Journal articles on the topic 'Narrative art, Italian Australia'

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how grape varieties are narrated online by non-winery-owned sources in four countries: Australia, Canada the UK and the USA. This study focuses on Sangiovese, the most important varietal of Italy. Design/methodology/approach Texts collected on the Internet underwent a software-assisted semantic clustering procedure based on text-mining techniques. Identified clusters were then qualitatively analyzed by content. Findings The digital narrative on Sangiovese is mainly technical and conveyed by adopting a professional slant that is suitable for knowledgeable consumers but less effective for common and unexperienced wine drinkers. Online information is concentrated in few websites that act as information gatekeepers. Research limitations/implications The study contributes to the wine-related managerial literature on grape varieties, which are considered one of the most powerful factors in addressing consumer wine choice. Additionally, the investigation sheds light on the online wine ecosystem, by providing insights on how information is provided and the contents that are conveyed on the Internet. The findings of this study may be useful for Italian operators willing to promote Sangiovese-based wines in foreign markets. Originality/value Though explorative in nature, this study represents one of the first attempts to investigate the online narrative of grape varieties by presenting a marketing perspective and examining the characteristics of non-winery-owned online information which may shape wine consumers’ behavior.

Abstract The paper presents the author’s research on the representation of painters and sculptors, their models and their art works in Italian silent cinema of the 1910s and early 1920s. This research deals with both the combination of optical (painterly) vs. haptical (sculptural) cinema. It also problematizes art versus the real, as well as art conceived from cinema’s own perspective, that is within the conventions of European and American cinema. In addition to research in these filmic conventions the author compares how the theme manifests itself within different genres, such as comedy, crime and adventure films, diva films and strong men films. Examples are : Il trionfo della forza (The Triumph of Strength, 1913), La signora Fricot è gelosa (Madam Fricot is Jelous, 1913), Il fuoco (The Fire, Giovanni Pastrone, 1915), Il fauno (The Faun, Febo Mari, 1917), Il processo Clemenceau (The Clemenceau Affair, Alfredo De Antoni, 1917) and L’atleta fantasma (The Ghost Athlete, Raimondo Scotti, 1919). I will relate this pioneering study to recent studies on the representation of art and artists in Hollywood cinema, such as Katharina Sykora’s As You Desire me. Das Bildnis im Film (2003), Susan Felleman’s Art in the Cinematic Imagination (2006) and Steven Jacobs’s Framing Pictures. Film and the Visual Arts (2011), and older studies by Thomas Elsaesser, Angela Dalle Vacche, Felleman and the author.

The paper examines the presence of Aboriginal art, its contact with colonial and federation Australian art to prove that silencing of this art from the official identity narrative and art histories also served elimination of Aboriginal people from national and identity discourse. It posits then that the recently observed acceptance and popularity as well as incorporation of Aboriginal art into the national Australian art and art histories of Australian art may be interpreted as a sign of indigenizing state nationalism and multicultural national identity of Australia in compliance with the definition of identity according to Anthony B. Smith.

This article investigates how Chaucer‘s Knight‘s and Squire‘s tales critically engage with the Orientalist strategies buttressing contemporary Italian humanist discussions of visual art. Framed by references to crusading, the two tales enter into a dialogue focusing, in particular, on the relations between the classical, the scientific and the Oriental in trecento Italian discourses on painting and optics, discourses that are alluded to in the description of Theseus Theatre and the events that happen there. The Squire‘s Tale exhibits what one might call a strategic Orientalism designed to draw attention to the Orientalism implicit in his fathers narrative, a narrative that, for all its painstaking classicism, displays both remarkably Italianate and Orientalist features. Read in tandem, the two tales present a shrewd commentary on the exclusionary strategies inherent in the construction of new cultural identities, arguably making Chaucer the first postcolonial critic of the Renaissance.

Visual culture has much to contribute to an understanding of the history of sexuality. Yet, to date, the depiction of pederasty in the art of the Renaissance has not been covered adequately by dominant theoretical paradigms. Moreover, the interpretive approach of traditional art historical discourse has been both limited and limiting in its timidity toward matters concerning the representation of sexual proclivity between males. This article will address the ways in which Italian Renaissance artistic depictions of some mythological narratives were enmeshed with the period’s attitudes toward sexual and social relationships between men.Particular attention is paid here to the manner in which, under the veneer of a mythological narrative, certain works of art embodied a complex set of messages that encoded issues of masculine behaviour and performance in the context of intergenerational same-sex erotic relationships. The primary case studies under investigation for these concerns of gender and sexuality in this particular context are Benvenuto Cellini’s marble Apollo and Hyacinth (1545), and Giulio Romano’s drawing of Apollo and Cyparissus (1524). By incorporating pictorial analysis, social history, and gender and sexuality studies, new possibilities will be offered for evaluating these artworks as visual chronicles of particular sexual and cultural mores of the period. Furthermore, this article will consider how visual representation of these mythic narratives of erotic behaviour between males conformed to the culturally defined sexual and social roles relating to the articulation of power that permeated one of the greatest milestones in art history.

The article contributes to research into the topos of furor poeticus or poetic madness and its prominence during the romantic period. In particular, it compares how the life story of the mad Italian poet from the Renaissance, Torquato Tasso, was represented in fictionalized versions across media and art forms. Romantic versions of Tasso’s life in drama (Wolfgang Goethe and B. S. Ingemann), poetry (Lord Byron), painting (Eugène Delacroix) and instrumental music (Franz Liszt) are analyzed with the aim of highlighting which aspects of Tasso’s life are portrayed, how the affordances of the medium affect the depiction and how intermedial references and transpositions are in play. In addition to intermediality theory, the transmedial narratology of Werner Wolf is introduced and employed to compare to what degree the different media and art forms can convey prototypical aspects of narrativity. Moving from the most prototypical to the least prototypical narrative genre, the article finds that the more representations of Tasso focus on his time spent in a madhouse, the more the narrative stresses experientiality at the expense of investment in plot development. The affordances of strong narrative media and strong and weak narrative-inducing media may highlight different aspects of the experientiality of furor poeticus, but in all cases the representation of Tasso is performed in an innovative romantic style.

The article deals with votive paintings of the Alpine region. These attractive works of folk art (and the religious culture of the Catholic South of Europe as well) are observed from the point of view of their functional aims as testimonies of a miracle that happened in human life. Votive paintings are interesting first of all as visualized stories, therefore it’s worthy of representing the perspective of the comparison between their narrative strategies and the narrative strategy of folklore legends. The author notes that the inclusion of a special inscription in the first person is optional for the picture. Moreover, Italian masters often use only formal inscriptions; they try to translate their customer’s stories into a drawing completely. However, the examination of some examples which show a parallel transmission of the event via words and images demonstrates remarkable differences in narrative strategies. It is significant that the visualization of a miracle as a divine intervention into the circumstances of a person’s life is mostly a result of the traditional iconography scheme followed by the painter; while the words of the person participating in the event are primarily focused on the reality and tiny details of what happened.

This article will investigate aspects of a little studied but key figure in Italian cinema, Tonino Guerra, focusing on his debut as a film screenwriter. The article employs a comparative approach, relating the first poetic and narrative works of Guerra of the 1940s to his first steps as a film scriptwriter of the 1950s, with his fruitful collaborations with directors such as Aglauco Casadio, Giuseppe De Santis and Michelangelo Antonioni. I rely on unpublished materials such as Guerra’s private writings and correspondence (in particular, with his friend and future colleague Federico Fellini) and then analyse the critical reception of the first cinematographic works of Guerra by film magazines active in the 1950s. My readings and analyses will be directed towards establishing the importance of Guerra in post-war Italian society and culture, particularly as he gravitated towards work in the cinema, and the role of that work in the complex transition from neorealism to auteur cinema.

The Aboriginal cultural traditions of Australia, their histories, philosophies and characteristics, have fascinated and intrigued European observers and scholars for a very long time. This paper explores some implications of recent ethnographic information and engagements related to the themes of Indigenous rock art, knowledge and the understanding of Country in the Kimberley region, Western Australia, for the interpretation of archaeological evidence. It is argued that the Aboriginal understanding of cultural features and practices, rock art and the natural environment is best described within a framework of relational ontology. This orientation has important consequences for the conceptualization of a range of interrelated key themes, most importantly ‘space and place’, ‘story and narrative’ and ‘knowledge and representation’. Thus, the paper calls for the development of opportunities of intellectual engagement and exchange as well as collaborative and creative responses, which should also include new forms of expression in academic contexts that themselves reflexively engage with the limitations of writing and representation.

Eleonora Duse (1858–1924), international star, national treasure, and patriotic Italian died in Pittsburgh in April 1924. Those involved in the memorializing process contended for control of her body, attempting to interpolate her renown in competing narratives of national pride and the universality of art. Duse died at a turning point for Italy, the year Mussolini's Fascists became the majority party. For Mussolini and the Fascists, Duse's death became the occasion for a pageant of Italian pride through a series of carefully orchestrated ceremonies. At the same time, the theatre community tried to establish an artistic narrative more akin to the ideals Duse expressed in life. In the end, nationalist motifs dominated the memorial discourse. Duse's own assertions of the importance of spirit over corporeality became an ironic footnote to a story in which the actress's body stood in for the nation.

The perception of Giotto’s heritage in Russian literature and culture has always been directly linked not only with the concept of the Renaissance and the development of Western culture, but with a special interest in writing practice and in the ambition of the narrative presented as innovative style to create communities. The main topic of the poetic thought was the transition from community to society, in other words, from community to church, so Giotto's status as a genius was always supported with statements about other geniuses who directly, but rather indirectly, made this transition. Despite the scarcity of references to the name Giotto, Russian poetry did not so much reflect the current art history conception, but anticipates or correctsconclusions of art historians. My careful analysis of the statements about Giotto in Russian poetry (V.Komarovsky, S.Soloviev, A.Voznesensky) in comparison with the conclusions of Russian philosophy and humanities (P.Florensky, P.Muratov, P.Bitsilli, V.Lazarev)explains plots of the poems related to picturesque impressions. The technique of chiaroscuro in Giotto, who first began to convey plausible depth through the illusory distribution of light, was understood as a technique primarily of hint and reflection, anegative, in comparison with which later Italian painting looks like a colorful positive. Such concept did not correspond to Giotto's real place in the history of art, but it did make it possible to correlate Giotto with Byzantine and Old Russian art using a golden background, emphasizing in the legacy of the Italian artist not credibility, but ability to create own art project relevant other projects.

Writers devote their lives to find words that faithfully resemble what is at the core of human experience and existence. Thus, psychologists interested in understanding human development in everyday life could turn toward writers and poets with humble curiosity. In this article, we illustrate how a narrative analysis of a work of art can be done, taking “ The Art of Being Fragile. How Leopardi can Save your Life” by the Italian writer and teacher Alessandro D’Avenia as a case. In addition, we reflect upon the mastery with which the author sheds light on aspects that theories in cultural psychology have tried to unveil. Such aspects are: (a) poetic activism: a revolution of the poetics of everyday life; (b) the poetics of human development; (c) the beauty within the fragile as a master; and (d) the intuition of the spirit as an invitation.

AbstractCrucial to understanding the reception of Renaissance music in nineteenth-century Germany is an appreciation of the contradictory components of Romantic historicism. The tension between subjective and objective historicism is fundamental to the historiographical reception of Renaissance music, epitomizing the interdependency of historical representation and modern reform. Protestant authors seeking to reform church music elevated two distinct repertories — Renaissance Italian music and Lutheran compositions from the Reformation era — as ideal archetypes: these competing paradigms reflect significantly different historiographical and ideological trends. Early romantic commentators, such as Hoffmann and Thibaut, elevated Palestrina as a universal model, constructing a golden age of old Italian church music by analogy with earlier narratives in art history; later historians, such as Winterfeld and Spitta, condemned the subjectivity of earlier reformers, seeking instead to revivify the objective foundations of Protestant church music. Both approaches are united, however, by the use of deterministic modes of narrative emplotment.

Albrecht Dürer was German, but it was Italy he loved and followed the example of. Along with Erasmus of Rotterdam, he was one of the first to instil the ideas of Italian humanism in northern Europe, paying attention to the study of ancient culture, and thus fighting for the renewal of art in the spirit of the Renaissance. Dürer believed that using the patterns developed in Florence, the art of imaging would achieve unprecedented narrative power. The uniqueness of the artist from Nuremberg was also that he was able not only to assimilate and synthesise German Gothic art with the achievements of the Florentine school, but also to develop his own vision of the theory of art taking into account the specifics of native art. His research on the theory of movement, the implementation of objects into the structure of the image, the search for the perfect beauty in woodcut and copper engraving can be considered to be unique and pioneering projects in Germany. The influence of Dürer on the sphere of Renaissance iconography is invaluable, but unfortunately it is often omitted in the literature as secondary or even insignificant. The article shows that Dürer’s theoretical influence on the shape of early modern art is noteworthy.

The article presents the creative history of “A Trip through Italy” — an extensive section of “The Book of My Life”, a memoir and journalistic work of Bishop Porphyrius (worldly Konstantin Uspensky), who was an orientalist and a Byzantologist, a paleographer and an archaeologist. The basis for “A Trip through Italy” was the entries in his diary about his acquaintance with Italy in May to August, 1854. When preparing his work, Bishop Porphyrius significantly supplemented the travel notes with materials from rare publications. Thus, the narrative took the form of a unique historical and cultural source, the compositional core of which remained a journey through Italy. Bishop Porphyrius recorded the state of historical monuments, architectural masterpieces, and urban planning. These professional observations, often accompanied by drawings, acquire special value as evidence with history of a century and a half. In art galleries in Italy, Bishop Porphyrius stated in detail information about the number of exhibition rooms in his travel book, as well as about the location of paintings on their walls, describing not only the content of the paintings, but also his own impressions, which form a well-founded idea of the author’s aesthetic credo. Equally meticulous are the book collections, the treasures of the sacristy of many Italian cathedrals and the basilicas. In “A Trip through Italy” the author appears as a deep connoisseur and scrupulous researcher of Italian art.

It was Florida International University's most unusual study abroad course this year. Compared to most study abroad programs that focus on art and culture, the Inclusive Recreation Services course, taught in Miami, FL; Florence, Italy; and Paris, France, focused on challenges people with disabilities confront while traveling. In addition to learning about disability groups, attitudes about disabilities, accessibility and recreation programming, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, this class included a review of, and comparison to, Italian and French disability laws, as well as hands on experiences designed to give students a perspective gained from experiencing challenges associated with accessing buildings, roads, and public transportation in cities with extensive histories. This article provides a description of select learning activities and information learned presented in a narrative format.

Giorgio De Chirico definitely stands out as a peculiar character of the Italian Novecento and his art ties directly with Nietzsche’s philosophy whose eternal questions paved the way to his “immanent metaphysics” which is typified and pervaded by ever-present melancholia brought about by a heightened awareness of the death of God. Grappling with “the world seen for the first time” De Chirico’s narrative does not depict reality rather its ghost, the latter is seen by dint of revelations and hallucinations. This paper sheds light onto some significant kinships between the two characters as not only philosophical concerns are vital but illness too. The philosopher suffered since his very childhood from severe migraine and then from a psychiatric illness with depression while the painter unknowingly suffered from migraine aura. This ailment, affecting the fragile border amid perceived reality and hallucinated reality, turned out to be a remarkable source of inspiration which boosted the visions and the enigmas the artist was entwined with. Overall, Nietzsche ushered in a picture of the world that De Chirico has wholeheartedly shared, however, in the light of his disorder, the empathy went even further, and this is the noteworthy aspect this paper aims at underscoring.

On March 8, 2019, during a demonstration organised on occasion of the International Women's Day in Milan, members of the feminist collective Non Una Di Meno (not one woman less) Milano threw washable pink paint on the statue that commemorates the Italian journalist Indro Montanelli (1909–2001). The aim of exposing at a visual level the acclaimed writer’s controversial past was crucial to the group’s symbolic action. In fact, despite being a reference figure for many Italian intellectuals, Montanelli participated in the Abyssinian war in 1935 and, as a member of the fascist army, he engaged in a relationship with a 12-year-old local girl who acted as his wife and sexual object. The collective’s action, which can be labelled as a feminist decolonizing performance, has already been read as a form of artivism that manipulated the Italian’s artistic heritage with the objective of criticising the existing narrative on Italy’s colonial past. In this sense, an analysis of the resonance that journalistic coverage assigned to the event proves crucial for understanding the impact that such an action has had on Italian public opinion and the progress towards the country's mental decolonization. This article presents the findings of a qualitative analysis conducted on a corpus of 10 online newspaper articles published in the aftermath of the artivist performance on Montanelli’s statue. The study employs Foucauldian critical discourse analysis in order to identify the rhetorical strategies used by journalists to criticise or legitimate the feminist collective’s action. Among these strategies, particular attention is paid to those discursive techniques adopted to portray the act as a form of vandalism or, on the contrary, as a form of art. The aim is to show how the discourse on art versus non-art/vandalism is used to confirm (or overcome) the discursive limits imposed by the still dominant narratives on the nation’s colonial history as well as on the disposability of “othered” women’s bodies.

ABSTRACTAntonio Vivaldi's cycle of violin concertos dramatizing the four seasons marked a substantial shift in the way that the seasons were depicted in the arts. Moving away from religious and mythological allegory, they exemplify a growing interest in descriptive representation of nature's power and in humanity's complex physical and emotional relationship with elements beyond its control. Positing new connections to Arcadian reform ideals of verisimilitude, this article addresses important questions concerning Vivaldi's pairing of sonnets with concertos and the aesthetic factors behind his choice of narrative topics to depict in the music. The article also demonstrates how Vivaldi used diverse textures and sonorities to create powerful contrasts that heighten the emotional impact of the aural imagery while underlining recurring expressive and pictorial motifs throughout the cycle. These last aspects, in particular, provide a new understanding of the historical significance of Vivaldi'sFour Seasonsas a powerful demonstration of both the expressive potential of the concerto genre and the still underappreciated art of orchestration during the early eighteenth century.

In the last few years, a growing number of writers and artists have begun to develop a new form of verbal art. They no longer devote themselves to individually writing fixed texts destined to be read in solitude and silence. Instead, they are designing mechanisms that enable large and heterogeneous groups to collaborate on projects that combine the production of discourses, the exploration of knowledge about local circumstances, and the invention of potential socialities. These projects intend to foster forms of cosmopolitan citizenship in a globalized world at a time of expanding digital technologies. The article describes some crucial aspects of this process through a reading of two projects: a platform for collaborative translation on the Internet designed by the American artists Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks and an “open-source narrative” by the Italian collective Wu Ming.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to record Visual Arts education in Western Australia (WA) as it underwent significant change between 1967 and 1987, in administration, policy, curriculum and professional development. Design/methodology/approach – A narrative inquiry approach was utilized to produce a collective recount of primary Visual Arts teacher education, based on 17 interviews with significant advocates and contributors to WA Visual Arts education during the aforementioned period. Findings – This paper underscores the history of the role of Western Australian Superintendents of Art and Crafts and the emergence of Visual Arts specialist teachers in primary schools, from the successful establishment of a specialist secondary Visual Arts program at Applecross Senior High School, to the mentoring of generalist primary teachers into a specialist role, as well as the development and implementation of a new Kindergarten through to Year 7 Art and Crafts Syllabus. It also discusses the disestablishment of the WA Education Department’s Art and Crafts Branch (1987). Originality/value – The history of primary Visual Arts specialists and advocacy for Visual Arts in WA has not been previously recorded. This history demonstrates the high quality of past Visual Arts education in WA, and questions current trends in pre-service teacher education and Visual Arts education in primary schools.

