are countering. Lyman Tower Sargent defines utopia as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space” and utopianism as “social dreaming” (9), to which I would add that both indicate an improvement on the alternatives, and may indeed be striving to represent the best place imaginable. Utopian contexts, by extension, are those situations where the “social dreaming” is enhanced through human agency, good governance, just laws, education, and work, rather than being a divinely ordained state of nature (Schaer et al). In this way, utopian contexts are explicitly countercultural through their very conception, as human agency is required and their emphasis is on social change. These modes of resistance against dominant paradigms are most evident in attempts to realise textual projections of a better society in countercultural communal experiments. Almost immediately after its publication, More’s Utopia became the model for Bishop Vasco de Quiroga’s communitarian hospital-town Santa Fe de la Laguna in Michoacan, Mexico, established in the 1530s as a counterculture to the oppressive enslavement and massacres of the Purhépecha people by Nuno Guzmán (Green). The countercultural thrust of the 1960s and 1970s provided many utopian contexts, perhaps most readily identifiable as the intentional communities that spawned and flourished, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand (Metcalf, Shared Lives). They were often inspired by texts such as Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America (1970) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), and this convergence of textual practices and alternative lifestyles can be seen in the development of Australia’s own Rainbow Region. Located in northern New South Wales, the geographical area of the Northern Rivers that has come to be known as the Rainbow Region encompasses Byron Bay, Nimbin, Mullumbimby, Bangalow, Clunes, Dunoon, Federal, with Lismore as the region’s largest town. But more evocative than these place names are the “rivers and creeks, vivid green hills, fruit and nut farms […] bounded by subtropical beaches and rainforest mountains” (Wilson 1). Utopian by nature, and recognised as such by the indigenous Bundjalung people who inhabited it before the white settlers, whalers and dairy farmers moved in, the Rainbow Region became utopian through culture–or indeed counterculture–during the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin when the hippies of Mullumbimby and the surfers of Byron Bay were joined by up to 10,000 people seeking alternative ways of being in the world. When the party was over, many Aquarians stayed on to form intentional communities in the beautiful region, like Tuntable Falls, Nimbin’s first and largest such cooperative (Metcalf, From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality 74-83). In utopian contexts, from the Renaissance to the 1970s and beyond, counterculture has underpinned and alternative media has circulated the aims and ideals of the communities of resistance. The early utopian context of the Anabaptist movement has been dubbed as countercultural by Sigrun Haude: “During the reign of the Münster (1534-5) Anabaptists erected not only a religious but also a social and political counterculture to the existing order” (240). And it was this Protestant Reformation that John Downing calls the first real media war, with conflicting movements using pamphlets produced on the new technology of the Gutenberg press to disseminate their ideas (144). What is striking here is the confluence of ideas and practices at this time–countercultural ideals are articulated, published, and disseminated, printing presses make this possible, and utopian activists realise how mass media can be used and abused, exploited and censored. Twentieth century countercultural movements drew on the lessons learnt from historical uprising and revolutions, understanding the importance of getting the word out through their own forms of media which, given the subversive nature of the messages, were essentially alternative, according to the criteria proposed by Chris Atton: alternative media may be understood as a radical challenge to the professionalized and institutionalized practices of the mainstream media. Alternative media privileges a journalism that is closely wedded to notions of social responsibility, replacing an ideology of “objectivity” with overt advocacy and oppositional practices. Its practices emphasize first person, eyewitness accounts by participants; a reworking of the populist approaches of tabloid newspapers to recover a “radical popular” style of reporting; collective and antihierarchical forms of organization which eschew demarcation and specialization–and which importantly suggest an inclusive, radical form of civic journalism. (267) Nick Couldry goes further to point out the utopian processes required to identify agencies of change, including alternative media, which he defines as “practices of symbolic production which contest (in some way) media power itself–that is, the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions” (25). Alternative media’s orientation towards oppositional and contestatory practices demonstrates clear parallels between its ambitions and those of counterculture in utopian contexts. From the 1960s onwards, the upsurge in alternative newspaper numbers is commensurate with the blossoming of the counterculture and increased utopian contexts; Susan Forde describes it thus: “a huge resurgence in the popularity of publications throughout the ‘counter-culture’ days of the 1960s and 1970s” (“Monitoring the Establishment”, 114). The nexus of counterculture and alternative media in such utopian contexts is documented in texts like Roger Streitmatter’s Voices of Revolution and Bob Osterlag’s People’s Movements, People’s Press. Like the utopian newspapers that came out of 18th and 19th century intentional communities, many of the new alternative press served to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the countercultural movements, often focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events (see also Frobert). The radical press in Australia was also gaining ground, with OZ in Australia from 1963-1969, and then from 1967-1973 in London. Magazines launched by Philip Frazer like The Digger, Go-Set, Revolution and High Times, and university student newspapers were the main avenues for youth and alternative expression on the Vietnam war and conscription, gay and lesbian rights, racism, feminism and ecological activism (Forde, Challenging the News; Cock & Perry). Nimbin 1973: Rusty Miller and The Byron Express The 1973 Aquarius Festival of counterculture in Nimbin (12-23 May) was a utopian context that had an alternative media life of its own before it arrived in the Rainbow Region–in student publications like Tharnuka and newsletters distributed via the Aquarius Foundation. There were other voices that announced the coming of the Aquarius Festival to Nimbin and reported on its impact, like The Digger from Melbourne and the local paper, The Northern Star. During the Festival, the Nimbin Good Times first appeared as the daily bulletin and continues today with the original masthead drawn by the Festival’s co-organiser, Graeme Dunstan. Some interesting work has been done on this area, ranging from general studies of the Rainbow Region (Wilson; Munro-Clark) to articles analysing its alternative press (Ward & van Vuuren; Martin & Ellis), but to date, there has been no focus on the Rainbow Region’s first alternative newspaper, The Byron Express. Co-edited by Rusty Miller and David Guthrie, this paper presented and mediated the aims and desires of the Aquarian movement. Though short-lived, as only 7 issues were published from 15 February 1973 to September 1973, The Byron Express left a permanent printed vestige of the Aquarian counterculture movement’s activism and ideals from an independent regional perspective. Miller’s credentials for starting up the newspaper are clear–he has always been a trailblazer, mixing “smarts” with surfing and environmental politics. After graduating from a Bachelor of Arts in history from San Diego State College, he first set foot in Byron Bay during his two semesters with the inaugural Chapman College affiliated University of the Seven Seas in 1965-6. Returning to his hometown of Encinitas, he co-founded the Surf Research accessory company with legendary Californian surfer Mike Doyle, and launched Waxmate, the first specially formulated surf wax in 1967 (Davis, Witzig & James; Warshaw 217), selling his interest in the business soon after to spend a couple of years “living the counterculture life on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai” (Davis, Witzig & James), before heading back to Byron Bay via Bells Beach in 1970 (Miller & Shantz) and Sydney, where he worked as an advertising salesman and writer with Tracks surfing magazine (Martin & Ellis). In 1971, he was one of the first to ride the now famous waves of Uluwatu in Bali, and is captured with Steven Cooney in the iconic publicity image for Albe Falzon’s 1971 film, Morning Of The Earth. The champion surfer from the US knew a thing or two about counterculture, alternative media, advertising and business when he found his new utopian context in Byron Bay. Miller and Guthrie’s front-page editorial of the inaugural issue of The Byron Express, published on 15 February 1973, with the byline “for a higher shire”, expressed the countercultural (cl)aims of the publication. Land use, property development and the lack of concern that some people in Byron had for their impact on the environment and people of the region were a prime target: With this first issue of the Byron Express, we hope to explain that the area is badly in need of a focal point. The transitions of present are vast and moving fast. The land is being sold and resold. Lots of money is coming into the area in the way of developments […] caravan parts, hotels, businesses and real estate. Many of the trips incoming are not exactly “concerned” as to what long term effect such developments might have on the environment and its people. We hope to serve as a focus of concern and service, a centre for expression and reflection. We would ask your contributions in vocal and written form. We are ready for some sock it to ya criticism… and hope you would grab us upon the street to tell us how you feel…The mission of this alternative newspaper is thereby defined by the need for a “focal point” that inscribes the voices of the community in a freely accessible narrative, recorded in print for posterity. Although this first issue contains no mention of the Aquarius Festival, there were already rumours circulating about it, as organisers Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen had been up to Main Arm, Mullumbimby and Nimbin on reconnaissance missions beginning in September 1972. Instead, there was an article on “Mullumbimby Man–Close to the Land” by Nicholas Shand, who would go on to found the community-based weekly newspaper The Echo in 1986, then called The Brunswick Valley Echo and still going strong. Another by Bob McTavish asked whether there could be a better form of government; there was a surf story, and a soul food section with a recipe for honey meade entitled “Do you want to get out of it on 10 cents a bottle?” The second issue continues in much the same vein. It is not until the third issue comes out on 17 March 1973 that the Aquarius Festival is mentioned in a skinny half column on page four. And it’s not particularly promising: Arrived at Nimbin, sleepy hamlet… Office in disused R.S.L. rooms, met a couple of guys recently arrived, said nothing was being done. “Only women here, you know–no drive”. Met Joanne and Vi, both unable to say anything to be reported… Graham Dunstan (codenamed Superfest) and John Allen nowhere in sight. Allen off on trip overseas. Dunstan due back in a couple of weeks. 10 weeks to go till “they” all come… and to what… nobody is quite sure. This progress report provides a fascinating contemporary insight into the tensions–between the local surfies and hippies on one hand, and the incoming students on the other–around the organisation of the Aquarius Festival. There is an unbridled barb at the sexist comments made by the guys, implicit criticism of the absent organisers, obvious skepticism about whether anyone will actually come to the festival, and wonderment at what it will be like. Reading between the lines, we might find a feeling of resentment about not being privy to new developments in their own backyard. The final lines of the article are non-committal “Anyway, let’s see what eventuates when the Chiefs return.” It seems that all has been resolved by the fifth issue of 11 May, which is almost entirely dedicated to the Aquarius Festival with the front page headline “Welcome to the New Age”. But there is still an undertone of slight suspicion at what the newcomers to the area might mean in terms of property development: The goal is improving your fellow man’s mind and nourishment in concert with your own; competition to improve your day and the quality of the day for society. Meanwhile, what is the first thing one thinks about when he enters Byron and the area? The physical environment is so magnificent and all encompassing that it can actually hold a man’s breath back a few seconds. Then a man says, “Wow, this land is so beautiful that one could make a quid here.” And from that moment the natural aura and spells are broken and the mind lapses into speculative equations, sales projections and future interest payments. There is plenty of “love” though, in this article: “The gathering at Nimbin is the most spectacular demonstration of the faith people have in a belief that is possible (and possible just because they want it to be) to live in love, through love together.” The following article signed by Rusty Miller “A Town Together” is equally focused on love: “See what you could offer the spirit at Nimbin. It might introduce you to a style that could lead to LOVE.” The centre spread features photos: the obligatory nudes, tents, and back to nature activities, like planting and woodworking. With a text box of “random comments” including one from a Lismore executive: ‘I took my wife and kids out there last weekend and we had such a good time. Seems pretty organized and the town was loaded with love. Heard there is some hepatitis about and rumours of VD. Everyone happy.” And another from a land speculator (surely the prime target of Miller’s wrath): “Saw guys kissing girls on the street, so sweet, bought 200 acres right outside of town, it’s going to be valuable out there some day.” The interview with Johnny Allen as the centrepiece includes some pertinent commentary on the media and reveals a well-founded suspicion of the mediatisation of the Aquarius Festival: We have tried to avoid the media actually. But we haven’t succeeded in doing so. Part of the basic idea is that we don’t need to be sold. All the down town press can do is try and interpret you. And by doing that it automatically places it in the wrong sort of context. So we’ve tried to keep it to people writing about the festival to people who will be involved in it. It’s an involvement festival. Coopting The Byron Express as an “involved” party effects a fundamental shift from an external reporting newspaper to a kind of proponent or even propaganda for the Aquarius festival and its ideas, like so many utopian newspapers had done before. It is therefore perhaps inevitable that The Byron Express should disappear very soon after the Aquarius festival. Fiona Martin and Rhonda Ellis explain that Rusty Miller stopped producing the paper because he “found the production schedule exhausting and his readership too small to attract consistent advertising” (5). At any rate, there were only two more issues, one in June–with some follow up reporting of the festival–and another in September 1973, which was almost entirely devoted to environmentally focused features, including an interview with Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal). Byron Bay 2013: Thirty Years of Rusty’s Byron Guide What Rusty did next is fairly well known locally–surfing and teaching people how to surf and a bit of writing. When major local employer Walkers slaughterhouse closed in 1983, he and his wife, social geographer Tricia Shantz, were asked by the local council to help promote Byron Bay as a tourist destination, writing the first Byron guide in 1983-4. Incorporating essays by local personalities and dedicated visitors, the Byron guide perpetuates the ideal of environmental awareness, spiritual experimentation, and respect for the land and sea. Recent contributors have included philosopher Peter Singer, political journalist Kerry O’Brien, and writer John Ralston Saul, and Miller and Shantz always have an essay in there themselves. “People, Politics and Culture” is the new byline for the 2013 edition. And Miller’s opening essay mediates the same utopian desires and environmental community messages that he espoused from the beginning of The Byron Express: The name Byron Bay represents something that we constantly try to articulate. If one was to dream up a menu of situations and conditions to compose a utopia, Australia would be the model of the nation-state and Byron would have many elements of the actual place one might wish to live for the rest of their lives. But of course there is always the danger of excesses in tropical paradises especially when they become famous destinations. Australia is being held to ransom for the ideology that we should be slaves to money and growth at the cost of a degraded and polluted physical and social environment. Byron at least was/is a refuge against this profusion of the so-called real-world perception that holds profit over environment as the way we must choose for our future. Even when writing for a much more commercial medium, Miller retains the countercultural utopian spirit that was crystallised in the Aquarius festival of 1973, and which remains relevant to many of those living in and visiting the Rainbow Region. Miller’s ethos moves beyond the alternative movements and communities to infiltrate travel writing and tourism initiatives in the area today, as evidenced in the Rusty’s Byron Guide essays. By presenting more radical discourses for a mainstream public, Miller together with Shantz have built on the participatory role that he played in launching the region’s first alternative newspaper in 1973 that became albeit briefly the equivalent of a countercultural utopian gazette. Now, he and Shantz effectively play the same role, producing a kind of countercultural form of utopian media for Byron Bay that corresponds to exactly the same criteria mentioned above. Through their free publication, they aim to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the Rainbow Region, focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events. The Byron Bay that Miller and Shantz promote is resolutely utopian, and certainly countercultural if compared to other free publications like The Book, a new shopping guide, or mainstream media elsewhere. Despite this new competition, they are planning the next edition for 2015 with essays to make people think, talk, and understand the region’s issues, so perhaps the counterculture is still holding its own against the mainstream. References Atton, Chris. “What Is ‘Alternative’ Journalism?” Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 4.3 (2003): 267-72. Berger, Bennett M. The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life among Rural Communards. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004. Cock, Peter H., & Paul F. Perry. “Australia's Alternative Media.” Media Information Australia 6 (1977): 4-13. Couldry, Nick. “Mediation and Alternative Media, or Relocating the Centre of Media and Communication Studies.” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 103, (2002): 24-31. Davis, Dale, John Witzig & Don James. “Rusty Miller.” Encyclopedia of Surfing. 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/entries/miller-rusty›. Downing, John. Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Davis, J.C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Forde, Susan. Challenging the News: The Journalism of Alternative and Independent Media. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2011. ---. “Monitoring the Establishment: The Development of the Alternative Press in Australia” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 87 (May 1998): 114-133. Frobert, Lucien. “French Utopian Socialists as the First Pioneers in Development.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 35 (2011): 729-49. Green, Toby. Thomas More’s Magician: A Novel Account of Utopia in Mexico. London: Phoenix, 2004. Goffman, Ken, & Dan Joy. Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. New York: Villard Books. 2004. Haude, Sigrun. “Anabaptism.” The Reformation World. Ed. Andrew Pettegree. London: Routledge, 2000. 237-256. Jameson, Fredric. Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. Levitas, Ruth. Utopia as Method. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Martin, Fiona, & Rhonda Ellis. “Dropping In, Not Out: The Evolution of the Alternative Press in Byron Shire 1970-2001.” Transformations 2 (2002). 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_02/pdf/MartinEllis.pdf›. McKay, George. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. London: Verso, 1996. Metcalf, Bill. From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality: Cooperative Lifestyles in Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995. ---. Shared Visions, Shared Lives: Communal Living around the Globe. Forres, UK: Findhorn Press, 1996. Miller, Rusty & Tricia Shantz. Turning Point: Surf Portraits and Stories from Bells to Byron 1970-1971. Surf Research. 2012. Molnar, Thomas. Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. London: Tom Stacey, 1972. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Osterlag, Bob. People’s Movements, People’s Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Anchor, 1969. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1-37. Schaer, Roland, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent, eds. Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. New York: New York Public Library/Oxford UP, 2000. Streitmatter, Roger. Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America. Columbia: Columbia UP, 2001. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Ward, Susan, & Kitty van Vuuren. “Belonging to the Rainbow Region: Place, Local Media, and the Construction of Civil and Moral Identities Strategic to Climate Change Adaptability.” Environmental Communication 7.1 (2013): 63-79. Warshaw, Matt. The History of Surfing. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2011. Wilson, Helen. (Ed.). Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University Press, 2003. Widmer, Kingsley. Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts. Ann Arbor, London: UMI Research Press, 1988. Yinger, J. Milton. Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a World Turned Upside Down. New York: The Free Press, 1982.

IntroductionRegional identity is a constant construction, in which landscape, human activity and cultural imaginary build a narrative of place. For the Tasmanian Midlands, the interactions between history, ecology and agriculture both define place and present problems in how to recognise, communicate and balance these interactions. In this sense, regionality is defined not so much as a relation of margin to centre, but as a specific accretion of environmental and cultural histories. According weight to more-than-human perspectives, a region can be seen as a constellation of plant, animal and human interactions and demands, where creative art and design can make space and give voice to the dynamics of exchange between the landscape and its inhabitants. Consideration of three recent art and design projects based in the Midlands reveal the potential for cross-disciplinary research, embedded in both environment and community, to create distinctive and specific forms of connectivity that articulate a regional identify.The Tasmanian Midlands have been identified as a biodiversity hotspot (Australian Government), with a long history of Aboriginal cultural management disrupted by colonial invasion. Recent archaeological work in the Midlands, including the Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project, has focused on the use of convict labour during the nineteenth century in opening up the Midlands for settler agriculture and transport. Now, the Midlands are placed under increasing pressure by changing agricultural practices such as large-scale irrigation. At the same time as this intensification of agricultural activity, significant progress has been made in protecting, preserving and restoring endemic ecologies. This progress has come through non-government conservation organisations, especially Greening Australia and their program Tasmanian Island Ark, and private landowners placing land under conservation covenants. These pressures and conservation activities give rise to research opportunities in the biological sciences, but also pose challenges in communicating the value of conservation and research outcomes to a wider public. The Species Hotel project, beginning in 2016, engaged with the aims of restoration ecology through speculative design while The Marathon Project, a multi-year curatorial art project based on a single property that contains both conservation and commercially farmed zones.This article questions the role of regionality in these three interconnected projects—Kerry Lodge, Species Hotel, and Marathon—sited in the Tasmanian Midlands: the three projects share a concern with the specificities of the region through engagement with specifics sites and their histories and ecologies, while also acknowledging the forces that shape these sites as far more mobile and global in scope. It also considers the interdisciplinary nature of these projects, in the crossover of art and design with ecological, archaeological and agricultural practices of measuring and intervening in the land, where communication and interpretation may be in tension with functionality. These projects suggest ways of working that connect the ecological and the cultural spheres; importantly, they see rural locations as sites of knowledge production; they test the value of small-scale and ephemeral interventions to explore the place of art and design as intervention within colonised landscape.Regions are also defined by overlapping circles of control, interest, and authority. We test the claim that these projects, which operate through cross-disciplinary collaboration and network with a range of stakeholders and community groups, successfully benefit the region in which they are placed. We are particularly interested in the challenges of working across institutions which both claim and enact connections to the region without being centred there. These projects are initiatives resulting from, or in collaboration with, University of Tasmania, an institution that has taken a recent turn towards explicitly identifying as place-based yet the placement of the Midlands as the gap between campuses risks attenuating the institution’s claim to be of this place. Paul Carter, in his discussion of a regional, site-specific collaboration in Alice Springs, flags how processes of creative place-making—operating through mythopoetic and story-based strategies—requires a concrete rather than imagined community that actively engages a plurality of voices on the ground. We identify similar concerns in these art and design projects and argue that iterative and long-term creative projects enable a deeper grappling with the complexities of shared regional place-making. The Midlands is aptly named: as a region, it is defined by its geographical constraints and relationships to urban centres. Heading south from the northern city of Launceston, travellers on the Midland Highway see scores of farming properties networking continuously for around 175 kilometres south to the outskirts of Brighton, the last major township before the Tasmanian capital city of Hobart. The town of Ross straddles latitude 42 degrees south—a line that has historically divided Tasmania into the divisions of North and South. The region is characterised by extensive agricultural usage and small remnant patches of relatively open dry sclerophyll forest and lowland grassland enabled by its lower attitude and relatively flatter terrain. The Midlands sit between the mountainous central highlands of the Great Western Tiers and the Eastern Tiers, a continuous range of dolerite hills lying south of Ben Lomond that slope coastward to the Tasman Sea. This area stretches far beyond the view of the main highway, reaching east in the Deddington and Fingal valleys. Campbell Town is the primary stopping point for travellers, superseding the bypassed towns, which have faced problems with lowering population and resulting loss of facilities.Image 1: Southern Midland Landscape, Ross, Tasmania, 2018. Image Credit: Patrick Sutczak.Predominantly under private ownership, the Tasmanian Midlands are a contested and fractured landscape existing in a state of ecological tension that has occurred with the dominance of western agriculture. For over 200 years, farmers have continually shaped the land and carved it up into small fragments for different agricultural agendas, and this has resulted in significant endemic species decline (Mitchell et al.). The open vegetation was the product of cultural management of land by Tasmanian Aboriginal communities (Gammage), attractive to settlers during their distribution of land grants prior to the 1830s and a focus for settler violence. As documented cartographically in the Centre for 21st Century Humanities’ Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930, the period 1820–1835, and particularly during the Black War, saw the Midlands as central to the violent dispossession of Aboriginal landowners. Clements argues that the culture of violence during this period also reflected the brutalisation that the penal system imposed upon its subjects. The cultivation of agricultural land throughout the Midlands was enabled by the provision of unfree convict labour (Dillon). Many of the properties granted and established during the colonial period have been held in multi-generational family ownership through to the present.Within this patchwork of private ownership, the tension between visibility and privacy of the Midlands pastures and farmlands challenges the capacity for people to understand what role the Midlands plays in the greater Tasmanian ecology. Although half of Tasmania’s land areas are protected as national parks and reserves, the Midlands remains largely unprotected due to private ownership. When measured against Tasmania’s wilderness values and reputation, the dry pasturelands of the Midland region fail to capture an equivalent level of visual and experiential imagination. Jamie Kirkpatrick describes misconceptions of the Midlands when he writes of “[f]latness, dead and dying eucalypts, gorse, brown pastures, salt—environmental devastation […]—these are the common impression of those who first travel between Spring Hill and Launceston on the Midland Highway” (45). However, Kirkpatrick also emphasises the unique intimate and intricate qualities of this landscape, and its underlying resilience. In the face of the loss of paddock trees and remnants to irrigation, change in species due to pasture enrichment and introduction of new plant species, conservation initiatives that not only protect but also restore habitat are vital. The Tasmanian Midlands, then, are pastoral landscapes whose seeming monotonous continuity glosses over the radical changes experienced in the processes of colonisation and intensification of agriculture.Underlying the Present: Archaeology and Landscape in the Kerry Lodge ProjectThe major marker of the Midlands is the highway that bisects it. Running from Hobart to Launceston, the construction of a “great macadamised highway” (Department of Main Roads 10) between 1820–1850, and its ongoing maintenance, was a significant colonial project. The macadam technique, a nineteenth century innovation in road building which involved the laying of small pieces of stone to create a surface that was relatively water and frost resistant, required considerable but unskilled labour. The construction of the bridge at Kerry Lodge, in 1834–35, was simultaneous with significant bridge buildings at other major water crossings on the highway, (Department of Main Roads 16) and, as the first water crossing south of Launceston, was a pinch-point through which travel of prisoners could be monitored and controlled. Following the completion of the bridge, the site was used to house up to 60 male convicts in a road gang undergoing secondary punishment (1835–44) and then in a labour camp and hiring depot until 1847. At the time of the La Trobe report (1847), the buildings were noted as being in bad condition (Brand 142–43). After the station was disbanded, the use of the buildings reverted to the landowners for use in accommodation and agricultural storage.Archaeological research at Kerry Lodge, directed by Eleanor Casella, investigated the spatial and disciplinary structures of smaller probation and hiring depots and the living and working conditions of supervisory staff. Across three seasons (2015, 2016, 2018), the emerging themes of discipline and control and as well as labour were borne out by excavations across the site, focusing on remnants of buildings close to the bridge. This first season also piloted the co-presence of a curatorial art project, which grew across the season to include eleven practitioners in visual art, theatre and poetry, and three exhibition outcomes. As a crucial process for the curatorial art project, creative practitioners spent time on site as participants and observers, which enabled the development of responses that interrogated the research processes of archaeological fieldwork as well as making connections to the wider historical and cultural context of the site. Immersed in the mundane tasks of archaeological fieldwork, the practitioners involved became simultaneously focused on repetitive actions while contemplating the deep time contained within earth. This experience then informed the development of creative works interrogating embodied processes as a language of site.The outcome from the first fieldwork season was earthspoke, an exhibition shown at Sawtooth, an artist-run initiative in Launceston in 2015, and later re-installed in Franklin House, a National Trust property in the southern suburbs of Launceston.Images 2 and 3: earthspoke, 2015, Installation View at Sawtooth ARI (top) and Franklin House (bottom). Image Credits: Melanie de Ruyter.This recontextualisation of the work, from contemporary ARI (artist run initiative) gallery to National Trust property enabled the project to reach different audiences but also raised questions about the emphases that these exhibition contexts placed on the work. Within the white cube space of the contemporary gallery, connections to site became more abstracted while the educational and heritage functions of the National Trust property added further context and unintended connotations to the art works.Image 4: Strata, 2017, Installation View. Image Credit: Karen Hall.The two subsequent exhibitions, Lines of Site (2016) and Strata (2017), continued to test the relationship between site and gallery, through works that rematerialised the absences on site and connected embodied experiences of convict and archaeological labour. The most recent iteration of the project, Strata, part of the Ten Days on the Island art festival in 2017, involved installing works at the site, marking with their presence the traces, fragments and voids that had been reburied when the landscape returned to agricultural use following the excavations. Here, the interpretive function of the works directly addressed the layered histories of the landscape and underscored the scope of the human interventions and changes over time within the pastoral landscape. The interpretative role of the artworks formed part of a wider, multidisciplinary approach to research and communication within the project. University of Manchester archaeology staff and postgraduate students directed the excavations, using volunteers from the Launceston Historical Society. Staff from Launceston’s Queen Victorian Museum and Art Gallery brought their archival and collection-based expertise to the site rather than simply receiving stored finds as a repository, supporting immediate interpretation