Journal articles on the topic 'Newspapers Victoria Melbourne'

This article explores the way two Melbourne daily newspapers reported the fatal police shooting of Graeme Jensen on 11 October 1988. In particular, the article examines how the newspapers dealt with reporting police suspicions about Graeme Jensen's involvement in criminal activities and the immediate circumstances of the shooting. It argues that information passed to the press by police was designed to present the shooting as the lawful and necessary killing of a dangerous criminal and thus maintain a positive police image. The newspapers assisted this process by uncritically reporting the police version of events and allegations about Graeme Jensen's involvement in crimes even when such information was contradicted by available evidence.

AbstractAfter reviewing the development of wire fencing in Great Britain and the United States of America in the early nineteenth century, I examine the introduction of wire into Australia using published sources only. Wire was available in the colonies from the early 1850s. The earliest published record of a wire fence was on Phillip Island near Melbourne (Victoria) in 1842. Almost a decade passed before wire was used elsewhere in Victoria and the other eastern colonies. Pastoralists either sought information on wire fences locally or from agents in Britain. Local agents of British companies advertised in colonial newspapers from the early 1850s, with one exceptional record in 1839. Once wire was adopted, pastoralists rejected iron posts used in Britain, preferring cheaper wood posts cut from the property. The most significant innovation was to increase post spacings with significant cost savings. Government and the iron industry played no part in these innovations, which were achieved through trial-and-error by pastoralists. The large tonnages of wire imported into Australia and the increasing demand did not stimulate local production of wire, and there were no local wire mills until 1911.

IntroductionSystems science methodologies have been used in attempts to address the complex and dynamic causes of childhood obesity with varied results. This paper presents a protocol for the Reflexive Evidence and Systems interventions to Prevention Obesity and Non-communicable Disease (RESPOND) trial. RESPOND represents a significant advance on previous approaches by identifying and operationalising a clear systems methodology and building skills and knowledge in the design and implementation of this approach among community stakeholders.Methods and analysisRESPOND is a 4-year cluster-randomised stepped-wedge trial in 10 local government areas in Victoria, Australia. The intervention comprises four stages: catalyse and set up, monitoring, community engagement and implementation. The trial will be evaluated for individuals, community settings and context, cost-effectiveness, and systems and implementation processes. Individual-level data including weight status, diet and activity behaviours will be collected every 2 years from school children in grades 2, 4 and 6 using an opt-out consent process. Community-level data will include knowledge and engagement, collaboration networks, economic costs and shifts in mental models aligned with systems training. Baseline prevalence data were collected between March and June 2019 among >3700 children from 91 primary schools.Ethics and disseminationEthics approval: Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC 2018-381) or Deakin University’s Faculty of Health Ethics Advisory Committee (HEAG-H_2019-1; HEAG-H 37_2019; HEAG-H 173_2018; HEAG-H 12_2019); Victorian Government Department of Education and Training (2019_003943); Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne (Catholic Education Melbourne, 2019-0872) and Diocese of Sandhurst (24 May 2019). The results of RESPOND, including primary and secondary outcomes, and emerging studies developed throughout the intervention, will be published in the academic literature, presented at national and international conferences, community newsletters, newspapers, infographics and relevant social media.Trial registration numberACTRN12618001986268p.

This article explores the role that elite sport has played in the State Government of Victoria’s (Australia) neoliberal agenda of creating an environment conducive to commercial activity. Adopting an urban entrepreneurial approach of selling the ‘city’ as an attractive place for cross-border investment, the state government has strategically invested public funds into major sporting events in Melbourne. Four specific sporting events were examined: i) construction and redevelopments of ‘Melbourne Park’ to host the Australian Open Tennis Championships; ii) hosting the 2006 Commonwealth Games; iii) acquisition of the Australian Formula One Grand Prix and continued political, corporate and media support for the event; and iv) construction of an urban football stadium. Newspaper reports and parliament transcripts between 1984 and 2014 were collected to highlight issues of contest in the ‘sport city’ in conjunction with a thematic analysis of interviews with influential cultural producers of the ‘sport city’ – most notably state premiers, members of parliament, CEOs of public sports trusts and newspaper journalists. Findings illustrate that the Victorian state has successively re-regulated a neoliberal urban entrepreneurial strategy, often preventing dissident groups from resisting neoliberal activities, and that in Melbourne sport operates as ‘cultural glue’ to establish the logic of neoliberalism in an embodied sense.

Swamp wallabies have dramatically extended their distribution through western Victoria and south-eastern South Australia over the last 40 years. Newspaper reports from 1875 onwards show that on European settlement, wallaby populations were confined to eastern Victoria, including the ranges around Melbourne, the Otway Ranges and Portland District of south-western Victoria, and a tiny part of south-eastern South Australia. Populations contracted further with intense hunting for the fur trade until the 1930s. In the late 1970s, however, wallabies began spreading into drier habitats than those initially recorded. Possible causes underlying this change in distribution are discussed; some seem unlikely but, because wallabies began spreading soon after the introduction of European rabbit fleas as vectors of myxomatosis, the cumulative effects of releases of biological agents to control rabbits appear important. A caution is given on assuming that thick vegetation in high-rainfall areas provides the only habitat suitable for swamp wallabies, but, most importantly, the study shows how native mammals may benefit if rabbit abundance is reduced.

Words not only describe and define events, but also describe and define those who use them. Recent media coverage of the rescue of an American Air Force Captain from Serb-held Northern Bosnia, and the slaughter of a family in Melbourne by a severely disturbed man used the term ‘Rambo’ for both stories. In the same newspaper, the activities of child molesters in Asia were described under the heading ‘Child love’. The importance of the words used to describe assaults on children was recognised in a recent Victorian Crime Prevention committee report.

Background ‘TESTme’ is a sexually transmissible infection (STI) screening service for Victorian young people living in rural areas. We evaluated the effectiveness of advertising for this service over an 11-month pilot period. Methods: The advertising that was used included websites, a Facebook page, posters, flyers, business cards, wrist bands and professional development sessions for health nurses that occurred throughout the pilot period. We also used once-off methods including advertisements in newspapers, student diaries and short messages to mobile phones. Results: Twenty-eight clients had a consultation through TESTme. Twenty found the service through health professionals, six through the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre (MSHC) web page, one through the Facebook page and one through the student diary. The total direct costs incurred by the centre for advertising were $20 850. The advertising cost per client reached for each advertising method was $26 for health professionals, $80 for the MSHC web advertisement, $1408 for Facebook and $790 for the student diary. Other advertising methods cost $12 248 and did not attract any clients. Conclusion: Advertising STI health services for rural young people would be best to focus on referrals from other health services or health care websites.

Multiple Walkley Award winners Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker from Fairfax’s Melbourne newspaper, The Age, have rocked venerable Australian institutions to their foundations with their investigative reporting. Previous investigations have exposed drug smuggling within Australian Customs, bribery on behalf of the Reserve Bank and organised criminals’ manipulation of horse racing. The duo started this year with an investigation deemed worthy of a Royal Commission. Their reports across the Fairfax network and on the ABC’s 7.30 programme featured interviews with whistleblowers risking their lives to go on the record to publicise the relationship between Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and organised crime. The stories also exposed registered businesses owned by major organised crime figures winning lucrative construction contracts from the Victorian state government, and dealings within the New South Wales government’s Barangaroo development. Freelance reporter and University of Technology, Sydney, Journalism Masters student Lawrence Bull spoke with Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker about their latest project in two careers full of influential investigations, ‘Inside the Building Racket’.Frontline editor: Professor Wendy Bacon