Abstract. Narrative evidence contained within historical documents and inscriptions provides an important record of climate variability for periods prior to the onset of systematic meteorological data collection. A common approach used by historical climatologists to convert such qualitative information into continuous quantitative proxy data is through the generation of ordinal-scale climate indices. There is, however, considerable variability in the types of phenomena reconstructed using an index approach and the practice of index development in different parts of the world. This review, written by members of the PAGES (Past Global Changes) CRIAS working group – a collective of climate historians and historical climatologists researching Climate Reconstructions and Impacts from the Archives of Societies – provides the first global synthesis of the use of the index approach in climate reconstruction. We begin by summarising the range of studies that have used indices for climate reconstruction across six continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia) as well as the world's oceans. We then outline the different methods by which indices are developed in each of these regions, including a discussion of the processes adopted to verify and calibrate index series, and the measures used to express confidence and uncertainty. We conclude with a series of recommendations to guide the development of future index-based climate reconstructions to maximise their effectiveness for use by climate modellers and in multiproxy climate reconstructions.

The author refers to the Renaissance era – mainly to the Italian region, which is associated with the development of theatrical dance. In Europe, it appeared a little later and French courtyards, mostly became a source of exquisite stylization and baroque beauty of this kind of art. It is noted that such rulers of Italian city-states as L. Medici, M. Sforza, the Este and Gonzaga dynasties began to pay more and more attention to magnificent spectacles. Using approaches and methods of system analysis, the article analyzes the main features of the development of dance from the Renaissance to the Baroque of the XVII century.then to the XVIII century and ballet Romanticism of the XIX century. The problems of transformation of dance vocabulary into the plot fantastic structure of performances and choreographic compositions are considered. As a result, having brought the existing transformations of the fantastic plot in the ballet into a single whole, it is indicated that in this transformation of the plots the connection of the times from ancient mythology to the fantastic refraction of the romantic narrative is revealed. Special attention is paid to the main types of theatrical dances at the court, which contributed to the development of stage choreography. The article also analyzes the main issues of the development of ballet in the period, mainly from the late Renaissance to the XIX century, in particular, the history of the opening of the First Ballet School in Paris, which influenced the composition of the technique of classical dance and the aesthetics of the formation of movements. It is noted that the increase in the level of classical dance technique enriched the artistic potential of ballet and largely expanded its thematic and genre range. As a result of the work, the author draws conclusions about the significant influence of the Renaissance era on the transformation of fantastic plots in the ballet theater of the subsequent time.

Adam Ochonicky, “‘A Better Civilization’ through Tourism: Cultural Appropriation in The Marble Faun” (pp. 221–237) This essay argues that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860) is an attempt to situate the United States within a lineage of “great” nations via the depiction of tourism abroad in the nineteenth century. In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne suggests that the historical legacies of nations are dependent on the production of art objects, literature, and cultural sites that demonstrate the sophistication of a given national identity. As such, the novel’s narrative revolves around the experiences of a pair of American artists, Hilda and Kenyon, during their stay in Rome. Hawthorne continually emphasizes the duo’s remarkable skills as evaluators and copyists of Italian art in order to legitimize their—and, by proxy, the United States’—appropriation of Italy’s culture and historical stature. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne disparages the degraded state of then-contemporary Rome, while elevating the comparatively youthful United States as the rightful inheritor of Italy’s illustrious past. Essentially, by situating critical work on the nineteenth-century “realm of leisure” alongside twenty-first-century theories of tourism, this essay provides a framework for understanding the complex interconnections between transnational tourism and the development of American cultural identity in The Marble Faun.

The first decade of the 20th century witnessed two revolutions in the world of arts: firstly, the upcoming of Avant-Garde art, and secondly - the birth of cinematic art. In painting, architecture and literature new revolutionary languages actually finalized the process of onthologisation which has begun much earlier. ttis process signaled its appearance with Modernity itself and reached its climax in the late 19 th century. We can observe since then a new species of artists whose artworks actually defy ideological meanings. Meanings and messages of artworks clearly distance themselves from convictions shared by authors. Visual and verbal arts as well as important strata of musical and theatrical productions embrace the discourse of Nature and Universe (i. e. primary components of Being). Avant-garde art makes the final accent in this development of Modernity. tte newly born film art seems to compensate functions ignored or denied by other artistic activities. Cinematic productions start realizing the human and cultural tasks (ideological propaganda, sentimental comfort, entertainment and other social functions). Elite-bound taste and high cultural pretentions seemingly fall out in early cinema. tte break-through in film art reaches its peak around 1910 parallel to the upheaval of Early Avant-Garde in painting. Handling of camera, constructing of visual field, as well as experimental boundlessness in space-and-time transformations bring the socially acceptable film narrative to the kind of onthological explosion on screen. In fact, film language itself (independently from any ideology or sociability) develops new methods of seeing. A decade before film art would enter its stormy marriage with Surrealism, masters of the screen already detected ways of hypnotic charm and irrational hurricane passing before our eyes. As examples of such inherent onthologization of means in film art we can see the structure itself of the picture and deliriumlike narration in several early films, i. e. Cabiria directed by Italian Giovanni Pastrone in 1914 as well as American masterpiece of 1915 - The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith.

Purpose The issue of gender inequality in the Italian universities and academic context does not seem to be particularly debated and is really rare. Starting from this “lack of interest”, the paper aims to inquire into the “state-of-the-art” of existing inequality in the scientific and academic path of Italian female scholars and academia, answering the following research question: Is discrimination between women and men linked to the number of scientific contributions in periodicals and their presence within academic boards of scientific accounting associations and journals in Italy? Design/methodology/approach The methodology is primarily developed through a deductive analysis of the literature strands concerning gender accounting, accounting in academia and the role of women in universities and academia. Second, within the inductive perspective, the authors have chosen to inquire into the scientific publications of women on the oldest Italian journal in the accounting field – the Rivista Italiana di Ragioneria e di Economia Aziendale (RIREA). Subsequently, the position and career of women were analysed in academia investigating their presence and role within the boards of a sample of Italian journals and the main Italian accounting scientific associations Findings Accordingly, this paper concentrates on gender inequalities in university and academia in Italy and on eventual obstacles that get in the way of the existence of scientific contributions in journals and of career progress of those women who carry on scholarly work in accounting. Research limitations/implications The analysis confirms the need to open more space for women at the summits of political, economic and cultural institutions, including accounting academia and scientific journals. The paper has some limitations concerning the consideration of only Italian journals and academic associations. Then, we will develop the analysis in comparative terms, as attention will be addressed on the participation in scientific committees and boards of some of the major international scientific associations of accounting. Moreover, we will consider the narrative approach describing the stories of Italian women and accounting scholars to carefully investigate the reasons for this persistent discrimination. Originality/value The innovative contribution of the paper is due to the fact that the authors are unaware of previous studies aimed at investigating if female accounting scholars are under-represented compared to their male colleagues within the top positions of the most prestigious Italian accounting associations and scientific journals. Previous research also did not investigate the existence of correlation between Italian women’s scientific productivity, their under-representation within academia and scientific career.

Monuments typify human habitation of place, memorialising ideologies of the prevailing power from moments in time. In recent decades, their form has undergone a revolution. Along with their transformation from the heavy permanence of monumentality, to the temporality of anti-monumental form — subject matter has also diametrically shifted from representing the state, to representing the marginalised. My practice-based research explores further the anti-monuments’ potential for social activism — to expand memorialisation beyond a human-centric narrative, to acknowledge the immemorial forces that shape place over deep time. An iterative creative process informs the major body of site-responsive works Human/Nature undertaken as Artist in Residence at Kyneton Botanic Gardens in regional Victoria, Australia, presented at the Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial 2018. Drawing on the site’s deep time environmental and ideological origins as transformative forces, I created a series of anti-monuments: activating public space as an experimental laboratory to explore and discover the how, why, and what next of our relationship to our environment.

The article examines the artistic logic of the development of the Kamennoostrovsky Cycle by Alexander Pushkin, arguing for the presence of an Easter narrative in it. The fact that the author did not complete his last cycle, and the difficulty in determining the composition of the cycle leads to a variety of interpretations. Nonetheless, the work proves the need to limit arbitrary interpretations to the indication of the numbering of poems within the cycle, which was provided by the author himself. It is methodologically correct for a researcher to proceed from the following sequence of texts recognized by all Pushkin scholars: II. “Desert fathers and women are blameless” — III. “(Imitation of Italian)” — IV. “Worldly Power”. Since the prayer of Ephraim the Syrian is paraphrased in text II, referring the reader to Great Lent and Holy Week, in text III Pushkin refers to the betrayal of Judas, in text IV — to the crucifixion of Christ, the surviving author's “backbone” of the cycle is strictly correlated with the middle of Holy Week. The artistic logic of the cycle is substantiated, leading to the correct reading of the superscript over the poem “(From Pindemonti),” namely, No. I. The missing (not numbered by Pushkin) links of the author's poetic construction are reconstructed: “In vain I run to the Zion heights”, “When outside the city, thoughtful, I wander” and “I erected a monument to myself not made by hands”. Using the categories of mimesis, paraphrasis and catharsis, presented here as a single system of concepts in their interconnection, the poetics of both Pushkin's individual poems and the unity of the cycle are described. The first article offers a new understanding of the first five poems of the Kamennoostrovsky Cycle. The second part of the work is devoted to Pushkin's “Monument.”

This Creative Matters piece is inspired by five objects in the archives of the colonial artist, Adelaide Ironside (1831–1867), which relate to her dying and death. In addition to two letters, one of which was the last Adelaide wrote before she died; the other by her mother shortly afterwards, I have drawn inspiration from the trunk the Ironsides took with them to Europe and which returned to Australia after their deaths and remains in the possession of her descendants. I have also referred to an obituary that was published the Athenaeum and a lost artwork by Ironside entitled ‘The Pilgrim of Art’, which depicts mother and daughter. The central focus of this work is, however, the only confirmed photograph we have of Adelaide Ironside, which was taken, a note in her archive suggests, ‘a short time before her death’. In this creative piece, I experiment with how such archival objects can be used to speculate and evoke the final moments of a biographical subject’s life in historical narrative.

This article examines the illustrated pamphletOngeluckige voyagie, van’t schipBatavia (Unlucky voyage of the shipBatavia) and its representation of a 1629 shipwreck off the coast of western Australia, followed by mutiny and the massacre of many survivors. The pamphlet was published in Amsterdam in 1647, and included fifteen (six full-page) fine copper engravings. It was very popular, helping to shape a new genre of shipwreck narrative and expressing the preoccupations of contemporary visual culture. The pamphlet’s illustrations translated new conceptualisations of space emerging from the period’s unique collaboration between cartography and art into popular form within a booming Dutch print culture. Through innovative techniques of montage and vignette these engraved images conveyed the narrative’s drama and affirmed principles of morality, honour, and order. While the era’s spectacular violence now seems very far away, these historical images effectively communicate the contemporary relish of the disaster to modern audiences. This “earliest of Australian books” is sometimes offered as an alternative Australian foundation myth, and theBataviadisaster continues to grow in cultural significance. Now as then, these illustrations provide a vivid counterpoint to its audience’s comfortable lives.

This article explores the connections between anti-fascism and hip hop in Italy between the 1990s and today. In the first part, I look at how several bands affiliated with the posse movement of the early 1990s relied on the network of students and of young people hanging out in the centri sociali (squatted centres) to spread their political messages. Picking up the baton from the militant singer-songwriters of the 1970s, Italian posses often mixed rap with other foreign musical influences such as reggae and punk, frequently rapping about the lack of anti-fascist activism among the youth and denouncing the gradual abandonment of anti-fascist ideals by members of the parliamentary Left. In the second part of the article, I discuss how, in the late 2000s, a new generation of anti-fascist hip hop artists emerged, with rappers such as Kento and Murubutu being among the most influential representatives of a subgenre known as ‘letteraturap’ (literature-rap). Kento and Murubutu’s narrative skills show their opposition to Fascism through the use of fictional characters, using short stories that are rich of metaphors to illustrate the importance of resisting to contemporary forms of fascism. Lastly, this article explores the gradual appropriation of hip hop culture by neo-fascist groups such as CasaPound. Understanding hip hop’s potentialities to recruit large numbers of young people, CasaPound organized street art conventions on graffiti, and promoted the emergence of hip hop crews like Rome’s Drittarcore. I conclude the article by analysing the efficacy of anti-fascist rap in earlier decades and considering CasaPound’s attempt to appropriate some of hip hop culture’s disciplines, ultimately showing not only a general crisis in political ideologies and cultural values, but also the power of neo-fascist movements to manipulate and reinvent subcultural formations to influence the youth.

German pianist Clara Wieck Schumann and Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi were both tutored by their fathers from an early age and made their mark as great European artists. Their art took them both across the continent, where they met many other famous historical persons. Their lives have not only been recorded in biographies but have also been retold in several novels, or ‘fictionalised biographies’. The fictionalised biography is an interesting hybrid genre, placed somewhat uncomfortably between historiography and the art of fiction, which permits it to disregard certain expectations raised by so-called ‘factual’ biographies (e.g. that authors should strive for ‘objectivity’ or ‘truthfulness’). The relationship between fact and fiction can thus be re-negotiated, following the author’s ideological inclinations and their imaginative closure of historiographical gaps. Beginning with some general remarks on fictionalised biographies of ‘exemplary women’, this paper then examines Janice Galloway’s Clara (2002) and Susan Vreeland’s The Passion of Artemisia (2002), focusing on the complex father-daughter relationships that Clara Wieck Schumann and Artemisia Gentileschi undoubtedly experienced, and which offered the authors ample ground for a critique of historical gender relations and hierarchies. The analyses will concentrate on the heroines’ journeys in Europe. The paper examines the ways in which the two fictional rewritings of historical women artists’ lives foreground gender aspects and make use of the narrative privileges of fictionalised biography to project contemporary feminist ideas onto historical characters and events, and explores the function of the featured European locales with regard to the protagonists’ personal development in the novels.The heroines’ ventures into foreign lands are revealed to function as an impulse towards a changing perception of their fathers as well as themselves.

Abstract This article re-engages with existing scholarship identifying Deep Red (Profondo rosso, 1975) as a typical example within Dario Argento’s body of work, in which the Italian horror-meister fully explores a distinguishing pairing of the acoustic and the iconic through an effective combination of elaborate camerawork and disjunctive music and sound. Specifically, this article seeks to complement these studies by arguing that such a stylistic and technical achievement in the film is also rendered by Argento’s use of a specific art-historical repertoire, which not only reiterates the Gesamtkunstwerk-like complexity of the director’s audiovisual spectacle, but also serves to transpose the film’s narrative over a metanarrative plane through pictorial techniques and their possible interpretations. The purpose of this article is, thus, twofold. Firstly, I shall discuss how Argento’s references to American Hyperrealism in painting are integrated into Deep Red’s spectacles of death through colour, framing, and lighting, as well as the extent to which such references allow us to undertake a more in-depth analysis of the director’s style in terms of referentiality and cinematic intermediality. Secondly, I will demonstrate how and to what extent in the film Argento manages to break down the epistemological system of knowledge and to disrupt the reasonable order of traditional storytelling through the technique of the trompe-l’oeil in painting.

By creatively expanding Deleuze's concept of the time-image crystal, I productively fold together and engineer an encounter between two comparable cinematic movements otherwise separated by huge vistas of time and space. Here, I work to plicate the post-war Italian neorealist movement which Deleuze saw inaugurating the modern cinema, with a ‘postsocialist’ mainland Chinese movement that I playfully call ‘(si)neo-realism’. The films of both historical moments formulate comparable break-away cinemas which are often considered moral or socially responsible art cinemas best approached through André Bazin's ‘ontological’ film philosophy lens. By using Deleuze, however, I hope to move beyond these realist discussions to explore how both movements are also fruitfully thought in terms of introducing distinct yet analogous mental relations into the image during historical junctures defined by radically transforming psycho-geographies. Like Deleuze's discussions of neorealism, (si)neo-realism is considered a loose impulse or mode that collectively bears witness to confusing and bewildering mental experiences from within a turbulent period of cultural, ideological and historical upheaval: which demands new ways of perceiving, thinking and acting. Without wanting to fall into a problematic auteur paradigm, I necessarily employ the films of Wang Xiaoshuai as emblematic examples of the wider impulse or trend. Indeed, Wang's films perfectly reify a new ethico-aesthetic form of Chinese cinema marked by a proliferation of new spaces, characters, experiences and narrative structures. Here, I also strive to do what Deleuze did not in his writing upon film, and explore the break-ups, breakdowns and breakthroughs in specific relation to a complex contextual web of political and cinematic ecosystems. Throughout this process I try to put Deleuze to work by using the films and context to re-interrogate and re-evaluate the time-image models as they appear within and across his Cinema books.

The article is devoted to the issue of studying Tan Dun’s music in light of the theory of performativity. By the example of the composer’s early composition Nine Songs the changes which have appeared in the genre of opera under the impact of live art performance as a new type of theatrical performance. The composition has designed artistic precepts which are also characteristic for other musical-theatrical oeuvres by the composer: specific work with the poetic text directed at destroying the linear logic of the subject and the cause and effect connections; vocalization based on connecting the techniques of the Italian operatic bel canto and the traditional Chinese qupai; a synthesis of music, an abstract poetic text and motions, gestures permeated with symbolism. The authors of the article come to the conclusion that the interpretation of the genre presented in Tan Dun’s Nine Songs goes far beyond the boundaries of academic traditions of representation of opera. In the poetic text of the libretto the composer deliberately dilutes the meanings encumbered in the primary source, which is achieved by means of infringement of the logic of narration, by accentuating the musicality in the sound of words detrimentally for their communicative function. In the dramaturgy, built with a reliance on the collage method and with an absence of a storyline narrative, the culminations and falls occur spontaneously. The music is endowed with suggestive traits indispensable for creation of an effect of emergence and together with the poetic text and the scenography does not call for conveying any concrete meanings. In this composition the role of the audience is interpreted specifically. The latter assumes the position of active participants of the events, rather than passive observers, and experience a liminal state, the departure from which is connected with an independent construction of the composition’s meanings.

Medieval hagiography is full of animal motifs. Representations of animals in medieval literature is usually metaphoric. They could represent theological, moral or political notions. Animals frequently were the symbols of vices and virtues. On one hand researching the changes of the hagiographic topoi related to animals could shed light to the human-nature relationship, on the other hand it provides several pieces of information about medieval society, mentality, religious and folkloristic beliefs. Animal episodes are emphatic in the lives of the desert fathers and later in the Western eremitic movement. The animals appear as the companions of the lonely hermits, give food and help them in the fi elds, and they underline the self mortifi cation of the saint. The motive of the taming of wild animals expresses the holy man’s power over nature. The hermits transform the deserted wilderness into an earthly Paradise, where ferocious animals can live in peace. Hagiographical animal motifs were thoroughly researched by Anglo-Saxon, Italian and French medievalists, however in Hungarian medieval studies this topic is not on the highlight, due to the limited amount of the narrative sources. Present study researches the animal motifs in Hungarian hagiographical literature with special regard to the “the hermit and the hunter” topos – a denomination used by the British scholar, Brian Golding. Chiefl y I analyse the legends of Saint Gerhard, Saint Ladislaus, Saint Günther and Saint Andreas, the hermit of Zobor. The Life of Paul the hermit of Thebes by Jerome and the Dialoges of Sulpicius Severus also appear in the study, although they are not connected directly to Hungary, but the cults of Saint Paul the hermit and Saint Martin of Tours were widespread in the medieval Hungarian Kingdom. The Vitae Patrum, the History of the Pauline Order from the early 16th century by provost Gergely Gyöngyösi also appears in the study, because several hagiographic motifs occur in the work. The magic deer is a crucial motif in the texts, this can be also connected to the ancient pagan Hungarian folkloristic “myths”. ”However I research only the Western hagiographic parallels of this topos, and make little reference to the pagan origins. This topic has already been researched by several medievalists, art historians and ethnographers.