and contextualisation of objects. In 2018, participation from the University of Tasmania School of Education enabled a larger number of on-site educational activities than afforded by previous open days. These multi-disciplinary and multi-organisational networks, drawn together provisionally in a shared time and place, provided rich opportunities for dialogue. However, the challenges of sustaining these exchanges have meant ongoing collaborations have become more sporadic, reflecting different institutional priorities and competing demands on participants. Even within long-term projects, continued engagement with stakeholders can be a challenge: while enabling an emerging and concrete sense of community, the time span gives greater vulnerability to external pressures. Making Home: Ecological Restoration and Community Engagement in the Species Hotel ProjectImages 5 and 6: Selected Species Hotels, Ross, Tasmania, 2018. Image Credits: Patrick Sutczak. The Species Hotels stand sentinel over a river of saplings, providing shelter for animal communities within close range of a small town. At the township of Ross in the Southern Midlands, work was initiated by restoration ecologists to address the lack of substantial animal shelter belts on a number of major properties in the area. The Tasmania Island Ark is a major Greening Australia restoration ecology initiative, connecting 6000 hectares of habitat across the Midlands. Linking larger forest areas in the Eastern Tiers and Central Highlands as well as isolated patches of remnant native vegetation, the Ark project is vital to the ongoing survival of local plant and animal species under pressure from human interventions and climate change. With fragmentation of bush and native grasslands in the Midland landscape resulting in vast open plains, the ability for animals to adapt to pasturelands without shelter has resulted in significant decline as animals such as the critically endangered Eastern Barred Bandicoot struggle to feed, move, and avoid predators (Cranney). In 2014 mass plantings of native vegetation were undertaken along 16km of the serpentine Macquarie River as part of two habitat corridors designed to bring connectivity back to the region. While the plantings were being established a public art project was conceived that would merge design with practical application to assist animals in the area, and draw community and public attention to the work that was being done in re-establishing native forests. The Species Hotel project, which began in 2016, emerged from a collaboration between Greening Australia and the University of Tasmania’s School of Architecture and Design, the School of Land and Food, the Tasmanian College of the Arts and the ARC Centre for Forest Value, with funding from the Ian Potter Foundation. The initial focus of the project was the development of interventions in the landscape that could address the specific habitat needs of the insect, small mammal, and bird species that are under threat. First-year Architecture students were invited to design a series of structures with the brief that they would act as ‘Species Hotels’, and once created would be installed among the plantings as structures that could be inhabited or act as protection. After installation, the privately-owned land would be reconfigured so to allow public access and observation of the hotels, by residents and visitors alike. Early in the project’s development, a concern was raised during a Ross community communication and consultation event that the surrounding landscape and its vistas would be dramatically altered with the re-introduced forest. While momentary and resolved, a subtle yet obvious tension surfaced that questioned the re-writing of an established community’s visual landscape literacy by non-residents. Compact and picturesque, the architectural, historical and cultural qualities of Ross and its location were not only admired by residents, but established a regional identity. During the six-week intensive project, the community reach was expanded beyond the institution and involved over 100 people including landowners, artists, scientists and school children from the region (Wright), attempting to address and channel the concerns of residents about the changing landscape. The multiple timescales of this iterative project—from intensive moments of collaboration between stakeholders to the more-than-human time of tree growth—open spaces for regional identity to shift as both as place and community. Part of the design brief was the use of fully biodegradable materials: the Species Hotels are not expected to last forever. The actual installation of the Species Hotelson site took longer than planned due to weather conditions, but once on site they were weathering in, showing signs of insect and bird habitation. This animal activity created an opportunity for ongoing engagement. Further activities generated from the initial iteration of Species Hotel were the Species Hotel Day in 2017, held at the Ross Community Hall where presentations by scientists and designers provided feedback to the local community and presented opportunities for further design engagement in the production of ephemeral ‘species seed pies’ placed out in and around Ross. Architecture and Design students have gone on to develop more examples of ‘ecological furniture’ with a current focus on insect housing as well as extrapolating from the installation of the Species Hotels to generate a VR visualisation of the surrounding landscape, game design and participatory movement work that was presented as part of the Junction Arts Festival program in Launceston, 2017. The intersections of technologies and activities amplified the lived in and living qualities of the Species Hotels, not only adding to the connectivity of social and environmental actions on site and beyond, but also making a statement about the shared ownership this project enabled.Working Property: Collaboration and Dialogues in The Marathon Project The potential of iterative projects that engage with environmental concerns amid questions of access, stewardship and dialogue is also demonstrated in The Marathon Project, a collaborative art project that took place between 2015 and 2017. Situated in the Northern Midland region of Deddington alongside the banks of the Nile River the property of Marathon became the focal point for a small group of artists, ecologists and theorists to converge and engage with a pastoral landscape over time that was unfamiliar to many of them. Through a series of weekend camps and day trips, the participants were able to explore and follow their own creative and investigative agendas. The project was conceived by the landowners who share a passion for the history of the area, their land, and ideas of custodianship and ecological responsibility. The intentions of the project initially were to inspire creative work alongside access, engagement and dialogue about land, agriculture and Deddington itself. As a very small town on the Northern Midland fringe, Deddington is located toward the Eastern Tiers at the foothills of the Ben Lomond mountain ranges. Historically, Deddington is best known as the location of renowned 19th century landscape painter John Glover’s residence, Patterdale. After Glover’s death in 1849, the property steadily fell into disrepair and a recent private restoration effort of the home, studio and grounds has seen renewed interest in the cultural significance of the region. With that in mind, and with Marathon a neighbouring property, participants in the project were able to experience the area and research its past and present as a part of a network of working properties, but also encouraging conversation around the region as a contested and documented place of settlement and subsequent violence toward the Aboriginal people. Marathon is a working property, yet also a vital and fragile ecosystem. Marathon consists of 1430 hectares, of which around 300 lowland hectares are currently used for sheep grazing. The paddocks retain their productivity, function and potential to return to native grassland, while thickets of gorse are plentiful, an example of an invasive species difficult to control. The rest of the property comprises eucalypt woodlands and native grasslands that have been protected under a conservation covenant by the landowners since 2003. The Marathon creek and the Nile River mark the boundary between the functional paddocks and the uncultivated hills and are actively managed in the interface between native and introduced species of flora and fauna. This covenant aimed to preserve these landscapes, linking in with a wider pattern of organisations and landowners attempting to address significant ecological degradation and isolation of remnant bushland patches through restoration ecology. Measured against the visibility of Tasmania’s wilderness identity on the national and global stage, many of the ecological concerns affecting the Midlands go largely unnoticed. The Marathon Project was as much a project about visibility and communication as it was about art and landscape. Over the three years and with its 17 participants, The Marathon Project yielded three major exhibitions along with numerous public presentations and research outputs. The length of the project and the autonomy and perspectives of its participants allowed for connections to be formed, conversations initiated, and greater exposure to the productivity and sustainability complexities playing out on rural Midland properties. Like Kerry Lodge, the 2015 first year exhibition took place at Sawtooth ARI. The exhibition was a testing ground for artists, and a platform for audiences, to witness the cross-disciplinary outputs of work inspired by a single sheep grazing farm. The interest generated led to the rethinking of the 2016 exhibition and the need to broaden the scope of what the landowners and participants were trying to achieve. Image 7: Panel Discussion at Open Weekend, 2016. Image Credit: Ron Malor.In November 2016, The Marathon Project hosted an Open Weekend on the property encouraging audiences to visit, meet the artists, the landowners, and other invited guests from a number of restoration, conservation, and rehabilitation organisations. Titled Encounter, the event and accompanying exhibition displayed in the shearing shed, provided an opportunity for a rhizomatic effect with the public which was designed to inform and disseminate historical and contemporary perspectives of land and agriculture, access, ownership, visitation and interpretation. Concluding with a final exhibition in 2017 at the University of Tasmania’s Academy Gallery, The Marathon Project had built enough momentum to shape and inform the practice of its participants, the knowledge and imagination of the public who engaged with it, and make visible the precarity of the cultural and rural Midland identity.Image 8. Installation View of The Marathon Project Exhibition, 2017. Image Credit: Patrick Sutczak.ConclusionThe Marathon Project, Species Hotel and the Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project all demonstrate the potential of site-based projects to articulate and address concerns that arise from the environmental and cultural conditions and histories of a region. Beyond the Midland fence line is a complex environment that needed to be experienced to be understood. Returning creative work to site, and opening up these intensified experiences of place to a public forms a key stage in all these projects. Beyond a commitment to site-specific practice and valuing the affective and didactic potential of on-site installation, these returns grapple with issues of access, visibility and absence that characterise the Midlands. Paul Carter describes his role in the convening of a “concretely self-realising creative community” in an initiative to construct a meeting-place in Alice Springs, a community defined and united in “its capacity to imagine change as a negotiation between past, present and future” (17). Within that regional context, storytelling, as an encounter between histories and cultures, became crucial in assembling a community that could in turn materialise story into place. In these Midlands projects, a looser assembly of participants with shared interests seek to engage with the intersections of plant, human and animal activities that constitute and negotiate the changing environment. The projects enabled moments of connection, of access, and of intervention: always informed by the complexities of belonging within regional locations.These projects also suggest the need to recognise the granularity of regionalism: the need to be attentive to the relations of site to bioregion, of private land to small town to regional centre. The numerous partnerships that allow such interconnect projects to flourish can be seen as a strength of regional areas, where proximity and scale can draw together sets of related institutions, organisations and individuals. However, the tensions and gaps within these projects reveal differing priorities, senses of ownership and even regional belonging. Questions of who will live with these project outcomes, who will access them, and on what terms, reveal inequalities of power. Negotiations of this uneven and uneasy terrain require a more nuanced account of projects that do not rely on the geographical labelling of regions to paper over the complexities and fractures within the social environment.These projects also share a commitment to the intersection of the social and natural environment. They recognise the inextricable entanglement of human and more than human agencies in shaping the landscape, and material consequences of colonialism and agricultural intensification. Through iteration and duration, the projects mobilise processes that are responsive and reflective while being anchored to the materiality of site. Warwick Mules suggests that “regions are a mixture of data and earth, historically made through the accumulation and condensation of material and informational configurations”. Cross-disciplinary exchanges enable all three projects to actively participate in data production, not interpretation or illustration afterwards. Mules’ call for ‘accumulation’ and ‘configuration’ as productive regional modes speaks directly to the practice-led methodologies employed by these projects. The Kerry Lodge and Marathon projects collect, arrange and transform material taken from each site to provisionally construct a regional material language, extended further in the dual presentation of the projects as off-site exhibitions and as interventions returning to site. The Species Hotel project shares that dual identity, where materials are chosen for their ability over time, habitation and decay to become incorporated into the site yet, through other iterations of the project, become digital presences that nonetheless invite an embodied engagement.These projects centre the Midlands as fertile ground for the production of knowledge and experiences that are distinctive and place-based, arising from the unique qualities of this place, its history and its ongoing challenges. Art and design practice enables connectivity to plant, animal and human communities, utilising cross-disciplinary collaborations to bring together further accumulations of the region’s intertwined cultural and ecological landscape.ReferencesAustralian Government Department of the Environment and Energy. Biodiversity Conservation. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2018. 1 Apr. 2019 <http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/conservation>.Brand, Ian. The Convict Probation System: Van Diemen’s Land 1839–1854. Sandy Bay: Blubber Head Press, 1990.Carter, Paul. “Common Patterns: Narratives of ‘Mere Coincidence’ and the Production of Regions.” Creative Communities: Regional Inclusion & the Arts. Eds. Janet McDonald and Robert Mason. Bristol: Intellect, 2015. 13–30.Centre for 21st Century Humanities. Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930. Newcastle: Centre for 21st Century Humanitie, n.d. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/>.Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2014. Cranney, Kate. Ecological Science in the Tasmanian Midlands. Melbourne: Bush Heritage Australia, 2016. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://www.bushheritage.org.au/blog/ecological-science-in-the-tasmanian-midlands>.Davidson N. “Tasmanian Northern Midlands Restoration Project.” EMR Summaries, Journal of Ecological Management & Restoration, 2016. 10 Apr. 2019 <https://site.emrprojectsummaries.org/2016/03/07/tasmanian-northern-midlands-restoration-project/>.Department of Main Roads, Tasmania. Convicts & Carriageways: Tasmanian Road Development until 1880. Hobart: Tasmanian Government Printer, 1988.Dillon, Margaret. “Convict Labour and Colonial Society in the Campbell Town Police District: 1820–1839.” PhD Thesis. U of Tasmania, 2008. <https://eprints.utas.edu.au/7777/>.Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2012.Greening Australia. Building Species Hotels, 2016. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://www.greeningaustralia.org.au/projects/building-species-hotels/>.Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project. Kerry Lodge Convict Site. 10 Mar. 2019 <http://kerrylodge.squarespace.com/>.Kirkpatrick, James. “Natural History.” Midlands Bushweb, The Nature of the Midlands. Ed. Jo Dean. Longford: Midlands Bushweb, 2003. 45–57.Mitchell, Michael, Michael Lockwood, Susan Moore, and Sarah Clement. “Building Systems-Based Scenario Narratives for Novel Biodiversity Futures in an Agricultural Landscape.” Landscape and Urban Planning 145 (2016): 45–56.Mules, Warwick. “The Edges of the Earth: Critical Regionalism as an Aesthetics of the Singular.” Transformations 12 (2005). 1 Mar. 2019 <http://transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_12/article_03.shtml>.The Marathon Project. <http://themarathonproject.virb.com/home>.University of Tasmania. Strategic Directions, Nov. 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.utas.edu.au/vc/strategic-direction>.Wright L. “University of Tasmania Students Design ‘Species Hotels’ for Tasmania’s Wildlife.” Architecture AU 24 Oct. 2016. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://architectureau.com/articles/university-of-tasmania-students-design-species-hotels-for-tasmanias-wildlife/>.