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

IntroductionThe National School Chaplaincy and Student Welfare Program (NSCSWP) has been one of the most controversial Australian news topics in the past eight years. Newspaper representations of the NSCSWP have been prolific since the Program began in 2006/07. In my previous research into the NSCSWP, I found that initially the Program was well received. Following the High Court Challenge campaign, however, which began in late 2010, newspaper reports portrayed the NSCSWP in a predominantly negative light. These negative portrayals of the NSCSWP persisted in the lead up to the second High Court Challenge from 2013 until June 2014. During this time, newspaper representations portrayed the Program as an illegitimate form of counseling for state school students. However, I would argue that it was the newspaper representations of the NSCSWP that were in fact illegitimate. In this article, I contend that illegitimate representations of the NSCSWP became hegemonic because of a lack of evidence-based research conducted into the Program’s operation within state schools. Evidence-based research would have appropriately evaluated the Program’s progress and contributed to a legitimate and fair representation of chaplains in online newspapers. My analysis acknowledges the overwhelming prejudice against the NSCSWP. Whether chaplains were indeed a legitimate or illegitimate form of counseling is not my argument. My argument is that newspaper representations of the NSCSWP were illegitimate because news articles were presenting biased and incomplete information to the Australian community. Defining IllegitimacyIllegitimacy as a term has a long history dating back to early modern England, when it was commonly used to refer to children born out of wedlock (Pritchard 19). However, the definition of illegitimacy extends beyond this social phenomenon. Katie Pritchard states:The understanding of illegitimacy encompasses a kind of theoretical illegitimacy that is nothing to do with birth, referring to a kind of falseness or unsuitability that can be applied in many circumstances. (21)For this article, I will be using the term ‘illegitimate’ to describe how the newspaper representations of the NSCSWP were unsuitable because they were biased and lacked valuable information. Newspaper reports, which can be accessed online via the newspaper company’s website, include important authoritative voices. However, these voices expressed a certain opinion or concern, rather than delivering information that contributed to society’s understanding of the NSCSWP. Therefore, newspapers did not present legitimate facts, but instead a range of subjective opinions.The Illegitimacy of Newspaper ReportingThe ideological bias of newspapers has been recently examined regarding News Corp, the owner of national title The Australian, and many of the major Australian state newspapers: The Daily Telegraph; The Courier Mail, Herald Sun; The Advertiser; and Sunday Times. This organisation has recently been accused of showing bias in its newspaper articles (Meade). Meade quotes Mark Scott, the ABC Managing Director, who states:Given the aggressive editorial positioning of some of their mastheads and their willingness to adopt and pursue an editorial position, an ideological position and a market segmentation, you could argue that News Corporation newspapers have never been more assertive in exercising media power. (1)The market domination enjoyed by large organisations such as News Corp, and even Fairfax Media, leads to consistency in journalists’ writing on political, social, religious, and economic issues, which may predominate over the articles published by smaller newspapers. There is the concern that over time a particular point of view will be favoured. According to Mark Scott “a range of influential voices [is] essential to ensure a fair and open media” (Meade 1). Scott cites Rupert Murdoch who stated, back in 1967, that “freedom of the press mustn’t be one-sided just for a publisher to speak as he pleases, to try and bully the community” (Meade 1). Therefore, it has been acknowledged that a biased news article is illegitimate, and national news articles are to present facts, not the opinions of the newspaper.A Methodological Framework For this article I will utilise Norman Fairclough’s theory of Critical Discourse Analysis. Fairclough states:By ‘critical’ discourse analysis I mean discourse analysis which aims to systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes. (132-133)This method of analysis examines three assumptions: Existential, Propositional and Value. Existential assumptions make claims about what exists with regards to the problem, and refers to social phenomena such as globalisation or social cohesion (56). Propositional assumptions make predictions about what is or will be (55). Value assumptions simply evaluate things as good or bad, needed or not needed (57). These assumptions can be identified through analysis of the various direct quotes included within online newspaper articles.Direct quotations in newspaper articles available online often represent polarised views demonstrating whether people agree or disagree with the topic being discussed. The selection, or framing, of dominant voices within an article can be used to construct or re-present certain ideologies (Entman, 165). Entman explains that “we can define framing as the process of culling a few elements of perceived reality and assembling a narrative that highlights connections among them to promote a particular interpretation” (164). The framing of direct quotes within an article, therefore, assists the reader in identifying the article’s bias. The National School Chaplaincy and Student Welfare ProgramThe National School Chaplaincy Program was first established in 2006 by the Howard Government, and in 2011 Julia Gillard included secular youth workers, expanding it from 2012 to become the National School Chaplaincy and Student Welfare Program. According to the National School Chaplaincy and Student Welfare Guidelines, the Program aimed to “assist school communities to provide pastoral care and general spiritual, social and emotional comfort to all students, irrespective of their faith or beliefs” (6). Chaplaincy in Australia has been a predominantly Christian counseling service with Christianity being the most commonly practiced religion in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics). However, there have been chaplains representing other faiths such as Islam, Judaism and Buddhism (Australian Government 8). Chaplains were chosen by their respective schools and were partly funded by the Government to provide support to students and staff.State Newspaper Articles Online: Representations 2013-2014My sample of articles came from nine state newspapers with an online presence: The Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane Courier Mail, Adelaide Advertiser, Melbourne Age, Northern Times, The Australian, The West Australian, The Daily Telegraph, and The Mercury. A total of 36 articles were collected, from the newspaper’s Website, for 2013 and 2014, and were divided into two categories.The two categories are Supportive (of the Program) and Unsupportive (of the Program). In 2013, two articles were supportive of the Program, whereas in 2014 there were four. In 2013 three articles were unsupportive of the Program, whereas in 2014 there were 27 unsupportive articles, representing the growing interest in the scheme in the final lead up to the High Court Challenge in 2014. An online newspaper article from 2013, which portrays the NSCSWP and in particular chaplains as illegitimate, is Call for Naked School Chaplain to Be Defrocked (Domjen). This article explains how an off-duty school chaplain was preaching naked in the main street of a country town in NSW. The NSW Teachers Federation President Maurie Mulheron, and Parents and Citizens Association publicity officer Rachael Sowden were quoted in this article. It is through their direct quotes that the illegitimacy of chaplaincy is framed. President Mulheron states:We believe the chaplaincy program is wrong and that money should be used for an increase in school-based counsellors. Obviously the right checks and balances are not in place. (1)When President Mulheron states “We” it is unclear to the reader as to whether he is referring to all NSW Teachers or the organisation’s administrators. The reader is left to make their own assumptions about whom he is referring to. The President also makes a value assumption that the money would be better spent on school-based counselors, thus expressing his own opinion that they are a better option. A propositional assumption is made when he claims that the “right checks and balances are not in place”, but is he basing his claim on this one incident or is there other research to support this assumption?Perhaps this naked chaplain appeared fine when the school hired him, perhaps he does not have a previous record of inappropriate behaviour, perhaps it was an isolated incident. The reader is not given any background information on this chaplain and is therefore meant to take the President’s assumptions as legitimate fact. Ms Sowden, representing the Parents’ and Citizens’ Association, also expresses the same assumptions and concerns. Ms Sowden states:We have great concerns about the chaplain scheme - many parents do. We are concerned about whether they go through the same processes as teachers in terms of working with children checks and their suitability to the position, and this case highlights that.Ms Sowden makes a propositional assumption that many parents and citizens are concerned about the Program. It would be interesting to know what the Parents and Citizens Association was doing about this, considering the choice to have a chaplain is a decision made by the school community? Ms Sowden also asks whether chaplains “go through the same processes as teachers in terms of working with children checks and their suitability to the position”. Chaplains do not go through the same process as teachers in their training as they have a different role in the school. However, chaplains do require a Certificate IV in Pastoral Care as well as a Working with Children Check because they are in close proximity to children, and are being paid for their school counseling service (Working with Children Check). Ms Sowden’s value assumption that chaplains are unsuitable for the position is based on her own limited understanding of their qualifications, which she admits to not knowing. In fact, to be appointed to represent parents and citizens and to even voice their concerns, but not know the qualifications of chaplains in her community, is an interesting area of ignorance.This article has been framed to evaluate the actions of all chaplains through the example of a publicly-naked chaplain, discussed without context in this article. The Program is portrayed as hiring unsuitable and thus illegitimate chaplains. However, the quotes are based on concerns and assumptions that are unfounded, and are fears presented as facts. Therefore the representation is illegitimate because it does not report any information that the public can use to better understand the NSCSWP, or even to understand the circumstances surrounding the chaplain who preached naked in the street. Another article from 2014, which represents chaplains as illegitimate, is Push to Divert Chaplain Cash to School Councillors (Paine). This article focuses on the comments of the Tasmanian Association of State School Organisations President Jenny Eddington, and the Australian Education Union President Angelo Gavrielatos. These dominant voices within the Tasmanian and Australian communities are chosen to express their opinion that the money once used for chaplains should now be used to fund psychologists in schools. AEU President Angelo Gavrielatos states: Apart from undermining our secular traditions, this additional funding should have been allocated to schools to better meet the educational needs of students with trained, specialist staff.Mr Gavrielatos makes a propositional assumption that chaplains are untrained staff and are thus illegitimate staff. However, chaplains are trained and specialise in providing counseling services. Thus, through his call for “trained, specialist staff” he aims to delegitimize the training of chaplains. Mr Gavrielatos also makes a value assumption when he claims that the funding put towards the NSCSWP undermines “our secular traditions”. “Secular traditions” is an existential assumption in positioning that Australians have secular traditions, and that these do not involve chaplaincy because the Australian Government is not supposed to support religion. The Australian Bureau of Statistics states:Enlightenment principles promoted a secular government, detached from the church, that encouraged tolerance and supported religious pluralism, including the right to practice no religion. By Federation, this diversity was enshrined in the Australian Constitution, which says that the Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion. (1)The funding of the Program was a contentious issue from the time of its inception; although it could be argued that it was the prerogative of the Government to support the practice of diverse cultural and religious beliefs by allowing schools to hire religious counselors of their choice. Given that not every student is Christian some would perhaps benefit from chaplains or counselors representing other faiths.These news articles have selected dominant voices to construct and promote an ideology of chaplains as an illegitimate resource for school communities. In these newspaper reports existential, propositional and value assumptions were expressed by dominant voices who expressed concern about the role and behaviour of chaplains in schools. However, research into the Program and its operation within each state may have avoided the representation of unfounded and illegitimate assumptions.Evidence-Based Research: Avoiding Illegitimacy Over the course of the Chaplaincy Program various resources, such as reports and journal articles attempted to provide evidence of how the NSCSWP was funded and operated within state schools.The Department of Education received frequent progress reports by state schools who hired chaplains, although this information was not made available to the public. However, in 2011 then Education Minister Peter Garrett released a discussion paper informing Australians about the current set up of the Program and how the community could have their say on the Program’s fulfillment from 2012-2014. The discussion paper was reported on by The Australian, which portrayed the Program as not catering to the needs of Australian youth because chaplains are predominantly Christian (Ferrari). The newspaper report focuses on the concerns of Australian communities regarding the funding, and qualifications of chaplains, and the cost of the Program. Thus, the Program appeared illegitimate and as though it could not cater to the Australian community’s expectations.Reports conducted by organisations external to the Education Department tried to examine schools communities’ expectations and experiences of the Program. One such report was written in 2009 by Dr Philip Hughes and Professor Margaret Sims from Edith Cowan University who aimed to examine how Australian schools evaluated the Program, and the role of chaplains, but their report excluded the state of NSW.Hughes and Sims state that chaplains’ “contribution was widely appreciated” by schools (6). This report attempted to provide a legitimate and independent account of the Program, however, the report was deemed biased by NSW Greens MLC, Dr John Kaye who remarked that the study was “deeply flawed” and lacked independence (Thielking & MacKenzie 1). According to critics, the study focussed on the positive benefits of chaplains, but the only benefit that was unique to them was that they were religious (The Greens). The study also neglected to report that Hughes was an employee of the Christian Research Association and that his background could impede his objectivity. In the same year, 2009, ACCESS ministries published a report titled: The value of chaplains in Victorian schools. The independent research conducted by Social Compass covers: “the value of chaplains; their social, spiritual and academic impacts; the difference made to the health, well being and quality of life of students; and the contributions made to strengthen communities” (2).This study promoted a positive view of chaplaincy within schools and tried to report on a portion of the community’s experiences with chaplains. However, it was limited in that it pertains only to Victorian schools and received very little media attention online. Even if this information were available online it would have only related to Victoria. Further research conducted into chaplaincy has been published in the Journal of Christian Education. This journal contains many articles on chaplaincy, but these are not easily available online as they require a subscription. The findings from these articles have not been published in newspaper articles online and have therefore not been made available to the general public. The Christian bias of the journal may have also contributed to its contents being neglected by news articles made available online, although they might have assisted in providing a more balanced representation of the NSCSWP.The extent of the research conducted into The National School Chaplaincy and Student Welfare Program has not been entirely delineated here, but these are some of the prominent resources. Nonetheless, the rigorous evaluation of the contribution of the NSCSWP was minimal, and the quality of its evaluation predominantly biased.Robert Slavin states that school program evaluations must “produce reliable, unbiased, and meaningful information on the strength of evidence behind each program” (1). Unfortunately, the research conducted into the Chaplaincy Program was not free from bias, consistent or properly designed in a way that legitimately evaluated the NSCSWP. According to Monica Thielking and David MacKenzie:The fact is that the provision of support services for students in Australian schools has never been subjected to serious research and evaluation, and any analysis is made more difficult by the fact that the various states and territories deploy somewhat different models. (1)Thus, the information on the Chaplaincy Program’s progress and the responsibilities of chaplains in schools was not comprehensive or accurate enough to be appropriately reported in newspapers available online. Therefore, newspaper articles used quotes and information based on a limited understanding of the Program, which in turn produced illegitimate representations of the NSCSWP.ConclusionNewspaper reports available online drew conclusions about the Program’s effectiveness, which had not been appropriately tested. If research had been made available to the public, or published within state-based media online, Australians would have had a more legitimate understanding of the Program’s operation within state education, even if that understanding could not have changed the High Court ruling.The Chaplaincy Program demonstrates how a lack of evidence-based research allows the media to construct illegitimate representations based on promoting the assumptions of dominant, and I would argue the loudest, voices, in society. The bias represented in a consistent approach adopted by newspapers owned by dominant media companies, is a factor in the re-presentation and promotion of certain ideologies. This was made evident by the fact that, in 2014, across nine state newspapers available online, 27 articles were unsupportive of the Program as opposed to only four articles that were supportive. Audiences need to be presented with facts rather than opinions, which are based on very little research. Hopefully newspaper reporting will change in the future to offer audiences a more legitimate representation of news events. ReferencesACCESS Ministries. The Value of Chaplains in Victorian Schools. NSW, 2009. Australian Bureau of Statistics. "Reflecting a Nation: Stories from the 2011 Census, 2012–2013." 2012. Australian Government. National School Chaplaincy Program: A Discussion Paper. Australia: Commonwealth of Australian, 2011. Chaplaincy Australia. "Training." n.d. Commonwealth of Australia. National School Chaplaincy and Student Welfare Program Guidelines. Australia: Australian Government, 2012. Domjen, Briana. “Call for Naked School Chaplain to Be Defrocked.” The Australian 3 Feb. 2013: 1.Entman, Robert. "Framing Bias: Media in the Distribution of Power." Journal of Communications 1 (2007): 163-73.Fairclough, Norman. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Longman, 2003.Ferrari, Justine. "School Chaplains Not Representative." The Australian 12 Feb. 2011: 1.Hughes, Philip, and Margaret Sims. The Effectivess of Chaplaincy: As Provided by the National School Chaplaincy Association to Government Schools in Australia. Perth: Edith Cowan University, 2009.Meade, Amanda. "Mark Scott: News Corp Papers Never More Aggressive than Now." The Guardian 3 Oct. 2014: 1.Paine, Michelle. “Push to Divert Chaplain Cash to School Councillors.” The Mercury 21 Jun. 2014: 1.Pritchard, Katie. "Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Sovereignty in Shakespeare’s British Plays." U of Manchester, 2011.Slavin, Robert. "Perspectives on Evidence-Based Research in Education: What Works? Issues in Synthesizing Educational Program Evaluations." Educational Researcher 37.1 (2008): 5-14. The Greens. "Chaplaincy Program Study 'Flawed and Biased': Conclusions Not Justified." n.d. Thielking, Monica, and David MacKenzie. “School Chaplains: Time to Look at the Evidence.” 2011. Working with Children Check. "Categories of Work." 2008.