As Martin Revermann forecast in 1999, the reception history of Greek drama has become ‘big business’ and, as the present volume demonstrates, we are indeed trying to move beyond the ‘Atheno-centric civic ideology approach to Greek drama, which has, fruitfully, been dominating our mode of thinking for quite some time now'. Nevertheless, like Revermann, I believe that work on the reciprocity between social context and theatre that Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (1990) so well exemplifies has been and continues to be an important approach to the field. Examining plays not simply as literary works, but as integral parts of social and political systems, remains a useful method of inquiry. Indeed, one strand of useful research may build on the work that has been done to situate Greek drama in Athens to ask similar questions about theatre outside Athens.In the case of South Italy and Sicily, the problem is particularly pressing. This is not only because of the traditional separation between the fields of philology, epigraphy, history, archaeology, art history and political science, which made comprehensive examination of theatre as a social and political phenomenon difficult in Athens, but also because of competing histories of the development of theatre in the ancient Greek world. In particular, the history of Athenian theatre, both from the literary perspective and now from the socio-political perspective, is so dominant that it often incorporates into its own narrative what evidence there is for theatre outside Attica. Likewise, from the later period, Roman theatre includes the evidence from Sicily and South Italy into its own history, though to a lesser extent. Nothing to Do with Dionysos? may nevertheless serve as a model for the development of a vital, and still missing, perspective on the theatrical evidence that remains from the West. How did drama and the theatre fit into the socio-political contexts of Greek cities outside Attica? Is it possible to write the history of Sicilian and South Italian theatre, or were these new world cities only recipients of the Attic theatre and stepping stones to that of Rome?I attempt below to set out a few of the questions that, I think, frame the debate. This is a preliminary, tentative examination of some of the problems that arise in this field, and it is not in any way exhaustive.

В статье рассматриваются ранние малоизученные романы английского писателя, журналиста и философа Уильяма Годвина «Деймон и Делия», «Имоджен» и «Итальянские письма». Цель данного исследования — выделение их сентиментальной основы, осознание ее эстетической значимости в художественной структуре произведений. Анализ ранних романов позволяет выделить в них характерные для сентиментализма особенности: преобладание естественного чувства над разумом, мотивы любования природой, возвышенным и прекрасным, восхищение искусством и сентиментальной поэзией, определившие характер героев и специфику сюжетно-мотивного комплекса. У. Годвин активно обращается к сентименталистской стилистике, используя как традиционные, так и оригинальные художественно-выразительные средства, которые основываются на контрасте как главном способе воздействия на читателя. Автор статьи приходит к выводу, что на раннем этапе творчества писателя происходит становление стиля и особого способа художественного выражения его философских и политических идей, тем самым опровергается широко распространенное мнение о том, что ранние романы У. Годвина не содержат каких-либо важных для его философии идей. Кроме того, анализируемые романы исходя из их жанрово-стилевой специфики можно отнести к типично сентиментальным произведениям. Данное исследование и его результаты могут быть использованы для дальнейшего анализа и изучения раннего творчества У. Годвина и для создания более полной панорамы его работ. The article treats an English writer, journalist and philosopher William Godwin’s previously underinvestigated novels “Damon and Delia”, “Imogen”, and “Italian Letters”. The aim of the research is to explore the sentimental aspects lying at the basis of the novels and to assess their aesthetic value. The analysis of W. Godwin’s early works enables one to trace in them some features characteristic of sentimental novels, such as prevalence of sentiment over common sense, fascination with nature, admiration for exquisite beauty, appreciation of art and sentimental poetry. All these characteristics account for the choice of personages and narrative devices. W. Godwin’s works abound with sentimentalism. The writer employs both traditional and unique stylistic devices, whose essence lies in contrast as the main means of affecting the reader. The author of the article concludes that W. Godwin’s early works bear witness to the evolution of W. Godwin’s writing style and to his search of literary devices which enable him to express his philosophical and political ideas. Therefore, the author of the article underlines that, contrary to widespread opinion, W. Godwin’s early works are not devoid of philosophical ideas. The author maintains that, judging by their genre characteristics, the analyzed novels can be classified as sentimental ones. The research can be used for further analysis of W. Godwin’s early novels and for the creation of a wider panorama of his works.

The stone pupil in the parish church of Bazin (Pezinok, Slovakia) is one of the finest specimens of its kind in the territory of mediaeval Hungary. The pulpit is on the left of the triumphal arch of the church. Held by a stocky column, its parapet panels trace the sides of an octagon. The date of origin features on one of the panels as 1523 and the coat of arms at the same place indicates the client who ordered it.Despite the usable data and the high quality of the pulpit, it could hardly make its way into the canon of Hungarian art historiography evolving from the late 19th century. Drawings were made of it, it was registered in the monuments directories, but nobody lifted it into the style historical narrative before Jolán Balogh, and when it took place at last, it was erroneously dated to 1573. In her history of Hungarian renaissance art, she included it with the date 1573 in the chapter on the late renaissance (1940). She cited it rightly as an example of the survival of Italianate forms in the 16th century in all editions of the two-tome manual up to 1973. Then it disappeared from sight again. It was omitted from the university course book (2001). At last, in the renaissance volume of the series on Hungarian art by Corvina Publishers a photo of it was reproduced too (2009).Slovakian art historiography has naturally devoted more attention to it, and also read the date correctly. It is included in the four-volume monuments directory and also in the summaries. It was ascribed a salient place in the great renaissance monograph of 2009 edited by Ivan Rusina. Since the type of the book did not allow images of seals to be presented for analogy, it is worth returning to the problem briefly.The central panel of the parapet carries the coat of arms and the date 1523. In the shield there is an eagle with spread wings, looking to dexter flank. There is an arched banderole (with a rosette in the middle) in front of its crop and a tiny six-point star above its head. On the chief there is a helmet with mantling falling on either side. It is topped with an imperial mitre crown with ribbons, cross and crosier and a crest above. The elements of the coat of arms – the eagle, star and imperial crown – are identical with the motifs in the coat of arms of the Counts of Szentgyörgy and Bazin. The ancient coat of arms of the family, with the six-point star of two colours, was endorsed by Holy Roman emperor Frederic III in 1459. Enikő Spekner pointed out that Count Tamás of Szentgyörgy and Bazin already used a quartered shield in 1496 (with the star in fields 1 and 4 and the eagle in fields 2 and 3) in 1496, and so did seneschal Péter of Szentgyörgy and Bazin, too (1511). On the seal dated 1540 of Kristóf II of Szentgyörgy and Bazin – with whose death the male line of the family died out (1543) – the shield only features the left-looking eagle, and on the chief the imperial crown and peacock feathers can be seen. Changes in the use of the coat of arms cannot be accurately retraced, but the town was the property of the family until 1543 and after Kristóf II’s death it passed to the treasury. The coat of arms strongly suggests that the person who commissioned the pulpit must be sought among the members of the family still alive in 1523. On the younger Bazin line Ferenc and Farkas were alive and shared the office of lord lieutenant of Moson until 1521; the family died out with Farkas’ son Kristóf (his birthdate is not known).The pulpit received coats of white paint and thick gilding in more recent times. Its new wooden abat-voix was made in the 18th century; the medieval stone edifice must have been repaired at that time and on several occasions later. The ornamental elements of the parapet of the basket closely resemble some Italian renaissance antecedents; what may suggest the involvement of northern masters is the regular, rigid symmetry of the cherubim heads, and more emphatically the thick column holding the basket of the pulpit. Its shaft bulges midway, its capital above the necking is embellished with flutes of regularly alternating sizes; on it is a polygonal echinus with concave sides which holds the broadly spreading dense bunch of acanthus leaves. It is like a perfectly spoiled Corinthian column of bad proportions. The origin of this representative monument must be hypothesized from the direction of Vienna, even if no exact analogy can be compared with it at present. Both the network of relations of the landowning family and the geographic proximity support this assumption.

The stone pupil in the parish church of Bazin (Pezinok, Slovakia) is one of the finest specimens of its kind in the territory of mediaeval Hungary. The pulpit is on the left of the triumphal arch of the church. Held by a stocky column, its parapet panels trace the sides of an octagon. The date of origin features on one of the panels as 1523 and the coat of arms at the same place indicates the client who ordered it.Despite the usable data and the high quality of the pulpit, it could hardly make its way into the canon of Hungarian art historiography evolving from the late 19th century. Drawings were made of it, it was registered in the monuments directories, but nobody lifted it into the style historical narrative before Jolán Balogh, and when it took place at last, it was erroneously dated to 1573. In her history of Hungarian renaissance art, she included it with the date 1573 in the chapter on the late renaissance (1940). She cited it rightly as an example of the survival of Italianate forms in the 16th century in all editions of the two-tome manual up to 1973. Then it disappeared from sight again. It was omitted from the university course book (2001). At last, in the renaissance volume of the series on Hungarian art by Corvina Publishers a photo of it was reproduced too (2009).Slovakian art historiography has naturally devoted more attention to it, and also read the date correctly. It is included in the four-volume monuments directory and also in the summaries. It was ascribed a salient place in the great renaissance monograph of 2009 edited by Ivan Rusina. Since the type of the book did not allow images of seals to be presented for analogy, it is worth returning to the problem briefly.The central panel of the parapet carries the coat of arms and the date 1523. In the shield there is an eagle with spread wings, looking to dexter flank. There is an arched banderole (with a rosette in the middle) in front of its crop and a tiny six-point star above its head. On the chief there is a helmet with mantling falling on either side. It is topped with an imperial mitre crown with ribbons, cross and crosier and a crest above. The elements of the coat of arms – the eagle, star and imperial crown – are identical with the motifs in the coat of arms of the Counts of Szentgyörgy and Bazin. The ancient coat of arms of the family, with the six-point star of two colours, was endorsed by Holy Roman emperor Frederic III in 1459. Enikő Spekner pointed out that Count Tamás of Szentgyörgy and Bazin already used a quartered shield in 1496 (with the star in fields 1 and 4 and the eagle in fields 2 and 3) in 1496, and so did seneschal Péter of Szentgyörgy and Bazin, too (1511). On the seal dated 1540 of Kristóf II of Szentgyörgy and Bazin – with whose death the male line of the family died out (1543) – the shield only features the left-looking eagle, and on the chief the imperial crown and peacock feathers can be seen. Changes in the use of the coat of arms cannot be accurately retraced, but the town was the property of the family until 1543 and after Kristóf II’s death it passed to the treasury. The coat of arms strongly suggests that the person who commissioned the pulpit must be sought among the members of the family still alive in 1523. On the younger Bazin line Ferenc and Farkas were alive and shared the office of lord lieutenant of Moson until 1521; the family died out with Farkas’ son Kristóf (his birthdate is not known).The pulpit received coats of white paint and thick gilding in more recent times. Its new wooden abat-voix was made in the 18th century; the medieval stone edifice must have been repaired at that time and on several occasions later. The ornamental elements of the parapet of the basket closely resemble some Italian renaissance antecedents; what may suggest the involvement of northern masters is the regular, rigid symmetry of the cherubim heads, and more emphatically the thick column holding the basket of the pulpit. Its shaft bulges midway, its capital above the necking is embellished with flutes of regularly alternating sizes; on it is a polygonal echinus with concave sides which holds the broadly spreading dense bunch of acanthus leaves. It is like a perfectly spoiled Corinthian column of bad proportions. The origin of this representative monument must be hypothesized from the direction of Vienna, even if no exact analogy can be compared with it at present. Both the network of relations of the landowning family and the geographic proximity support this assumption.