Introduction Over the past two decades the Cairns landscape has transformed from a remote tourist town beside the Great Barrier Reef to an international, tropical city with a new focus on culture and the arts. A number of important urban design projects have enabled this transformation, including key waterfront redevelopments, the addition of a large shopping mall and convention centre, a renovated museum, and now a new performing arts precinct and proposed ‘gallery precinct’ for the people of Cairns to access new art forms and events. Anderson and Law (556) depict recent developments as a kind of “mayor’s trophy collection” or set of “must have” attractions Cairns needs to stay ‘competitive’. More generally they might be interpreted as ‘entrepreneurial urbanism’ (Harvey) and the attractors for Richard Florida’s creative class, although there is now more scepticism about how these projects fuel property speculation and benefit the middle classes rather than the ‘bohemians’ Florida saw as key to urban growth and transformation (Wainwright). The renovation of Munro Martin Park discussed here is a culture infrastructure project helping transform Cairns into the ‘arts and culture capital of the north’. Here we interrogate the winners and losers of the renovation, with a specific focus on how its heritage values are preserved. The identity of Cairns as an arts and culture hub is not new or unfounded, but the debate changed in emphasis with a proposed Cairns Entertainment Precinct (CEP) in 2011/2012. The then Mayor Val Schier had secured federal and state funding for the development of a $155 million arts precinct on the waterfront near the Cairns Port, as the city had outgrown its existing facilities at the nearby Cairns Civic Theatre and the venue was unable to host large performances. The CEP was to be a key cultural infrastructure project marking a new era of arts and culture activities in Cairns. The subsequent election became a referendum on the precinct, with its location and need being questioned. Bob Manning became the new Mayor with a mandate to scrap the CEP and instead renovate the existing Civic Theatre as part of a scaled-down vision. In 2016, the Cairns Civic Theatre was demolished to make way for a new Cairns Performing Arts Centre. The original Civic Theatre was constructed in the 1970s and was one of a small handful of buildings in Cairns designed in late Brutalist architectural style: its exterior walls were made of fluted grey concrete blocks. Popular from the 1950s to the 1970s, brutalist architecture celebrated Modernism translated into raw, exposed concrete. Despite a renewed popular interest in Brutalist buildings in many western cities, many “are being demolished and new, … homogenous (often glass and composite-clad) towers [are being] erected in their place” (Mould 701). The Cairns Civic Theatre was no exception. Munro Martin Park, directly across from the Cairns Civic Theatre, was folded into the plans for the area and the two were imagined together to form a new Cairns Performing Arts Precinct (CPAC). Munro Martin Park History Munro Martin Park (originally Norman Park) was gazetted as a recreational reserve for Cairns in 1882. The park was set aside soon after European settlement and became a space for outdoor recreation. Community attachment to the park grew over time as the park became known as a meeting place for sporting events, community celebrations, parades, and political rallies. Circuses began annual visits to the park from 1891 as it was the closest large area of open ground to the inner city. These physical features also facilitated other community events, such as public holiday celebrations including May Day and ANZAC Day. Attempts to beautify the park and create shade were made in the early 1880s and again in 1892. Trees were planted with the aim of establishing a botanical reserve, although many did not survive. Those that did – mangoes, figs, and other tropical species – created shade, provided fruit for eating fresh or making chutneys and sauces, and became roosts for local flying foxes and bats. A major change of use occurred when the park was taken over by the military during WWII, and it became a space for accommodation huts and military training. An Air Raids Precautions control centre was erected (today one of the few remaining examples, and heritage listed), and a radio tower. After the war the local authority had no control over the park until it was returned from the military. The park’s war infrastructure was mostly removed, and after the war the parkland was in decline and underutilised (Grimwade 21). Most sporting clubs had moved to new grounds and community gatherings were no longer associated with sporting events (Cairns Regional Council 804). In 1954 the Cairns community saw substantial redevelopment of the park with a bequest from well-regarded local philanthropists: the Munro Martin sisters. The Cairns City Council redeveloped and beautified the park and on completion it was renamed Munro Martin Park in recognition of the sisters. It quickly renewed its status as a place for community gatherings and organised events, and as a rallying point for parades and political protests. Although the park continued to be used, it was no longer the focus of sports, with the development of purpose-built sporting fields on the southside of town. Much of the passive activity in the park began moving to the Cairns Esplanade in the early 1960s, with multi-purpose recreation areas and a large open saltwater swimming baths. This trend continued as the land along the Esplanade was reclaimed from mudflats and turned into areas for recreation and swimming (McKenzie et al. 113). By 2014 no major work had been undertaken in the park for some time, and it again became underutilised. A report by Grimwade evaluating the park’s condition found much of the infrastructure in disrepair. While it was still used by circuses, festivals, May Day celebrations and political rallies, the group most often found there were homeless Indigenous people. Plans to redevelop the park once again occurred in 2015, and these were folded into the CPAC vision. Fig. 1: Aerial image of Munro Martin Park, 1970. (Source: Cairns Historical Society image P291110.) Fig. 2: Aerial image of Munro Martin Park, 2018. (Source: Creative Life – Cairns Regional Council.) Winners and Losers After its renovation and re-opening in 2016, Munro Martin Park became a new public space with an art focus for the Cairns community. It is beautifully landscaped and entices new audiences to enjoy the arts, including families who find it a safe and secure environment for leisure. The barriers often associated with entering arts and culture venues are displaced by egalitarian outdoor seating on blankets, and programming and casting are demographically inclusive, which in turn entices a diverse audience. In this way the park is important to community life, offers health benefits and social interactions, and is a place that welcomes regardless of social standing (Slater and Koo 99). At the same time, the new space reflects neoliberal sensibilities in regard to safety and anti-social behaviour, as the park reflects a wider city branding exercise for Cairns (Mercer and Mayfield 508). The need for controlled ticketing, for example, means the park is now fenced with restricted access. Prior to its renovation the park was a safe haven and meeting and waiting place for those travelling from Indigenous communities in Cape York and the Torres Strait Islands to Cairns. It was frequented by Rosie’s, a local charity providing meals for the homeless, and many used it as a place to sleep (Dalton, Cairns Post). These communities are now locked out during performances and every night at sunset (CCTV ensures they do not remain). This is unfortunate as the park is underutilised on a day-to-day basis as performances are sporadic; this is partly because it is costly to rent and access for community events. In this way the public space of the park has become commodified as part of a new political economy of the city and displaced its use as a refuge for the alienated or excluded. In other words, the park’s renovation raises familiar questions about the ‘right to the city’ (Marcuse). The park had been a place where people could just ‘be’ or dwell, but this was inevitably associated with homelessness (Mitchell 123). It is not uncommon for different groups of people to claim the same site at different times of the day. The important thing is that the users feel a strong enough connection and that it reflects their cultural or social needs so that they are likely to use the place (Barnes et al.). In addition to the displacement of a homeless community, the park also lost significant heritage trees that had survived from the late 1800s. Local environmental activists protested by sitting in – and refusing to come down from – some of the trees as the renovation commenced (Power, Cairns Post). The trees expressed heritage value but were also home to endangered bat colonies (Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management). Although Munro Martin Park trees are not the only flying fox habitats, their loss has contributed to their demise. On the other hand, and through the park’s addition of new trees, tropical plants and elaborate vined arbours, the park is an award-winning showcase of tropical urban greenery evoking civic pride. This revitalisation and beautification creates opportunities for new community attachments to place through new sensory perceptions (Hashemnezhad et al. 7). Community attachment to Munro Martin Park and its related social value has thus changed over time. The park’s social value, as understood by the Burra Charter, is the social quality which makes it a focus for spiritual, political, national, or other cultural sentiment. Jones (21) defines social value as encompassing “the significance of the historic environment to contemporary communities, including people's sense of identity, belonging and place, as well as forms of memory and spiritual association” (see also Johnston, 1). Fond memories of sporting days, school excursions, and the circus are held by the older community, but after 1970 these positive associations diminish as the park became known for anti-social behaviour and was avoided. The heritage value and community associations are now remembered with interpretive panels that recall political rallies, circuses and celebrations, and the military takeover – making this history more accessible to younger audiences. While the park is no longer a rally point for the start of the annual May Day march, and the circus has shifted outside the city centre, portrait panels remember the stories of people who had a connection with the park. An obelisk created in the memory of the Munro and Martin sisters has been restored, which is also a reminder of Eddie Oribin’s and Sid Barnes’s joint work as influential Cairns-based architects (who built the former neighbouring brutalist Cairns Civic Theatre). The World War Two Air Raids Precautions control room, which coordinated all the air raid wardens in the city, remains and is listed on the Queensland Heritage Register. It was reused as a Scouts shop and has a large fibreglass scout hat put on top. The redevelopment thereby acknowledges the past and makes it more accessible than it was from the 1970s to the 2000s. Old places need new uses and new uses need old places, as urban activist Jane Jacobs famously said (Chang 524). These new uses become a part of a new city narrative and imaginary, creating new community attachments as a part of an evolving story. As it the case with other parts of the city’s history, however, some histories of Cairns are silenced in urban renewal (Law), reflecting the multiple and sometimes conflicting social values at play. Fig. 3: Munro Martin Park as a WWII Command Centre, n.d. (Source: Cairns Historical Society, image P08730.) Fig. 4: WWII Command Centre as Scout Hut with hat, 2016. (Source: Cairns Historical Society, image P20692.) Conclusion The revitalisation of places through arts-led gentrification is well documented and understood. This article builds on critiques of gentrification, asking slightly different questions about memory, history, and the contested meanings of heritage in urban renewal. The social value of Munro Martin Park is situated in time and space and by different users, and community attachment has evolved over time. For older generations the park evokes memories of sports, circuses, political rallies, and the closeness of the war. These histories have been remembered and curated through new park signage reflecting a conservative middle-class past: No Sports on Sundays; Circuses and Celebrations; Rallying at the Park; Military Takeover. For younger generations, for whom the park was a place to be avoided – a dangerous place on the edge of the city centre inhabited by the homeless – the park is now a new cultural space promoting accessibility to the arts. The mangoes that were once shelter for the flying fox population have given way to a new venue, tropical vines and foliage, and new signage and programming will produce new social value over time. Whether its redevelopment will “herald a renaissance in Cairns cultural life” by delivering “fresh performing arts and botanic experiences” (Cultural Services 8) remains to be seen in the shadow of COVID-19. What we do know is that the history and social significance of the park as a space for the homeless or a stopover and waiting place for Indigenous people from the Cape and the Torres Strait Islands has been erased, and that the now dispersed homeless population is difficult to reach except for food trucks and shelters. Their use of the park, whether as shelter or meeting place, is now highly constrained to a small, unfenced corner of the park at the corner of Sheridan and Minnie Street (which is rarely used). Although the redevelopment of Munro Martin Park is part of a vision for Cairns as a hub for arts and culture activities, it is important to ask at what cost. The controlled and surveilled nature of the park no longer permits the use of the space for rough sleeping or informal community events, although its redevelopment has increased visitation and created a safe and inclusive public space for middle class residents to enjoy the arts and contemplate the city’s history. With Marcuse and Mitchell we think it is important to ask larger questions about whose right to the city, and to see the remaking of urban sites as ongoing struggles over public space. In a city with one of the highest rates of homelessness per capita in Queensland, the renovation of this site of refuge reflects neoliberal tendencies in the creative economy to remake the city without due attention to the exclusion of undesirables and growing spatial inequality. References Anderson, Allison, and Lisa Law. "Putting Carmona’s Place-Shaping Continuum to Use in Research Practice." Journal of Urban Design 20.5 (2015): 545-562. DOI: 10.1080/13574809.2015.1071656. Barnes, Leanne, et al. Places Not Spaces: Placemaking in Australia. Envirobook, 1995. Cairns Regional Council. "Planning Scheme Policy – Places of Significance." Cairns Regional Council, 2016. 801-805. Chang, T.C. "‘New Uses Need Old Buildings’: Gentrification Aesthetics and the Arts in Singapore." Urban Studies 53.3 (2016): 524-539. DOI: 10.1177/0042098014527482. Cultural Services. "Cairns Regional Council Strategy for Culture and the Arts 2022." Cairns Regional Council, 2018. Dalton, Nick. "Call to Shift Cairns' Charity Food Van Because of Appalling Drunks." Cairns Post, 2016. <https://www.cairnspost.com.au/news/cairns/cairns-food-van-offers-to-move-after-tempers-flare-over-itinerants/news-story/0a112da6109a9a5b4dcb1fd82b1d2013>. Florida, Richard L. The Rise of the Creative Class : And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Basic Books, 2004. Grimwade, Gordon. "Heritage Plan Munro Martin Park." Cairns Regional Council, 2013. 68. Harvey, David. "From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism." Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 71.1 (1989): 3. DOI: 10.2307/490503. Hashemnezhad, Hashem, et al. "'Sense of Place' and 'Place Attachment'." International Journal of Architecture and Urban Development 3.1 (2013): 5-12. <http://ijaud.srbiau.ac.ir/article_581_a90b5ac919ddc57e6743d8ce32d19741.pdf>. Johnston, Chris. "What Is Social Value? A Discussion Paper." Australian Government Publishing Service, 1992. Jones, Siân. "Wrestling with the Social Value of Heritage: Problems, Dilemmas and Opportunities." Journal of Community Archaeology & Heritage 4.1 (2017): 21-37. DOI: 10.1080/20518196.2016.1193996. Law, Lisa. "The Ghosts of White Australia: Excavating the Past(s) of Rusty's Market in Tropical Cairns." Continuum 25.5 (2011): 669-681. DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2011.605519. Marcuse, Peter. "From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City." City: Cities for People, Not for Profit 13.2-3 (2009): 185-197. DOI: 10.1080/13604810902982177. McKenzie, J., et al. "Cairns Thematic History of the City of Cairns and Its Regional Towns." Cairns Regional Council, 2011. 150. <https://www.cairns.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/40888/CairnsThematic.pdf>. Mercer, David, and Prashanti Mayfield. "City of the Spectacle: White Night Melbourne and the Politics of Public Space." Australian Geographer 46.4 (2015): 507-534. DOI: 10.1080/00049182.2015.1058796. Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. Guilford Press, 2003. Mould, Oli. "Brutalism Redux: Relational Monumentality and the Urban Politics of Brutalist Architecture." Antipode 49.3 (2017): 701-720. DOI: 10.1111/anti.12306. Power, Shannon. "Locals Angry Cairns Regional Council Has Removed Trees in Munro Martin Park." The Cairns Post, 2015. <https://www.cairnspost.com.au/news/cairns/locals-angry-cairns-regional-council-has-removed-trees-in-munro-martin-park/news-story/837cb6c0769f7651d884481bcf1e25e8>. Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management. "National Recovery Plan for the Spectacled Flying Fox Pteropus Conspicillatus." 2010. Slater, Alix, and Hee Jung Koo. "A New Type of 'Third Place'?" Journal of Place Management and Development 3.2 (2010): 99. DOI: 10.1108/17538331011062658. Wainwright, Oliver. "‘Everything Is Gentrification Now’: But Richard Florida Isn't Sorry." The Guardian, 2017. <https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/oct/26/gentrification-richard-florida-interview-creative-class-new-urban-crisis>.