IntroductionIn 1802 George Howe (1769-1821), the recently appointed Government Printer, published Australia’s first book. The following year he established Australia’s first newspaper; an enterprise that ran counter to all the environmental factors of the day, including: 1) issues of logistics and a lack of appropriate equipment and basic materials to produce a regularly issued newspaper; 2) issues resulting from the very close supervision of production and the routine censorship by the Governor; and 3) issues associated with the colony’s primary purposes as a military outpost and as a penal settlement, creating conflicts between very different readerships. The Sydney Gazette was, critically for Howe, the only newspaper in the infant city for over two decades. Alternative voices would not enter the field of printed media until the 1820s and 1830s. This article briefly explores the birth of an Australian industry and looks at how a very modest newspaper overcame a range of serious challenges to ignite imaginations and lay a foundation for media empires.Government Printer The first book published in Australia was the New South Wales General Standing Orders and General Orders (1802), authorised by Governor Philip Gidley King for the purposes of providing a convenient, single-volume compilation of all Government Orders, issued in New South Wales, between 1791 and 1802. (As the Australian character has been described as “egalitarian, anti-authoritarian and irreverent” [D. Jones 690], it is fascinating that the nation’s first published book was a set of rules.) Prescribing law, order and regulation for the colony the index reveals the desires of those charged with the colony’s care and development, to contain various types of activities. The rules for convicts were, predictably, many. There were also multiple orders surrounding administration, animal husbandry as well as food stuffs and other stores. Some of the most striking headings in the index relate to crime. For example, in addition to headings pertaining to courts there are also headings for a broad range of offences from: “BAD Characters” to “OFFENSIVE Weapons – Again[s]t concealing” (i-xii). The young colony, still in its teenage years, was, for the short-term, very much working on survival and for the long-term developing ambitious plans for expansion and trade. It was clear though, through this volume, that there was no forgetting the colony of New South Wales was first, and foremost, a penal settlement which also served as a military outpost. Clear, too, was the fact that not all of those who were shipped out to the new colony were prepared to abandon their criminal careers which “did not necessarily stop with transportation” (Foyster 10). Containment and recidivism were matters of constant concern for the colony’s authorities. Colonial priorities could be seen in the fact that, when “Governor Arthur Phillip brought the first convicts (548 males and 188 females) to Port Jackson on 26 January 1788, he also brought a small press for printing orders, rules, and regulations” (Goff 103). The device lay dormant on arrival, a result of more immediate concerns to feed and house all those who made up the First Fleet. It would be several years before the press was pushed into sporadic service by the convict George Hughes for printing miscellaneous items including broadsides and playbills as well as for Government Orders (“Hughes, George” online). It was another convict (another man named George), convicted at the Warwick Assizes on March 1799 (Ferguson vi) then imprisoned and ultimately transported for shoplifting (Robb 15), who would transform the small hand press into an industry. Once under the hand of George Howe, who had served as a printer with several London newspapers including The Times (Sydney Gazette, “Never” 2) – the printing press was put to much more regular use. In these very humble circumstances, Australia’s great media tradition was born. Howe, as the Government Printer, transformed the press from a device dedicated to ephemera as well as various administrative matters into a crucial piece of equipment that produced the new colony’s first newspaper. Logistical Challenges Governor King, in the year following the appearance of the Standing Orders, authorised the publishing of Australia’s first newspaper, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. The publication history of The Sydney Gazette, in a reflection of some of the challenges faced by the printer, is erratic. First published on a Saturday from 5 March 1803, it quickly changed to a Sunday paper from 10 April 1803. Interestingly, Sunday “was not an approved day for the publication of newspapers, and although some English publishers had been doing so since about 1789, Sunday papers were generally frowned upon” (Robb 58). Yet, as argued by Howe a Sunday print run allowed for the inclusion of “the whole of the Ship News, and other Incidental Matter, for the preceeding week” (Sydney Gazette, “To the Public” 1).The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser Vol. 1, No. 1, 5 March 1803 (Front Page)Call Number DL F8/50, Digital ID a345001, State Library of New South WalesPublished weekly until 1825, then bi-weekly until 1827 before coming out tri-weekly until 20 October 1842 (Holden 14) there were some notable pauses in production. These included one in 1807 (Issue 214, 19 April-Issue 215, 7 June) and one in 1808-1809 (Issue 227, 30 August-Issue 228, 15 May) due to a lack of paper, with the latter pause coinciding with the Rum Rebellion and the end of William Bligh’s term as Governor of New South Wales (see: Karskens 186-88; Mundle 323-37). There was, too, a brief attempt at publishing as a daily from 1 January 1827 which lasted only until 10 February of that year when the title began to appear tri-weekly (Kirkpatrick online; Holden 14). There would be other pauses, including one of two weeks, shortly before the final issue was produced on 20 October 1842. There were many problems that beset The Sydney Gazette with paper shortages being especially challenging. Howe regularly advertised for: “any quantity” of Spanish paper (e.g.: Sydney Gazette, “Wanted to Purchase” 4) and needing to be satisfied “with a variety of size and colour” (P.M. Jones 39). In addition, the procurement of ink was so difficult in the colony, that Howe often resorted to making his own out of “charcoal, gum and shark oil” (P.M. Jones 39).The work itself was physically demanding and papers printed during this period, by hand, required a great deal of effort with approximately “250 sheets per hour … [the maximum] produced by a printer and his assistant” (Robb 8). The printing press itself was inadequate and the subject of occasional repairs (Sydney Gazette, “We Have” 2). Type was also a difficulty. As Gwenda Robb explains, traditionally six sets of an alphabet were supplied to a printer with extras for ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘r’ and ‘t’ as well as ‘s’. Without ample type Howe was required to improvise as can be seen in using a double ‘v’ to create a ‘w’ and an inverted ‘V’ to represent a capital ‘A’ (50, 106). These quirky work arounds, combined with the use of the long-form ‘s’ (‘∫’) for almost a full decade, can make The Sydney Gazette a difficult publication for modern readers to consume. Howe also “carried the financial burden” of the paper, dependent, as were London papers of the late eighteenth century, on advertising (Robb 68, 8). Howe also relied upon subscriptions for survival, with the collection of payments often difficult as seen in some subscribers being two years, or more, in arrears (e.g.: Sydney Gazette, “Sydney Gazette” 1; Ferguson viii; P.M. Jones 38). Governor Lachlan Macquarie granted Howe an annual salary, in 1811, of £60 (Byrnes 557-559) offering some relief, and stability, for the beleaguered printer.Gubernatorial Supervision Governor King wrote to Lord Hobart (then Secretary of State for War and the Colonies), on 9 May 1803: it being desirable that the settlers and inhabitants at large should be benefitted by useful information being dispersed among them, I considered that a weekly publication would greatly facilitate that design, for which purpose I gave permission to an ingenious man, who manages the Government printing press, to collect materials weekly, which, being inspected by an officer, is published in the form of a weekly newspaper, copies of which, as far as they have been published, I have the honor to enclose. (85)In the same letter, King wrote: “to the list of wants I have added a new fount of letters which may be procured for eight or ten pounds, sufficient for our purpose, if approved of” (85). King’s motivations were not purely altruistic. The population of the colony was growing in Sydney Cove and in the outlying districts, thus: “there was an increasing administrative need for information to be disseminated in a more accessible form than the printed handbills of government orders” (Robb 49). There was, however, a need for the administration to maintain control and the words “Published By Authority”, appearing on the paper’s masthead, were a constant reminder to the printer that The Sydney Gazette was “under the censorship of the Secretary to the Governor, who examined all proofs” (Ferguson viii). The high level of supervision, worked in concert with the logistical difficulties described above, ensured the newspaper was a source of great strain and stress. All for the meagre reward of “6d per copy” (Ferguson viii). This does not diminish Howe’s achievement in establishing a newspaper, an accomplishment outlined, with some pride, in an address printed on the first page of the first issue:innumerable as the Obstacles were which threatened to oppose our Undertaking, yet we are happy to affirm that they were not insurmountable, however difficult the task before us.The utility of a PAPER in the COLONY, as it must open a source of solid information, will, we hope, be universally felt and acknowledged. (Sydney Gazette, “Address” 1)Howe carefully kept his word and he “wrote nothing like a signature editorial column, nor did he venture his personal opinions, conscious always of the powers of colonial officials” (Robb 72). An approach to reportage he passed to his eldest son and long-term assistant, Robert (1795-1829), who later claimed The Sydney Gazette “reconciled in one sheet the merits of the London Gazette in upholding the Government and the London Times in defending the people” (Walker 10). The censorship imposed on The Sydney Gazette, by the Governor, was lifted in 1824 (P.M. Jones 40), when the Australian was first published without permission: Governor Thomas Brisbane did not intervene in the new enterprise. The appearance of unauthorised competition allowed Robert Howe to lobby for the removal of all censorship restrictions on The Sydney Gazette, though he was careful to cite “greater dispatch and earlier publication, not greater freedom of expression, as the expected benefit” (Walker 6). The sudden freedom was celebrated, and still appreciated many years after it was given:the Freedom of the Press has now been in existence amongst us on the verge of four years. In October 1824, we addressed a letter to the Colonial Government, fervently entreating that those shackles, under which the Press had long laboured, might be removed. Our prayer was attended to, and the Sydney Gazette, feeling itself suddenly introduced to a new state of existence, demonstrated to the Colonists the capabilities that ever must flow from the spontaneous exertions of Constitutional Liberty. (Sydney Gazette, “Freedom” 2)Early Readerships From the outset, George Howe presented a professional publication. The Sydney Gazette was formatted into three columns with the front page displaying a formal masthead featuring a scene of Sydney and the motto “Thus We Hope to Prosper”. Gwenda Robb argues the woodcut, the first produced in the colony, was carved by John W. Lewin who “had plenty of engraving skills” and had “returned to Sydney [from a voyage to Tahiti] in December 1802” (51) while Roger Butler has suggested that “circumstances point to John Austin who arrived in Sydney in 1800” as being the engraver (91). The printed text was as vital as the visual supports and every effort was made to present full accounts of colonial activities. “As well as shipping and court news, there were agricultural reports, religious homilies, literary extracts and even original poetry written by Howe himself” (Blair 450). These items, of course, sitting alongside key Government communications including General Orders and Proclamations.Howe’s language has been referred to as “florid” (Robb 52), “authoritative and yet filled with deference for all authority, pompous in a stiff, affected eighteenth century fashion” (Green 10) and so “some of Howe’s readers found the Sydney Gazette rather dull” (Blair 450). Regardless of any feelings towards authorial style, circulation – without an alternative – steadily increased with the first print run in 1802 being around 100 copies but by “the early 1820s, the newspaper’s production had grown to 300 or 400 copies” (Blair 450).In a reflection of the increasing sophistication of the Sydney-based reader, George Howe, and Robert Howe, would also publish some significant, stand-alone, texts. These included several firsts: the first natural history book printed in the colony, Birds of New South Wales with their Natural History (1813) by John W. Lewin (praised as a text “printed with an elegant and classical simplicity which makes it the highest typographical achievement of George Howe” [Wantrup 278]); the first collection of poetry published in the colony First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819) by Barron Field; the first collection of poetry written by a Australian-born author, Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel (1826) by Charles Tompson; and the first children’s book A Mother’s Offering to Her Children: By a Lady, Long Resident in New South Wales (1841) by Charlotte Barton. The small concern also published mundane items such as almanacs and receipt books for the Bank of New South Wales (Robb 63, 72). All against the backdrop of printing a newspaper.New Voices The Sydney Gazette was Australia’s first newspaper and, critically for Howe, the only newspaper for over two decades. (A second paper appeared in 1810 but the Derwent Star and Van Diemen’s Land Intelligencer, which only managed twelve issues, presented no threat to The Sydney Gazette.) No genuine, local rival entered the field until 1824, when the Australian was founded by barristers William Charles Wentworth and Robert Wardell. The Monitor debuted in 1826, followed the Sydney Herald in 1831 and the Colonist in 1835 (P.M. Jones 38). It was the second title, the Australian, with a policy that asserted articles to be: “Independent, yet consistent – free, yet not licentious – equally unmoved by favours and by fear” (Walker 6), radically changed the newspaper landscape. The new paper made “a strong point of its independence from government control” triggering a period in which colonial newspapers “became enmeshed with local politics” (Blair 451). This new age of opinion reflected how fast the colony was evolving from an antipodean gaol into a complex society. Also, two papers, without censorship restrictions, without registration, stamp duties or advertisement duties meant, as pointed out by R.B. Walker, that “in point of law the Press in the remote gaol of exile was now freer than in the country of origin” (6). An outcome George Howe could not have predicted as he made the long journey, as a convict, to New South Wales. Of the early competitors, the only one that survives is the Sydney Herald (The Sydney Morning Herald from 1842), which – founded by immigrants Alfred Stephens, Frederick Stokes and William McGarvie – claims the title of Australia’s oldest continuously published newspaper (Isaacs and Kirkpatrick 4-5). That such a small population, with so many pressing issues, factions and political machinations, could support a first newspaper, then competitors, is a testament to the high regard, with which newspaper reportage was held. Another intruder would be The Government Gazette. Containing only orders and notices in the style of the London Gazette (McLeay 1), lacking any news items or private advertisements (Walker 19), it was first issued on 7 March 1832 (and continues, in an online format, today). Of course, Government orders and other notices had news value and newspaper proprietors could bid for exclusive rights to produce these notices until a new Government Printer was appointed in 1841 (Walker 20).Conclusion George Howe, an advocate of “reason and common sense” died in 1821 placing The Sydney Gazette in the hands of his son who “fostered religion” (Byrnes 557-559). Robert Howe, served as editor, experiencing firsthand the perils and stresses of publishing, until he drowned in a boating accident in Sydney Harbour, in 1829 leaving the paper to his widow Ann Howe (Blair 450-51). The newspaper would become increasingly political leading to controversy and financial instability; after more changes in ownership and in editorial responsibility, The Sydney Gazette, after almost four decades of delivering the news – as a sole voice and then as one of several alternative voices – ceased publication in 1842. During a life littered with personal tragedy, George Howe laid the foundation stone for Australia’s media empires. His efforts, in extraordinary circumstances and against all environmental indicators, serve as inspiration to newspapers editors, proprietors and readers across the country. He established the Australian press, an institution that has been described asa profession, an art, a craft, a business, a quasi-public, privately owned institution. It is full of grandeurs and faults, sublimities and pettinesses. It is courageous and timid. It is fallible. It is indispensable to the successful on-going of a free people. (Holden 15)George Howe also created an artefact of great beauty. The attributes of The Sydney Gazette are listed, in a perfunctory manner, in most discussions of the newspaper’s history. The size of the paper. The number of columns. The masthead. The changes seen across 4,503 issues. Yet, consistently overlooked, is how, as an object, the newspaper is an exquisite example of the printed word. There is a physicality to the paper that is in sharp contrast to contemporary examples of broadsides, tabloids and online publications. Concurrently fragile and robust: its translucent sheets and mottled print revealing, starkly, the problems with paper and ink; yet it survives, in several collections, over two centuries since the first issue was produced. The elegant layout, the glow of the paper, the subtle crackling sound as the pages are turned. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser is an astonishing example of innovation and perseverance. It provides essential insights into Australia’s colonial era. It is a metonym for making words matter. AcknowledgementsThe author offers her sincere thanks to Geoff Barker, Simon Dwyer and Peter Kirkpatrick for their comments on an early draft of this paper. The author is also grateful to Bridget Griffen-Foley for engaging in many conversations about Australian newspapers. ReferencesBlair, S.J. “Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser.” A Companion to the Australian Media. Ed. Bridget Griffen-Foley. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014.Butler, Roger. Printed Images in Colonial Australia 1801-1901. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2007.Byrnes, J.V. “Howe, George (1769–1821).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography: 1788–1850, A–H. Canberra: Australian National University, 1966. 557-559. Ferguson, J.A. “Introduction.” The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser: A Facsimile Reproduction of Volume One, March 5, 1803 to February 26, 1804. Sydney: The Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales in Association with Angus & Robertson, 1963. v-x. Foyster, Elizabeth. “Introduction: Newspaper Reporting of Crime and Justice.” Continuity and Change 22.1 (2007): 9-12.Goff, Victoria. “Convicts and Clerics: Their Roles in the Infancy of the Press in Sydney, 1803-1840.” Media History 4.2 (1998): 101-120.Green, H.M. “Australia’s First Newspaper.” Sydney Morning Herald, 11 Apr. 1935: 10.Holden, W. Sprague. Australia Goes to Press. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1961. “Hughes, George (?–?).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography: 1788–1850, A–H. Canberra: Australian National University, 1966. 562. Isaacs, Victor, and Rod Kirkpatrick. Two Hundred Years of Sydney Newspapers. Richmond: Rural Press, 2003. Jones, Dorothy. “Humour and Satire (Australia).” Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. 2nd ed. Eds. Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly. London: Routledge, 2005. 690-692.Jones, Phyllis Mander. “Australia’s First Newspaper.” Meanjin 12.1 (1953): 35-46. Karskens, Grace. The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010. King, Philip Gidley. “Letter to Lord Hobart, 9 May 1803.” Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, Governors’ Despatches to and from England, Volume IV, 1803-1804. Ed. Frederick Watson. Sydney: Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1915.Kirkpatrick, Rod. Press Timeline: 1802 – 1850. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2011. 6 Jan. 2017 <https://www.nla.gov.au/content/press-timeline-1802-1850>. McLeay, Alexander. “Government Notice.” The New South Wales Government Gazette 1 (1832): 1. Mundle, R. Bligh: Master Mariner. Sydney: Hachette, 2016.New South Wales General Standing Orders and General Orders: Selected from the General Orders Issued by Former Governors, from the 16th of February, 1791, to the 6th of September, 1800. Also, General Orders Issued by Governor King, from the 28th of September, 1800, to the 30th of September, 1802. Sydney: Government Press, 1802. Robb, Gwenda. George Howe: Australia’s First Publisher. Kew: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2003.Spalding, D.A. Collecting Australian Books: Notes for Beginners. 1981. Mawson: D.A. Spalding, 1982. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. “Address.” 5 Mar. 1803: 1.———. “To the Public.” 2 Apr. 1803: 1.———. “Wanted to Purchase.” 26 June 1803: 4.———. “We Have the Satisfaction to Inform Our Readers.” 3 Nov. 1810: 2. ———. “Sydney Gazette.” 25 Dec. 1819: 1. ———. “The Freedom of the Press.” 29 Feb. 1828: 2.———. “Never Did a More Painful Task Devolve upon a Public Writer.” 3 Feb. 1829: 2. Walker, R.B. The Newspaper Press in New South Wales, 1803-1920. Sydney: Sydney UP, 1976.Wantrup, Johnathan. Australian Rare Books: 1788-1900. Sydney: Hordern House, 1987.