“We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,” in the (probably apocryphal) words of the Prime Minister, sometime after the unification of the nation in 1860. Perhaps in French, if it was said at all. (The quotation is typically attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio, the prime minister of Piedmont and predecessor of the first Italian prime minister Camillo Cavour. Many have suggested that the phrase was misquoted and misunderstood (see Doyle.) D’Azeglio spoke in Italian when he addressed the newly-formed Italian parliament, but my reference to French is meant to indicate the fragility of the national language in early Italy where much of the ruling class spoke French while the majority of the people in the peninsula still spoke regional dialects.) It was television – more than print media or even radio – that would have the biggest impact in terms of ‘making Italians.’ Writing about Italy in the 1950s, a well-known media critic suggested that television, a game show actually, “was able to succeed where The Divine Comedy failed … it gave Italy a national language” (qtd. in Foot). But these are yesterday’s problems. We have Italy and Italians. Moreover, the emergence of global ways of being and belonging are evidence of the ways in which the present transcends forms of belonging rooted in the old practices and older institutions of the nation-state. But, then again, maybe not. “A country that allows you to vote in its elections must be able to provide you with information about those elections” (Magliaro). This was 2002. The country is still Italy, but this time the Italians are anywhere but Italy. The speaker is referring to the extension of the vote to Italian citizens abroad, represented directly by 18 members of parliament, and the right to information guaranteed the newly enfranchised electorate. What, then, is the relationship between citizenship, the state and global television today? What are the modalities of involvement and participation involved in these transformations of the nation-state into a globally-articulated network of institutions? I want to think through these questions in relation to two ways that RAI International, the ‘global’ network of the Italian public broadcaster, has viewed Italians around the world at different moments in its history: mega-events and return information. Mega-Events Eighteen months after its creation in 1995, RAI International was re-launched. This decision was partially due to a change in government (which also meant a change in the executive and staff), but it was also a response to the perceived failure of RAI International to garner an adequate international audience (Morrione, Testimony [1997]). This re-launch involved a re-conceptualisation of the network’s mandate to include both information services for Italians abroad (the traditional ‘public service’ mandate for Italy’s international broadcasting) as well as programming that would increase the profile of Italian media in the global market. The mandate outlined for Roberto Morrione – appointed president as part of the re-launch – read: The necessity of strategic and operative certainties in the international positioning of the company, both with regard to programming for our co-nationals abroad and for other markets…are at the centre of the new role of RAI International. This involves bringing together in the best way the informative function of the public service, which is oriented to our community in the world in order to enrich its cultural patrimony and national identity, with an active presence in evolving markets. (Morrione, Testimony [1998]) The most significant change in the executive of the network was the appointment of Renzo Arbore, a well-known singer and bandleader, to the position of artistic director. At the time of Arbore’s appointment, the responsibilities of the artistic director at the network were ill defined, but he very quickly transformed the position into the ‘face’ of RAI International. In an interview from 1998, Arbore explained his role at the network as follows: “I’m the artistic director, which means I’m in charge of the programs that have any kind of artistic content. Also, I’m the so called “testimonial”, which is to say I do propaganda for the network, I’m the soul of RAI International” (Affatato). The most often discussed aspect of the programming on RAI International during Arbore’s tenure as artistic director was the energy and resources dedicated to events that put the spotlight on the global reach of the service itself and the possibilities that satellite distribution gave for simultaneous exchange between locations around the world. It was these ‘mega-events’ (Garofalo), in spite of constituting only a small portion of the programming schedule, that were often seen as defining RAI’s “new way” of creating international programming (Milana). La Giostra [The Merry Go Round], broadcast live on New Year’s Eve 1996, is often cited as the launch of the network’s new approach to its mission. Lasting 20 hours in total, the program was hosted by Arbore. As Morrione described it recently, The ‘mother of live shows’ was the Giostra of New Year’s ’97 where Arbore was live in the studio for 20 consecutive hours, with many guests and segments from the Pole, Peking, Moscow, Berlin, Jerusalem, San Paolo, Buenos Aires, New York and Los Angeles. It was a memorable enterprise without precedent and never to be duplicated. (Morrione, RAI International) The presentation of television as a global medium in La Giostra draws upon the relationship between live broadcasting, satellite television and conceptions of globality that has developed since the 1960s as part of what Lisa Parks describes as ‘global presence’ (Parks). However, in keeping with the dual mandate of RAI International, the audience that La Giostra is intended to constitute was not entirely homogenous in nature. The lines between the ‘national’ audience, which is to say Italians abroad, and the international audience involving a broader spectrum of viewers are often blurred, but still apparent. This can be seen in the locations to which La Giostra travelled, locations that might be seen as a mirror of the places to which the broadcast might be received. On the one hand, there are segments from a series of location that speak to a global audience, many of which are framed by the symbols of the cold war and the ensuing triumph of global capitalism. The South Pole, Moscow, Beijing and a reunified Berlin can be seen as representing this understanding of the globe. These cities highlighted the scope of the network, reaching cities previously cut off from Italy behind the iron curtain (or, in the case of the Pole, the extreme of geographic isolation.) The presence of Jerusalem contributed to this mapping of the planet with an ecclesiastical, but ecumenical accent to this theme. On the other hand, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne (not mentioned by Morrione, but the first international segment in the program) also mapped the world of Italian communities around the world. The map of the globe offered by La Giostra is similar to the description of the prospective audience for RAI International that Morrione gave in November 1996 upon his appointment as director. After having outlined the network’s reception in the Americas and Australia, where there are large communities of Italians who need to be served, he goes on to note the importance of Asia: “China, India, Japan, and Korea, where there aren’t large communities of Italians, but where “made in Italy,” the image of Italy, the culture and art that separate us from others, are highly respected resources” (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). La Giostra served as a container that held together a vision of the globe that is centered around Italy (particularly Rome, caput mundi) through the presentation on screen of the various geopolitical alliances as well as the economic and migratory connections which link Italy to the world. These two mappings of the globe brought together within the frame of the 20-hour broadcast and statements about the network’s prospective audiences suggest that two different ways of watching RAI International were often overlaid over each other. On the one hand, the segments spanning the planet stood as a sign of RAI International’s ability to produce programs at a global scale. On the other hand, there was an attempt to speak directly to communities of Italians abroad. The first vision of the planet offered by the program suggests a mode of watching more common among disinterested, cosmopolitan viewers belonging to a relatively homogenous global media market. While the second vision of the planet was explicitly rooted in the international family of Italians constituted through the broadcast. La Giostra, like the ‘dual mandate’ of the network, can be seen as an attempt to bring together the national mission of network with its attempts to improve its position in global media markets. It was an attempt to unify what seemed two very different kinds of audiences: Italians abroad and non-Italians, those who spoke some Italian and those who speak no Italian at all. It was also an attempt to unify two very different ways of understanding global broadcasting: public service on the one hand and the profit-oriented goals of building a global brand. Given this orientation in the network’s programming philosophy, it is not surprising that Arbore, speaking of his activities as Artistic director, stated that his goals were to produce shows that would be accessible both to those that spoke very little Italian as well as those that were highly cultured (Arbore). In its attempt to bring these divergent practices and imagined audiences together, La Giostra can be seen as part of vision of globalisation rooted in the euphoria of the early nineties in which distance and cultural differences were reconciled through communications technology and “virtuous” transformation of ethnicity into niche markets. However, this approach to programming started to fracture and fail after a short period. The particular balance between the ethnic and the economically ecumenical mappings of the globe present in La Giostra proved to be as short lived as the ‘dual mandate’ at RAI International that underwrote its conception. Return Information The mega-events that Arbore organised came under increasing criticism from the parliamentary committees overseeing RAI’s activities as well as the RAI executive who saw them both extremely expensive to produce and of questionable value in the fulfillment of RAI’s mission as a public broadcaster (GRTV). They were sometimes described as misfatti televisivi [broadcasting misdeeds] (Arbore). The model of the televisual mega-event was increasingly targeted towards speaking to Italians abroad, dropping broader notions of the audience. This was not an overnight change, but part of a process through which the goals of the network were refocused towards ‘public service.’ Morrione, speaking before the parliamentary committee overseeing RAI’s activities, describes an evening dedicated to a celebration of the Italian flag which exemplifies this trend: The minister of Foreign Affairs asked us to prepare a Tricolore (the Italian flag) evening – that would go on air in the month of January – that we would call White, Red and Green (not the most imaginative name, but effective enough.) It would include international connections with Argentina, where there exists one of the oldest case d’italiani [Italian community centers], built shortly after the events of our Risorgimento and where they have an ancient Tricolore. We would also connect with Reggio Emilia, where the Tricolore was born and where they are celebrating the anniversary this year. Segments would also take us to the Vittoriano Museum in Rome for a series of testimonies. (Morrione, Testimony [1997]) Similar to La Giostra, the global reach of RAI International was used to create a sense of simultaneity among the dispersed communities of Italians around the world (including the population of Italy itself). The festival of the Italian flag was similarly deeply implicated in the rituals and patterns that bring together an audience and, at another level, a people. However, in the celebration of the Italian flag, the notion that such a spectacle might be of interest to those outside of a global “Italian” community has disappeared. Like La Giostra, programs of this kind are intended to be constitutive of an audience, a collectivity that would not exist were it not for the common space provided through television spectatorship. The celebration of the Italian flag is part of an attempt to produce a sense of global community organised by a shared sense of ethnic identity as expressed through the common temporality of a live broadcast. Italians around the world were part of the same Italian community not because of their shared history (even when this was the stated subject of the program as was the case with Red, White and Green), but because they co-existed by means of their experience of the mediated event. Through these events, the shared national history is produced out of the simultaneity of the common present and not, as the discourse around Italian identity presented in these programs would have it (for example, the narratives around the origin around the flag), the other way around. However, this connection between the global television event that was broadcast live and national belonging raised questions about the kind of participation they facilitated. This became a particularly salient issue with the election of the second Berlusconi government and the successful campaign to grant Italians citizens living abroad the vote, a campaign that was lead by formerly fascist (but centre-moving) Alleanza Nazionale. With the appoint of Massimo Magliaro, a longtime member of Alleanza Nazionale, to the head of the network in 2000, the concept of informazione di ritorno [return information] became increasingly prominent in descriptions of the service. The phrase was frequently used, along with tv di ritorno (Tremaglia), by the Minister for Italiani nel Mondo during the second Berlusconi administration, Mirko Tremaglia, and became a central theme in the projects envisioned for the service. (The concept had circulated previously, but it was not given the same emphasis that it would gain after Magliaro’s appointment. In an interview from 1996, Morrione is asked about his commitment to the policy of “so-called” return information. He answers the question by commenting in support of producing a ‘return image’ (immagine di ritorno), but never uses the phrase (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). Similarly, Arbore, in an interview from 1998, is also asked about ‘so-called’ return information, but also never uses the term himself (Affatato). This suggests that its circulation was limited up until the late 1990s.) The concept of ‘return information’ – not quite a neologism in Italian, but certainly an uncommon expression – was a two-pronged, and never fully implemented, initiative. Primarily it was a policy that sought to further integrate RAI International into the system of RAI’s national television networks. This involved both improving the ability of RAI International to distribute information about Italy to communities of Italians abroad as well as developing strategies for the eventual use of programming produced by RAI International on the main national networks as a way of raising the awareness of Italians in Italy about the lives and beliefs of Italians abroad. (The programming produced by RAI International was never successfully integrated into the schedules of the other national networks. This issue remained an issue that had yet to be resolved as recently as the negotiations between the Prime Minister’s office and RAI to establish a new agreement governing RAI’s international service in 2007.) This is not to say that there was a dramatic shift in the kind of programming on the network. There had always been elements of these new goals in the programming produced exclusively for RAI International. The longest running program on the network, Sportello Italia [Information Desk Italy], provided information to Italians abroad about changes in Italian law that effected Italians abroad as well as changes in bureaucratic practice generally. It often focused on issues such as the voting rights of Italians abroad, questions about receiving pensions and similar issues. It was joined by a series of in-house productions that primarily consisted of news and information programming whose roots were in the new division in charge of radio and television broadcasts since the sixties. The primary change was the elimination of large-scale programs, aside from those relating to the Italian national soccer team and the Pope, due to budget restrictions. This was part of a larger shift in the way that the service was envisioned and its repositioning as the primary conduit between Italy and Italians abroad. Speaking in 2000, Magliaro explained this as a change in the network’s priorities from ‘entertainment’ to ‘information’: There will be a larger dose of information and less space for entertainment. Informational programming will be the privileged product in which we will invest the majority of our financial and human resources, both on radio and on television. Providing information means both telling Italians abroad about Italy and allowing public opinion in our country to find out about Italians around the world. (Morgia) Magliaro’s statement suggests that there is a direct connection between the changing way of conceiving of ‘global’ Italian television and the mandate of RAI International. The spectacles of the mid-nineties, implicitly characterised by Magliaro as ‘entertainment,’ were as much about gaining the attention of those who did not speak Italian or watch Italian television as speaking to Italians abroad. The kind of participation in the nation that these events solicited were limited in that they did not move beyond a relatively passive experience of that nation as community brought together through the diffuse and distracted experience of ‘entertainment’. The rise of informazione di ritorno was a discourse that offered a particular conception of Italians abroad who were more directly involved in the affairs of the nation. However, this was more than an increased interest in the participation of audiences. Return information as developed under Magliaro’s watch posited a different kind of viewer, a viewer whose actions were explicitly and intimately linked to their rights as citizens. It is not surprising that Magliaro prefaced his comments about the transformation of RAI’s mandate and programming priorities by acknowledging that the extension of the vote to Italians abroad demands a different kind of broadcaster. The new editorial policy of RAI International is motivated from the incontrovertible fact that Italians abroad will have the right to vote in a few months … . In terms of the product that we are developing, aimed at adequately responding to the new demands created by the vote… (Morgia) The granting of the vote to Italians abroad meant that the forms of symbolic communion that produced through the mega-events needed to be supplanted by a policy that allowed for a more direct link between the ritual aspects of global media to the institutions of the Italian state. The evolution of RAI International cannot be separated from the articulation of an increasingly ethno-centric conception of citizenship and the transformation of the Italian state over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s towards. The transition between these two approaches to global television in Italy is important for understanding the events that unfolded around RAI International’s role in the development of a global Italian citizenry. A development that should not be separated from the development of increasingly stern immigration policies whose effect is to identify and export undesirable outsiders. The electoral defeat of Berlusconi in 2006 and the ongoing political instability surrounding the centre-left government in power since then has meant that the future development of RAI International and the long-term effects of the right-wing government on the cultural and political fabric of Italy remain unclear at present. The current need for a reformed electoral system and talk about the need for greater efficiency from the new executive at RAI make the evolution of the global Italian citizenry an important context for understanding the role of media in the globalised nation-state in the years to come. References Affatato, M. “I ‘Segreti’ di RAI International.” GRTV.it, 17 Feb. 1998. Arbore, R. “‘Il mio sogno? Un Programma con gli italiani all’estero.’” GRTV.it, 18 June 1999. Foot, J. Milan since the Miracle: City, Culture, and Identity. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Garofalo, R. “Understanding Mega-Events: If We Are the World, Then How Do We Change It? In C. Penley and A. Ross, eds., Technoculture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 247-270. Magliaro, M. “Speech to Second Annual Conference.” Comites Canada, 2002. Milana, A. RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. Morgia, G. La Rai del Duemila per gli italiani nel mondo: Intervista con Massimo Magliaro. 2001. Morrione, R. “Gli Italiani all’estero ‘azionisti di riferimento.’” Interview with Roberto Morrione. GRTV.it, 15 Nov. 1996. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 12 December 1997. Rome, 1997. 824-841. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 17 November 1998. Rome, 1998. 1307-1316. Morrione, R. “Tre anni memorabili.” RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. 129-137. Parks, L. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hayward, Mark. "Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/05-hayward.php>. APA Style Hayward, M. (Apr. 2008) "Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/05-hayward.php>.

“We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,” in the (probably apocryphal) words of the Prime Minister, sometime after the unification of the nation in 1860. Perhaps in French, if it was said at all. (The quotation is typically attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio, the prime minister of Piedmont and predecessor of the first Italian prime minister Camillo Cavour. Many have suggested that the phrase was misquoted and misunderstood (see Doyle.) D’Azeglio spoke in Italian when he addressed the newly-formed Italian parliament, but my reference to French is meant to indicate the fragility of the national language in early Italy where much of the ruling class spoke French while the majority of the people in the peninsula still spoke regional dialects.) It was television – more than print media or even radio – that would have the biggest impact in terms of ‘making Italians.’ Writing about Italy in the 1950s, a well-known media critic suggested that television, a game show actually, “was able to succeed where The Divine Comedy failed … it gave Italy a national language” (qtd. in Foot). But these are yesterday’s problems. We have Italy and Italians. Moreover, the emergence of global ways of being and belonging are evidence of the ways in which the present transcends forms of belonging rooted in the old practices and older institutions of the nation-state. But, then again, maybe not. “A country that allows you to vote in its elections must be able to provide you with information about those elections” (Magliaro). This was 2002. The country is still Italy, but this time the Italians are anywhere but Italy. The speaker is referring to the extension of the vote to Italian citizens abroad, represented directly by 18 members of parliament, and the right to information guaranteed the newly enfranchised electorate. What, then, is the relationship between citizenship, the state and global television today? What are the modalities of involvement and participation involved in these transformations of the nation-state into a globally-articulated network of institutions? I want to think through these questions in relation to two ways that RAI International, the ‘global’ network of the Italian public broadcaster, has viewed Italians around the world at different moments in its history: mega-events and return information. Mega-Events Eighteen months after its creation in 1995, RAI International was re-launched. This decision was partially due to a change in government (which also meant a change in the executive and staff), but it was also a response to the perceived failure of RAI International to garner an adequate international audience (Morrione, Testimony [1997]). This re-launch involved a re-conceptualisation of the network’s mandate to include both information services for Italians abroad (the traditional ‘public service’ mandate for Italy’s international broadcasting) as well as programming that would increase the profile of Italian media in the global market. The mandate outlined for Roberto Morrione – appointed president as part of the re-launch – read: The necessity of strategic and operative certainties in the international positioning of the company, both with regard to programming for our co-nationals abroad and for other markets…are at the centre of the new role of RAI International. This involves bringing together in the best way the informative function of the public service, which is oriented to our community in the world in order to enrich its cultural patrimony and national identity, with an active presence in evolving markets. (Morrione, Testimony [1998]) The most significant change in the executive of the network was the appointment of Renzo Arbore, a well-known singer and bandleader, to the position of artistic director. At the time of Arbore’s appointment, the responsibilities of the artistic director at the network were ill defined, but he very quickly transformed the position into the ‘face’ of RAI International. In an interview from 1998, Arbore explained his role at the network as follows: “I’m the artistic director, which means I’m in charge of the programs that have any kind of artistic content. Also, I’m the so called “testimonial”, which is to say I do propaganda for the network, I’m the soul of RAI International” (Affatato). The most often discussed aspect of the programming on RAI International during Arbore’s tenure as artistic director was the energy and resources dedicated to events that put the spotlight on the global reach of the service itself and the possibilities that satellite distribution gave for simultaneous exchange between locations around the world. It was these ‘mega-events’ (Garofalo), in spite of constituting only a small portion of the programming schedule, that were often seen as defining RAI’s “new way” of creating international programming (Milana). La Giostra [The Merry Go Round], broadcast live on New Year’s Eve 1996, is often cited as the launch of the network’s new approach to its mission. Lasting 20 hours in total, the program was hosted by Arbore. As Morrione described it recently, The ‘mother of live shows’ was the Giostra of New Year’s ’97 where Arbore was live in the studio for 20 consecutive hours, with many guests and segments from the Pole, Peking, Moscow, Berlin, Jerusalem, San Paolo, Buenos Aires, New York and Los Angeles. It was a memorable enterprise without precedent and never to be duplicated. (Morrione, RAI International) The presentation of television as a global medium in La Giostra draws upon the relationship between live broadcasting, satellite television and conceptions of globality that has developed since the 1960s as part of what Lisa Parks describes as ‘global presence’ (Parks). However, in keeping with the dual mandate of RAI International, the audience that La Giostra is intended to constitute was not entirely homogenous in nature. The lines between the ‘national’ audience, which is to say Italians abroad, and the international audience involving a broader spectrum of viewers are often blurred, but still apparent. This can be seen in the locations to which La Giostra travelled, locations that might be seen as a mirror of the places to which the broadcast might be received. On the one hand, there are segments from a series of location that speak to a global audience, many of which are framed by the symbols of the cold war and the ensuing triumph of global capitalism. The South Pole, Moscow, Beijing and a reunified Berlin can be seen as representing this understanding of the globe. These cities highlighted the scope of the network, reaching cities previously cut off from Italy behind the iron curtain (or, in the case of the Pole, the extreme of geographic isolation.) The presence of Jerusalem contributed to this mapping of the planet with an ecclesiastical, but ecumenical accent to this theme. On the other hand, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne (not mentioned by Morrione, but the first international segment in the program) also mapped the world of Italian communities around the world. The map of the globe offered by La Giostra is similar to the description of the prospective audience for RAI International that Morrione gave in November 1996 upon his appointment as director. After having outlined the network’s reception in the Americas and Australia, where there are large communities of Italians who need to be served, he goes on to note the importance of Asia: “China, India, Japan, and Korea, where there aren’t large communities of Italians, but where “made in Italy,” the image of Italy, the culture and art that separate us from others, are highly respected resources” (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). La Giostra served as a container that held together a vision of the globe that is centered around Italy (particularly Rome, caput mundi) through the presentation on screen of the various geopolitical alliances as well as the economic and migratory connections which link Italy to the world. These two mappings of the globe brought together within the frame of the 20-hour broadcast and statements about the network’s prospective audiences suggest that two different ways of watching RAI International were often overlaid over each other. On the one hand, the segments spanning the planet stood as a sign of RAI International’s ability to produce programs at a global scale. On the other hand, there was an attempt to speak directly to communities of Italians abroad. The first vision of the planet offered by the program suggests a mode of watching more common among disinterested, cosmopolitan viewers belonging to a relatively homogenous global media market. While the second vision of the planet was explicitly rooted in the international family of Italians constituted through the broadcast. La Giostra, like the ‘dual mandate’ of the network, can be seen as an attempt to bring together the national mission of network with its attempts to improve its position in global media markets. It was an attempt to unify what seemed two very different kinds of audiences: Italians abroad and non-Italians, those who spoke some Italian and those who speak no Italian at all. It was also an attempt to unify two very different ways of understanding global broadcasting: public service on the one hand and the profit-oriented goals of building a global brand. Given this orientation in the network’s programming philosophy, it is not surprising that Arbore, speaking of his activities as Artistic director, stated that his goals were to produce shows that would be accessible both to those that spoke very little Italian as well as those that were highly cultured (Arbore). In its attempt to bring these divergent practices and imagined audiences together, La Giostra can be seen as part of vision of globalisation rooted in the euphoria of the early nineties in which distance and cultural differences were reconciled through communications technology and “virtuous” transformation of ethnicity into niche markets. However, this approach to programming started to fracture and fail after a short period. The particular balance between the ethnic and the economically ecumenical mappings of the globe present in La Giostra proved to be as short lived as the ‘dual mandate’ at RAI International that underwrote its conception. Return Information The mega-events that Arbore organised came under increasing criticism from the parliamentary committees overseeing RAI’s activities as well as the RAI executive who saw them both extremely expensive to produce and of questionable value in the fulfillment of RAI’s mission as a public broadcaster (GRTV). They were sometimes described as misfatti televisivi [broadcasting misdeeds] (Arbore). The model of the televisual mega-event was increasingly targeted towards speaking to Italians abroad, dropping broader notions of the audience. This was not an overnight change, but part of a process through which the goals of the network were refocused towards ‘public service.’ Morrione, speaking before the parliamentary committee overseeing RAI’s activities, describes an evening dedicated to a celebration of the Italian flag which exemplifies this trend: The minister of Foreign Affairs asked us to prepare a Tricolore (the Italian flag) evening – that would go on air in the month of January – that we would call White, Red and Green (not the most imaginative name, but effective enough.) It would include international connections with Argentina, where there exists one of the oldest case d’italiani [Italian community centers], built shortly after the events of our Risorgimento and where they have an ancient Tricolore. We would also connect with Reggio Emilia, where the Tricolore was born and where they are celebrating the anniversary this year. Segments would also take us to the Vittoriano Museum in Rome for a series of testimonies. (Morrione, Testimony [1997]) Similar to La Giostra, the global reach of RAI International was used to create a sense of simultaneity among the dispersed communities of Italians around the world (including the population of Italy itself). The festival of the Italian flag was similarly deeply implicated in the rituals and patterns that bring together an audience and, at another level, a people. However, in the celebration of the Italian flag, the notion that such a spectacle might be of interest to those outside of a global “Italian” community has disappeared. Like La Giostra, programs of this kind are intended to be constitutive of an audience, a collectivity that would not exist were it not for the common space provided through television spectatorship. The celebration of the Italian flag is part of an attempt to produce a sense of global community organised by a shared sense of ethnic identity as expressed through the common temporality of a live broadcast. Italians around the world were part of the same Italian community not because of their shared history (even when this was the stated subject of the program as was the case with Red, White and Green), but because they co-existed by means of their experience of the mediated event. Through these events, the shared national history is produced out of the simultaneity of the common present and not, as the discourse around Italian identity presented in these programs would have it (for example, the narratives around the origin around the flag), the other way around. However, this connection between the global television event that was broadcast live and national belonging raised questions about the kind of participation they facilitated. This became a particularly salient issue with the election of the second Berlusconi government and the successful campaign to grant Italians citizens living abroad the vote, a campaign that was lead by formerly fascist (but centre-moving) Alleanza Nazionale. With the appoint of Massimo Magliaro, a longtime member of Alleanza Nazionale, to the head of the network in 2000, the concept of informazione di ritorno [return information] became increasingly prominent in descriptions of the service. The phrase was frequently used, along with tv di ritorno (Tremaglia), by the Minister for Italiani nel Mondo during the second Berlusconi administration, Mirko Tremaglia, and became a central theme in the projects envisioned for the service. (The concept had circulated previously, but it was not given the same emphasis that it would gain after Magliaro’s appointment. In an interview from 1996, Morrione is asked about his commitment to the policy of “so-called” return information. He answers the question by commenting in support of producing a ‘return image’ (immagine di ritorno), but never uses the phrase (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). Similarly, Arbore, in an interview from 1998, is also asked about ‘so-called’ return information, but also never uses the term himself (Affatato). This suggests that its circulation was limited up until the late 1990s.) The concept of ‘return information’ – not quite a neologism in Italian, but certainly an uncommon expression – was a two-pronged, and never fully implemented, initiative. Primarily it was a policy that sought to further integrate RAI International into the system of RAI’s national television networks. This involved both improving the ability of RAI International to distribute information about Italy to communities of Italians abroad as well as developing strategies for the eventual use of programming produced by RAI International on the main national networks as a way of raising the awareness of Italians in Italy about the lives and beliefs of Italians abroad. (The programming produced by RAI International was never successfully integrated into the schedules of the other national networks. This issue remained an issue that had yet to be resolved as recently as the negotiations between the Prime Minister’s office and RAI to establish a new agreement governing RAI’s international service in 2007.) This is not to say that there was a dramatic shift in the kind of programming on the network. There had always been elements of these new goals in the programming produced exclusively for RAI International. The longest running program on the network, Sportello Italia [Information Desk Italy], provided information to Italians abroad about changes in Italian law that effected Italians abroad as well as changes in bureaucratic practice generally. It often focused on issues such as the voting rights of Italians abroad, questions about receiving pensions and similar issues. It was joined by a series of in-house productions that primarily consisted of news and information programming whose roots were in the new division in charge of radio and television broadcasts since the sixties. The primary change was the elimination of large-scale programs, aside from those relating to the Italian national soccer team and the Pope, due to budget restrictions. This was part of a larger shift in the way that the service was envisioned and its repositioning as the primary conduit between Italy and Italians abroad. Speaking in 2000, Magliaro explained this as a change in the network’s priorities from ‘entertainment’ to ‘information’: There will be a larger dose of information and less space for entertainment. Informational programming will be the privileged product in which we will invest the majority of our financial and human resources, both on radio and on television. Providing information means both telling Italians abroad about Italy and allowing public opinion in our country to find out about Italians around the world. (Morgia) Magliaro’s statement suggests that there is a direct connection between the changing way of conceiving of ‘global’ Italian television and the mandate of RAI International. The spectacles of the mid-nineties, implicitly characterised by Magliaro as ‘entertainment,’ were as much about gaining the attention of those who did not speak Italian or watch Italian television as speaking to Italians abroad. The kind of participation in the nation that these events solicited were limited in that they did not move beyond a relatively passive experience of that nation as community brought together through the diffuse and distracted experience of ‘entertainment’. The rise of informazione di ritorno was a discourse that offered a particular conception of Italians abroad who were more directly involved in the affairs of the nation. However, this was more than an increased interest in the participation of audiences. Return information as developed under Magliaro’s watch posited a different kind of viewer, a viewer whose actions were explicitly and intimately linked to their rights as citizens. It is not surprising that Magliaro prefaced his comments about the transformation of RAI’s mandate and programming priorities by acknowledging that the extension of the vote to Italians abroad demands a different kind of broadcaster. The new editorial policy of RAI International is motivated from the incontrovertible fact that Italians abroad will have the right to vote in a few months … . In terms of the product that we are developing, aimed at adequately responding to the new demands created by the vote… (Morgia) The granting of the vote to Italians abroad meant that the forms of symbolic communion that produced through the mega-events needed to be supplanted by a policy that allowed for a more direct link between the ritual aspects of global media to the institutions of the Italian state. The evolution of RAI International cannot be separated from the articulation of an increasingly ethno-centric conception of citizenship and the transformation of the Italian state over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s towards. The transition between these two approaches to global television in Italy is important for understanding the events that unfolded around RAI International’s role in the development of a global Italian citizenry. A development that should not be separated from the development of increasingly stern immigration policies whose effect is to identify and export undesirable outsiders. The electoral defeat of Berlusconi in 2006 and the ongoing political instability surrounding the centre-left government in power since then has meant that the future development of RAI International and the long-term effects of the right-wing government on the cultural and political fabric of Italy remain unclear at present. The current need for a reformed electoral system and talk about the need for greater efficiency from the new executive at RAI make the evolution of the global Italian citizenry an important context for understanding the role of media in the globalised nation-state in the years to come. References Affatato, M. “I ‘Segreti’ di RAI International.” GRTV.it, 17 Feb. 1998. Arbore, R. “‘Il mio sogno? Un Programma con gli italiani all’estero.’” GRTV.it, 18 June 1999. Foot, J. Milan since the Miracle: City, Culture, and Identity. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Garofalo, R. “Understanding Mega-Events: If We Are the World, Then How Do We Change It? In C. Penley and A. Ross, eds., Technoculture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 247-270. Magliaro, M. “Speech to Second Annual Conference.” Comites Canada, 2002. Milana, A. RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. Morgia, G. La Rai del Duemila per gli italiani nel mondo: Intervista con Massimo Magliaro. 2001. Morrione, R. “Gli Italiani all’estero ‘azionisti di riferimento.’” Interview with Roberto Morrione. GRTV.it, 15 Nov. 1996. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 12 December 1997. Rome, 1997. 824-841. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 17 November 1998. Rome, 1998. 1307-1316. Morrione, R. “Tre anni memorabili.” RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. 129-137. Parks, L. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.