Introduction This article situates the dark as a liminal and creative space of experimentation where tensions are generative and people tinker with emerging technologies to create alternative futures. Darkness need not mean chaos and fear of violence – it can mean privacy and protection. We define dark as an experimental space based upon uncertainties rather than computational knowns (Bridle) and then demonstrate via a case study of cryptocurrencies the contribution of dark and liminal social spaces to future(s)-making. Cryptocurrencies are digital cash systems that use decentralised (peer-to-peer) networking to enable irreversible payments (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz). Cryptocurrencies are often clones or variations on the ‘original’ Bitcoin payment systems protocol (Trump et al.) that was shared with the cryptographic community through a pseudonymous and still unknown author(s) (Nakamoto), creating a founder mystery. Due to the open creation process, a new cryptocurrency is relatively easy to make. However, many of them are based on speculative bubbles that mirror Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ICOs’ wealth creation. Examples of cryptocurrencies now largely used for speculation due to their volatility in holding value are rampant, with online clearing houses competing to trade hundreds of different assets from AAVE to ZIL. Many of these altcoins have little to no following or trading volume, leading to their obsolescence. Others enjoy immense popularity among dedicated communities of backers and investors. Consequently, while many cryptocurrency experiments fail or lack adoption and drop from the purview of history, their constant variation also contributes to the undertow of the future that pulls against more visible surface waves of computational progress. The article is structured to first define how we understand and leverage ‘dark’ against computational cultures. We then apply thematic and analytical tactics to articulate future-making socio-technical experiments in the dark. Based on past empirical work of the authors (Maddox "Netnography") we focus on crypto-cultures’ complex emancipatory and normative tensions via themes of construction, disruption, contention, redirection, obsolescence, and iteration. Through these themes we illustrate the mutation and absorption of dark experimental spaces into larger social structures. The themes we identify are not meant as a complete or necessarily serial set of occurrences, but nonetheless contribute a new vocabulary for students of technology and media to see into and grapple with the dark. Embracing the Dark: Prework & Analytical Tactics for Outside the Known To frame discussion of the dark here as creative space for alternative futures, we focus on scholars who have deeply engaged with notions of socio-technical darkness. This allows us to explore outside the blinders of computational light and, with a nod to Sassen, dig in the shadows of known categories to evolve the analytical tactics required for the study of emerging socio-technical conditions. We understand the Dark Web to usher shifting and multiple definitions of darkness, from a moral darkness to a technical one (Gehl). From this work, we draw the observation of how technologies that obfuscate digital tracking create novel capacities for digital cultures in spaces defined by anonymity for both publisher and user. Darknets accomplish this by overlaying open internet protocols (e.g. TCP/IP) with non-standard protocols that encrypt and anonymise information (Pace). Pace traces concepts of darknets to networks in the 1970s that were 'insulated’ from the internet’s predecessor ARPANET by air gap, and then reemerged as software protocols similarly insulated from cultural norms around intellectual property. ‘Darknets’ can also be considered in ternary as opposed to binary terms (Gehl and McKelvey) that push to make private that which is supposed to be public infrastructure, and push private platforms (e.g. a Personal Computer) to make public networks via common bandwidth. In this way, darknets feed new possibilities of communication from both common infrastructures and individual’s platforms. Enabling new potentials of community online and out of sight serves to signal what the dark accomplishes for the social when measured against an otherwise unending light of computational society. To this point, a new dark age can be welcomed insofar it allows an undecided future outside of computational logics that continually define and refine the possible and probable (Bridle). This argument takes von Neumann’s 1945 declaration that “all stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control” (in Bridle 21) as a founding statement for computational thought and indicative of current society. The hope expressed by Bridle is not an absence of knowledge, but an absence of knowing the future. Past the computational prison of total information awareness within an accelerating information age (Castells) is the promise of new formations of as yet unknowable life. Thus, from Bridle’s perspective, and ours, darkness can be a place of freedom and possibility, where the equality of being in the dark, together, is not as threatening as current privileged ways of thinking would suggest (Bridle 15). The consequences of living in a constant glaring light lead to data hierarchies “leaching” (Bridle) into everything, including social relationships, where our data are relationalised while our relations are datafied (Maddox and Heemsbergen) by enforcing computational thinking upon them. Darkness becomes a refuge that acknowledges the power of unknowing, and a return to potential for social, equitable, and reciprocal relations. This is not to say that we envision a utopian life without the shadow of hierarchy, but rather an encouragement to dig into those shadows made visible only by the brightest of lights. The idea of digging in the shadows is borrowed from Saskia Sassen, who asks us to consider the ‘master categories’ that blind us to alternatives. According to Sassen (402), while master categories have the power to illuminate, their blinding power keeps us from seeing other presences in the landscape: “they produce, then, a vast penumbra around that center of light. It is in that penumbra that we need to go digging”. We see darkness in the age of digital ubiquity as rejecting the blinding ‘master category’ of computational thought. Computational thought defines social/economic/political life via what is static enough to predict or unstable enough to render a need to control. Otherwise, the observable, computable, knowable, and possible all follow in line. Our dig in the shadows posits a penumbra of protocols – both of computational code and human practice – that circle the blinding light of known digital communications. We use the remainder of this short article to describe these themes found in the dark that offer new ways to understand the movements and moments of potential futures that remain largely unseen. Thematic Resonances in the Dark This section considers cryptocultures of the dark. We build from a thematic vocabulary that has been previously introduced from empirical examples of the crypto-market communities which tinker with and through the darkness provided by encryption and privacy technologies (Maddox "Netnography"). Here we refine these future-making themes through their application to events surrounding community-generated technology aimed at disrupting centralised banking systems: cryptocurrencies (Maddox, Singh, et al.). Given the overlaps in collective values and technologies between crypto-communities, we find it useful to test the relevance of these themes to the experimental dynamics surrounding cryptocurrencies. We unpack these dynamics as construction, rupture and disruption, redirection, and the flip-sided relationship between obsolescence and iteration leading to mutation and absorption. This section provides a working example for how these themes adapt in application to a community dwelling at the edge of experimental technological possibilities. The theme of construction is both a beginning and a materialisation of a value field. It originates within the cyberlibertarians’ ideological stance towards using technological innovations to ‘create a new world in the shell of the old’ (van de Sande) which has been previously expressed through the concept of constructive activism (Maddox, Barratt, et al.). This libertarian ideology is also to be found in the early cultures that gave rise to cryptocurrencies. Through their interest in the potential of cryptography technologies related to social and political change, the Cypherpunks mailing list formed in 1992 (Swartz). The socio-cultural field surrounding cryptocurrencies, however, has always consisted of a diverse ecosystem of vested interests building collaborations from “goldbugs, hippies, anarchists, cyberpunks, cryptographers, payment systems experts, currency activists, commodity traders, and the curious” (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz 262). Through the theme of construction we can consider architectures of collaboration, cooperation, and coordination developed by technically savvy populations. Cryptocurrencies are often developed as code by teams who build in mechanisms for issuance (e.g. ‘mining’) and other controls (Conway). Thus, construction and making of cryptocurrencies tend to be collective yet decentralised. Cryptocurrencies arose during a time of increasing levels of distrust in governments and global financial instability from the Global Financial Crisis (2008-2013), whilst gaining traction through their usefulness in engaging in illicit trade (Saiedi, Broström, and Ruiz). It was through this rupture in the certainties of ‘the old system’ that this technology, and the community developing it, sought to disrupt the financial system (Maddox, Singh, et al.; Nelms et al.). Here we see the utility of the second theme of rupture and disruption to illustrate creative experimentation in the liminal and emergent spaces cryptocurrencies afford. While current crypto crazes (e.g. NFTs, ICOs) have their detractors, Cohen suggests, somewhat ironically, that the momentum for change of the crypto current was “driven by the grassroots, and technologically empowered, movement to confront the ills perceived to be powered and exacerbated by market-based capitalism, such as climate change and income inequality” (Cohen 739). Here we can start to envision how subterranean currents that emerge from creative experimentations in the dark impact global social forces in multifaceted ways – even as they are dragged into the light. Within a disrupted environment characterised by rupture, contention and redirection is rife (Maddox "Disrupting"). Contention and redirection illustrate how competing agendas bump and grind to create a generative tension around a deep collective desire for social change. Contention often emerges within an environment of hacks and scams, of which there are many stories in the cryptocurrency world (see Bartlett for an example of OneCoin, for instance; Kavanagh, Miscione, and Ennis). Other aspects of contention emerge around how the technology works to produce (mint) cryptocurrencies, including concern over the environmental impact of producing cryptocurrencies (Goodkind, Jones, and Berrens) and the production of non-fungible tokens for the sale of digital assets (Howson). Contention also arises through the gendered social dynamics of brogramming culture skewing inclusive and diverse engagement (Bowles). Shifting from the ideal of inclusion to the actual practice of crypto-communities begs the question of whose futures are being made. Contention and redirections are also evidenced by ‘hard forks’ in cryptocurrency. The founder mystery resulted in the gifting of this technology to a decentralised and leaderless community, materialised through the distributed consensus processes to approve software updates to a cryptocurrency. This consensus system consequently holds within it the seeds for governance failures (Trump et al.), the first of which occurred with the ‘hard forking’ of Bitcoin into Bitcoin cash in 2017 (Webb). Hard forks occur when developers and miners no longer agree on a proposed change to the software: one group upgraded to the new software while the others operated on the old rules. The resulting two separate blockchains and digital currencies concretised the tensions and disagreements within the community. This forking resulted initially in a shock to the market value of, and trust in, the Bitcoin network, and the dilution of adoption networks across the two cryptocurrencies. The ongoing hard forks of Bitcoin Cash illustrate the continued contention occurring within the community as crypto-personalities pit against each other (Hankin; Li). As these examples show, not all experiments in cryptocurrencies are successful; some become obsolete through iteration (Arnold). Iteration engenders mutations in the cultural framing of socio-technical experiments. These mutations of meaning and signification then facilitate their absorption into novel futures, showing the ternary nature of how what happens in the dark works with what is known by the light. As a rhetorical device, cryptocurrencies have been referred to as a currency (a payment system) or a commodity (an investment or speculation vehicle; Nelms et al. 21). However, new potential applications for the underlying technologies continue emerge. For example, Ethereum, the second-most dominant cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, now offers smart contract technology (decentralised autonomous organisations, DAO; Kavanagh, Miscione, and Ennis) and is iterating technology to dramatically reduce the energy consumption required to mine and mint the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) associated with crypto art (Wintermeyer). Here we can see how these rhetorical framings may represent iterative shifts and meaning-mutation that is as pragmatic as it is cultural. While we have considered here the themes of obsolescence and iteration threaded through the technological differentiations amongst cryptocurrencies, what should we make of these rhetorical or cultural mutations? This cultural mutation, we argue, can be seen most clearly in the resurgence of Dogecoin. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency launched in 2013 that takes its name and logo from a Shiba Inu meme that was popular several years ago (Potts and Berg). We can consider Dogecoin as a playful infrastructure (Rennie) and cultural product that was initially designed to provide a low bar for entry into the market. Its affordability is kept in place by the ability for miners to mint an unlimited number of coins. Dogecoin had a large resurgence of value and interest just after the meme-centric Reddit community Wallstreetbets managed to drive the share price of video game retailer GameStop to gain 1,500% (Potts and Berg). In this instance we see the mutation of a cryptocurrency into memecoin, or cultural product, for which the value is a prism to the wild fluctuations of internet culture itself, linking cultural bubbles to financial ones. In this case, technologies iterated in the dark mutated and surfaced as cultural bubbles through playful infrastructures that intersected with financial systems. The story of dogecoin articulates how cultural mutation articulates the absorption of emerging techno-potentials into larger structures. Conclusion From creative experiments digging in the dark shadows of global socio-economic forces, we can see how the future is formed beneath the surface of computational light. Yet as we write, cryptocurrencies are being absorbed by centralising and powerful entities to integrate them into global economies. Examples of large institutions hoarding Bitcoin include the crypto-counterbalancing between the Chinese state through its digital currency DCEP (Vincent) and Facebook through the Libra project. Vincent observes that the state-backed DCEP project is the antithesis of the decentralised community agenda for cryptocurrencies to enact the separation of state and money. Meanwhile, Facebook’s centralised computational control of platforms used by 2.8 billion humans provide a similarly perverse addition to cryptocurrency cultures. The penumbra fades as computational logic shifts its gaze. Our thematic exploration of cryptocurrencies highlights that it is only in their emergent forms that such radical creative experiments can dwell in the dark. They do not stay in the dark forever, as their absorption into larger systems becomes part of the future-making process. The cold, inextricable, and always impending computational logic of the current age suffocates creative experimentations that flourish in the dark. Therefore, it is crucial to tend to the uncertainties within the warm, damp, and dark liminal spaces of socio-technical experimentation. References Arnold, Michael. "On the Phenomenology of Technology: The 'Janus-Faces' of Mobile Phones." Information and Organization 13.4 (2003): 231-56. Bartlett, Jamie. 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"Bugging Out: Darknets as Parasites of Large-Scale Media Objects." Media, Culture & Society 41.2 (2019): 219-35. Goodkind, Andrew L., Benjamin A. Jones, and Robert P. Berrens. "Cryptodamages: Monetary Value Estimates of the Air Pollution and Human Health Impacts of Cryptocurrency Mining." Energy Research & Social Science 59 (2020): 101281. Hankin, Aaron. "What You Need to Know about the Bitcoin Cash ‘Hard Fork’." MarketWatch 13 Nov. 2018. 21 Apr. 2021 <https://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-bitcoin-cash-hard-fork-2018-11-13>. Howson, Peter. "NFTs: Why Digital Art Has Such a Massive Carbon Footprint." The Conversation April 2021. 21 Apr. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/nfts-why-digital-art-has-such-a-massive-carbon-footprint-158077>. Kavanagh, Donncha, Gianluca Miscione, and Paul J. Ennis. "The Bitcoin Game: Ethno-Resonance as Method." Organization (2019): 1-20. Li, Shine. "Bitcoin Cash (Bch) Hard Forks into Two New Blockchains Following Disagreement on Miner Tax." Blockchain.News Nov. 2020. 19 Feb. 2021 <https://blockchain.news/news/bitcoin-cash-bch-hard-forks-two-new-blockchains-disagreement-on-miner-tax>. Maddox, Alexia. "Disrupting the Ethnographic Imaginarium: Challenges of Immersion in the Silk Road Cryptomarket Community." Journal of Digital Social Research 2.1 (2020): 31-51. ———. "Netnography to Uncover Cryptomarkets." Netnography Unlimited: Understanding Technoculture Using Qualitative Social Media Research. Eds. Rossella Gambetti and Robert V. Kozinets. London: Routledge, 2021: 3-23. Maddox, Alexia, Monica J. Barratt, Matthew Allen, and Simon Lenton. "Constructive Activism in the Dark Web: Cryptomarkets and Illicit Drugs in the Digital ‘Demimonde’." Information Communication and Society 19.1 (2016): 111-26. Maddox, Alexia, and Luke Heemsbergen. "The Electrified Social: A Policing and Politics of the Dark." Continuum (forthcoming). Maddox, Alexia, Supriya Singh, Heather Horst, and Greg Adamson. "An Ethnography of Bitcoin: Towards a Future Research Agenda." Australian Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy 4.1 (2016): 65-78. Maurer, Bill, Taylor C. Nelms, and Lana Swartz. "'When Perhaps the Real Problem Is Money Itself!': The Practical Materiality of Bitcoin." Social Semiotics 23.2 (2013): 261-77. Nakamoto, Satoshi. "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." Bitcoin.org 2008. 21 Apr. 2021 <https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf>. Nelms, Taylor C., et al. "Social Payments: Innovation, Trust, Bitcoin, and the Sharing Economy." Theory, Culture & Society 35.3 (2018): 13-33. Pace, Jonathan. "Exchange Relations on the Dark Web." Critical Studies in Media Communication 34.1 (2017): 1-13. Potts, Jason, and Chris Berg. "After Gamestop, the Rise of Dogecoin Shows Us How Memes Can Move Market." The Conversation Feb. 2021. 21 Apr. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/after-gamestop-the-rise-of-dogecoin-shows-us-how-memes-can-move-markets-154470>. Rennie, Ellie. "The Governance of Degenerates Part II: Into the Liquidityborg." Medium Nov. 2020. 21 Apr. 2021 <https://ellierennie.medium.com/the-governance-of-degenerates-part-ii-into-the-liquidityborg-463889fc4d82>. Saiedi, Ed, Anders Broström, and Felipe Ruiz. "Global Drivers of Cryptocurrency Infrastructure Adoption." Small Business Economics (Mar. 2020). Sassen, Saskia. "Digging in the Penumbra of Master Categories." British Journal of Sociology 56.3 (2005): 401-03. Swartz, Lana. "What Was Bitcoin, What Will It Be? The Techno-Economic Imaginaries of a New Money Technology." Cultural Studies 32.4 (2018): 623-50. Trump, Benjamin D., et al. "Cryptocurrency: Governance for What Was Meant to Be Ungovernable." Environment Systems and Decisions 38.3 (2018): 426-30. Van de Sande, Mathijs. "Fighting with Tools: Prefiguration and Radical Politics in the Twenty-First Century." Rethinking Marxism 27.2 (2015): 177-94. Vincent, Danny. "'One Day Everyone Will Use China's Digital Currency'." BBC News Sep. 2020. 19 Feb. 2021 <https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54261382>. Webb, Nick. "A Fork in the Blockchain: Income Tax and the Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork." North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology 19.4 (2018): 283-311. Wintermeyer, Lawrence. "Climate-Positive Crypto Art: The Next Big Thing or NFT Overreach." Forbes 19 Mar. 2021. 21 Apr. 2021 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencewintermeyer/2021/03/19/climate-positive-crypto-art-the-next-big-thing-or-nft-overreach/>.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)Doubt has been my closest companion for several years as I struggle to make sense of certain hidden events from within my family’s history. The actual nature of such events, although now lost to us, can nevertheless be explored through the distorting lens of memory and academic research. I base such explorations in part on my intuition and sensitivity to emotional experience, which are inevitably riddled with doubt. I write from the position of a psychoanalytic psychologist who is also a creative writer and my doubts increase further when I use the autobiographical impulse as a driving force. I am not alone with such uncertainties. Ross Gibson, an historian and filmmaker, uses his doubts to explore empty spaces in the Australian landscape. He looks to see “what’s gone missing” as he endeavours with a team of colleagues to build up some “systematic comprehension in response to fragments” (Gibson, “Places” 1). How can anyone be certain as to what has transpired with no “facts” to go on? he asks. What can we do with our doubts? To this end, Gibson has collected a series of crime scene photographs, taken in post war Sydney, and created a display – a photographic slide show with a minimalist musical score, mostly of drumming and percussion, coupled with a few tight, poetic words, in the form of haiku, splattered across the screen. The notes accompanying the photographic negatives were lost. The only details “known” include the place, the date and the image. Of some two thousand photos, Gibson selected only fifty for display, by hunch, by nuance, or by whatever it was that stirred in him when he first glimpsed them. He describes each photo as “the imprint of a scream”, a gut reaction riddled with doubt (Gibson and Richards, Wartime). In this type of research, creative imaginative flair is essential, Gibson argues. “We need to propose ‘what if’ scenarios that help us account for what has happened…so that we can better envisage what might happen. We need to apprehend the past” (Gibson, “Places” 2). To do this we need imagination, which involves “a readiness to incorporate the unknown…when one encounters evidence that’s in smithereens”, the evidence of the past that lies rooted in a seedbed of doubt (Gibson, “Places” 2). The sociologist, Avery Gordon, also argues in favour of the imaginative impulse. “Fiction is getting pretty close to sociology,” she suggests as she begins her research into the business of ghosts and haunting (Gordon 38). As we entertain our doubts we tune in with our uncertain imaginations. “The places where our discourse is unauthorised by virtue of its unruliness…take us away from abstract questions of method, from bloodless professionalised questions, toward the materiality of institutionalised storytelling, with all its uncanny repetitions” (Gordon 39). If we are to dig deeper, to understand more about the emotional truth of our “fictional” pasts we must look to “the living traces, the memories of the lost and disappeared” (Gordon ix). According to Janice Radway, Gordon seeks a new way of knowing…a knowing that is more a listening than a seeing, a practice of being attuned to the echoes and murmurs of that which has been lost but which is still present among us in the form of intimations, hints, suggestions and portents … ghostly matters … . To be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effects. (x) And to be tied to such effects is to live constantly in the shadow of doubt. A photograph of my dead baby sister haunts me still. As a child I took this photo to school one day. I had peeled it from its corners in the family album. There were two almost identical pictures, side by side. I hoped no one would notice the space left behind. “She’s dead,” I said. I held the photo out to a group of girls in the playground. My fingers had smeared the photo’s surface. The children peered at the image. They wanted to stare at the picture of a dead baby. Not one had seen a dead body before, and not one had been able to imagine the stillness, a photographic image without life, without breath that I passed around on the asphalt playground one spring morning in 1962 when I was ten years old. I have the photo still—my dead sister who bears the same name as my older sister, still living. The dead one has wispy fine black hair. In the photo there are dark shadows underneath her closed eyes. She looks to be asleep. I do not emphasise grief at the loss of my mother’s first-born daughter. My mother felt it briefly, she told me later. But things like that happened all the time during the war. Babies were born and died regularly. Now, all these years later, these same unmourned babies hover restlessly in the nurseries of generations of survivors. There is no way we can be absolute in our interpretations, Gibson argues, but in the first instance there is some basic knowledge to be generated from viewing the crime scene photographs, as in viewing my death photo (Gibson, "Address"). For example, we can reflect on the décor and how people in those days organised their spaces. We can reflect on the way people stood and walked, got on and off vehicles, as well as examine something of the lives of the investigative police, including those whose job it was to take these photographs. Gibson interviewed some of the now elderly men from the Sydney police force who had photographed the crime scenes he displays. He asked questions to deal with his doubts. He now has a very different appreciation of the life of a “copper”, he says. His detective work probing into these empty spaces, digging into his doubts, has reduced his preconceptions and prejudices (Gibson, "Address"). Preconception and prejudice cannot tolerate doubt. In order to bear witness, Gibson says we need to be speculative, to be loose, but not glib, “narrativising” but not inventive, with an eye to the real world (Gibson, "Address"). Gibson’s interest in an interpretation of life after wartime in Sydney is to gather a sense of the world that led to these pictures. His interpretations derive from his hunches, but hunches, he argues, also need to be tested for plausibility (Gibson, Address). Like Gibson, I hope that the didactic trend from the past—to shut up and listen—has been replaced by one that involves “discovery based learning”, learning that is guided by someone who knows “just a little more”, in a common sense, forensic, investigative mode (Gibson, “Address”). Doubt is central to this heuristic trend. Likewise, my doubts give me permission to explore my family’s past without the paralysis of intentionality and certainty. “What method have you adopted for your research?” Gordon asks, as she considers Luce Irigaray’s thoughts on the same question. It is “a delicate question. For isn’t it the method, the path to knowledge, that has always also led us away, led us astray, by fraud and artifice” (Gordon 38). So what is my methodology? I use storytelling meshed with theory and the autobiographical. But what do you think you’re doing? my critics ask. You call this research? I must therefore look to literary theorists on biography and autobiography for support. Nancy Miller writes about the denigration of the autobiographical, particularly in academic circles, where the tendency has been to see the genre as “self indulgent” in its apparent failure to maintain standards of objectivity, of scrutiny and theoretical distance (Miller 421). However, the autobiographical, Miller argues, rather than separating and dividing us through self-interests can “narrow the degree of separation” by operating as an aid to remembering (425). We recognise ourselves in another’s memoir, however fleetingly, and the recognition makes our “own experience feel more meaningful: not ‘merely’ personal but part of the bigger picture of cultural memory” (Miller 426). I speak with some hesitation about my family of origin yet it frames my story and hence my methodology. For many years I have had a horror of what writers and academics call “structure”. I considered myself lacking any ability to create a structure within my writing. I write intuitively. I have some idea of what I wish to explore and then I wait for ideas to enter my mind. They rise to the surface much like air bubbles from a fish. I wait till the fish joggles my bait. Often I write as I wait for a fish to bite. This writing, which is closely informed by my reading, occurs in an intuitive way, as if by instinct. I follow the associations that erupt in my mind, even as I explore another’s theory, and if it is at all possible, if I can get hold of these associations, what I, too, call hunches, then I follow them, much as Gibson and Gordon advocate. Like Gordon, I take my “distractions” seriously (Gordon, 31-60). Gordon follows ghosts. She looks for the things behind the things, the things that haunt her. I, too, look for what lies beneath, what is unconscious, unclear. This writing does not come easily and it takes many drafts before a pattern can emerge, before I, who have always imagined I could not develop a structure, begin to see one—an outline in bold where the central ideas accrue and onto which other thoughts can attach. This structure is not static. It begins with the spark of desire, the intercourse of opposing feelings, for me the desire to untangle family secrets from the past, to unpack one form, namely the history as presented within my family and then to re-assemble it through a written re-construction that attempts to make sense of the empty spaces left out of the family narrative, where no record, verbal or written, has been