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. 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“There is nothing more public than privacy.” (Berlant and Warner, Sex) How did it come to this? How did it happen that a one-off, two-hour event at a public swimming pool in a suburb of outer Melbourne ignited international hate mail and generated media-fanned political anguish and debate about the proper use of public spaces? In 2010, women who attend a women’s only swim session on Sunday evenings at the Dandenong Oasis public swimming pool asked the pool management and the local council for permission to celebrate the end of Ramadan at the pool during the time of their regular swim session. The request was supported by the pool managers and the council and promoted by both as an opportunity for family and friends to get together in a spirit of multicultural learning and understanding. Responding to criticisms of the event as an unreasonable claim on public facilities by one group, the Mayor of the City of Greater Dandenong, Jim Memeti, rejected claims that this event discriminates against non-Muslim residents of the suburb. But here’s the rub. The event, to be held after hours at the pool, requires all participants older than ten years of age to follow a dress code of knee-length shorts and T-shirts. This is a suburban moment that is borne of but exceeds the local. It reflects and responds to a contemporary global conundrum of great political and theoretical significance—how to negotiate and govern the relations between multiculturalism, religion, gender, sexual freedom, and democracy. Specifically this event speaks to how multicultural democracy in the public sphere negotiates the public presence and expression of different cultural and religious frameworks related to gender and sexuality. This is demanding political stuff. Situated in the messy political and theoretical terrains of the relation between public space and the public sphere, this local moment called for political judgement about how cultural differences should be allowed to manifest in and through public space, giving consideration to the potential effects of these decisions on an inclusive multicultural democracy. The local authorities in Dandenong engaged in an admirable process of democratic labour as they puzzled over how to make decisions that were responsible and equitable, in the absence of a rulebook or precedents for success. Ultimately however this mode of experimental decision-making, which will become increasingly necessary to manage such predicaments in the future, was foreclosed by unwarranted and unhelpful media outrage. "Foreclosed" here stresses the preemptive nature of the loss; a lost opportunity for trialing approaches to governing cultural diversity that may fail, but might then be modified. It was condemned in advance of either success or failure. The role of the media rather than the discomfort of the local publics has been decisive in this event.This Multicultural SuburbDandenong is approximately 30 kilometres southeast of central Melbourne. Originally home to the Bunorong People of the Kulin nation, it was settled by pastoralists by the 1800s, heavily industrialised during the twentieth century, and now combines cultural diversity with significant social disadvantage. The City of Greater Dandenong is proud of its reputation as the most culturally and linguistically diverse municipality in Australia. Its population of approximately 138,000 comprises residents from 156 different language groups. More than half (56%) of its population was born overseas, with 51% from nations where English is not the main spoken language. These include Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Italy, Greece, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It is also a place of significant religious diversity with residents identifying as Buddhist (15 per cent) Muslim (8 per cent), Hindu (2 per cent) and Christian (52 per cent) [CGD]. Its city logo, “Great Place, Great People” evokes its twin pride in the placemaking power of its diverse population. It is also a brazen act of civic branding to counter its reputation as a derelict and dangerous suburb. In his recent book The Bogan Delusion, David Nichols cites a "bogan" website that names Dandenong as one of Victoria’s two most bogan areas. The other was Moe. (p72). The Sunday Age newspaper had already depicted Dandenong as one of two excessively dangerous suburbs “where locals fear to tread” (Elder and Pierik). The other suburb of peril was identified as Footscray.Central Dandenong is currently the site of Australia’s largest ever state sponsored Urban Revitalisation program with a budget of more than $290 million to upgrade infrastructure, that aims to attract $1billion in private investment to provide housing and future employment.The Cover UpIn September 2010, the Victorian and Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal (VCAT) granted the YMCA an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to allow a dress code for the Ramadan event at the Oasis swimming pool that it manages. The "Y" sees the event as “an opportunity for the broader community to learn more about Ramadan and the Muslim faith, and encourages all members of Dandenong’s diverse community to participate” (YMCA Ramadan). While pool management and the municipal council refer to the event as an "opening up" of the closed swimming session, the media offer a different reading of the VCAT decision. The trope of the "the cover up" has framed most reports and commentaries (Murphy; Szego). The major focus of the commentaries has not been the event per se, but the call to dress "appropriately." Dress codes however are a cultural familiar. They exist for workplaces, schools, nightclubs, weddings, racing and sporting clubs and restaurants, to name but a few. While some of these codes or restrictions are normatively imposed rather than legally required, they are not alien to cultural life in Australia. Moreover, there are laws that prohibit people from being meagerly dressed or naked in public, including at beaches, swimming pools and so on. The dress code for this particular swimming pool event was, however, perceived to be unusual and, in a short space of time, "unusual" converted to "social threat."Responses to media polls about the dress code reveal concerns related to the symbolic dimensions of the code. The vast majority of those who opposed the Equal Opportunity exemption saw it as the thin edge of the multicultural wedge, a privatisation of public facilities, or a denial of the public’s right to choose how to dress. Tabloid newspapers reported on growing fears of Islamisation, while the more temperate opposition situated the decision as a crisis of human rights associated with tolerating illiberal cultural practices. Julie Szego reflects this view in an opinion piece in The Age newspaper:the Dandenong pool episode is neither trivial nor insignificant. It is but one example of human rights laws producing outcomes that restrict rights. It raises tough questions about how far public authorities ought to go in accommodating cultural practices that sit uneasily with mainstream Western values. (Szego)Without enquiring into the women’s request and in the absence of the women’s views about what meaning the event held for them, most media commentators and their electronically wired audiences treated the announcement as yet another alarming piece of evidence of multicultural failure and the potential Islamisation of Australia. The event raised specific concerns about the double intrusion of cultural difference and religion. While the Murdoch tabloid Herald Sun focused on the event as “a plan to force families to cover up to avoid offending Muslims at a public event” (Murphy) the liberal Age newspaper took a more circumspect approach, reporting on its small vox pop at the Dandenong pool. Some people here referred to the need to respect religions and seemed unfazed by the exemption and the event. Those who disagreed thought it was important not to enforce these (dress) practices on other people (Carey).It is, I believe, significant that several employees of the local council informed me that most of the opposition has come from the media, people outside of Dandenong and international groups who oppose the incursion of Islam into non-Islamic settings. Opposition to the event did not appear to derive from local concern or opposition.The overwhelming majority of Herald Sun comments expressed emphatic opposition to the dress code, citing it variously as unAustralian, segregationist, arrogant, intolerant and sexist. The Herald Sun polled readers (in a self-selecting and of course highly unrepresentative on-line poll) asking them to vote on whether or not they agreed with the VCAT exemption. While 5.52 per cent (512 voters) agreed with the ruling, 94.48 per cent (8,760) recorded disagreement. In addition, the local council has, for the first time in memory, received a stream of hate-mail from international anti-Islam groups. Muslim women’s groups, feminists, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner and academics have also weighed in. According to local reports, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Shahram Akbarzadeh, considered the exemption was “nonsense” and would “backfire and the people who will pay for it will be the Muslim community themselves” (Haberfield). He repudiated it as an example of inclusion and tolerance, labeling it “an effort of imposing a value system (sic)” (Haberfield). He went so far as to suggest that, “If Tony Abbott wanted to participate in his swimwear he wouldn’t be allowed in. That’s wrong.” Tasneem Chopra, chairwoman of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council and Sherene Hassan from the Islamic Council of Victoria, both expressed sensitivity to the group’s attempt to establish an inclusive event but would have preferred the dress code to be a matter of choice rather coercion (Haberfield, "Mayor Defends Dandenong Pool Cover Up Order"). Helen Szoke, the Commissioner of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, defended the pool’s exemption from the Law that she oversees. “Matters such as this are not easy to resolve and require a balance to be achieved between competing rights and obligations. Dress codes are not uncommon: e.g., singlets, jeans, thongs etc in pubs/hotels” (in Murphy). The civil liberties organisation, Liberty Victoria, supported the ban because the event was to be held after hours (Murphy). With astonishing speed this single event not only transformed the suburban swimming pool to a theatre of extra-local disputes about who and what is entitled to make claims on public space and publically funded facilities, but also fed into charged debates about the future of multiculturalism and the vulnerability of the nation to the corrosive effects of cultural and religious difference. In this sense suburbs like Dandenong are presented as sites that not only generate fear about physical safety but whose suburban sensitivities to its culturally diverse population represent a threat to the safety of the nation. Thus the event both reflects and produces an antipathy to cultural difference and to the place where difference resides. This aversion is triggered by and mediated in this case through the figure, rather than the (corpo)reality, of the Muslim woman. In this imagining, the figure of the Muslim woman is assigned the curious symbolic role of "cultural creep." The debates around the pool event is not about the wellbeing or interests of the Muslim women themselves, nor are broader debates about the perceived, culturally-derived restrictions imposed on Muslim women living in Australia or other western countries. The figure of the Muslim woman is, I would argue, simply the ground on which the debates are held. The first debate relates to social and public space, access to which is considered fundamental to freedom and participatory democracy, and in current times is addressed in terms of promoting inclusion, preventing exclusion and finding opportunities for cross cultural encounters. The second relates not to public space per se, but to the public sphere or the “sphere of private people coming together as a public” for political deliberation (Habermas 21). The literature and discussions dealing with these two terrains have remained relatively disconnected (Low and Smith) with public space referring largely to activities and opportunities in the socio-cultural domain and the public sphere addressing issues of politics, rights and democracy. This moment in Dandenong offers some modest leeway for situating "the suburb" as an ideal site for coalescing these disparate discussions. In this regard I consider Iveson’s provocative and productive question about whether some forms of exclusions from suburban public space may actually deepen the democratic ideals of the public sphere. Exclusions may in such cases be “consistent with visions of a democratically inclusive city” (216). He makes his case in relation to a dispute about the exclusion of men exclusion from a women’s only swimming pool in the Sydney suburb of Coogee. The Dandenong case is similarly exclusive with an added sense of exclusion generated by an "inclusion with restrictions."Diversity, Difference, Public Space and the Public SphereAs a prelude to this discussion of exclusion as democracy, I return to the question that opened this article: how did it come to this? How is it that Australia has moved from its renowned celebration and pride in its multiculturalism so much in evidence at the suburban level through what Ghassan Hage calls an “unproblematic” multiculturalism (233) and what others have termed “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham). Local cosmopolitanisms are often evinced through the daily rituals of people enjoying the ethnic cuisines of their co-residents’ pasts, and via moments of intercultural encounter. People uneventfully rub up against and greet each other or engage in everyday acts of kindness that typify life in multicultural suburbs, generating "reservoirs of hope" for democratic and cosmopolitan cities (Thrift 147). In today’s suburbs, however, the “Imperilled Muslim women” who need protection from “dangerous Muslim men” (Razack 129) have a higher discursive profile than ethnic cuisine as the exemplar of multiculturalism. Have we moved from pleasure to hostility or was the suburban pleasure in racial difference always about a kind of “eating the other” (bell hooks 378). That is to ask whether our capacity to experience diversity positively has been based on consumption, consuming the other for our own enrichment, whereas living with difference entails a commitment not to consumption but to democracy. This democratic multicultural commitment is a form of labour rather than pleasure, and its outcome is not enrichment but transformation (although this labour can be pleasurable and transformation might be enriching). Dandenong’s prized cultural precincts, "Little India" and the "Afghan bazaar" are showcases of food, artefacts and the diversity of the suburb. They are centres of pleasurable and exotic consumption. The pool session, however, requires one to confront difference. In simple terms we can think about ethnic