IntroductionFood Studies is a relatively recent area of research enquiry in Australia and Magazine Studies is even newer (Le Masurier and Johinke), with the consequence that Australian culinary magazines are only just beginning to be investigated. Moreover, although many major libraries have not thought such popular magazines worthy of sustained collection (Fox and Sornil), considering these publications is important. As de Certeau argues, it can be of considerable consequence to identify and analyse everyday practices (such as producing and reading popular magazines) that seem so minor and insignificant as to be unworthy of notice, as these practices have the ability to affect our lives. It is important in this case as these publications were part of the post-war gastronomic environment in Australia in which national tastes in domestic cookery became radically internationalised (Santich). To further investigate Australian magazines, as well as suggesting how these cosmopolitan eating habits became more widely embraced, this article will survey the various ways in which the idea of “abroad” is expressed in one Australian culinary serial from the post-war period, Australian Wines & Food Quarterly magazine, which was published from 1956 to 1960. The methodological approach taken is an historically-informed content analysis (Krippendorff) of relevant material from these magazines combined with germane media data (Hodder). All issues in the serial’s print run have been considered.Australian Post-War Culinary PublishingTo date, studies of 1950s writing in Australia have largely focused on literary and popular fiction (Johnson-Wood; Webby) and literary criticism (Bird; Dixon; Lee). There have been far fewer studies of non-fiction writing of any kind, although some serial publications from this time have attracted some attention (Bell; Lindesay; Ross; Sheridan; Warner-Smith; White; White). In line with studies internationally, groundbreaking work in Australian food history has focused on cookbooks, and includes work by Supski, who notes that despite the fact that buying cookbooks was “regarded as a luxury in the 1950s” (87), such publications were an important information source in terms of “developing, consolidating and extending foodmaking knowledge” at that time (85).It is widely believed that changes to Australian foodways were brought about by significant post-war immigration and the recipes and dishes these immigrants shared with neighbours, friends, and work colleagues and more widely afield when they opened cafes and restaurants (Newton; Newton; Manfredi). Although these immigrants did bring new culinary flavours and habits with them, the overarching rhetoric guiding population policy at this time was assimilation, with migrants expected to abandon their culture, language, and habits in favour of the dominant British-influenced ways of living (Postiglione). While migrants often did retain their foodways (Risson), the relationship between such food habits and the increasingly cosmopolitan Australian food culture is much more complex than the dominant cultural narrative would have us believe. It has been pointed out, for example, that while the haute cuisine of countries such as France, Italy, and Germany was much admired in Australia and emulated in expensive dining (Brien and Vincent), migrants’ own preference for their own dishes instead of Anglo-Australian choices, was not understood (Postiglione). Duruz has added how individual diets are eclectic, “multi-layered and hybrid” (377), incorporating foods from both that person’s own background with others available for a range of reasons including availability, cost, taste, and fashion. In such an environment, popular culinary publishing, in terms of cookbooks, specialist magazines, and recipe and other food-related columns in general magazines and newspapers, can be posited to be another element contributing to this change.Australian Wines & Food QuarterlyAustralian Wines & Food Quarterly (AWFQ) is, as yet, a completely unexamined publication, and there appears to be only three complete sets of this magazine held in public collections. It is important to note that, at the time it was launched in the mid-1950s, food writing played a much less significant part in Australian popular publishing than it does today, with far fewer cookbooks released than today, and women’s magazines and the women’s pages of newspapers containing only small recipe sections. In this environment, a new specialist culinary magazine could be seen to be timely, an audacious gamble, or both.All issues of this magazine were produced and printed in, and distributed from, Melbourne, Australia. Although no sales or distribution figures are available, production was obviously a struggle, with only 15 issues published before the magazine folded at the end of 1960. The title of the magazine changed over this time, and issue release dates are erratic, as is the method in which volumes and issues are numbered. Although the number of pages varied from 32 up to 52, and then less once again, across the magazine’s life, the price was steadily reduced, ending up at less than half the original cover price. All issues were produced and edited by Donald Wallace, who also wrote much of the content, with contributions from family members, including his wife, Mollie Wallace, to write, illustrate, and produce photographs for the magazine.When considering the content of the magazine, most is quite familiar in culinary serials today, although AWFQ’s approach was radically innovative in Australia at this time when cookbooks, women’s magazines, and newspaper cookery sections focused on recipes, many of which were of cakes, biscuits, and other sweet baking (Bannerman). AWFQ not only featured many discursive essays and savory meals, it also featured much wine writing and review-style content as well as information about restaurant dining in each issue.Wine-Related ContentWine is certainly the most prominent of the content areas, with most issues of the magazine containing more wine-related content than any other. Moreover, in the early issues, most of the food content is about preparing dishes and/or meals that could be consumed alongside wines, although the proportion of food content increases as the magazine is published. This wine-related content takes a clearly international perspective on this topic. While many articles and advertisements, for example, narrate the long history of Australian wine growing—which goes back to early 19th century—these articles argue that Australia's vineyards and wineries measure up to international, and especially French, examples. In one such example, the author states that: “from the earliest times Australia’s wines have matched up to world standard” (“Wine” 25). This contest can be situated in Australia, where a leading restaurant (Caprice in Sydney) could be seen to not only “match up to” but also, indeed to, “challenge world standards” by serving Australian wines instead of imports (“Sydney” 33). So good, indeed, are Australian wines that when foreigners are surprised by their quality, this becomes newsworthy. This is evidenced in the following excerpt: “Nearly every English businessman who has come out to Australia in the last ten years … has diverted from his main discussion to comment on the high quality of Australian wine” (Seppelt, 3). In a similar nationalist vein, many articles feature overseas experts’ praise of Australian wines. Thus, visiting Italian violinist Giaconda de Vita shows a “keen appreciation of Australian wines” (“Violinist” 30), British actor Robert Speaight finds Grange Hermitage “an ideal wine” (“High Praise” 13), and the Swedish ambassador becomes their advocate (Ludbrook, “Advocate”).This competition could also be located overseas including when Australian wines are served at prestigious overseas events such as a dinner for members of the Overseas Press Club in New York (Australian Wines); sold from Seppelt’s new London cellars (Melbourne), or the equally new Australian Wine Centre in Soho (Australia Will); or, featured in exhibitions and promotions such as the Lausanne Trade Fair (Australia is Guest;“Wines at Lausanne), or the International Wine Fair in Yugoslavia (Australia Wins).Australia’s first Wine Festival was held in Melbourne in 1959 (Seppelt, “Wine Week”), the joint focus of which was the entertainment and instruction of the some 15,000 to 20,000 attendees who were expected. At its centre was a series of free wine tastings aiming to promote Australian wines to the “professional people of the community, as well as the general public and the housewife” (“Melbourne” 8), although admission had to be recommended by a wine retailer. These tastings were intended to build up the prestige of Australian wine when compared to international examples: “It is the high quality of our wines that we are proud of. That is the story to pass on—that Australian wine, at its best, is at least as good as any in the world and better than most” (“Melbourne” 8).There is also a focus on promoting wine drinking as a quotidian habit enjoyed abroad: “We have come a long way in less than twenty years […] An enormous number of husbands and wives look forward to a glass of sherry when the husband arrives home from work and before dinner, and a surprising number of ordinary people drink table wine quite un-selfconsciously” (Seppelt, “Advance” 3). However, despite an acknowledged increase in wine appreciation and drinking, there is also acknowledgement that this there was still some way to go in this aim as, for example, in the statement: “There is no reason why the enjoyment of table wines should not become an Australian custom” (Seppelt, “Advance” 4).The authority of European experts and European habits is drawn upon throughout the publication whether in philosophically-inflected treatises on wine drinking as a core part of civilised behaviour, or practically-focused articles about wine handling and serving (Keown; Seabrook; “Your Own”). Interestingly, a number of Australian experts are also quoted as stressing that these are guidelines, not strict rules: Crosby, for instance, states: “There is no ‘right wine.’ The wine to drink is the one you like, when and how you like it” (19), while the then-manager of Lindemans Wines is similarly reassuring in his guide to entertaining, stating that “strict adherence to the rules is not invariably wise” (Mackay 3). Tingey openly acknowledges that while the international-style of regularly drinking wine had “given more dignity and sophistication to the Australian way of life” (35), it should not be shrouded in snobbery.Food-Related ContentThe magazine’s cookery articles all feature international dishes, and certain foreign foods, recipes, and ways of eating and dining are clearly identified as “gourmet”. Cheese is certainly the most frequently mentioned “gourmet” food in the magazine, and is featured in every issue. These articles can be grouped into the following categories: understanding cheese (how it is made and the different varieties enjoyed internationally), how to consume cheese (in relation to other food and specific wines, and in which particular parts of a meal, again drawing on international practices), and cooking with cheese (mostly in what can be identified as “foreign” recipes).Some of this content is produced by Kraft Foods, a major advertiser in the magazine, and these articles and recipes generally focus on urging people to eat more, and varied international kinds of cheese, beyond the ubiquitous Australian cheddar. In terms of advertorials, both Kraft cheeses (as well as other advertisers) are mentioned by brand in recipes, while the companies are also profiled in adjacent articles. In the fourth issue, for instance, a full-page, infomercial-style advertisement, noting the different varieties of Kraft cheese and how to serve them, is published in the midst of a feature on cooking with various cheeses (“Cooking with Cheese”). This includes recipes for Swiss Cheese fondue and two pasta recipes: spaghetti and spicy tomato sauce, and a so-called Italian spaghetti with anchovies.Kraft’s company history states that in 1950, it was the first business in Australia to manufacture and market rindless cheese. Through these AWFQ advertisements and recipes, Kraft aggressively marketed this innovation, as well as its other new products as they were launched: mayonnaise, cheddar cheese portions, and Cracker Barrel Cheese in 1954; Philadelphia Cream Cheese, the first cream cheese to be produced commercially in Australia, in 1956; and, Coon Cheese in 1957. Not all Kraft products were seen, however, as “gourmet” enough for such a magazine. Kraft’s release of sliced Swiss Cheese in 1957, and processed cheese slices in 1959, for instance, both passed unremarked in either the magazine’s advertorial or recipes.An article by the Australian Dairy Produce Board urging consumers to “Be adventurous with Cheese” presented general consumer information including the “origin, characteristics and mode of serving” cheese accompanied by a recipe for a rich and exotic-sounding “Wine French Dressing with Blue Cheese” (Kennedy 18). This was followed in the next issue by an article discussing both now familiar and not-so familiar European cheese varieties: “Monterey, Tambo, Feta, Carraway, Samsoe, Taffel, Swiss, Edam, Mozzarella, Pecorino-Romano, Red Malling, Cacio Cavallo, Blue-Vein, Roman, Parmigiano, Kasseri, Ricotta and Pepato” (“Australia’s Natural” 23). Recipes for cheese fondues recur through the magazine, sometimes even multiple times in the same issue (see, for instance, “Cooking With Cheese”; “Cooking With Wine”; Pain). In comparison, butter, although used in many AWFQ’s recipes, was such a common local ingredient at this time that it was only granted one article over the entire run of the magazine, and this was largely about the much more unusual European-style unsalted butter (“An Expert”).Other international recipes that were repeated often include those for pasta (always spaghetti) as well as mayonnaise made with olive oil. Recurring sweets and desserts include sorbets and zabaglione from Italy, and flambéd crepes suzettes from France. While tabletop cooking is the epitome of sophistication and described as an international technique, baked Alaska (ice cream nestled on liquor-soaked cake, and baked in a meringue shell), hailing from America, is the most featured recipe in the magazine. Asian-inspired cuisine was rarely represented and even curry—long an Anglo-Australian staple—was mentioned only once in the magazine, in an article reprinted from the South African The National Hotelier, and which included a recipe alongside discussion of blending spices (“Curry”).Coffee was regularly featured in both articles and advertisements as a staple of the international gourmet kitchen (see, for example, Bancroft). Articles on the history, growing, marketing, blending, roasting, purchase, percolating and brewing, and serving of coffee were common during the magazine’s run, and are accompanied with advertisements for Bushell’s, Robert Timms’s and Masterfoods’s coffee ranges. AWFQ believed Australia’s growing coffee consumption was the result of increased participation in quality internationally-influenced dining experiences, whether in restaurants, the “scores of colourful coffee shops opening their doors to a new generation” (“Coffee” 39), or at home (Adams). Tea, traditionally the Australian hot drink of choice, is not mentioned once in the magazine (Brien).International Gourmet InnovationsAlso featured in the magazine are innovations in the Australian food world: new places to eat; new ways to cook, including a series of sometimes quite unusual appliances; and new ways to shop, with a profile of the first American-style supermarkets to open in Australia in this period. These are all seen as overseas innovations, but highly suited to Australia. The laws then controlling the service of alcohol are also much discussed, with many calls to relax the licensing laws which were seen as inhibiting civilised dining and drinking practices. The terms this was often couched in—most commonly in relation to the Olympic Games (held in Melbourne in 1956), but also in relation to tourism in general—are that these restrictive regulations were an embarrassment for Melbourne when considered in relation to international practices (see, for example, Ludbrook, “Present”). This was at a time when the nightly hotel closing time of 6.00 pm (and the performance of the notorious “six o’clock swill” in terms of drinking behaviour) was only repealed in Victoria in 1966 (Luckins).Embracing scientific approaches in the kitchen was largely seen to be an American habit. The promotion of the use of electricity in the kitchen, and the adoption of new electric appliances (Gas and Fuel; Gilbert “Striving”), was described not only as a “revolution that is being wrought in our homes”, but one that allowed increased levels of personal expression and fulfillment, in “increas[ing] the time and resources available to the housewife for the expression of her own personality in the management of her home” (Gilbert, “The Woman’s”). This mirrors the marketing of these modes of cooking and appliances in other media at this time, including in newspapers, radio, and other magazines. This included features on freezing food, however AWFQ introduced an international angle, by suggesting that recipe bases could be pre-prepared, frozen, and then defrosted to use in a range of international cookery (“Fresh”; “How to”; Kelvinator Australia). The then-new marvel of television—another American innovation—is also mentioned in the magazine ("Changing concepts"), although other nationalities are also invoked. The history of the French guild the Confrerie de la Chaine des Roitisseurs in 1248 is, for instance, used to promote an electric spit roaster that was part of a state-of-the-art gas stove (“Always”), and there are also advertisements for such appliances as the Gaggia expresso machine (“Lets”) which draw on both Italian historical antecedence and modern science.Supermarket and other forms of self-service shopping are identified as American-modern, with Australia’s first shopping mall lauded as the epitome of utopian progressiveness in terms of consumer practice. Judged to mark “a new era in Australian retailing” (“Regional” 12), the opening of Chadstone Regional Shopping Centre in suburban Melbourne on 4 October 1960, with its 83 tenants including “giant” supermarket Dickens, and free parking for 2,500 cars, was not only “one of the most up to date in the world” but “big even by American standards” (“Regional” 12, italics added), and was hailed as a step in Australia “catching up” with the United States in terms of mall shopping (“Regional” 12). This shopping centre featured international-styled dining options including Bistro Shiraz, an outdoor terrace restaurant that planned to operate as a bistro-snack bar by day and full-scale restaurant at night, and which was said to offer diners a “Persian flavor” (“Bistro”).ConclusionAustralian Wines & Food Quarterly was the first of a small number of culinary-focused Australian publications in the 1950s and 1960s which assisted in introducing a generation of readers to information about what were then seen as foreign foods and beverages only to be accessed and consumed abroad as well as a range of innovative international ideas regarding cookery and dining. For this reason, it can be posited that the magazine, although modest in the claims it made, marked a revolutionary moment in Australian culinary publishing. As yet, only slight traces can be found of its editor and publisher, Donald Wallace. The influence of AWFQ is, however, clearly evident in the two longer-lived magazines that were launched in the decade after AWFQ folded: Australian Gourmet Magazine and The Epicurean. Although these serials had a wider reach, an analysis of the 15 issues of AWFQ adds to an understanding of how ideas of foods, beverages, and culinary ideas and trends, imported from abroad were presented to an Australian readership in the 1950s, and contributed to how national foodways were beginning to change during that decade.ReferencesAdams, Jillian. “Australia’s American Coffee Culture.” Australian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 23–36.“Always to Roast on a Turning Spit.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 17.“An Expert on Butter.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 11.“Australia Is Guest Nation at Lausanne.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 18–19.“Australia’s Natural Cheeses.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 23.“Australia Will Be There.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 14.“Australian Wines Served at New York Dinner.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.5 (1958): 16.“Australia Wins Six Gold Medals.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.11 (1959/1960): 3.Bancroft, P.A. “Let’s Make Some Coffee.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 10. Bannerman, Colin. Seed Cake and Honey Prawns: Fashion and Fad in Australian Food. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2008.Bell, Johnny. “Putting Dad in the Picture: Fatherhood in the Popular Women’s Magazines of 1950s Australia.” Women's History Review 22.6 (2013): 904–929.Bird, Delys, Robert Dixon, and Christopher Lee. Eds. Authority and Influence: Australian Literary Criticism 1950-2000. Brisbane: U of Queensland P, 2001.“Bistro at Chadstone.” The Magazine of Good Living 4.3 (1960): 3.Brien, Donna Lee. “Powdered, Essence or Brewed? Making and Cooking with Coffee in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s.” M/C Journal 15.2 (2012). 20 July 2016 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/475>.Brien, Donna Lee, and Alison Vincent. “Oh, for a French Wife? Australian Women and Culinary Francophilia in Post-War Australia.” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 22 (2016): 78–90.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.“Changing Concepts of Cooking.” Australian Wines & Food 2.11 (1958/1959): 18-19.“Coffee Beginnings.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 37–39.“Cooking with Cheese.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 25–28.“Cooking with Wine.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.11 (1959/1960): 24–30.Crosby, R.D. “Wine Etiquette.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 19–21.“Curry and How to Make It.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.2 (1957): 32.Duruz, Jean. “Rewriting the Village: Geographies of Food and Belonging in Clovelly, Australia.” Cultural Geographies 9 (2002): 373–388.Fox, Edward A., and Ohm Sornil. “Digital Libraries.” Encyclopedia of Computer Science. 4th ed. Eds. Anthony Ralston, Edwin D. Reilly, and David Hemmendinger. 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Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2004.Kelvinator Australia. “Try Cooking the Frozen ‘Starter’ Way.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 10–12.Kennedy, H.E. “Be Adventurous with Cheese.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 3.12 (1960): 18–19.Keown, K.C. “Some Notes on Wine.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 32–33.Krippendorff, Klaus. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.“Let’s Make Some Coffee.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wines and Food 4.2: 23.Lindesay, Vance. The Way We Were: Australian Popular Magazines 1856–1969. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1983.Luckins, Tanja. “Pigs, Hogs and Aussie Blokes: The Emergence of the Term “Six O’clock Swill.”’ History Australia 4.1 (2007): 8.1–8.17.Ludbrook, Jack. “Advocate for Australian Wines.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 3–4.Ludbrook, Jack. “Present Mixed Licensing Laws Harm Tourist Trade.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 14, 31.Kelvinator Australia. “Try Cooking the Frozen ‘Starter’ Way.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 10–12.Mackay, Colin. “Entertaining with Wine.” Australian Wines &Foods Quarterly 1.5 (1958): 3–5.Le Masurier, Megan, and Rebecca Johinke. “Magazine Studies: Pedagogy and Practice in a Nascent Field.” TEXT Special Issue 25 (2014). 20 July 2016 <http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue25/LeMasurier&Johinke.pdf>.“Melbourne Stages Australia’s First Wine Festival.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.10 (1959): 8–9.Newton, John, and Stefano Manfredi. “Gottolengo to Bonegilla: From an Italian Childhood to an Australian Restaurant.” Convivium 2.1 (1994): 62–63.Newton, John. 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Special Care NoticeThis article discusses trauma and violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania through the processes of colonisation. Content within this article may be distressing to some readers. IntroductionThis article looks briefly at the collection, consultation, and digital sharing of stories essential to the histories of the First Nations peoples of Australia. Focusing on materials held in Sydney, New South Wales two case studies—the object known as the Proclamation Board and the George Augustus Robinson Papers—explore how materials can be shared with Aboriginal peoples of the region now known as Tasmania. Specifically, the authors of this article (a Palawa man and an Australian woman of European descent) ask how can the idea of the privileging of Indigenous voices, within Eurocentric cultural collections, be transformed from rhetoric to reality? Moreover, how can we navigate this complex work, that is made even more problematic by distance, through the utilisation of knowledge networks which are geographically isolated from the collections holding stories crucial to Indigenous communities? In seeking to answer these important questions, this article looks at how cultural, emotional, and intellectual ownership can be divested from the physical ownership of a collection in a way that repatriates—appropriately and sensitively—stories of Aboriginal Australia and of colonisation. Holding Stories, Not Always Our OwnCultural institutions, including libraries, have, in recent years, been drawn into discussions centred on the notion of digital disruption and “that transformative shift which has seen the ongoing realignment of business resources, relationships, knowledge, and value both facilitating the entry of previously impossible ideas and accelerating the competitive impact of those same impossible ideas” (Franks and Ensor n.p.). As Molly Brown has noted, librarians “are faced, on a daily basis, with rapidly changing technology and the ways in which our patrons access and use information. Thus, we need to look at disruptive technologies as opportunities” (n.p.). Some innovations, including the transition from card catalogues to online catalogues and the provision of a wide range of electronic resources, are now considered to be business as usual for most institutions. So, too, the digitisation of great swathes of materials to facilitate access to collections onsite and online, with digitising primary sources seen as an intermediary between the pillars of preserving these materials and facilitating access for those who cannot, for a variety of logistical and personal reasons, travel to a particular repository where a collection is held.The result has been the development of hybrid collections: that is, collections that can be accessed in both physical and digital formats. Yet, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions is often selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale digitisation projects usually only realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents that are considered high use and at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from the larger full body of records while other lesser-known components are often omitted. Digitisation projects therefore tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable or famous documents online only. Documents can be profiled as an exhibition separate from their complete collection and, critically, their wider context. Libraries of course are not neutral spaces and this practice of (re)enforcing the canon through digitisation is a challenge that cultural institutions, in partnerships, need to address (Franks and Ensor n.p.). Indeed, our digital collections are as affected by power relationships and the ongoing impacts of colonisation as our physical collections. These power relationships can be seen through an organisation’s “processes that support acquisitions, as purchases and as the acceptance of artefacts offered as donations. Throughout such processes decisions are continually made (consciously and unconsciously) that affect what is presented and actively promoted as the official history” (Thorpe et al. 8). While it is important to acknowledge what we do collect, it is equally important to look, too, at what we do not collect and to consider how we continually privilege and exclude stories. Especially when these stories are not always our own, but are held, often as accidents of collecting. For example, an item comes in as part of a larger suite of materials while older, city-based institutions often pre-date regional repositories. An essential point here is that cultural institutions can often become comfortable in what they collect, building on existing holdings. This, in turn, can lead to comfortable digitisation. If we are to be truly disruptive, we need to embrace feeling uncomfortable in what we do, and we need to view digitisation as an intervention opportunity; a chance to challenge what we ‘know’ about our collections. This is especially relevant in any attempts to decolonise collections.Case Study One: The Proclamation BoardThe first case study looks at an example of re-digitisation. One of the seven Proclamation Boards known to survive in a public collection is held by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, having been purchased from Tasmanian collector and photographer John Watt Beattie (1859–1930) in May 1919 for £30 (Morris 86). Why, with so much material to digitise—working in a program of limited funds and time—would the Library return to an object that has already been privileged? Unanswered questions and advances in digitisation technologies, created a unique opportunity. For the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania), colonisation by the British in 1803 was “an emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually confronting series of encounters” (Franks n.p.). Violent incidents became routine and were followed by a full-scale conflict, often referred to as the Black War (Clements 1), or more recently as the Tasmanian War, fought from the 1820s until 1832. Image 1: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Behind the British combatants were various support staff, including administrators and propagandists. One of the efforts by the belligerents, behind the front line, to win the war and bring about peace was the production of approximately 100 Proclamation Boards. These four-strip pictograms were the result of a scheme introduced by Lieutenant Governor George Arthur (1784–1854), on the advice of Surveyor General George Frankland (1800–38), to communicate that all are equal under the rule of law (Arthur 1). Frankland wrote to Arthur in early 1829 to suggest these Proclamation Boards could be produced and nailed to trees (Morris 84), as a Eurocentric adaptation of a traditional method of communication used by Indigenous peoples who left images on the trunks of trees. The overtly stated purpose of the Boards was, like the printed proclamations exhorting peace, to assert, all people—black and white—were equal. That “British Justice would protect” everyone (Morris 84). The first strip on each of these pictogram Boards presents Indigenous peoples and colonists living peacefully together. The second strip 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 strips depict the repercussions for committing murder (or, indeed, any significant crime), with an Indigenous man hanged for spearing a colonist and a European man hanged for shooting an Aboriginal man. Both men executed in the presence of the Lieutenant Governor. The Boards, oil on Huon pine, were painted by “convict artists incarcerated in the island penal colony” (Carroll 73).The Board at the State Library of New South Wales was digitised quite early on in the Library’s digitisation program, it has been routinely exhibited (including for the Library’s centenary in 2010) and is written about regularly. Yet, many questions about this small piece of timber remain unanswered. For example, some Boards were outlined with sketches and some were outlined with 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). Could such a sketch or example of pouncing be seen beneath the surface layers of paint on this particular Board? What might be revealed by examining the Board more closely and looking at this object in different ways?An important, but unexpected, discovery was that while most of the pigments in the painting correlate with those commonly available to artists in the early nineteenth century there is one outstanding anomaly. X-ray analysis revealed cadmium yellow present in several places across the painting, including the dresses of the little girls in strip one, uniform details in strip two, and the trousers worn by the settler men in strips three and four (Kahabka 2). This is an extraordinary discovery, as cadmium yellows were available “commercially as an artist pigment in England by 1846” and were shown by “Winsor & Newton at the 1851 Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace, London” (Fiedler and Bayard 68). The availability of this particular type of yellow in the early 1850s could set a new marker for the earliest possible date for the manufacture of this Board, long-assumed to be 1828–30. Further, the early manufacture of cadmium yellow saw the pigment in short supply and a very expensive option when compared with other pigments such as chrome yellow (the darker yellow, seen in the grid lines that separate the scenes in the painting). This presents a clearly uncomfortable truth in relation to an object so heavily researched and so significant to a well-regarded collection that aims to document much of Australia’s colonial history. Is it possible, for example, the Board has been subjected to overpainting at a later date? Or, was this premium paint used to produce a display Board that was sent, by the Tasmanian Government, to the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne? In seeking to see the finer details of the painting through re-digitisation, the results were much richer than anticipated. The sketch outlines are clearly visible in the new high-resolution files. There are, too, details unable to be seen clearly with the naked eye, including this warrior’s headdress and ceremonial scarring on his stomach, scars that tell stories “of pain, endurance, identity, status, beauty, courage, sorrow or grief” (Australian Museum n.p.). The image of this man has been duplicated and distributed since the 1830s, an anonymous figure deployed to tell a settler-centric story of the Black, or Tasmanian, War. This man can now be seen, for the first time nine decades later, to wear his own story. We do not know his name, but he is no longer completely anonymous. This image is now, in some ways, a portrait. The State Library of New South Wales acknowledges this object is part of an important chapter in the Tasmanian story and, though two Boards are in collections in Tasmania (the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston), each Board is different. The Library holds an important piece of a large and complex puzzle and has a moral obligation to make this information available beyond its metropolitan location. Digitisation, in this case re-digitisation, is allowing for the disruption of this story in sparking new questions around provenance and for the relocating of a Palawa warrior to a more prominent, perhaps even equal role, within a colonial narrative. Image 2: Detail, Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Case Study Two: The George Augustus Robinson PapersThe second case study focuses on the work being led by the Indigenous Engagement Branch at the State Library of New South Wales on the George Augustus Robinson (1791–1866) Papers. In 1829, Robinson was granted a government post in Van Diemen’s Land to ‘conciliate’ with the Palawa peoples. More accurately, Robinson’s core task was dispossession and the systematic disconnection of the Palawa peoples from their Country, community, and culture. Robinson was a habitual diarist and notetaker documenting much of his own life as well as the lives of those around him, including First Nations peoples. His extensive suite of papers represents a familiar and peculiar kind of discomfort for Aboriginal Australians, one in which they are forced to learn about themselves through the eyes and words of their oppressors. For many First Nations peoples of Tasmania, Robinson remains a violent and terrible figure, but his observations of Palawa culture and language are as vital as they are problematic. Importantly, his papers include vibrant and utterly unique descriptions of people, place, flora and fauna, and language, as well as illustrations revealing insights into the routines of daily life (even as those routines were being systematically dismantled by colonial authorities). “Robinson’s records have informed much of the revitalisation of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture in the twentieth century and continue to provide the basis for investigations of identity and deep relationships to land by Aboriginal scholars” (Lehman n.p.). These observations and snippets of lived culture are of immense value to Palawa peoples today but the act of reading between Robinson’s assumptions and beyond his entrenched colonial views is difficult work.Image 3: George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.The canonical reference for Robinson’s archive is Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834, edited by N.J.B. Plomley. The volume of over 1,000 pages was first published in 1966. This large-scale project is recognised “as a monumental work of Tasmanian history” (Crane ix). Yet, this standard text (relied upon by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers) has clearly not reproduced a significant percentage of Robinson’s Tasmanian manuscripts. Through his presumptuous truncations Plomley has not simply edited Robinson’s work but has, quite literally, written many Palawa stories out of this colonial narrative. It is this lack of agency in determining what should be left out that is most troubling, and reflects an all-too-familiar approach which libraries, including the State Library of New South Wales, are now urgently trying to rectify. Plomley’s preface and introduction does not indicate large tranches of information are missing. Indeed, Plomley specifies “that in extenso [in full] reproduction was necessary” (4) and omissions “have been kept to a minimum” (8). A 32-page supplement was published in 1971. A new edition, including the supplement, some corrections made by Plomley, and some extra material was released in 2008. But much continues to be unknown outside of academic circles, and far too few Palawa Elders and language revival workers have had access to Robinson’s original unfiltered observations. Indeed, Plomley’s text is linear and neat when compared to the often-chaotic writings of Robinson. Digitisation cannot address matters of the materiality of the archive, but such projects do offer opportunities for access to information in its original form, unedited, and unmediated.Extensive consultation with communities in Tasmania is underpinning the digitisation and re-description of a collection which has long been assumed—through partial digitisation, microfilming, and Plomley’s text—to be readily available and wholly understood. Central to this project is not just challenging the canonical status of Plomley’s work but directly challenging the idea non-Aboriginal experts can truly understand the cultural or linguistic context of the information recorded in Robinson’s journals. One of the more exciting outcomes, so far, has been working with Palawa peoples to explore the possibility of Palawa-led transcriptions and translation, and not breaking up the tasks of this work and distributing them to consultants or to non-Indigenous student groups. In this way, people are being meaningfully reunited with their own histories and, crucially, given first right to contextualise and understand these histories. Again, digitisation and disruption can be seen here as allies with the facilitation of accessibility to an archive in ways that re-distribute the traditional power relations around interpreting and telling stories held within colonial-rich collections.Image 4: Detail, George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.As has been so brilliantly illustrated by Bruce Pascoe’s recent work Dark Emu (2014), when Aboriginal peoples are given the opportunity to interpret their own culture from the colonial records without interference, they are able to see strength and sophistication rather than victimhood. For, to “understand how the Europeans’ assumptions selectively filtered the information brought to them by the early explorers is to see how we came to have the history of the country we accept today” (4). Far from decrying these early colonial records Aboriginal peoples understand their vital importance in connecting to a culture which was dismantled and destroyed, but importantly it is known that far too much is lost in translation when Aboriginal Australians are not the ones undertaking the translating. ConclusionFor Aboriginal Australians, culture and knowledge is no longer always anchored to Country. These histories, once so firmly connected to communities through their ancestral lands and languages, have been dispersed across the continent and around the world. Many important stories—of family history, language, and ways of life—are held in cultural institutions and understanding the role of responsibly disseminating these collections through digitisation is paramount. In transitioning from physical collections to hybrid collections of the physical and digital, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions can be—and due to the size of some collections is inevitably—selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale and well-resourced digitisation projects usually realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents considered high use or at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from a full body of records. Digitisation projects, as noted, tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable documents online, separate from their complete collection and, critically, their context. Our institutions carry the weight of past collecting strategies and, today, the pressure of digitisation strategies as well. Contemporary librarians should not be gatekeepers, but rather key holders. In collaborating across sectors and with communities we open doors for education, research, and the repatriation of culture and knowledge. We must, always, remember to open these doors wide: the call of Aboriginal Australians of ‘nothing about us without us’ is not an invitation to collaboration but an imperative. Libraries—as well as galleries, archives, and museums—cannot tell these stories alone. Also, these two case studies highlight what we believe to be one of the biggest mistakes that not just libraries but all cultural institutions are vulnerable to making, the assumption that just because a collection is open access it is also accessible. Digitisation projects are more valuable when communicated, contextualised and—essentially—the result of community consultation. Such work can, for some, be uncomfortable while for others it offers opportunities to embrace disruption and, by extension, opportunities to decolonise collections. For First Nations peoples this work can be more powerful than any simple measurement tool can record. Through examining our past collecting, deliberate efforts to consult, and through digital sharing projects across metropolitan and regional Australia, we can make meaningful differences to the ways in which Aboriginal Australians can, again, own their histories.Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the Palawa peoples: the traditional custodians of the lands known today as Tasmania. The authors acknowledge, too, the Gadigal people upon whose lands this article was researched and written. We are indebted to Dana Kahabka (Conservator), Joy Lai (Imaging Specialist), Richard Neville (Mitchell Librarian), and Marika Duczynski (Project Officer) at the State Library of New South Wales. Sincere thanks are also given to Jason Ensor of Western Sydney University.ReferencesArthur, George. “Proclamation.” The Hobart Town Courier 19 Apr. 1828: 1.———. Proclamation to the Aborigines. Graphic Materials. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SAFE R / 247, ca. 1828–1830.Australian Museum. “Aboriginal Scarification.” 2018. 11 Jan. 2019 <https://australianmuseum.net.au/about/history/exhibitions/body-art/aboriginal-scarification/>.Brown, Molly. “Disruptive Technology: A Good Thing for Our Libraries?” International Librarians Network (2016). 26 Aug. 2018 <https://interlibnet.org/2016/11/25/disruptive-technology-a-good-thing-for-our-libraries/>.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.Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia, U of Queensland P, 2014.Crane, Ralph. “Introduction.” Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829-1834. 2nd ed. Launceston and Hobart: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and Quintus Publishing, 2008. ix.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.Fiedler, Inge, and Michael A. Bayard. Artist Pigments, a Handbook of Their History and Characteristics. Ed. Robert L. Feller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 65–108. Franks, Rachel. “A True Crime Tale: Re-Imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board for the Tasmanian Aborigines.” M/C Journal 18.6 (2015). 1 Feb. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1036>.Franks, Rachel, and Jason Ensor. “Challenging the Canon: Collaboration, Digitisation and Education.” ALIA Online: A Conference of the Australian Library and Information Association, 11–15 Feb. 2019, Sydney.Kahabka, Dana. Condition Assessment [Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830, SAFE / R247]. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 2017.Lehman, Greg. “Pleading Robinson: Reviews of Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson (2008) and Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission (2008).” Australian Humanities Review 49 (2010). 1 May 2019 <http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p41961/html/review-12.xhtml?referer=1294&page=15>. 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.Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu. Broome: Magabala Books, 2014/2018.Plomley, N.J.B. Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834. Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966.Robinson, George Augustus. Papers. Textual Records. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, A 7023–A 7031, 1829–34. Thorpe, Kirsten, Monica Galassi, and Rachel Franks. “Discovering Indigenous Australian Culture: Building Trusted Engagement in Online Environments.” Journal of Web Librarianship 10.4 (2016): 343–63.