provided. This operates against pressure from certain members of my family to leave the family past unexplored. My methodology is subjective. Any objectivity I glean in exploring the work and theories of others comes through my own perspective. I read the works of academics in the literary field, and academics from psychoanalysis interested in infant development and personality theory. They consider these issues in different ways from the way in which I, as a psychotherapist, a doubt-filled researcher, and writer, read and experience them. To my clinician self, these ideas evolve in practice. I do not see them as mere abstractions. To me they are living ideas, they pulse and flow, and yet there are some who would seek to tie them down or throw them out. Recently I asked my mother about the photo of her dead baby, her first-born daughter who had died during the Hongerwinter (Hunger winter) of 1945 in Heilo, Holland. I was curious to know how the photo had come about. My curiosity had been flamed by Jay Ruby’s Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, a transcript on the nature of post-mortem photography, which includes several photos of dead people. The book I found by chance in a second-hand books store. I could not leave these photographs behind. Ruby is concerned to ask questions about why we have become so afraid of death, at least in the western world, that we no longer take photographs of our loved ones after death as mementos, or if we take such photos, they are kept private, not shared with the public, for fear that the owners might be considered ghoulish (Ruby 161). I follow in Gordon’s footsteps. She describes how one day, on her way to a conference to present a paper, she had found herself distracted from her conference topic by thoughts of a woman whose image she had discovered was “missing” from a photo taken in Berlin in 1901. According to Gordon’s research, the woman, Sabina Spielrein, should have been present in this photo, but was not. Spielrein is a little known psychoanalyst, little known despite the fact that she was the first to hypothesise on the nature of the death instinct, an unconscious drive towards death and oblivion (Gordon 40). Gordon’s “search” for this missing woman overtook her initial research. My mother could not remember who took her dead baby’s photograph, but suspected it was a neighbour of her cousin in whose house she had stayed. She told me again the story she has told me many times before, and always at my instigation. When I was little I wondered that my mother could stay dry-eyed in the telling. She seemed so calm, when I had imagined that were I the mother of a dead baby I would find it hard to go on. “It is harder,” my mother said, to lose an older child. “When a child dies so young, you have fewer memories. It takes less time to get over it.” Ruby concludes that after World War Two, postmortem photographs were less likely to be kept in the family album, as they would have been in earlier times. “Those who possess death-related family pictures regard them as very private pictures to be shown only to selected people” (Ruby 161). When I look at the images in Ruby’s book, particularly those of the young, the children and babies, I am struck again at the unspoken. The idea of the dead person, seemingly alive in the photograph, propped up in a chair, on a mother’s lap, or resting on a bed, lifeless. To my contemporary sensibility it seems wrong. To look upon these dead people, their identities often unknown, and to imagine the grief for others in that loss—for grief there must have been such that the people remaining felt it necessary to preserve the memory—becomes almost unbearable. It is tempting to judge the past by present standards. In 1999, while writing her historical novel Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks came across a letter Henry James had written ninety eight years earlier to a young Sarah Orne Jewett who had previously sent him a manuscript of her historical novel for comment. In his letter, James condemns the notion of the historical novel as an impossibility: “the invention, the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense of horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world,” are all impossible, he insisted (Brooks 3). Despite Brooks’s initial disquiet at James’s words, she realised later that she had heard similar ideas uttered in different contexts before. Brooks had worked as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa: “They don’t think like us,” white Africans would say of their black neighbours, or Israelis of Arabs or upper class Palestinians about their desperately poor refugee-camp brethren … . “They don’t value life as we do. They don’t care if their kids get killed—they have so many of them”. (Brookes 3) But Brooks argues, “a woman keening for a dead child sounds exactly as raw in an earth-floored hovel as it does in a silk-carpeted drawing room” (3). Brooks is concerned to get beyond the certainties of our pre-conceived ideas: “It is human nature to put yourself in another’s shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy”(3). And empathy again requires the capacity to tolerate doubt. Later I asked my mother yet again about what it was like for her when her baby died, and why she had chosen to have her dead baby photographed. She did not ask for the photograph to be taken, she told me. But she was glad to have it now; otherwise nothing would remain of this baby, buried in an unfamiliar cemetery on the other side of the world. Why am I haunted by this image of my dead baby sister and how does it connect with my family’s secrets? The links are still in doubt. Gibson’s creative flair, Gordon’s ideas on ghostly matters and haunting, the things behind the things, my preoccupation with my mother’s dead baby and a sense that this sister might mean less to me did I not have the image of her photograph planted in my memory from childhood, all come together through parataxis if we can bear our doubts. Certainty is the enemy of introspection of imagination and of creativity. Yet too much doubt can paralyse. Here I write about tolerable levels of doubt tempered with an inquisitive mind that can land on hunches and an imagination that allows the researcher to follow such hunches and then seek evidence that corroborates or disproves them. As Gibson writes elsewhere, I tried to use all these scrappy details to help people think about the absences and silences between all the pinpointed examples that made up the scenarios that I presented in prose that was designed to spur rigorous speculation rather than lock down singular conclusions. (“Extractive” 2) Ours is a positive doubt, one that expects to find something, however “unexpected”, rather than a negative doubt that expects nothing. For doubt in large doses can paralyse a person into inaction. Furthermore, a balanced state of doubt fosters connectivity. As John Patrick Shanley’s character, the parish priest, Father Flynn, in the film Doubt, observes, “there are these times in our life when we feel lost. It happens and it’s a bond” (Shanley). References Brooks, Geraldine. "Timeless Tact Helps Sustain a Literary Time Traveller." New York Times, 2001. 14 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/02/arts/writers-on-writing-timeless-tact-helps-sustain-a-literary-time-traveler.html?pagewanted=3&src=pm›. Doubt. Shanley, Dir. J. P. Shanley. Miramax Films, 2008. Gibson, Ross, and Kate Richards. “Life after Wartime.” N.d. 25 Feb. 2011. ‹http://www.lifeafterwartime.com/›. Gibson, Ross. “The Art of the Real Conference.” Keynote address. U Newcastle, 2008. Gibson, Ross. “Places past Disappearance.” Transformations 13-1 (2006). 22 Feb. 2007 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml›. ———. “Extractive Realism.” Australian Humanities Review 47 (2009). 25 Feb. 2011 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2009/gibson.html›. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2008. Miller, Nancy K. “But Enough about Me, What Do You Think of My Memoir?” The Yale Journal of Criticism 13.2 (2000): 421-536. Ruby, Jay. Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995.

IntroductionBallarat’s Theatre Royal was the first permanent theatre built in inland Australia. Upon opening in 1858, it was acclaimed as having “the handsomest theatrical exterior in the colony” (Star, “Editorial” 7 Dec. 1889) and later acknowledged as “the grandest playhouse in all Australia” (Spielvogel, Papers Vol. 1 160). Born of Gold Rush optimism, the Royal was loved by many, yet the over-arching story of its ill-fated existence has failed to surface, in any coherent fashion, in official history. This article takes some first steps toward retrieving lost knowledge from fragmented archival records, and piecing together the story of why this purpose-built theatre ceased operation within a twenty-year period. A short history of the venue will be provided, to develop context. It will be argued that while a combination of factors, most of which were symptomatic of unfortunate timing, destroyed the longevity of the Royal, the principal problem was one of stigmatisation. This was an era in which the societal pressure to visibly conform to conservative values was intense and competition in the pursuit of profits was fierce.The cultural silence that befell the story of the Royal, after its demise, is explicable in relation to history being written by the victors and a loss of spokespeople since that time. As theatre arts historiographer McConachie (131) highlights, “Theatres, like places for worship and spectator sports, hold memories of the past in addition to providing a practical and cognitive framework for performance events in the present.” When that place, “a bounded area denoted by human agency and memory” (131), is lost in time, so too may be the socio-cultural lessons from the period, if not actively recalled and reconsidered. The purpose of this article is to present the beginning of an investigation into the disjointed narrative of Ballarat’s Theatre Royal. Its ultimate failure demonstrates how dominant community based entertainment became in Ballarat from the 1860s onwards, effectively crushing prospects for mid-range professional theatre. There is value in considering the evolution of the theatre’s lifespan and its possible legacy effects. The connection between historical consciousness and the performing arts culture of by-gone days offers potential to reveal specks of cross-relevance for regional Australian theatrical offerings today.In the BeginningThe proliferation of entertainment venues in Ballarat East during the 1850s was a consequence of the initial discovery of surface alluvial gold and the ongoing success of deep-lead mining activities in the immediate area. This attracted extraordinary numbers of people from all over the world who hoped to strike it rich. Given the tough nature of life on the early gold diggings, most disposable income was spent on evening entertainment. As a result, numerous venues sprang into operation to cater for demand. All were either canvas tents or makeshift wooden structures: vibrant in socio-cultural activity, however humble the presentation values. It is widely agreed (Withers, Bate and Brereton) that noteworthy improvements occurred from 1856 onwards in the artistry of the performers, audience tastes, the quality of theatrical structures and living standards in general. Residents began to make their exit from flood and fire prone Ballarat East, moving to Ballarat West. The Royal was the first substantial entertainment venture to be established in this new, affluent, government surveyed township area. Although the initial idea was to draw in some of the patronage which had flourished in Ballarat East, Brereton (14) believed “There can be no doubt that it was [primarily] intended to attract those with good taste and culture”. This article will contend that how society defined ‘good taste’ turned out to be problematic for the Royal.The tumultuous mid-1850s have attracted extensive academic and popular attention, primarily because they were colourful and politically significant times. The period thereafter has attracted little scholarly interest, unless tied to the history of surviving organisations. Four significant structures designed to incorporate theatrical entertainment were erected and opened in Ballarat from 1858 onwards: The Royal was swiftly followed by the Mechanics Institute 1859, Alfred Hall 1867 and Academy of Music 1874-75. As philosopher Albert Borgmann (41) highlighted, the erection of “magnificent settings in which the public could gather and enjoy itself” was the dominant urban aspiration for cultural consumption in the nineteenth century. Men of influence in Victorian cities believed strongly in progress and grand investments as a conscious demonstration of power, combined with Puritan vales, teetotalism and aggressive self-assertiveness (Briggs 287-88). At the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone for the Royal on 20 January 1858, eminent tragedian, Gustavos Brooke, announced “… may there be raised a superstructure perfect in all its parts, and honourable to the builder.” He proclaimed the memorial bottle to be “a lasting memento of the greatness of Ballarat in erecting such a theatre” and philosophised that “the stage not only refines the manners, but it is the best teacher of morals, for it is the truest and most intelligible picture of life. It stamps the image of virtue on the mind …” (Star, “Laying” 21 Jan. 1858). These initial aspirations seem somewhat ambitious when viewed with the benefit of hindsight. Ballarat’s Theatre Royal opened in December 1858, ironically with Jerrold’s comedy ‘Time Works Wonders’. The large auditorium holding around 1500 people “was crowded to overflowing and was considered altogether brilliant in its newness and beauty” by all in attendance (Star, “Local and General” 30 Dec. 1858). Generous descriptions abound of how splendid it was, in architectural terms, but also in relation to scenery, decorations and all appointments. Underneath the theatre were two shops, four bars, elegant dining rooms, a kitchen and 24 bedrooms. A large saloon was planned to be attached soon-after. The overall cost of the build was estimated at a substantial 10,000 pounds.The First Act: 1858-1864In the early years, the Royal was deemed a success. The pleasure-seeking public of Ballarat came en masse and the glory days seemed like they might continue unabated. By the early 1860s, Ballarat was known as a great theatrical centre for performing arts, its population was famous both nationally and internationally for an appreciation of good acting, and the Royal was considered the home of the best dramatic art in Ballarat (Withers 260). Like other theatres of the 1850s diggings, it had its own resident company of actors, musicians, scenic artists and backstage crew. Numerous acclaimed performers came to visit and these were prosperous and happy times for the Royal’s lively theatrical community. As early as 1859, however, there was evident rivalry between the Royal and the Mechanics Institute, as suggested on numerous occasions in the Ballarat Star. As a multi-purpose venue for education and the betterment of the working classes, the latter venue had the distinct advantage of holding the moral high ground. Over time this competition increased as audiences decreased. As people shifted to family-focussed entertainments, these absorbed their time and attention. The transformation of a transient population into a township of families ultimately suffocated prospects for professional entertainment in Ballarat. Consumer interest