food, festivals and handicrafts as cultural diversity, and the Muslim woman as cultural difference.This distinction between diversity and difference is useful for thinking through the relation between multiculturalism in public space and multicultural democracy of the public sphere. According to the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, while a neoliberal sensibility supports cultural diversity in the public space, cultural difference is seen as a major cause of social problems associated with immigrants, and has a diminishing effect on the public sphere (14). According to Eriksen, diversity is understood as aesthetic, or politically and morally neutral expressions of culture that are enriching (Hage 118) or digestible. Difference, however, refers to morally objectionable cultural practices. In short, diversity is enriching. Difference is corrosive. Eriksen argues that differences that emerge from distinct cultural ideas and practices are deemed to create conflicts with majority cultures, weaken social solidarity and lead to unacceptable violations of human rights in minority groups. The suburban swimming pool exists here at the boundary of diversity and difference, where the "presence" of diverse bodies may enrich, but their different practices deplete and damage existing culture. The imperilled Muslim woman of the suburbs carries a heavy symbolic load. She stands for major global contests at the border of difference and diversity in three significant domains, multiculturalism, religion and feminism. These three areas are positioned simultaneously in public space and of the public sphere and she embodies a specific version of each in this suburban setting. First, there a global retreat from multiculturalism evidenced in contemporary narratives that describe multiculturalism (both as official policy and unofficial sensibility) as failed and increasingly ineffective at accommodating or otherwise dealing with religious, cultural and ethnic differences (Cantle; Goodhart; Joppke; Poynting and Mason). In the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, popular media sources and political discourses speak of "parallel lives,"immigrant enclaves, ghettoes, a lack of integration, the clash of values, and illiberal cultural practices. The covered body of the Muslim woman, and more particularly the Muslim veil, are now read as visual signs of this clash of values and of the refusal to integrate. Second, religion has re-emerged in the public domain, with religious groups and individuals making particular claims on public space both on the basis of their religious identity and in accord with secular society’s respect for religious freedom. This is most evident in controversies in France, Belgium and Netherlands associated with banning niqab in public and other religious symbols in schools, and in Australia in court. In this sense the covered Muslim woman raises concerns and indignation about the rightful place of religion in the public sphere and in social space. Third, feminism is increasingly invoked as the ground from which claims about the imperilled Muslim woman are made, particularly those about protecting women from their dangerous men. The infiltration of the Muslim presence into public space is seen as a threat to the hard won gains of women’s freedom enjoyed by the majority population. This newfound feminism of the public sphere, posited by those who might otherwise disavow feminism, requires some serious consideration. This public discourse rarely addresses the discrimination, violation and lack of freedom experienced systematically on an everyday basis by women of majority cultural backgrounds in western societies (such as Australia). However, the sexism of racially and religiously different men is readily identified and decried. This represents a significant shift to a dubious feminist register of the public sphere such that: “[w]omen of foreign origin, ...more specifically Muslim women…have replaced the traditional housewife as the symbol of female subservience” (Tissot 41–42).The three issues—multiculturalism, religion and feminism—are, in the Dandenong pool context, contests about human rights, democracy and the proper use of public space. Szego’s opinion piece sees the Dandenong pool "cover up" as an example of the conundrum of how human rights for some may curtail the human rights of others and lead us into a problematic entanglement of universal "rights," with claims of difference. In her view the combination of human rights and multiculturalism in the case of the Dandenong Pool accommodates illiberal practices that put the rights of "the general public" at risk, or as she puts it, on a “slippery slope” that results in a “watering down of our human rights.” Ideas that entail women making a claim for private time in public space are ultimately not good for "us."Such ideas run counter to the West's more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom—including both freedom of religion and freedom from religion—and for gender equality. Our public authorities ought to be pushing back hardest when these values are under threat. Yet this is precisely where they've been buckling under pressure (Szego)But a different reading of the relation between public and private space, human rights, democracy and gender freedom is readily identifiable in the Dandenong event—if one looks for it. Living with difference, I have already suggested, is a problem of democracy and the public sphere and does not so easily correspond to consuming diversity, as it demands engagement with cultural difference. In what remains, I explore how multicultural democracy in the public sphere and women’s rights in public and private realms relate, firstly, to the burgeoning promise of democracy and civility that might emerge in public space through encounter and exchange. I also point out how this moment in Dandenong might be read as a singular contribution to dealing with this global problematic of living with difference; of democracy in the public sphere. Public urban space has become a focus for speculation among geographers and sociologists in particular, about the prospects for an enhanced civic appreciation of living with difference through encountering strangers. Random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures typify contemporary urban life. It remains an open question however as to whether these encounters open up or close down possibilities for conviviality and understanding, and whether they undo or harden peoples’ fears and prejudices. There is, however, at least in some academic and urban planning circles, some hope that the "throwntogetherness" (Massey) and the "doing" of togetherness (Laurier and Philo) found in the multicultural city may generate some lessons and opportunities for developing a civic culture and political commitment to living with difference. Alongside the optimism of those who celebrate the city, the suburb, and public spaces as forging new ways of living with difference, there are those such as Gill Valentine who wonder how this might be achieved in practice (324). Ash Amin similarly notes that city or suburban public spaces are not necessarily “the natural servants of multicultural engagement” (Ethnicity 967). Amin and Valentine point to the limited or fleeting opportunities for real engagement in these spaces. Moreover Valentine‘s research in the UK revealed that the spatial proximity found in multicultural spaces did not so much give rise to greater mutual respect and engagement, but to a frustrated “white self-segregation in the suburbs.” She suggests therefore that civility and polite exchange should not be mistaken for respect (324). Amin contends that it is the “micro-publics” of social encounters found in workplaces, schools, gardens, sports clubs [and perhaps swimming pools] rather than the fleeting encounters of the street or park, that offer better opportunities for meaningful intercultural exchange. The Ramadan celebration at the pool, with its dress code and all, might be seen more fruitfully as a purposeful event engaging a micro-public in which people are able to “break out of fixed relations and fixed notions” and “learn to become different” (Amin, Ethnicity 970) without that generating discord and resentment.Micropublics, Subaltern Publics and a Democracy of (Temporary) ExclusionsIs this as an opportunity to bring the global and local together in an experiment of forging new democratic spaces for gender, sexuality, culture and for living with difference? More provocatively, can we see exclusion and an invitation to share in this exclusion as a precursor to and measure of, actually existing democracy? Painter and Philo have argued that democratic citizenship is questionable if “people cannot be present in public spaces (streets, squares, parks, cinemas, churches, town halls) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’…" (Iveson 216). Feminists have long argued that distinctions between public and private space are neither straightforward nor gender neutral. For Nancy Fraser the terms are “cultural classifications and rhetorical labels” that are powerful because they are “frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views and topics and to valorize others” (73). In relation to women and other subordinated minorities, the "rhetoric of privacy" has been historically used to restrict the domain of legitimate public contestation. In fact the notion of what is public and particularly notions of the "public interest" and the "public good" solidify forms of subordination. Fraser suggests the concept of "subaltern counterpublics" as an alternative to notions of "the public." These are discursive spaces where groups articulate their needs, and demands are circulated formulating their own public sphere. This challenges the very meaning and foundational premises of ‘the public’ rather than simply positing strategies of inclusion or exclusion. The twinning of Amin’s notion of "micro-publics" and Fraser’s "counterpublics" is, I suggest, a fruitful approach to interpreting the Dandenong pool issue. It invites a reading of this singular suburban moment as an experiment, a trial of sorts, in newly imaginable ways of living democratically with difference. It enables us to imagine moments when a limited democratic right to exclude might create the sorts of cultural exchanges that give rise to a more authentic and workable recognition of cultural difference. I am drawn to think that this is precisely the kind of democratic experimentation that the YMCA and Dandenong Council embarked upon when they applied for the Equal Opportunity exemption. I suggest that by trialing, rather than fixing forever a "critically exclusive" access to the suburban swimming pool for two hours per year, they were in fact working on the practical problem of how to contribute in small but meaningful ways to a more profoundly free democracy and a reworked public sphere. In relation to the similar but distinct example of the McIver pool for women and children in Coogee, New South Wales, Kurt Iveson makes the point that such spaces of exclusion or withdrawal, “do not necessarily serve simply as spaces where people ‘can be themselves’, or as sites through which reified identities are recognised—in existing conditions of inequality, they can also serve as protected spaces where people can take the risk of exploring who they might become with relative safety from attack and abuse” (226). These are necessary risks to take if we are to avoid entrenching fear of difference in a world where difference is itself deeply, and permanently, entrenched.ReferencesAmin, Ash. “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity.” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 959–80.———. “The Good City.” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23.Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–66.Cantle, Ted. Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. London, UK Home Office, 2001.Carey, Adam. “Backing for Pool Cover Up Directive.” The Age 17 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/backing-for-pool-coverup-directive-20100916-15enz.html›.Elder, John, and Jon Pierick. “The Mean Streets: Where the Locals Fear to Tread.” The Sunday Age 10 Jan. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/the-mean-streets-where-the-locals-fear-to-tread-20100109-m00l.html?skin=text-only›.Eriksen, Thomas Hyland. “Diversity versus Difference: Neoliberalism in the Minority Debate." The Making and Unmaking of Difference. Ed. Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, and Shingo Shimada. Bielefeld: Transaction, 2006. 13–36.Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80.Goodhart, David. “Too Diverse.” Prospect 95 (2004): 30-37.Haberfield, Georgie, and Gilbert Gardner. “Mayor Defends Pool Cover-up Order.” Dandenong Leader 16 Sep. 2010 ‹http://dandenong-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/dandenong-oasis-tells-swimmers-to-cover-up/›.Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto, 1998.hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Eds. Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 366-380.Iveson, Kurt. "Justifying Exclusion: The Politics of Public Space and the Dispute over Access to McIvers Ladies' Baths, Sydney.” Gender, Place and Culture 10.3 (2003): 215–28.Joppke, Christian. “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy.” The British Journal of Sociology 55.2 (2004): 237–57.Laurier, Chris, and Eric Philo. “Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures of Responsibility.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (2006): 193–207.Low, Setha, and Neil Smith, eds. The Politics of Public Space. London: Routledge, 2006.Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.Murphy, Padraic. "Cover Up for Pool Even at Next Year's Ramadan.” Herald Sun 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/cover-up-for-pool-event-during-next-years-ramadan/story-e6frf7kx-1225924291675›.Nichols, David. The Bogan Delusion. Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2011.Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. "The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia: Retreat from Multiculturalism in Australia." International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 36 (2008): 230–46.Razack, Sherene H. “Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages.” Feminist Legal Studies 12.2 (2004): 129–74.Szego, Julie. “Under the Cover Up." The Age 9 Oct. 2010. < http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/under-the-coverup-20101008-16c1v.html >.Thrift, Nigel. “But Malice Afterthought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 133–50.Tissot, Sylvie. “Excluding Muslim Women: From Hijab to Niqab, from School to Public Space." Public Culture 23.1 (2011): 39–46.Valentine, Gill. “Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter.” Progress in Human Geography 32.3 (2008): 323–37.Wise, Amanda, and Selveraj Velayutham, eds. Everyday Multiculturalism. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.YMCA. “VCAT Ruling on Swim Sessions at Dandenong Oasis to Open Up to Community During Ramadan Next Year.” 16 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.victoria.ymca.org.au/cpa/htm/htm_news_detail.asp?page_id=13&news_id=360›.