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. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1967.Borgmann, Albert. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Briggs, Asa. Victorian Cities: Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Melbourne. London: Penguin, 1968.Doggett, Anne. “And for Harmony Most Ardently We Long”: Musical Life in Ballarat, 1851-187. PhD Thesis. Ballarat: Ballarat University, 2006.Freund, Peter. Her Maj: A History of Her Majesty's Theatre. Ballarat: Currency Press, 2007.Hazelwood, Jennifer. A Public Want and a Public Duty: The Role of the Mechanics Institute in the Cultural, Social and Educational Development of Ballarat from 1851 to 1880. PhD Thesis. Ballarat: University of Ballarat 2007.Jenkins, Lloyd. Another Five Ballarat Cameos. Ballarat: Lloyd Jenkins, 1989.McConachie, Bruce. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.Reide, John, and John Chisholm. Ballarat Golden City: A Pictorial History. Bacchus Marsh: Joval Publications, 1989.Spielvogel, Nathan. Spielvogel Papers, Volume 1. 4th ed. Bakery Hill: Ballarat Historical Society, 2016.Spielvogel, Nathan. Spielvogel Papers, Volume 3. 4th ed. Bakery Hill: Ballarat Historical Society, 2016.Urry, John. Consuming Places. London: Routledge, 1995.Withers, William. History of Ballarat (1870) and some Ballarat Reminiscences (1895/96). Ballarat: Ballarat Heritage Services, 1999.NewspapersThe Age.The Argus (Melbourne).The Australasian.The Ballarat Courier.The Ballarat Star.Coolgardie Miner.The Malcolm Chronicle and Leonora Advertiser.Mount Alexander Mail.The Star (Ballarat).