turned to the growth of strong amateur societies with the establishment of the Welsh Eisteddfod 1863; Harmonic Society 1864; Bell Ringers’ Club 1866 and Glee and Madrigal Union 1867 (Brereton 38). By 1863, the Royal was reported to have “scanty patronage” and Proprietor Symonds was in financial trouble (Star, “News and Notes” 15 Sep. 1864). It was announced that the theatre would open for the last time on Saturday, 29 October 1864 (Australasian). On that same date, the Royal was purchased by Rowlands & Lewis, the cordial makers. They promptly on-sold it to the Ballarat Temperance League, who soon discovered that there was a contract in place with Bouchier, the previous owner, who still held the hotel next door, stating that “all proprietors … were bound to keep it open as a theatre” (Withers 260-61). Having invested immense energy into the quest to purchase it, the Temperance League backed out of the deal. Prominent Hotelier Walter Craig bought it for less than 3,000 pounds. It is possible that this stymied effort to quell the distribution of liquor in the heart of the city evoked the ire of the Protestant community, who were on a dedicated mission “to attack widespread drunkenness, profligacy, licentiousness and agnosticism,” and forming an interdenominational Bible and Tract Society in 1866 (Bate 176). This caused a segment of the population to consider the Royal a ‘lost cause’ and steer clear of it, advising ‘respectable’ families to do the same, and so the stigma grew. Social solidarity of this type had significant impact in an era in which people openly demonstrated their morality by way of unified public actions.The Second Act: 1865-1868The Royal closed for renovations until May 1865. Of the various alterations made to the interior and its fittings, the most telling was the effort to separate the ladies from the ‘town women’, presumably to reassure ‘respectable’ female patrons. To this end, a ladies’ retiring room was added, in a position convenient to the dress circle. The architectural rejuvenation of the Royal was cited as an illustration of great progress in Sturt Street (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 27 May 1865). Soon after, the Royal hosted the Italian Opera Company.However, by 1866 there was speculation that the Royal may be converted into a dry goods store. References to what sort of impression the failing of theatre would convey to the “old folks at home” in relation to “progress in civilisation'' and "social habits" indicated the distress of loyal theatre-goers. Impassioned pleas were written to the press to help preserve the “Temple of Thespus” for the legitimate use for which it was intended (Ballarat Star, “Messenger” and “Letters to the Editor” 30 Aug. 1866). By late 1867, a third venue materialised. The Alfred Hall was built for the reception of Ballarat’s first Royal visitor, the Duke of Edinburgh. On the night prior to the grand day at the Alfred, following a private dinner at Craig’s Hotel, Prince Alfred was led by an escorted torchlight procession to a gala performance at Craig’s very own Theatre Royal. The Prince’s arrival caused a sensation that completely disrupted the show (Spielvogel, Papers Vol. 1 165). While visiting Ballarat, the Prince laid the stone for the new Temperance Hall (Bate 159). This would not have been required had the League secured the Royal for their use three years earlier.Thereafter, the Royal was unable to reach the heights of what Brereton (15) calls the “Golden Age of Ballarat Theatre” from 1855 to 1865. Notably, the Mechanics Institute also experienced financial constraints during the 1860s and these challenges were magnified during the 1870s (Hazelwood 89). The late sixties saw the Royal reduced to the ‘ordinary’ in terms of the calibre of productions (Brereton 15). Having done his best to improve the physical attributes and prestige of the venue, Craig may have realised he was up against a growing stigma and considerable competition. He sold the Royal to R.S. Mitchell for 5,500 pounds in 1868.Another New Owner: 1869-1873For the Saturday performance of Richard III in 1869, under the new Proprietor, it was reported that “From pit to gallery every seat was full” and for many it was standing room only (Ballarat Star, “Theatre Royal” 1 Feb. 1869). Later that year, Othello attracted people with “a critical appreciation of histrionic matters” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 19 July 1869). The situation appeared briefly promising. Unfortunately, larger economic factors were soon at play. During 1869, Ballarat went ‘mad’ with mine share gambling. In 1870 the economic bubble burst, and hundreds of people in Ballarat were financially ruined. Over the next ten years the population fell from 60,000 to less than 40,000 (Spielvogel, Papers Vol. 3 39). The last surviving theatre in Ballarat East, the much-loved Charles Napier, put on its final show in September 1869 (Brereton 15). By 1870 the Royal was referred to as a “second-class theatre” and was said to be such bad repute that “it would be most difficult to draw respectable classes” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 17 Jan. 1870). It seems the remaining theatre patrons from the East swung over to support the Royal, which wasn’t necessarily in the best interests of its reputation. During this same period, family-oriented crowds of “the pleasure-seeking public of Ballarat” were attending events at the newly fashionable Alfred Hall (Ballarat Courier, “Theatre Royal” June 1870). There were occasional high points still to come for the Royal. In 1872, opera drew a crowded house “even to the last night of the season” which according to the press, “gave proof, if proof were wanting, that the people of Ballarat not only appreciate, but are willing to patronise to the full any high-class entertainment” (Ballarat Courier, “Theatre Royal” 26 Aug. 1872). The difficulty, however, lay in the deterioration of the Royal’s reputation. It had developed negative connotations among local temperance and morality movements, along with their extensive family, friendship and business networks. Regarding collective consumption, sociologist John Urry wrote “for those engaged in the collective tourist gaze … congregation is paramount” (140). Applying this socio-cultural principle to the behaviour of Victorian theatre-going audiences of the 1870s, it was compelling for audiences to move with the masses and support popular events at the fresh Alfred Hall rather than the fading Royal. Large crowds jostling for elbow room was perceived as the hallmark of a successful event back then, as is most often the case now.The Third Act: 1874-1878An additional complication faced by the Royal was the long-term effect of the application of straw across the ceiling. Acoustics were initially poor, and straw was intended to rectify the problem. This caused the venue to develop a reputation for being stuffy and led to the further indignity of the Royal suffering an infestation of fleas (Jenkins 22); a misfortune which caused some to label it “The Royal Bug House” (Reid 117). Considering how much food was thrown at the stage in this era, it is not surprising that rotten debris attracted insects. In 1873, the Royal closed for another round of renovations. The interior was redesigned, and the front demolished and rebuilt. This was primarily to create retail store frontage to supplement income (Reid 117). It was reported that the best theatrical frontage in Australasia was lost, and in its place was “a modestly handsome elevation” for which all play-goers of Ballarat should be thankful, as the miracle required of the rebuild was that of “exorcising the foul smells from the old theatre and making it bright and pretty and sweet” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 26 Jan. 1874). The effort at rejuvenation seemed effective for a period. A “large and respectable audience” turned out to see the Fakir of Oolu, master of the weird, mystical, and strange. The magician’s show “was received with cheers from all parts of the house, and is certainly a very attractive novelty” (Ballarat Courier, “Theatre Royal” 29 Mar. 1875). That same day, the Combination Star Company gave a concert at the Mechanics Institute. Indicating the competitive tussle, the press stated: “The attendance, however, doubtless owing to attractions elsewhere, was only moderately large” (Courier, “Concert at the Mechanics’” 29 Mar. 1875). In the early 1870s, there had been calls from sectors of society for a new venue to be built in Ballarat, consistent with its status. The developer and proprietor, Sir William Clarke, intended to offer a “higher class” of entertainment for up to 1700 people, superior to the “broad farces” at the Royal (Freund n.p.) In 1875, the Academy of Music opened, at a cost of twelve thousand pounds, just one block away from the Royal.As the decade of decreasing population wore on, it is intriguing to consider an unprecedented “riotous” incident in 1877. Levity's Original Royal Marionettes opened at the Royal with ‘Beauty and the Beast’ to calamitous response. The Company Managers, Wittington & Lovell made clear that the performance had scarcely commenced when the “storm” arose and they believed “the assault to be premeditated” (Wittington and Lovell in Argus, “The Riot” 6 Apr. 1877). Paid thuggery, with the intent of spooking regular patrons, was the implication. They pointed out that “It is evident that the ringleaders of the riot came into the theatre ready armed with every variety of missiles calculated to get a good hit at the figures and scenery, and thereby create a disturbance.” The mob assaulted the stage with “head-breaking” lemonade bottles, causing costly damage, then chased the frightened puppeteers down Sturt Street (Mount Alexander Mail, “Items of News” 4 Apr. 1877). The following night’s performance, by contrast, was perfectly calm (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 7 Apr. 1877). Just three months later, Webb’s Royal Marionette pantomimes appeared at the Mechanics’ Institute. The press wrote “this is not to be confounded, with the exhibition which created something like a riot at the Theatre Royal last Easter” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 5 July 1877).The final performance at the Royal was the American Rockerfellers’ Minstrel Company. The last newspaper references to the Royal were placed in the context of other “treats in store” at The Academy of Music, and forthcoming offerings at the Mechanics Institute (Star, “Advertising” 3 July 1878). The Royal had experienced three re-openings and a series of short-term managements, often ending in loss or even bankruptcy. When it wound up, investors were left to cover the losses, while the owner was forced to find more profitable uses for the building (Freund n.p.). At face value, it seemed that four performing arts venues was one too many for Ballarat audiences to support. By August 1878 the Royal’s two shop fronts were up for lease. Thereafter, the building was given over entirely to retail drapery sales (Withers 260). ReflectionsThe Royal was erected, at enormous expense, in a moment of unbridled optimism, after several popular theatres in Ballarat East had burned to the ground. Ultimately the timing for such a lavish investment was poor. It suffered an inflexible old-fashioned structure, high overheads, ongoing staffing costs, changing demographics, economic crisis, increased competition, decreased population, the growth of local community-based theatre, temperance agitation and the impact of negative rumour and hear-say.The struggles endured by the various owners and managers of, and investors in, the Royal reflected broader changes within the larger community. The tension between the fixed nature of the place and the fluid needs of the public was problematic. Shifting demographics meant the Royal was negatively affected by conservative values, altered tastes and competing entertainment options. Built in the 1850s, it was sound, but structurally rigid, dated and polluted with the bacterial irritations of the times. “Resident professional companies could not compete with those touring from Melbourne” by whom it was considered “… hard to use and did not satisfy the needs of touring companies who required facilities equivalent to those in the metropolitan theatres” (Freund n.p.). Meanwhile, the prevalence of fund-raising concerts, created by charitable groups and member based community organisations, detracted from people’s interest in supporting professional performances. After-all, amateur concerts enabled families to “embrace the values of British middle class morality” (Doggett 295) at a safe distance from grog shops and saloons. Children aged 5-14 constituted only ten percent of the Ballarat population in 1857, but by 1871 settler families had created a population in which school aged children comprised twenty-five of the whole (Bate 146). This had significant ramifications for the type of theatrical entertainments required. By the late sixties, as many as 2000 children would perform at a time, and therefore entrance fees were able to be kept at affordable levels for extended family members. Just one year after the demise of the Royal, a new secular improvement society became active, holding amateur events and expanding over time to become what we now know as the Royal South Street Society. This showed that the appetite for home-grown entertainment was indeed sizeable. It was a function that the Royal was unable to service, despite several ardent attempts. Conclusion The greatest misfortune of the Royal was that it became stigmatised, from the mid 1860s onwards. In an era when people were either attempting to be pure of manners or were considered socially undesirable, it was hard for a cultural venue to survive which occupied the commercial middle ground, as the Royal did. It is also conceivable that the Royal was ‘framed’, by one or two of its competitor venues, or their allies, just one year before its closure. The Theatre Royal’s negative stigma as a venue for rough and intemperate human remnants of early Ballarat East had proven insurmountable. The Royal’s awkward position between high-class entrepreneurial culture and wholesome family-based community values, both of which were considered tasteful, left it out-of-step with the times and vulnerable to the judgement of those with either vested interests or social commitments elsewhere. This had long-term resonance for the subsequent development of entertainment options within Ballarat, placing the pendulum of favour either on elite theatre or accessible community based entertainments. The cultural middle-ground was sparse. The eventual loss of the building, the physical place of so much dramatic energy and emotion, as fondly recalled by Withers (260), inevitably contributed to the Royal fading from intergenerational memory. The telling of the ‘real story’ behind the rise and fall of the Ballarat Theatre Royal requires further exploration. If contemporary cultural industries are genuinely concerned “with the re-presentation of the supposed history and culture of a place”, as Urry believed (154), then untold stories such as that of Ballarat’s Theatre Royal require scholarly attention. This article represents the first attempt to examine its troubled history in a holistic fashion and locate it within a context ripe for cultural analysis.ReferencesBate, Weston. Lucky City: The First Generation at Ballarat 1851–1901. Carlton South: Melbourne UP, 1978.Brereton, Roslyn. Entertainment and Recreation on the Victorian Goldfields in the 1850s. BA (Honours) Thesis. 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