Imagining Sydney’s Sexual Geography through the Gay/Lesbian Media As a cultural geographer I am interested in how the identities of places are imagined in popular culture. Places do not exist a priori, but are constructed through social and cultural processes (Anderson and Gale). This does not simply refer to how built environments are materialized through planning and building, but rather elicits the way places are represented through maps, film, literature, art, and, of crucial importance in contemporary society, a range of media sources, including newspapers, websites and television (Cosgrove and Daniels; Duncan and Ley; May). These representations are what give different localities their identities, and consequently places cannot be experienced and interpreted apart from their circulated images (Shurmer-Smith; da Costa). In this brief paper I explore how Sydney’s King Street precinct is imagined as a gay/lesbian place in the gay/lesbian media – an approach which follows the examples of Forest and Miller, who respectively examine how West Hollywood, Los Angeles, and Davie Street, Vancouver, are defined and constructed in the gay/lesbian media as ‘gay places’. At the same time, I also seek to I extend this approach by exploring how different ostensibly gay/lesbian places are infused with different gay/lesbian identities by the gay/lesbian media. Sydney makes an interesting case study here. The city possesses two notable gay/lesbian precincts: the iconic Oxford Street precinct, located in the ‘inner east’, comprising Darlinghurst, Paddington and Surry Hills; and the King Street precinct, located in the ‘inner west’, encompassing Newtown, Erskineville and Enmore. While there is some research on Oxford Street as gay/lesbian space (Wotherspoon; Faro and Wotherspoon; Murphy and Watson), academic literature is silent on the particular position of King Street in Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography. McInnes, Hodge, and Costello and Hodge, for instance, bypass King Street, and instead examine the binary between ‘inner Sydney’ and the ‘western suburbs’ generated by the gay/lesbian media. While this work is important in demonstrating how Sydney’s gay/lesbian media imagines the city’s sexual geography – a ‘queer’ inner-city and ‘straight’ suburbia – these authors omit any consideration of differences within the inner-city, and instead focus on the similarities between the various gay/lesbian spaces of inner Sydney. For example, McInnes simply states: Sydney’s two gay spaces are considered to be the area[s] centred on Oxford Street Darlinghurst … and … King Street Newtown. These two places are gay spaces largely because of the presence of gay business … and because a large number of gay men and lesbians live in these two areas. (167) However, it is also possible to examine the differences between how these two discrete spaces are imagined in the gay/lesbian media. This is one of my aims in this paper. Through examining media representations of King Street specifically, rather than the inner-city generally, I seek to advance present understandings of Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography. Interpreting Media Images of King Street The commentaries analysed are taken from several gay/lesbian media sources widely circulated in Sydney – Sydney Star Observer (SSO), SX, Gay Australia Guide (GAG) and lesbian.com.au. They have been drawn from between 2003 and 2005. 2003 was selected as a suitable start date because of the closure of several gay/lesbian venues on and around Oxford Street during that year, prompting the publication of a number of articles in SSO (12 Dec. 2002, 20 Mar. 2003, 6 Nov. 2003) and SX (16 Oct. 2003, 15 July 2004) raising fears over the ‘de-gaying’ of Oxford Street. These reports signify heightened concern for the integrity of Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography by the gay/lesbian media and a concomitant anxiety over the place-identities of gay/lesbian precincts. These commentaries were then subject to various textual analyses (Hannam; Shurmer-Smith). Manifest and latent content analyses were used to extract key themes about the media constructions of King Street’s gay/lesbian place-identity. Here, I looked for the descriptors applied to King Street to elicit particular representations. Diverse words, like ‘alternative’ and ‘centre’, recurred over and over again. Since there seemed to be multiple – and somewhat competing – images of King Street in these media commentaries, I then turned to discourse analysis to try to understand how such divergent representations might arise, and what they signify about King Street’s gay/lesbian place-identity and the precinct’s place in the gay/lesbian media’s imaginative sexual geography of Sydney (Waitt; Miller). Here I paid close attention to the interpretive context of commentaries concerned with King Street, and the places (and identities) with which King Street was juxtaposed. This closer discursive analysis suggested that where King Street is considered in the gay/lesbian media, it is often juxtaposed with Oxford Street. In other words, the gay/lesbian media seems to have constructed a binary relationship between Oxford and King Streets, so that King Street is typically identified, defined and imagined in relation to Oxford Street. However, the contours of this binary relationship are unstable and shifting, differing across the commentaries. Sometimes Oxford Street is seen as the ‘hub’ of Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography, the symbolic ‘heart’ of the gay/lesbian spatial imaginary, while King Street is perceived as its ‘alternative’. But at other times, Oxford Street is described as ‘old’, and King Street is presented as its ‘successor’, the ‘new centre’ of gay/lesbian Sydney. Either way, what is significant is the way King Street is often made to rely on the image of Oxford Street for its own definition and identity. In the following discussion, I examine each of these imagined place-identities in turn, citing selected examples from the gay/lesbian media. Only the most explicit examples are presented and discussed, but the gay/lesbian media includes various other references juxtaposing and comparing the two street-precincts. King Street as the ‘Alternative’ A number of commentaries represent Oxford Street as the ‘centre’ or ‘heart’ of gay/lesbian Sydney, while King Street is presented as its ‘alternative’ (eg. SX 29 Jan. 2004). Take, for instance, the way they are juxtaposed in the following: Darlinghurst. Welcome to the hub of Sydney’s gay and lesbian community. Darlinghurst is home for some of Sydney’s hottest gay and lesbian clubs, cafes, and bars, and it’s where many community groups are based. The main strip, Oxford Street, is queer central. … Newtown. The edgier alternative to Darlinghurst. … The buzz here is on King Street, home to Sydney’s alternative and grunge crowd. (GAG’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Visitors’ Guide, 2005, 6, 15) The heart of gay Sydney is Oxford Street. … It’s loud, proud and colourful. … Want something a little more edgier and cosmopolitan? Rock into Newtown. Sydney’s most colourful characters gather around King Street and Enmore Road. (http://www.lesbian.com.au/lesbiansydney.htm) In both commentaries, King Street is imagined in relation to Oxford Street. Oxford Street is presented first: the precinct can stand alone as ‘queer central’, ‘the heart of gay Sydney’, drawing on no other places for its definition as the centre of gay/lesbian Sydney. Oxford Street simply is gay/lesbian Sydney. Meanwhile, King Street is ‘second choice’ it seems. In both reports, descriptions of King Street appear immediately after Oxford Street, and are drawn in comparison, with King Street identified as Oxford Street’s ‘edger alternative’. Since it is depicted as the ‘hub’ of gay/lesbian Sydney, Oxford Street is also imagined as Sydney’s ‘gay ghetto’, a uniformly gay/lesbian residential-and-commercial space. This is another representation against which King Street is defined in the gay/lesbian media: Since moving from Taylor Square [Oxford Street] to the Newtown/St.Peters border [King Street] … I’ve celebrated being part of a mixed community. … Don’t get me wrong. I love living gay. … But a couple of years spent drowning in the ghetto has made me appreciate the simple things about not being a part of it. (SSO 20 Jan. 2005) Newtown is a culturally diverse suburb and fortunately it is gay-friendly, not a gay ghetto. People can be themselves in Newtown without fear of persecution. (SSO 27 Jan. 2005) I do not believe that Newtown [King Street] is a ‘gay ghetto’ … Granted, it is one of the few places where I can walk hand in and with my (male) partner and feel relatively safe. However, there is a wide diversity of people here, and the LGBT community is only a part of it. (SSO 21 Jan. 2005) Although these commentators are clearly happy to represent King Street as a ‘gay-friendly’ locality rather than a ‘gay ghetto’, this identity is only attained in contrast with Oxford Street, the gay ghetto. Again King Street is depicted as Oxford Street’s alternative, its particular ‘gay-friendly’ place-identity bound to a comparative relationship with Oxford Street. King Street as the ‘New Centre’ But this centre/alternative binary is unstable. In other commentaries, King Street is not presented as the ‘alternative’, but as the ‘successor’ to Oxford Street, the ‘new centre’ of gay/lesbian Sydney. Take the following commentary from GAG (Summer 2003), which now promotes King Street the ‘best gay street in Australia’: King Street, Newtown, is now the best GLBTI street in Sydney and, inevitably, in Oz – no argument. It’s book-ended by Victoria Park at its city end – site of the annual Mardi Gras fair day and poolside pashing all year round – and Sydney Park at its southern end – queer dog off-leash heaven. Without any of Oxford Street’s tackiness, here you’ll find the kissingest, handholdingest fags and dykes, along with hets who aren’t out to hoon or hurt. … Why? Because 24/7 it’s a lived-in street, not an after-hours entertainment strip for the desperate and dateless. King Street’s claim to be the ‘best gay street in Australia’, however, is tellingly made in direct comparison with Oxford Street (and interestingly, not with ‘gay streets’ in other Australian cities): while Oxford Street is a ‘tacky entertainment strip’, King Street is ‘lived-in’. Oxford Street continues to haunt the place-identity of King Street: even in being imagined as the ‘top’ gay precinct, King Street is defined against and through Oxford Street. In a similar vein, another article from SSO (21 Oct. 2004) asserts that ‘Newtown’s King Street is set to overtake Darlinghurst’s Oxford Street as the epicentre of gay Sydney’. The report outlines evidence for the elevation of King Street to the centre of gay/lesbian Sydney, in terms of residential visibility and the number of gay/lesbian organisations moving to the area, which include the New Mardi Gras, Twenty10 (a gay/lesbian youth service), the Gay and Lesbian Counselling Service, the Gender Centre and the Metropolitan Community Church. Yet even as King Street succeeds Oxford Street as the ‘epicentre of gay Sydney’, the precinct is imagined through Oxford Street: the article is entitled ‘King Street the new Darlo’. Here, King Street is not acknowledged as the centre of gay/lesbian Sydney in its own terms, by virtue of its own identity as a gay/lesbian place, but through replacing Oxford Street. Literally re-placing: King Street is not the ‘new centre’: it is the ‘new Darlo’. It is as if Oxford Street is inherently and synonymously ‘central’, and King Street can only be seen as central through being imagined as Oxford Street. In doing this, rather than asserting King Street’s gay/lesbian place-identity, Oxford Street’s identity as the symbolic ‘heart’ of Sydney’s gay/lesbian spatial imaginary is confirmed. It is not Oxford Street that has been dis-placed by King Street’s growing gay/lesbian community and identity. Rather, King Street’s identity has been dis-placed by the continued representation of Oxford Street as ‘queer central’. Conclusion The identities of different places are not ‘natural’, but constructed through social and cultural representations. In contemporary western society, the media – print, television, web-based – is a key producer and disseminator of place images and identities. This paper has sought to add to our understanding of this phenomenon. Specifically, I have sought to explore how the gay/lesbian media can influence the gay/lesbian identities of certain places. Moreover, by exploring how King Street has been represented in and through the gay/lesbian media vis-à-vis Oxford Street, I have attempted to understand how different gay/lesbian places are imbued with different and multiple gay/lesbian identities in the gay/lesbian media. Consequently, this discussion also augments our understanding of Sydney’s particular gay/lesbian geography, providing a more nuanced understanding of the imaginative sexual identities of different places collectively imagined as gay/lesbian. Several specific conclusions can be drawn here. First, King and Oxford Streets are imagined differently by the gay/lesbian media. Second, King Street is imagined in relation to Oxford Street. Third, these relational depictions shift between alternative to, and a successor of, Oxford Street. Finally, either way, King Street is often made to rely upon Oxford Street for its place-identity, infrequently imagined apart from Oxford Street. Yet, since place-identities are fluid and unstable, this may change in the future, especially as King Street continues to develop as a locality of gay/lesbian community and identity. And in looking to the future, I hope the claims made here stimulate further enquiry into the nuanced relationship between Sydney’s gay/lesbian precincts. More work remains to be done – not just of media representations – but in-depth interviews and participant observations to understand the experiences of King Street’s residents, and what this particular place means to them and their identities. References Anderson, Kay, and Fay Gale, eds. Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography. Melbourne: Longman Chesire, 1992. Anon. “Oxford Hotel in Receivership.” Sydney Star Observer 6 Nov. 2003. Benzie, Tim. “Bye Bye Beresford.” Sydney Star Observer 12 Dec. 2002. ———. “Barracks Down.” Sydney Star Observer 20 Mar. 2003. Cosgrove, Daniel and Stephen Daniels. Eds. The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Costello, Lauren, and Stephen Hodge. “Queer/Clear/Here: Destabilising Sexualities and Space.” Australian Cultural Geographies. Ed. Elaine Stratford. South Melbourne: Oxford, 1999. 131-152. Da Costa, Maria Helena. “Cinematic Cities: Researching Films as Geographical Texts.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Eds. Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder. London: Arnold, 2003. 191-201. Duncan, James, and David Ley, eds. Place/Culture/Representation. London: Routledge, 1993. Farrar, Stacy. “I See Gay People.” Sydney Star Observer 21 Jan. 2005. Faro, Clive, with Garry Wotherspoon. Street Seen: A History of Oxford Street. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000. Fishlock, Gary. “And Then There Were Nine.” SX 16 Oct. 2003. ———. “Oxford Street, Darlinghurst.” SX 29 Jan. 2004. ———. “A Call to Arms.” SX 15 July 2004. Forest, Benjamin. “West Hollywood as Symbol: The Significance of Place in the Construction of a Gay Identity.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13.2 (1995): 133-157. Hannam, Kevin. “Coping with Archival and Textual Data.” Doing Cultural Geography. Ed. Pamela Shurmer-Smith. London: Sage, 2002. 189-197. Hodge, Stephen. “No Fags Out There: Gay Men, Identity and Suburbia.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies 1.1 (1995): 41-48. Lesbian Sydney. 28 Nov. 2005 http://www.lesbian.com.au/lesbiansydney.htm>. May, Jon. “The View from the Streets: Geographies of Homelessness in the British Newspaper Press.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Eds. Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder. London: Arnold, 2003. 23-36. McInnes, David. “Inside the Outside: Politics and Gay and Lesbian Spaces in Sydney.” Queer City: Gay and Lesbian Politics in Sydney. Eds. Craig Johnston and Paul van Reyk. Pluto Press: Annandale, 2001. 164-178. Miller, Vincent. “Intertextuality, the Referential Illusion and the Production of a Gay Ghetto.” Social and Cultural Geography 6.1 (2005): 61-80. Murphy, Peter and Sophie Watson. “Gay Sites and the Pink Dollar.” Written with Iain Bruce. Chapter 4 of Surface City: Sydney at the Millenium. Pluto: Annandale, 1997. O’Grady, Dominic, ed. Gay Australia Guide’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Visitors’ Guide. Blackheath: Gay Travel Guides, 2005. Reader views. Sydney Star Observer 27 Jan. 2005. Shurmer-Smith, Pamela. “Reading Texts.” Doing Cultural Geography. Ed. Pamela Shurmer-Smith. London: Sage, 2002. 123-136. Van Reyk, Paul. “Best Gay Street – King Street Newtown, Sydney.” Gay Australia Guide 9 (Summer 2003): 11. Waitt, Gordon. “Doing Discourse Analysis.” Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography. Ed. Iain Hay. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2005. 163-191. Wearring, Myles. “King Street the New Darlo.” Sydney Star Observer 21 Oct. 2004. Wotherspoon, Garry. City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-Culture. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1991. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gorman-Murray, Andrew. "Imagining King Street in the Gay/Lesbian Media." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/04-gorman-murray.php>. APA Style Gorman-Murray, A. (Jul. 2006) "Imagining King Street in the Gay/Lesbian Media," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/04-gorman-murray.php>.