Stand-up is a global phenomenon. It is Australia’s most significant form of advocatorial theatre and a major platform for challenging stigma and prejudice. In the twenty-first century, Australian stand-up is transforming into a more culturally diverse form and extending the spectrum of material addressing human rights. Since the 1980s Australian stand-up routines have moved beyond the old colonial targets of England and America, and Indigenous comics such as Kevin Kopinyeri, Andy Saunders, and Shiralee Hood have gained an established following. Additionally, the turn to Asia is evident not just in trade agreements and the higher education market but also in cultural exchange and in the billing of emerging Asian stand-ups at mainstream events. The major cultural driver for stand-up is the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF), Australia’s largest cultural event, now over 30 years old, and an important site for dissecting constructs of democracy and nationhood. As John McCallum has observed, popular humour in post-World War II Australia drew on widespread feelings of “displacement, migration and otherness—resonant topics in a country of transplanted people and a dispossessed indigenous population arguing over a distinct Australian identity” (205–06). This essay considers the traditional comic strategies of first and second generation immigrant stand-ups in Australia and compares them with the new wave of post 9/11 Asian-Australian and Middle-Eastern-Australian stand-ups whose personas and interrogations are shifting the paradigm. Self-identifying Muslim stand-ups challenge myths of dominant Australian identity in ways which many still find confronting. Furthermore, the theories of incongruity, superiority, and psychological release re-rehearsed in traditional humour studies, by figures such as Palmer (1994) and Morreall (2009), are predicated on models of humour which do not always serve live performance, especially stand-up with its relational dependence on audience interaction.Stand-ups who immigrated to Australia as children or whose parents immigrated and struggled against adversity are important symbols both of the Australian comedy industry and of a national self-understanding of migrant resilience and making good. Szubanski and Berger hail from earlier waves of European migrants in the 1950s and 1960s. Szubanski has written eloquently of her complex Irish-Polish heritage and documented how the “hand-me-down trinkets of family and trauma” and “the culture clash of competing responses to calamity” have been integral to the development of her comic success and the making of her Aussie characters (347). Rachel Berger, the child of Polish holocaust survivors, advertises and connects both identities on her LinkedIn page: “After 23 years as a stand-up comedian, growing up with Jewish guilt and refugee parents, Rachel Berger knows more about survival than any idiot attending tribal council on reality TV.”Anh Do, among Australia’s most famous immigrant stand-ups, identifies as one of the Vietnamese “boat people” and arrived as a toddler in 1976. Do’s tale of his family’s survival against the odds and his creation of a persona which constructs the grateful, happy immigrant clown is the staple of his very successful routine and increasingly problematic. It is a testament to the power of Do’s stand-up that many did not perceive the toll of the loss of his birth country; the grinding poverty; and the pain of his father’s alcoholism, violence, and survivor guilt until the publication of Do’s ironically titled memoir The Happiest Refugee. In fact, the memoir draws on many of the trauma narratives that are still part of his set. One of Do’s most legendary routines is the story of his family’s sea journey to Australia, told here on ABC1’s Talking Heads:There were forty of us on a nine metre fishing boat. On day four of the journey we spot another boat. As the boat gets closer we realise it’s a boatload of Thai pirates. Seven men with knives, machetes and guns get on our boat and they take everything. One of the pirates picks up the smallest child, he lifts up the baby and rips open the baby’s nappy and dollars fall out. And the pirate decides to spare the kid’s life. And that’s a good thing cos that’s my little brother Khoa Do who in 2005 became Young Australian of the Year. And we were saved on the fifth day by a big German merchant ship which took us to a refugee camp in Malaysia and we were there for around three months before Australia says, come to Australia. And we’re very glad that happened. So often we heard Mum and Dad say—what a great country. How good is this place? And the other thing—kids, as you grow up, do as much as you can to give back to this great country and to give back to others less fortunate.Do’s strategy is apparently one of genuflection and gratitude, an adoption of what McCallum refers to as an Australian post-war tradition of the comedy of inadequacy and embarrassment (210–14). Journalists certainly like to bill Do as the happy clown, framing articles about him with headlines like Rosemary Neill’s “Laughing through Adversity.” In fact, Do is direct about his gallows humour and his propensity to darkness: his humour, he says, is a means of countering racism, of “being able to win people over who might have been averse to being friends with an Asian bloke,” but Neill does not linger on this, nor on the revelation that Do felt stigmatised by his refugee origins and terrified and shamed by the crippling poverty of his childhood in Australia. In The Happiest Refugee, Do reveals that, for him, the credibility of his routines with predominantly white Australian audiences lies in the crafting of himself as an “Aussie comedian up there talking about his working-class childhood” (182). This is not the official narrative that is retold even if it is how Do has endeared himself to Australians, and ridding himself of the happy refugee label may yet prove difficult. Suren Jayemanne is well known for his subtle mockery of multiculturalist rhetoric. In his 2016 MICF show, Wu-Tang Clan Name Generator, Jayemanne played on the supposed contradiction of his Sri Lankan-Malaysian heritage against his teenage years in the wealthy suburb of Malvern in Melbourne, his private schooling, and his obsession with hip hop and black American culture. Jayemanne’s strategy is to gently confound his audiences, leading them slowly up a blind alley. He builds up a picture of how to identify Sri Lankan parents, supposedly Sri Lankan qualities such as an exceptional ability at maths, and Sri Lankan employment ambitions which he argues he fulfilled in becoming an accountant. He then undercuts his story by saying he has recently realised that his suburban background, his numerical abilities, his love of black music, and his rejection of accountancy in favour of comedy, in fact prove conclusively that he has, all along, been white. He also confesses that this is a bruising disappointment. Jayemanne exposes the emptiness of the conceits of white, brown, and black and of invented identity markers and plays on his audiences’ preconceptions through an old storyteller’s device, the shaggy dog story. The different constituencies in his audiences enjoy his trick equally, from quite different perspectives.Diana Nguyen, a second generation Vietnamese stand-up, was both traumatised and politicised by Pauline Hanson when she was a teenager. Hanson described Nguyen’s community in Dandenong as “yellow Asian people” (Filmer). Nguyen’s career as a community development worker combating racism relates directly to her activity as a stand-up: migrant stories are integral to Australian history and Nguyen hypothesises that the “Australian psyche of being invaded or taken over” has reignited over the question of Islamic fundamentalism and expresses her concern to Filmer about the Muslim youths under her care.Nguyen’s alarm about the elision of Islamic radicalism with Muslim culture drives an agenda that has led the new generation of self-identified Muslim stand-ups since 9/11. This post 9/11 world is described by Wajahat as gorged with “exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslim [. . . ] and perpetuated by negative discrimination and the marginalisation and exclusion of Muslims from social, political, and civic life in western societies.” In Australia, Aamer Rahman, Muhamed Elleissi, Khaled Khalafalla, and Nazeem Hussain typify this newer, more assertive form of second generation immigrant stand-up—they identify as Muslim (whether religious or not), as brown, and as Australian. They might be said to symbolise a logical response to Ghassan Hage’s famous White Nation (1998), which argues that a white supremacism underlies the mindset of the white elite in Australia. Their positioning is more nuanced than previous generations of stand-up. Nazeem Hussain’s routines mark a transformation in Australian stand-up, as Waleed Aly has argued: “ethnic comedy” has hitherto been about the parading of stereotypes for comfortable, mainstream consumption, about “minstrel characters” [. . .] but Hussain interrogates his audiences in every direction—and aggravates Muslims too. Hussain’s is the world of post 9/11 Australian Muslims. It’s about more than ethnic stereotyping. It’s about being a consistent target of political opportunism, where everyone from the Prime Minister to the Foreign Minister to an otherwise washed-up backbencher with a view on burqas has you in their sights, where bombs detonate in Western capitals and unrelated nations are invaded.Understandably, a prevalent theme among the new wave of Muslim comics, and not just in Australia, is the focus on the reading of Muslims as manifestly linked with Islamic State (IS). Jokes about mistaken identity, plane crashes, suicide bombing, and the Koran feature prominently. English-Pakistani Muslim, Shazia Mirza, gained comedy notoriety in the UK in the wake of 9/11 by introducing her routine with the words: “My name’s Shazia Mirza. At least that’s what it says on my pilot’s licence” (Bedell). Stand-ups Negin Farsad, Ahmed Ahmed, and Dean Obeidalla are all also activists challenging prevailing myths about Islam, skin colour and terrorism in America. Egyptian-American Ahmed Ahmed acquired prominence for telling audiences in the infamous Axis of Evil Comedy Tour about how his life had changed much for the worse since 9/11. Ahmed Ahmed was the alias used by one of Osama Bin Laden’s devotees and his life became on ongoing struggle with anti-terrorism officials doing security checks (he was once incarcerated) and with the FBI who were certain that the comedian was among their most wanted terrorists. Similarly, Obeidalla, an Italian-Palestinian-Muslim, notes in his TEDx talk that “If you have a Muslim name, you are probably immune to identity theft.” His narration of a very sudden experience of becoming an object of persecution and of others’ paranoia is symptomatic of a shared understanding of a post 9/11 world among many Muslim comics: “On September 10th 2001 I went to bed as a white American and I woke up an Arab,” says Obeidalla, still dazed from the seismic shift in his life.Hussain and Khalafalla demonstrate a new sophistication and directness in their stand-up, and tackle their majority white audiences head-on. There is no hint of the apologetic or deferential stance performed by Anh Do. Many of the jokes in their routines target controversial or taboo issues, which up until recently were shunned in Australian political debate, or are absent or misrepresented in mainstream media. An Egyptian-Australian born in Saudi Arabia, Khaled Khalafalla arrived on the comedy scene in 2011, was runner-up in RAW, Australia’s most prestigious open mic competition, and in 2013 won the best of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for Devious. Khalafalla’s shows focus on racist stereotypes and identity and he uses a range of Middle Eastern and Indian accents to broach IS recruitment, Muslim cousin marriages, and plane crashes. His 2016 MICF show, Jerk, was a confident and abrasive routine exploring relationships, drug use, the extreme racism of Reclaim Australia rallies, controversial visa checks by Border Force’s Operation Fortitude, and Islamophobia. Within the first minute of his routine, he criticises white people in the audience for their woeful refusal to master Middle Eastern names, calling out to the “brown woman” in the audience for support, before lining up a series of jokes about the (mis)pronunciation of his name. Khalafalla derives his power on stage by what Oliver Double calls “uncovering.” Double contends that “one of the most subversive things stand-up can do is to uncover the unmentionable,” subjects which are difficult or impossible to discuss in everyday conversation or the broadcast media (292). For instance, in Jerk Khalafalla discusses the “whole hating halal movement” in Australia as a metaphor for exposing brutal prejudice: Let me break it down for you. Halal is not voodoo. It’s just a blessing that Muslims do for some things, food amongst other things. But, it’s also a magical spell that turns some people into fuckwits when they see it. Sometimes people think it’s a thing that can get stuck to your t-shirt . . . like ‘Oh fuck, I got halal on me’ [Australian accent]. I saw a guy the other day and he was like Fuck halal, it funds terrorism. And I was like, let me show you the true meaning of Islam. I took a lamb chop out of my pocket and threw it in his face. And, he was like Ah, what was that? A lamb chop. Oh, I fucking love lamb chops. And, I say you fool, it’s halal and he burst into flames.In effect, Khalafalla delivers a contemptuous attack on the white members of his audience, but at the same time his joke relies on those same audience members presuming that they are morally and intellectually superior to the individual who is the butt of the joke. Khalafalla’s considerable charm is a help in this tricky send-up. In 2015 the Australian Department of Defence recognised his symbolic power and invited him to join the Afghanistan Task Force to entertain the troops by providing what Doran describes as “home-grown Australian laughs” (7). On stage in Australia, Khalafalla constructs a persona which is an outsider to the dominant majority and challenges the persecution of Muslim communities. Ironically, on the NATO base, Khalafalla’s act was perceived as representing a diverse but united Australia. McCallum has pointed to such contradictions, moments where white Australia has shown itself to be a “culture which at first authenticates emigrant experience and later abrogates it in times of defiant nationalism” (207). Nazeem Hussain, born in Australia to Sri Lankan parents, is even more confrontational. His stand-up is born of his belief that “comedy protects us from the world around us” and is “an evolutionary defence mechanism” (8–9). His ground-breaking comedy career is embedded in his work as an anti-racism activist and asylum seeker supporter and shaped by his second-generation migrant experiences, law studies, community youth work, and early mentorship by American Muslim comic trio Allah Made Me Funny. He is well-known for his pioneering television successes Legally Brown and Salam Café. In his stand-up, Hussain often dwells witheringly on the failings and peculiarities of white people’s attempts to interact with him. Like all his routines, his sell-out show Fear of the Brown Planet, performed with Aamer Rahman from 2004–2008, explored casual, pathologised racism. Hussain deliberately over-uses the term “white people” in his routines as a provocation and deploys a reverse racism against his majority white audiences, knowing that many will be squirming. “White people ask me how can Muslims have fun if they don’t drink? Muslims have fun! Of course we have fun! You’ve seen us on the news.” For Hussain stand-up is “fundamentally an art of protest,” to be used as “a tool by communities and people with ideas that challenge and provoke the status quo with a spirit of counterculture” (Low 1–3). His larger project is to humanise Muslims to white Australians so that “they see us firstly as human beings” (1–3). Hussain’s 2016 MICF show, Hussain in the Membrane, both satirised media hype and hysterical racism and pushed for a better understanding of the complex problems Muslim communities face in Australia. His show also connected issues to older colonial traditions of racism. In a memorable and beautifully crafted tirade, Hussain inveighed against the 2015 Bendigo riots which occurred after local Muslims lodged an application to Bendigo council to build a mosque in the sleepy Victorian town. [YELLING in an exaggerated Australian accent] No we don’t want Muslims! NO we don’t want Muslims—to come invade Bendigo by application to the local council! That is the most bureaucratic invasion of all times. No place in history has been invaded by lodging an application to a local council. Can you see ISIS running around chasing town planners? Of course not, Muslims like to wait 6–8 months to invade! That’s a polite way to invade. What if white people invaded that way? What a better world we’d be living in. If white people invaded Australia that way, we’d be able to celebrate Australia Day on the same day without so much blood on our hands. What if Captain Cook came to Australia and said [in a British accent] Awe we would like to apply to invade this great land and here is our application. [In an Australian accent] Awe sorry, mate, rejected, but we’ll give you Bendigo.As Waleed Aly sees it, the Australian cultural majority is still “unused to hearing minorities speak with such assertiveness.” Hussain exposes “a binary world where there’s whiteness, and then otherness. Where white people are individuals and non-white people (a singular group) are not” (Aly). Hussain certainly speaks as an insider and goes so far as recognising his coloniser’s guilt in relation to indigenous Australians (Tan). Aly well remembers the hate mail he and Hussain received when they worked on Salam Café: “The message was clear. We were outsiders and should behave as such. We were not real Australians. We should know our place, as supplicants, celebrating the nation’s unblemished virtue.” Khalafalla, Rahman, Elleissi, and Hussain make clear that the new wave of comics identify as Muslim and Australian (which they would argue many in the audiences receive as a provocation). They have zero tolerance of racism, their comedy is intimately connected with their political activism, and they have an unapologetically Australian identity. No longer is it a question of whether the white cultural majority in Australia will anoint them as worthy and acceptable citizens, it is a question of whether the audiences can rise to the moral standards of the stand-ups. The power has been switched. For Hussain laughter is about connection: “that person laughs because they appreciate the point and whether or not they accept what was said was valid isn’t important. What matters is, they’ve understood” (Low 5). ReferencesAhmed, Ahmed. “When It Comes to Laughter, We Are All Alike.” TedXDoha (2010). 16 June 2016 <http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxDoha-Ahmed-Ahmed-When-it-Co>.Aly, Waleed. “Comment.” Sydney Morning Herald 24 Sep. 2013."Anh Do". Talking Heads with Peter Thompson. ABC1. 4 Oct. 2010. Radio.Bedell, Geraldine. “Veiled Humour.” The Guardian (2003). 8 Aug. 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/apr/20/comedy.artsfeatures?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other>.Berger, Rachel. LinkedIn [Profile page]. 14 June 2016 <http://www.linkedin.com/company/rachel-berger>.Do, Anh. The Happiest Refugee. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010. Doran, Mark. "Service with a Smile: Entertainers Give Troops a Taste of Home.” Air Force 57.21 (2015). 12 June 2016 <http://www.defence.gov.au/Publications/NewsPapers/Raaf/editions/5721/5721.pdf>.Double, Oliver. Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.Filmer, Natalie. "For Dandenong Comedian and Actress Diana Nguyen The Colour Yellow has a Strong Meaning.” The Herald Sun 3 Sep. 2013.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of a White Supremacy in a Multicultural Age. Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998.Hussain, Nazeem. Hussain in the Membrane. Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2016.———. "The Funny Side of 30.” Spectrum. The Age 12 Mar. 2016.Khalafalla, Khaled. Jerk. Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2016.Low, Lian. "Fear of a Brown Planet: Fight the Power with Laughter.” Peril: Asian Australian Arts and Culture (2011). 12 June 2016 <http://peril.com.au/back-editions/edition10/fear-of-a-brown-planet-fight-the-power-with-laughter>. McCallum, John. "Cringe and Strut: Comedy and National Identity in Post-War Australia.” Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference. Ed. Stephen Wagg. New York: Routledge, 1998. Morreall, John. Comic Relief. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.Neill, Rosemary. "Laughing through Adversity.” The Australian 28 Aug. 2010.Obeidalla, Dean. "Using Stand-Up to Counter Islamophobia.” TedXEast (2012). 16 June 2016 <http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxEast-Dean-Obeidalla-Using-S;TEDxEast>.Palmer, Jerry. Taking Humour Seriously. London: Routledge, 1994. Szubanski, Magda. Reckoning. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015. Tan, Monica. "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Allahu Akbar! Nazeem Hussain's Bogan-Muslim Army.” The Guardian 29 Feb. 2016. "Uncle Sam.” Salam Café (2008). 11 June 2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeQPAJt6caU>.Wajahat, Ali, et al. "Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.” Center for American Progress (2011). 11 June 2016 <https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/report/2011/08/26/10165/fear-inc>.