At a time when a trip abroad was out of the reach of most women, even if they could not make the journey, Australian women could imagine “abroad” just by reading popular women’s magazines such as Woman (later Woman’s Day and Home then Woman’s Day) and The Australian Women’s Weekly, and journals, such as The Progressive Woman and The Housewife. Increasingly in the post-war period, these magazines and journals contained advertisements for holidaying abroad, recipes for international foods and articles on overseas fashions. It was not unusual for local manufacturers, to use the lure of travel and exotic places as a way of marketing their goods. Healing Bicycles, for example, used the slogan “In Venice men go to work on Gondolas: In Australia it’s a Healing” (“Healing Cycles” 40), and Exotiq cosmetics featured landscapes of countries where Exotiq products had “captured the hearts of women who treasured their loveliness: Cincinnati, Milan, New York, Paris, Geneva and Budapest” (“Exotiq Cosmetics” 36).Unlike Homer’s Penelope, who stayed at home for twenty years waiting for Odysseus to return from the Trojan wars, women have always been on the move to the same extent as men. Their rich travel stories (Riggal, Haysom, Lancaster)—mostly written as letters and diaries—remain largely unpublished and their experiences are not part of the public record to the same extent as the travel stories of men. Ros Pesman argues that the women traveller’s voice was one of privilege and authority full of excitement and disbelief (Pesman 26). She notes that until well into the second part of the twentieth century, “the journey for Australian women to Europe was much more than a return to the sources of family identity and history” (19). It was also:a pilgrimage to the centres and sites of culture, literature and history and an encounter with “the real world.”Europe, and particularly London,was also the place of authority and reference for all those seeking accreditation and recognition, whether as real writers, real ladies or real politicians and statesmen. (19)This article is about two Australian writers; Helen Seager, a journalist employed by The Argus, a daily newspaper in Melbourne Australia, and Gwen Hughes, a graduate of Emily McPherson College of Domestic Economy in Melbourne, working in England as a lecturer, demonstrator and cookbook writer for Parkinsons’ Stove Company. Helen Seager travelled to England on an assignment for The Argus in 1950 and sent articles each day for publication in the women’s section of the newspaper. Gwen Hughes travelled extensively in the Balkans in the 1930s recording her impressions, observations, and recipes for traditional foods whilst working for Parkinsons in England. These women were neither returning to the homeland for an encounter with the real world, nor were they there as cultural tourists in the Cook’s Tour sense of the word. They were professional writers and their observations about the places they visited offer fresh and lively versions of England and Europe, its people, places, and customs.Helen SeagerAustralian Journalist Helen Seager (1901–1981) wrote a daily column, Good Morning Ma’am in the women’s pages of The Argus, from 1947 until shortly after her return from abroad in 1950. Seager wrote human interest stories, often about people of note (Golding), but with a twist; a Baroness who finds knitting exciting (Seager, “Baroness” 9) and ballet dancers backstage (Seager, “Ballet” 10). Much-loved by her mainly female readership, in May 1950 The Argus sent her to England where she would file a daily report of her travels. Whilst now we take travel for granted, Seager was sent abroad with letters of introduction from The Argus, stating that she was travelling on a special editorial assignment which included: a certificate signed by the Lord Mayor of The City of Melbourne, seeking that any courtesies be extended on her trip to England, the Continent, and America; a recommendation from the Consul General of France in Australia; and introductions from the Premier’s Department, the Premier of Victoria, and Austria’s representative in Australia. All noted the nature of her trip, her status as an esteemed reporter for a Melbourne newspaper, and requested that any courtesy possible to be made to her.This assignment was an indication that The Argus valued its women readers. Her expenses, and those of her ten-year-old daughter Harriet, who accompanied her, were covered by the newspaper. Her popularity with her readership is apparent by the enthusiastic tone of the editorial article covering her departure. Accompanied with a photograph of Seager and Harriet boarding the aeroplane, her many women readers were treated to their first ever picture of what she looked like:THOUSANDS of "Argus" readers, particularly those in the country, have wanted to know what Helen Seager looks like. Here she is, waving good-bye as she left on the first stage of a trip to England yesterday. She will be writing her bright “Good Morning, Ma'am” feature as she travels—giving her commentary on life abroad. (The Argus, “Goodbye” 1)Figure 1. Helen Seager and her daughter Harriet board their flight for EnglandThe first article “From Helen in London” read,our Helen Seager, after busy days spent exploring England with her 10-year-old daughter, Harriet, today cabled her first “Good Morning, Ma’am” column from abroad. Each day from now on she will report from London her lively impressions in an old land, which is delightfully new to her. (Seager, “From Helen” 3)Whilst some of her dispatches contain the impressions of the awestruck traveller, for the most they are exquisitely observed stories of the everyday and the ordinary, often about the seemingly most trivial of things, and give a colourful, colonial and egalitarian impression of the places that she visits. A West End hair-do is described, “as I walked into that posh looking establishment, full of Louis XV, gold ornateness to be received with bows from the waist by numerous satellites, my first reaction was to turn and bolt” (Seager, “West End” 3).When she visits Oxford’s literary establishments, she is, for this particular article, the awestruck Australian:In Oxford, you go around saying, soto voce and aloud, “Oh, ye dreaming spires of Oxford.” And Matthew Arnold comes alive again as a close personal friend.In a weekend, Ma’am, I have seen more of Oxford than lots of native Oxonians. I have stood and brooded over the spit in Christ Church College’s underground kitchens on which the oxen for Henry the Eighth were roasted.I have seen the Merton Library, oldest in Oxford, in which the chains that imprisoned the books are still to be seen, and have added by shoe scrape to the stone steps worn down by 500 years of walkers. I have walked the old churches, and I have been lost in wonder at the goodly virtues of the dead. And then, those names of Oxford! Holywell, Tom’s Quad, Friars’ Entry, and Long Wall. The gargoyles at Magdalen and the stones untouched by bombs or war’s destruction. It adds a new importance to human beings to know that once, if only, they too have walked and stood and stared. (Seager, “From Helen” 3)Her sense of wonder whilst in Oxford is, however, moderated by the practicalities of travel incorporated into the article. She continues to describe the warnings she was given, before her departure, of foreign travel that had her alarmed about loss and theft, and the care she took to avoid both. “It would have made you laugh, Ma’am, could you have seen the antics to protect personal property in the countries in transit” (Seager, “From Helen” 3).Her description of a trip to Blenheim Palace shows her sense of fun. She does not attempt to describe the palace or its contents, “Blenheim Palace is too vast and too like a great Government building to arouse much envy,” settling instead on a curiosity should there be a turn of events, “as I surged through its great halls with a good-tempered, jostling mob I couldn’t help wondering what those tired pale-faced guides would do if the mob mood changed and it started on an old-fashioned ransack.” Blenheim palace did not impress her as much as did the Sunday crowd at the palace:The only thing I really took a fancy to were the Venetian cradle, which was used during the infancy of the present Duke and a fine Savvonerie carpet in the same room. What I never wanted to see again was the rubbed-fur collar of the lady in front.Sunday’s crowd was typically English, Good tempered, and full of Cockney wit, and, if you choose to take your pleasures in the mass, it is as good a company as any to be in. (Seager, “We Look” 3)In a description of Dublin and the Dubliners, Seager describes the food-laden shops: “Butchers’ shops leave little room for customers with their great meat carcasses hanging from every hook. … English visitors—and Dublin is awash with them—make an orgy of the cakes that ooze real cream, the pink and juicy hams, and the sweets that demand no points” (Seager, “English” 6). She reports on the humanity of Dublin and Dubliners, “Dublin has a charm that is deep-laid. It springs from the people themselves. Their courtesy is overlaid with a real interest in humanity. They walk and talk, these Dubliners, like Kings” (ibid.).In Paris she melds the ordinary with the noteworthy:I had always imagined that the outside of the Louvre was like and big art gallery. Now that I know it as a series of palaces with courtyards and gardens beyond description in the daytime, and last night, with its cleverly lighted fountains all aplay, its flags and coloured lights, I will never forget it.Just now, down in the street below, somebody is packing the boot of a car to go for, presumably, on a few days’ jaunt. There is one suitcase, maybe with clothes, and on the footpath 47 bottles of the most beautiful wines in the world. (Seager, “When” 3)She writes with a mix of awe and ordinary:My first glimpse of that exciting vista of the Arc de Triomphe in the distance, and the little bistros that I’ve always wanted to see, and all the delights of a new city, […] My first day in Paris, Ma’am, has not taken one whit from the glory that was London. (ibid.) Figure 2: Helen Seager in ParisIt is my belief that Helen Seager intended to do something with her writings abroad. The articles have been cut from The Argus and pasted onto sheets of paper. She has kept copies of the original reports filed whist she was away. The collection shows her insightful egalitarian eye and a sharp humour, a mix of awesome and commonplace.On Bastille Day in 1950, Seager wrote about the celebrations in Paris. Her article is one of exuberant enthusiasm. She writes joyfully about sirens screaming overhead, and people in the street, and looking from windows. Her article, published on 19 July, starts:Paris Ma’am is a magical city. I will never cease to be grateful that I arrived on a day when every thing went wrong, and watched it blossom before my eyes into a gayness that makes our Melbourne Cup gala seem funeral in comparison.Today is July 14.All places of business are closed for five days and only the places of amusement await the world.Parisians are tireless in their celebrations.I went to sleep to the music of bands, dancing feet and singing voices, with the raucous but cheerful toots from motors splitting the night air onto atoms. (Seager, “When” 3)This article resonates uneasiness. How easily could those scenes of celebration on Bastille Day in 1950 be changed into the scenes of carnage on Bastille Day 2016, the cheerful toots of the motors transformed into cries of fear, the sirens in the sky from aeroplanes overhead into the sirens of ambulances and police vehicles, as a Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, as part of a terror attack drives a truck through crowds of people celebrating in Nice.Gwen HughesGwen Hughes graduated from Emily Macpherson College of Domestic Economy with a Diploma of Domestic Science, before she travelled to England to take up employment as senior lecturer and demonstrator of Parkinson’s England, a company that manufactured electric and gas stoves. Hughes wrote in her unpublished manuscript, Balkan Fever, that it was her idea of making ordinary cooking demonstration lessons dramatic and homelike that landed her the job in England (Hughes, Balkan 25-26).Her cookbook, Perfect Cooking, was produced to encourage housewives to enjoy cooking with their Parkinson’s modern cookers with the new Adjusto temperature control. The message she had to convey for Parkinsons was: “Cooking is a matter of putting the right ingredients together and cooking them at the right temperature to achieve a given result” (Hughes, Perfect 3). In reality, Hughes used this cookbook as a vehicle to share her interest in and love of Continental food, especially food from the Balkans where she travelled extensively in the 1930s.Recipes of Continental foods published in Perfect Cooking sit seamlessly alongside traditional British foods. The section on soup, for example, contains recipes for Borscht, a very good soup cooked by the peasants of Russia; Minestrone, an everyday Italian soup; Escudella, from Spain; and Cream of Spinach Soup from France (Perfect 22-23). Hughes devoted a whole chapter to recipes and descriptions of Continental foods labelled “Fascinating Foods From Far Countries,” showing her love and fascination with food and travel. She started this chapter with the observation:There is nearly as much excitement and romance, and, perhaps fear, about sampling a “foreign dish” for the “home stayer” as there is in actually being there for the more adventurous “home leaver”. Let us have a little have a little cruise safe within the comfort of our British homes. Let us try and taste the good things each country is famed for, all the while picturing the romantic setting of these dishes. (Hughes, Perfect 255)Through her recipes and descriptive passages, Hughes took housewives in England and Australia into the strange and wonderful kitchens of exotic women: Madame Darinka Jocanovic in Belgrade, Miss Anicka Zmelova in Prague, Madame Mrskosova at Benesova. These women taught her to make wonderful-sounding foods such as Apfel Strudel, Knedlikcy, Vanilla Kipfel and Christmas Stars. “Who would not enjoy the famous ‘Goose with Dumplings,’” she declares, “in the company of these gay, brave, thoughtful people with their romantic history, their gorgeously appareled peasants set in their richly picturesque scenery” (Perfect 255).It is Hughes’ unpublished manuscript Balkan Fever, written in Melbourne in 1943, to which I now turn. It is part of the Latrobe Heritage collection at the State Library of Victoria. Her manuscript was based on her extensive travels in the Balkans in the 1930s whilst she lived and worked in England, and it was, I suspect, her intention to seek publication.In her twenties, Hughes describes how she set off to the Balkans after meeting a fellow member of the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW) at the Royal Yugoslav Legation. He was an expert on village life in the Balkans and advised her, that as a writer she would get more information from the local villagers than she would as a tourist. Hughes, who, before television gave cooking demonstrations on the radio, wrote, “I had been writing down recipes and putting them in books for years and of course the things one talks about over the air have to be written down first—that seemed fair enough” (Hughes, Balkan 25-26). There is nothing of the awestruck traveller in Hughes’ richly detailed observations of the people and the places that she visited. “Travelling in the Balkans is a very different affair from travelling in tourist-conscious countries where you just leave it to Cooks. You must either have unlimited time at your disposal, know the language or else have introductions that will enable the right arrangements to be made for you” (Balkan 2), she wrote. She was the experiential tourist, deeply immersed in her surroundings and recording food culture and society as it was.Hughes acknowledged that she was always drawn away from the cities to seek the real life of the people. “It’s to the country district you must go to find the real flavour of a country and the heart of its people—especially in the Balkans where such a large percentage of the population is agricultural” (Balkan 59). Her descriptions in Balkan Fever are a blend of geography, history, culture, national songs, folklore, national costumes, food, embroidery, and vivid observation of the everyday city life. She made little mention of stately homes or buildings. Her attitude to travel can be summed up in her own words:there are so many things to see and learn in the countries of the old world that, walking with eyes and mind wide open can be an immensely delightful pastime, even with no companion and nowhere to go. An hour or two spent in some unpretentious coffee house can be worth all the dinners at Quaglino’s or at The Ritz, if your companion is a good talker, a specialist in your subject, or knows something of the politics and the inner life of the country you are in. (Balkan 28)Rather than touring the grand cities, she was seduced by the market places with their abundance of food, colour, and action. Describing Sarajevo she wrote:On market day the main square is a blaze of colour and movement, the buyers no less colourful than the peasants who have come in from the farms around with their produce—cream cheese, eggs, chickens, fruit and vegetables. Handmade carpets hung up for sale against walls or from trees add their barbaric colour to the splendor of the scene. (Balkan 75)Markets she visited come to life through her vivid descriptions:Oh those markets, with the gorgeous colours, and heaped untidiness of the fruits and vegetables—paprika, those red and green peppers! Every kind of melon, grape and tomato contributing to the riot of colour. Then there were the fascinating peasant embroideries, laces and rich parts of old costumes brought in from the villages for sale. The lovely gay old embroideries were just laid out on a narrow carpet spread along the pavement or hung from a tree if one happened to be there. (Balkan 11)Perhaps it was her radio cooking shows that gave her the ability to make her descriptions sensorial and pictorial:We tasted luxurious foods, fish, chickens, fruits, wines, and liqueurs. All products of the country. Perfect ambrosial nectar of the gods. I was entirely seduced by the rose petal syrup, fragrant and aromatic, a red drink made from the petals of the darkest red roses. (Balkan 151)Ordinary places and everyday events are beautifully realised:We visited the cheese factory amongst other things. … It was curious to see in that far away spot such a quantity of neatly arranged cheeses in the curing chamber, being prepared for export, and in another room the primitive looking round balls of creamed cheese suspended from rafters. Later we saw trains of pack horses going over the mountains, and these were probably the bearers of these cheeses to Bitolj or Skoplje, whence they would be consigned further for export. (Balkan 182)ConclusionReading Seager and Hughes, one cannot help but be swept along on their travels and take part in their journeys. What is clear, is that they were inspired by their work, which is reflected in the way they wrote about the places they visited. Both sought out people and places that were, as Hughes so vividly puts it, not part of the Cook’s Tour. They travelled with their eyes wide open for experiences that were both new and normal, making their writing relevant even today. Written in Paris on Bastille Day 1950, Seager’s Bastille Day article is poignant when compared to Bastille Day in France in 2016. Hughes’s descriptions of Sarajevo are a far cry from the scenes of destruction in that city between 1992 and 1995. The travel writing of these two women offers us vivid impressions and images of the often unreported events, places, daily lives, and industry of the ordinary and the then every day, and remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.Pesman writes, “women have always been on the move and Australian women have been as numerous as passengers on the outbound ships as have men” (20), but the records of their travels seldom appear on the public record. Whilst their work-related writings are part of the public record (see Haysom; Lancaster; Riggal), this body of women’s travel writing has not received the attention it deserves. Hughes’ cookbooks, with their traditional Eastern European recipes and evocative descriptions of people and kitchens, are only there for the researcher who knows that cookbooks are a trove of valuable social and cultural material. Digital copies of Seager’s writing can be accessed on Trove (a digital repository), but there is little else about her or her body of writing on the public record.ReferencesThe Argus. “Goodbye Ma’am.” 26 May 1950: 1. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22831285?searchTerm=Goodbye%20Ma%E2%80%99am%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.“Exotiq Cosmetics.” Advertisement. Woman 20 Aug. 1945: 36.Golding, Peter. “Just a Chattel of the Sale: A Mostly Light-Hearted Retrospective of a Diverse Life.” In Jim Usher, ed., The Argus: Life & Death of Newspaper. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing 2007.Haysom, Ida. Diaries and Photographs of Ida Haysom. <http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/MAIN:Everything:SLV_VOYAGER1637361>.“Healing Cycles.” Advertisement. Woman 27 Aug. 1945: 40. Hughes, Gwen. Balkan Fever. Unpublished Manuscript. State Library of Victoria, MS 12985 Box 3846/4. 1943.———. Perfect Cooking London: Parkinsons, c1940.Lancaster, Rosemary. Je Suis Australienne: Remarkable Women in France 1880-1945. Crawley WA: UWA Press, 2008.Pesman, Ros. “Overseas Travel of Australian Women: Sources in the Australian Manuscripts Collection of the State Library of Victoria.” The Latrobe Journal 58 (Spring 1996): 19-26.Riggal, Louie. (Louise Blanche.) Diary of Italian Tour 1905 February 21 - May 1. <http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/MAIN:Everything:SLV_VOYAGER1635602>.Seager, Helen. “Ballet Dancers Backstage.” The Argus 10 Aug. 1944: 10. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11356057?searchTerm=Ballet%20Dancers%20Backstage&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=194>.———. “The Baroness Who Finds Knitting Exciting.” The Argus 1 Aug. 1944: 9. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11354557?searchTerm=Helen%20seager%20Baroness&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=194>.———. “English Visitors Have a Food Spree in Eire.” The Argus 29 Sep. 1950: 6. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22912011?searchTerm=English%20visitors%20have%20a%20spree%20in%20Eire&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “From Helen in London.” The Argus 20 June 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22836738?searchTerm=From%20Helen%20in%20London&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “Helen Seager Storms Paris—Paris Falls.” The Argus 15 July 1950: 7.<http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22906913?searchTerm=Helen%20Seager%20Storms%20Paris%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “We Look over Blenheim Palace.” The Argus 28 Sep. 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22902040?searchTerm=Helen%20Seager%20Its%20as%20a%20good%20a%20place%20as%20you%20would%20want%20to%20be&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “West End Hair-Do Was Fun.” The Argus 3 July 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22913940?searchTerm=West%20End%20hair-do%20was%20fun%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “When You Are in Paris on July 14.” The Argus 19 July 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22906244?searchTerm=When%20you%20are%20in%20Paris%20on%20July%2014&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.