"verbiage very thinly sliced and plated up real nice" (Barrett 1)IntroductionMany of us share in an obsessive collecting of cookbooks and recipes. Torn or cut from newspapers and magazines, recipes sit swelling scrapbooks with bloated, unfilled desire. They’re non-hybrid seeds, peas under the mattress, an endless cycle of reproduction. Desire and narrative are folded into each other in our drive, as humans, to create meaning. But what holds us to narrative is good writing. And what can also drive desire is image—literal as well as metaphorical—the visceral pleasure of the gaze, or looking and viewing the sensually aesthetic and the work of the imagination. Creative WritingCooking, winemaking, and food and wine writing can all be considered art. For example, James Halliday (31), the eminent Australian wine critic, posed the question “Is winemaking an art?,” answering: “Most would say so” (31). Cookbooks are stories within stories, narratives that are both factual and imagined, everyday and fantastic—created by both writer and reader from where, along with its historical, cultural and publishing context, a text gets its meaning. Creative writing, in broad terms of genre, is either fiction (imagined, made-up) or creative nonfiction (true, factual). Genre comes from the human taxonomic impulse to create order from chaos through cataloguing and classification. In what might seem overwhelming infinite variety, we establish categories and within them formulas and conventions. But genres are not necessarily stable or clear-cut, and variation in a genre can contribute to its de/trans/formation (Curti 33). Creative nonfiction includes life writing (auto/biography) and food writing among other subgenres (although these subgenres can also be part of fiction). Cookbooks sit within the creative nonfiction genre. More clearly, dietary or nutrition manuals are nonfiction, technical rather than creative. Recipe writing specifically is perhaps less an art and more a technical exercise; generally it’s nonfiction, or between that and creative nonfiction. (One guide to writing recipes is Ostmann and Baker.) Creative writing is built upon approximately five, more or less, fundamentals of practice: point of view or focalisation or who narrates, structure (plot or story, and theme), characterisation, heightened or descriptive language, setting, and dialogue (not in any order of importance). (There are many handbooks on creative writing, that will take a writer through these fundamentals.) Style or voice derives from what a writer writes about (their recurring themes), and how they write about it (their vocabulary choice, particular use of imagery, rhythm, syntax etc.). Traditionally, as a reader, and writer, you are either a plot person or character person, but you can also be interested primarily in ideas or language, and in the popular or literary.Cookbooks as Creative NonfictionCookbooks often have a sense of their author’s persona or subjectivity as a character—that is, their proclivities, lives and thus ideology, and historical, social and cultural place and time. Memoir, a slice of the author–chef/cook’s autobiography, is often explicitly part of the cookbook, or implicit in the nature of the recipes, and the para-textual material which includes the book’s presentation and publishing context, and the writer’s biographical note and acknowledgements. And in relation to the latter, here's Australian wine educator Colin Corney telling us, in his biographical note, about his nascent passion for wine: “I returned home […] stony broke. So the next day I took a job as a bottleshop assistant at Moore Park Cellars […] to tide me over—I stayed three years!” (xi). In this context, character and place, in the broadest sense, are inevitably evoked. So in conjunction with this para-textual material, recipe ingredients and instructions, visual images and the book’s production values combine to become the components for authoring a fictive narrative of self, space and time—fictive, because writing inevitably, in a broad or conceptual sense, fictionalises everything, since it can only re-present through language and only from a particular point of view.The CookbooksTo talk about the art of cookbooks, I make a judgmental (from a creative-writer's point of view) case study of four cookbooks: Lyndey Milan and Colin Corney’s Balance: Matching Food and Wine, Sean Moran’s Let It Simmer (this is the first edition; the second is titled Let It Simmer: From Bush to Beach and Onto Your Plate), Kate Lamont’s Wine and Food, and Greg Duncan Powell’s Rump and a Rough Red (this is the second edition; the first was The Pig, the Olive & the Squid: Food & Wine from Humble Beginnings) I discuss reading, writing, imaging, and designing, which, together, form the nexus for interpreting these cookbooks in particular. The choice of these books was only relatively random, influenced by my desire to see how Australia, a major wine-producing country, was faring with discussion of wine and food choices; by the presence of discursive text beyond technical presentation of recipes, and of photographs and purposefully artful design; and by familiarity with names, restaurants and/or publishers. Reading Moran's cookbook is a model of good writing in its use of selective and specific detail directed towards a particular theme. The theme is further created or reinforced in the mix of narrative, language use, images and design. His writing has authenticity: a sense of an original, distinct voice.Moran’s aphoristic title could imply many things, but, in reading the cookbook, you realise it resonates with a mindfulness that ripples throughout his writing. The aphorism, with its laidback casualness (legendary Australian), is affectively in sync with the chef’s approach. Jacques Derrida said of the aphorism that it produces “an echo of really curious, indelible power” (67).Moran’s aim for his recipes is that they be about “honest, home-style cooking” and bringing “out a little bit of the professional chef in the home cook”, and they are “guidelines” available for “sparkle” and seduction from interpretation (4). The book lives out this persona and personal proclivities. Moran’s storytellings are specifically and solely highlighted in the Contents section which structures the book via broad categories (for example, "Grains" featuring "The dance of the paella" and "Heaven" featuring "A trifle coming on" for example). In comparison, Powell uses "The Lemon", for example, as well as "The Sheep". The first level of Contents in Lamont’s book is done by broad wine styles: sparkling, light white, robust white and so on, and the second level is the recipe list in each of these sections. Lamont’s "For me, matching food and wine comes down to flavour" (xiii) is not as dramatic or expressive as Powell’s "Wine: the forgotten condiment." Although food is first in Milan and Corney’s book’s subtitle, their first content is wine, then matching food with colour and specific grape, from Sauvignon Blanc to Barbera and more. Powell claims that the third of his rules (the idea of rules is playful but not comedic) for choosing the best wine per se is to combine region with grape variety. He covers a more detailed and diversified range of grape varieties than Lamont, systematically discussing them first-up. Where Lamont names wine styles, Powell points out where wine styles are best represented in Australian states and regions in a longish list (titled “13 of the best Australian grape and region combos”). Lamont only occasionally does this. Powell discusses the minor alternative white, Arneis, and major alternative reds such as Barbera and Nebbiolo (Allen 81, 85). This engaging detail engenders a committed reader. Pinot Gris, Viognier, Sangiovese, and Tempranillo are as alternative as Lamont gets. In contrast to Moran's laidbackness, Lamont emphasises professionalism: "My greatest pleasure as a chef is knowing that guests have enjoyed the entire food and wine experience […] That means I have done my job" (xiii). Her reminders of the obvious are, nevertheless, noteworthy: "Thankfully we have moved on from white wine/white meat and red wine/red meat" (xiv). She then addresses the alterations in flavour caused by "method of cooking" and "combination of ingredients", with examples. One such is poached chicken and mango crying "out for a vibrant, zesty Riesling" (xiii): but where from, I ask? Roast chicken with herbs and garlic would favour "red wine with silky tannin" and "chocolatey flavours" (xiii): again, I ask, where from? Powell claims "a different evolution" for his book "to the average cookbook" (7). In recipes that have "a wine focus", there are no "pretty […] little salads, or lavish […] cakes" but "brown" albeit tasty food that will not require ingredients from "poncy inner-city providores", be easy to cook, and go with a cheap, budget-based wine (7). While this identity-setting is empathetic for a Powell clone, and I am envious of his skill with verbiage, he doesn’t deliver dreaming or desire. Milan and Corney do their best job in an eye-catching, informative exemplar list of food and wine matches: "Red duck curry and Barossa Valley Shiraz" for example (7), and in wine "At-a-glance" tables, telling us, for example, that the best Australian regions for Chardonnay are Margaret River and the Adelaide Hills (53). WritingThe "Introduction" to Moran’s cookbook is a slice of memoir, a portrait of a chef as a young man: the coming into being of passion, skill, and professionalism. And the introduction to the introduction is most memorable, being a loving description of his frugal Australian childhood dinners: creations of his mother’s use of manufactured, canned, and bottled substitutes-for-the-real, including Gravox and Dessert Whip (1). From his travel-based international culinary education in handmade, agrarian food, he describes "a head of buffalo mozzarella stuffed with ricotta and studded with white truffles" as "sheer beauty", "ambrosial flavour" and "edible white 'terrazzo'." The consonants b, s, t, d, and r are picked up and repeated, as are the vowels e, a, and o. Notice, too, the comparison of classic Italian food to an equally classic Italian artefact. Later, in an interactive text, questions are posed: "Who could now imagine life without this peppery salad green?" (23). Moran uses the expected action verbs of peel, mince, toss, etc.: "A bucket of tiny clams needs a good tumble under the running tap" (92). But he also uses the unexpected hug, nab, snuggle, waltz, "wave of garlic" and "raining rice." Milan and Corney display a metaphoric-language play too: the bubbles of a sparkling wine matching red meat become "the little red broom […] sweep[ing] away the […] cloying richness" (114). In contrast, Lamont’s cookbook can seem flat, lacking distinctiveness. But with a title like Wine and Food, perhaps you are not expecting much more than information, plain directness. Moran delivers recipes as reproducible with ease and care. An image of a restaurant blackboard menu with the word "chook" forestalls intimidation. Good quality, basic ingredients and knowledge of their source and season carry weight. The message is that food and drink are due respect, and that cooking is neither a stressful, grandiose nor competitive activity. While both Moran and Lamont have recipes for Duck Liver Pâté—with the exception that Lamont’s is (disturbingly, for this cook) "Parfait", Moran also has Lentil Patties, a granola, and a number of breads. Lamont has Brioche (but, granted, without the yeast, seeming much easier to make). Powell’s Plateless Pork is "mud pies for grown-ups", and you are asked to cook a "vat" of sauce. This communal meal is "a great way to spread communicable diseases", but "fun." But his passionately delivered historical information mixed with the laconic attitude of a larrikin (legendary Australian again) transform him into a sage, a step up from the monastery (Powell is photographed in dress-up friar’s habit). Again, the obvious is noteworthy in Milan and Corney’s statement that Rosé "possesses qualities of both red and white wines" (116). "On a hot summery afternoon, sitting in the sun overlooking the view … what could be better?" (116). The interactive questioning also feeds in useful information: "there is a huge range of styles" for Rosé so "[g]rape variety is usually a good guide", and "increasingly we are seeing […] even […] Chambourcin" (116). Rosé is set next to a Bouillabaisse recipe, and, empathetically, Milan and Corney acknowledge that the traditional fish soup "can be intimidating" (116). Succinctly incorporated into the recipes are simple greyscale graphs of grape "Flavour Profiles" delineating the strength on the front and back palate and tongue (103).Imaging and DesigningThe cover of Moran’s cookbook in its first edition reproduces the colours of 1930–1940's beach towels, umbrellas or sunshades in matt stripes of blue, yellow, red, and green (Australian beaches traditionally have a grass verge; and, I am told (Costello), these were the colours of his restaurant Panoroma’s original upholstery). A second edition has the same back cover but a generic front cover shifting from the location of his restaurant to the food in a new subtitle: "From Bush to Beach and onto Your Plate". The front endpapers are Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach where Panoroma restaurant is embedded on the lower wall of an old building of flats, ubiquitous in Bondi, like a halved avocado, or a small shallow elliptic cave in one of the sandstone cliff-faces. The cookbook’s back endpapers are his bush-shack country. Surfaces, cooking equipment, table linen, crockery, cutlery and glassware are not ostentatious, but simple and subdued, in the colours and textures of nature/culture: ivory, bone, ecru, and cream; and linen, wire, wood, and cardboard. The mundane, such as a colander, is highlighted: humbleness elevated, hands at work, cooking as an embodied activity. Moran is photographed throughout engaged in cooking, quietly fetching in his slim, clean-cut, short-haired, altar-boyish good-looks, dressed casually in plain bone apron, t-shirt (most often plain white), and jeans. While some recipes are traditionally constructed, with the headnote, the list of ingredients and the discursive instructions for cooking, on occasion this is done by a double-page spread of continuous prose, inviting you into the story-telling. The typeface of Simmer varies to include a hand-written lookalike. The book also has a varied layout. Notes and small images sit on selected pages, as often as not at an asymmetric angle, with faux tape, as if stuck there as an afterthought—but an excited and enthusiastic afterthought—and to signal that what is informally known is as valuable as professional knowledge/skill and the tried, tested, and formally presented.Lamont’s publishers have laid out recipe instructions on the right-hand side (traditional English-language Western reading is top down, left to right). But when the recipe requires more than one item to be cooked, there is no repeated title; the spacing and line-up are not necessarily clear; and some immediate, albeit temporary, confusion occurs. Her recipes, alongside images of classic fine dining, carry the implication of chefing rather than cooking. She is photographed as a professional, with a chef’s familiar striped apron, and if she is not wearing a chef’s jacket, tunic or shirt, her staff are. The food is beautiful to look at and imagine, but tackling it in the home kitchen becomes a secondary thought. The left-hand section divider pages are meant to signal the wines, with the appropriate colour, and repetitive pattern of circles; but I understood this belatedly, mistaking them for retro wallpaper bemusedly. On the other hand, Powell’s bog-in-don’t-wait everyday heartiness of a communal stewed dinner at a medieval inn (Peasy Lamb looks exactly like this) may be overcooked, and, without sensuousness, uninviting. Images in Lamont’s book tend toward the predictable and anonymous (broad sweep of grape-vined landscape; large groups of people with eating and drinking utensils). The Lamont family run a vineyard, and up-market restaurants, one photographed on Perth’s river dockside. But Sean's Panoroma has a specificity about it; it hasn’t lost its local flavour in the mix with the global. (Admittedly, Moran’s bush "shack", the origin of much Panoroma produce and the destination of Panoroma compost, looks architect-designed.) Powell’s book, given "rump" and "rough" in the title, stridently plays down glitz (large type size, minimum spacing, rustic surface imagery, full-page portraits of a chicken, rump, and cabbage etc). While not over-glam, the photography in Balance may at first appear unsubtle. Images fill whole pages. But their beautifully coloured and intriguing shapes—the yellow lime of a white-wine bottle base or a sparkling wine cork beneath its cage—shift them into hyperreality. White wine in a glass becomes the edge of a desert lake; an open fig, the jaws of an alien; the flesh of a lemon after squeezing, a sea anemone. The minimal number of images is a judicious choice. ConclusionReading can be immersive, but it can also hover critically at a meta level, especially if the writer foregrounds process. A conversation starts in this exchange, the reader imagining for themselves the worlds written about. Writers read as writers, to acquire a sense of what good writing is, who writing colleagues are, where writing is being published, and, comparably, to learn to judge their own writing. Writing is produced from a combination of passion and the discipline of everyday work. To be a writer in the world is to observe and remember/record, to be conscious of aiming to see the narrative potential in an array of experiences, events, and images, or, to put it another way, "to develop the habit of art" (Jolley 20). Photography makes significant whatever is photographed. The image is immobile in a literal sense but, because of its referential nature, evocative. Design, too, is about communication through aesthetics as a sensuous visual code for ideas or concepts. (There is a large amount of scholarship on the workings of image combined with text. Roland Barthes is a place to begin, particularly about photography. There are also textbooks dealing with visual literacy or culture, only one example being Shirato and Webb.) It is reasonable to think about why there is so much interest in food in this moment. Food has become folded into celebrity culture, but, naturally, obviously, food is about our security and survival, physically and emotionally. Given that our planet is under threat from global warming which is also driving climate change, and we are facing peak oil, and alternative forms of energy are still not taken seriously in a widespread manner, then food production is under threat. Food supply and production are also linked to the growing gap between poverty and wealth, and the movement of whole populations: food is about being at home. Creativity is associated with mastery of a discipline, openness to new experiences, and persistence and courage, among other things. We read, write, photograph, and design to argue and critique, to use the imagination, to shape and transform, to transmit ideas, to celebrate living and to live more fully.References Allen, Max. The Future Makers: Australian Wines for the 21st Century. Melbourne: Hardie Grant, 2010. Barratt, Virginia. “verbiage very thinly sliced and plated up real nice.” Assignment, ENG10022 Writing from the Edge. Lismore: Southern Cross U, 2009. [lower case in the title is the author's proclivity, and subsequently published in Carson and Dettori. Eds. Banquet: A Feast of New Writing and Arts by Queer Women]Costello, Patricia. Personal conversation. 31 May 2012. Curti, Lidia. Female Stories, Female Bodies: Narrative, Identity and Representation. UK: Macmillan, 1998.Derrida, Jacques. "Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword." Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume. Eds. Andreas Apadakis, Catherine Cook, and Andrew Benjamin. New York: Rizzoli, 1989.Halliday, James. “An Artist’s Spirit.” The Weekend Australian: The Weekend Australian Magazine 13-14 Feb. (2010): 31.Jolley, Elizabeth. Central Mischief. Ringwood: Viking/Penguin 1992. Lamont, Kate. Wine and Food. Perth: U of Western Australia P, 2009. Milan, Lyndey, and Corney, Colin. Balance: Matching Food and Wine: What Works and Why. South Melbourne: Lothian, 2005. Moran, Sean. Let It Simmer. Camberwell: Lantern/Penguin, 2006. Ostmann, Barbara Gibbs, and Jane L. Baker. The Recipe Writer's Handbook. Canada: John Wiley, 2001.Powell, Greg Duncan. Rump and a Rough Red. Millers Point: Murdoch, 2010. Shirato, Tony, and Jen Webb. Reading the Visual. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2004.

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

Through references to four anecdotes, this article approaches the complex and often neglected topic of the relationship between Sicilian migrants in Australia and Aborigines. It does so not in search of clear evidences that may structure a well-defined historical narrative, but rather looking for moments of truth that may open up new dialogues, narratives, research. Within embodied otherness, it is the uncanny feeling towards the racialised other that most effectively make us understand the complex relationship Italian migrants have had with the (un)familiar. The concept of the uncanny helps us understand that the racism of many Italian migrants towards Aboriginal people in Australia has not been resulting from a frightening encounter with the other, with the unfamiliar, with the difference. It has rather been the result of the return of what has been repressed from historical memory, namely the colonial character of Italian unification, Italians’ own racist and colonial history, the colonial nature of many Italian migrants’ settlement abroad, and the identification of southern Italians as the colonised, racialised others, in Italy and abroad. Through positive examples of emotional, intimate and political engagement between Sicilians and Aborigines, this article also consider people’s agency in moving within and challenging the constraining, intricate pervasiveness of the racial and colonial dictate in contemporary Australian society.