IntroductionFilmed during a 1955 family trip from Perth to the Gulf of Carpentaria, Keith Adams’s Northern Safari showed to packed houses across Australia, and in some overseas locations, across three decades. Essentially a home movie, initially accompanied by live commentary and subsequently by a homemade sound track, it tapped into audiences’ sense of Australia’s north as a place of adventure. In the film Adams interacts with the animals of northern Australia (often by killing them), and while by 1971 the violence apparent in the film was attracting criticism in letters to newspapers, the film remained popular through to the mid-1980s, and was later shown on television in Australia and the United States (Cowan 2; Adams, Crocodile Safari Man 261). A DVD is at present available for purchase from the website of the same name (Northern Safari). Adams and his supporters credited the film’s success to the rugged and adventurous landscape of northern Australia (Northeast vii), characterised by dangerous animals, including venomous spiders, sharks and crocodiles (see Adams, “Aussie”; “Crocodile”). The notion of Australia’s north as a place of rugged adventure was not born with Adams’s film, and that film was certainly not the last production to exploit the region and its wildlife as a source of excitement. Rather, Northern Safari belongs to a long list of adventure narratives whose hunting exploits have helped define the north of Australian as a distinct region and contrast it with the temperate south where most Australians make their lives.This article explores the connection between adventure in Australia’s north and the large animals of the region. Adams’s film capitalised on popular interest in natural history, but his film is only one link in a chain of representations of the Australian north as a place of dangerous and charismatic megafauna. While over time interest shifted from being largely concentrated on the presence of buffalo in the Northern Territory to a fascination with the saltwater crocodiles found more widely in northern Australia that interest in dangerous prey animals is significant to Australia’s northern imaginary.The Northern Safari before AdamsNorthern Australia gained a reputation for rugged, masculine adventure long before the arrival there of Adams and his cameras. That reputation was closely associated with the animals of the north, and it is generally the dangerous species that have inspired popular accounts of the region. Linda Thompson has recognised that before the release of the film Crocodile Dundee in 1986 crocodiles “received significant and sensational (although sporadic) media attention across Australia—attention that created associations of danger, mystery, and abnormality” (118). While Thompson went on to argue that in the wake of Crocodile Dundee the saltwater crocodile became a widely recognised symbol of Australia (for both Australians and non-Australians) it is perhaps more pertinent to consider the place of animals in creating a notion of the Australian north.Adams’s extended and international success (he showed his film profitably in the United States, Canada, England, Germany, South Africa, Rhodesia, and New Zealand as well as throughout Australia) suggests that the landscape and wildlife of northern Australia holds a fascination for a wide audience (Adams, Crocodile Safari Man 169-261). Certainly northern Australia, and its wild beasts, had established a reputation for adventure earlier, particularly in the periods following the world wars. Perhaps crocodiles were not the most significant of the north’s charismatic megafauna in the first half of the twentieth century, but their presence was a source of excitement well before the 1980s, and they were not the only animals in the north to attract attention: the Northern Territory’s buffalo had long acted as a drawcard for adventure seekers.Carl Warburton’s popular book Buffaloes was typical in linking Australians’ experiences of war with the Australian north and the pursuit of adventure, generally in the form of dangerous big game. War and hunting have long been linked as both are expressions of masculine valour in physically dangerous circumstances (Brennan “Imperial” 44-46). That link is made very clear in Warbuton’s account when he begins it on the beach at Gallipoli as he and his comrades discuss their plans for the future. After Warburton announces his determination not to return from war to work in a bank, he and a friend determine that they will go to either Brazil or the Northern Territory to seek adventure (2). Back in Sydney, a coin flip determines their “compass was set for the unknown north” (5).As the title of his book suggests, the game pursued by Warburton and his mate were buffaloes, as buffalo hides were fetching high prices when he set out for the north. In his writing Warburton was keen to establish his reputation as an adventurer and his descriptions of the dangers of buffalo hunting used the animals to establish the adventurous credentials of northern Australia. Warburton noted of the buffalo that: “Alone of all wild animals he will attack unprovoked, and in single combat is more than a match for a tiger. It is the pleasant pastime of some Indian princes to stage such combats for the entertainment of their guests” (62-63). Thereby, he linked Arnhem Land to India, a place that had long held a reputation as a site of adventurous hunting for the rulers of the British Empire (Brennan “Africa” 399). Later Warburton reinforced those credentials by noting: “there is no more dangerous animal in the world than a wounded buffalo bull” (126). While buffalo might have provided the headline act, crocodiles also featured in the interwar northern imaginary. Warburton recorded: “I had always determined to have a crack at the crocodiles for the sport of it.” He duly set about sating this desire (222-3).Buffalo had been hunted commercially in the Northern Territory since 1886 and Warburton was not the first to publicise the adventurous hunting available in northern Australia (Clinch 21-23). He had been drawn north after reading “of the exploits of two crack buffalo shooters, Fred Smith and Paddy Cahill” (Warburton 6). Such accounts of buffalo, and also of crocodiles, were common newspaper fodder in the first half of the twentieth century. Even earlier, explorers’ accounts had drawn attention to the animal excitement of northern Australia. For example, John Lort Stokes had noted ‘alligators’ as one of the many interesting animals inhabiting the region (418). Thus, from the nineteenth century Australia’s north had popularly linked together remoteness, adventure, and large animals; it was unsurprising that Warburton in turn acted as inspiration to later adventure-hunters in northern Australia. In 1954 he was mentioned in a newspaper story about two English migrants who had come to Australia to shoot crocodiles on Cape York with “their ambitions fed by the books of men such as Ion Idriess, Carl Warburton, Frank Clune and others” (Gay 15).The Development of Northern ‘Adventure’ TourismNot all who sought adventure in northern Australia were as independent as Adams. Cynthia Nolan’s account of travel through outback Australia in the late 1940s noted the increasing tourist infrastructure available, particularly in her account of Alice Springs (27-28, 45). She also recorded the significance of big game in the lure of the north. At the start of her journey she met a man seeking his fortune crocodile shooting (16), later encountered buffalo shooters (82), and recorded the locals’ hilarity while recounting a visit by a city-based big game hunter who arrived with an elephant gun. According to her informants: “No, he didn’t shoot any buffaloes, but he had his picture taken posing behind every animal that dropped. He’d arrange himself in a crouch, gun at the ready, and take self-exposure shots of himself and trophy” (85-86). Earlier, organised tours of the Northern Territory included buffalo shooter camps in their itineraries (when access was available), making clear the continuing significance of dangerous game to the northern imaginary (Cole, Hell 207). Even as Adams was pursuing his independent path north, tourist infrastructure was bringing the northern Australian safari experience within reach for those with little experience but sufficient funds to secure the provision of equipment, vehicles and expert advice. The Australian Crocodile Shooters’ Club, founded in 1950, predated Northern Safari, but it tapped into the same interest in the potential of northern Australia to offer adventure. It clearly associated that adventure with big game hunting and the club’s success depended on its marketing of the adventurous north to Australia’s urban population (Brennan “Africa” 403-06). Similarly, the safari camps which developed in the Northern Territory, starting with Nourlangie in 1959, promoted the adventure available in Australia’s north to those who sought to visit without necessarily roughing it. The degree of luxury that was on offer initially is questionable, but the notion of Australia’s north as a big game hunting destination supported the development of an Australian safari industry (Berzins 177-80, Brennan “Africa” 407-09). Safari entrepreneur Allan Stewart has eagerly testified to the broad appeal of the safari experience in 1960s Australia, claiming his clientele included accountants, barristers, barmaids, brokers, bankers, salesmen, journalists, actors, students, nursing sisters, doctors, clergymen, soldiers, pilots, yachtsmen, racing drivers, company directors, housewives, precocious children, air hostesses, policemen and jockeys (18).Later Additions to the Imaginary of the Northern SafariAdams’s film was made in 1955, and its subject of adventurous travel and hunting in northern Australia was taken up by a number of books during the 1960s as publishers kept the link between large game and the adventurous north alive. New Zealand author Barry Crump contributed a fictionalised account of his time hunting crocodiles in northern Australia in Gulf, first published in 1964. Crump displayed his trademark humour throughout his book, and made a running joke of the ‘best professional crocodile-shooters’ that he encountered in pubs throughout northern Australia (28-29). Certainly, the possibility of adventure and the chance to make a living as a professional hunter lured men to the north. Among those who came was Australian journalist Keith Willey who in 1966 published an account of his time crocodile hunting. Willey promoted the north as a site of adventure and rugged masculinity. On the very first page of his book he established his credentials by advising that “Hunting crocodiles is a hard trade; hard, dirty and dangerous; but mostly hard” (1). Although Willey’s book reveals that he did not make his fortune crocodile hunting he evidently revelled in its adventurous mystique and his book was sufficiently successful to be republished by Rigby in 1977. The association between the Australian north, the hunting of large animals, and adventure continued to thrive.These 1960s crocodile publications represent a period when crocodile hunting replaced buffalo hunting as a commercial enterprise in northern Australia. In the immediate post-war period crocodile skins increased in value as traditional sources became unreliable, and interest in professional hunting increased. As had been the case with Warburton, the north promised adventure to men unwilling to return to domesticity after their experiences of war (Brennan, “Crocodile” 1). This part of the northern imaginary was directly discussed by another crocodile hunting author. Gunther Bahnemann spent some time crocodile hunting in Australia before moving his operation north to poach crocodiles in Dutch New Guinea. Bahnemann had participated in the Second World War and in his book he was clear about his unwillingness to settle for a humdrum life, instead choosing crocodile hunting for his profession. As he described it: “We risked our lives to make quick money, but not easy money; yet I believe that the allure of adventure was the main motive of our expedition. It seems so now, when I think back to it” (8).In the tradition of Adams, Malcolm Douglas released his documentary film Across the Top in 1968, which was subsequently serialised for television. From around this time, television was becoming an increasingly popular medium and means of reinforcing the connection between the Australian outback and adventure. The animals of northern Australia played a role in setting the region apart from the rest of the continent. The 1970s and 1980s saw a boom in programs that presented the outback, including the north, as a source of interest and national pride. In this period Harry Butler presented In the Wild, while the Leyland brothers (Mike and Mal) created their iconic and highly popular Ask the Leyland Brothers (and similar productions) which ran to over 150 episodes between 1976 and 1980. In the cinema, Alby Mangels’s series of World Safari movies included Australia in his wide-ranging adventures. While these documentaries of outback Australia traded on the same sense of adventure and fascination with Australia’s wildlife that had promoted Northern Safari, the element of big game hunting was muted.That link was reforged in the 1980s and 1990s. Crocodile Dundee was an extremely successful movie and it again placed interactions with charismatic megafauna at the heart of the northern Australian experience (Thompson 124). The success of the film reinvigorated depictions of northern Australia as a place to encounter dangerous beasts. Capitalising on the film’s success Crump’s book was republished as Crocodile Country in 1990, and Tom Cole’s memoirs of his time in northern Australia, including his work buffalo shooting and crocodile hunting, were first published in 1986, 1988, and 1992 (and reprinted multiple times). However, Steve Irwin is probably the best known of northern Australia’s ‘crocodile hunters’, despite his Australia Zoo lying outside the crocodile’s natural range, and despite being a conservationist opposed to killing crocodiles. Irwin’s chosen moniker is ironic, given his often-stated love for the species and his commitment to preserving crocodile lives through relocating (when necessary, to captivity) rather than killing problem animals. He first appeared on Australian television in 1996, and continued to appear regularly until his death in 2006.Tourism Australia used both Hogan and Irwin for promotional purposes. While Thompson argues that at this time the significance of the crocodile was broadened to encompass Australia more generally, the examples of crocodile marketing that she lists relate to the Northern Territory, with a brief mention of Far North Queensland and the crocodile remained a signifier of northern adventure (Thompson 125-27). The depiction of Irwin as a ‘crocodile hunter’ despite his commitment to saving crocodile lives marked a larger shift that had already begun within the safari. While the title ‘safari’ retained its popularity in the late twentieth century it had come to be applied generally to organised adventurous travel with a view to seeing and capturing images of animals, rather than exclusively identifying hunting expeditions.ConclusionThe extraordinary success of Adams’s film was based on a widespread understanding of northern Australia as a type of adventure playground, populated by fascinating dangerous beasts. That imaginary was exploited but not created by Adams. It had been in existence since the nineteenth century, was particularly evident during the buffalo and crocodile hunting bubbles after the world wars, and boomed again with the popularity of the fictional Mick Dundee and the real Steve Irwin, for both of whom interacting with the charismatic megafauna of the north was central to their characters. The excitement surrounding large game still influences visions of northern Australia. At present there is no particularly striking northern bushman media personage, but the large animals of the north still regularly provoke discussion. The north’s safari camps continue to do business, trading on the availability of large game (particularly buffalo, banteng, pigs, and samba) and northern Australia’s crocodiles have established themselves as a significant source of interest among international big game hunters. Australia’s politicians regularly debate the possibility of legalising a limited crocodile safari in Australia, based on the culling of problem animals, and that debate highlights a continuing sense of Australia’s north as a place apart from the more settled, civilised south of the continent.ReferencesAdams, Keith. ’Aussie Bites.’ Australian Screen 2017. <https://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/northern-safari/clip2/>.———. ‘Crocodile Hunting.’ Australian Screen 2017. <https://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/northern-safari/clip3/>.———. Crocodile Safari Man: My Tasmanian Childhood in the Great Depression & 50 Years of Desert Safari to the Gulf of Carpentaria 1949-1999. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2000.Bahnemann, Gunther. New Guinea Crocodile Poacher. 2nd ed. London: The Adventurers Club, 1965.Berzins, Baiba. Australia’s Northern Secret: Tourism in the Northern Territory, 1920s to 1980s. Sydney: Baiba Berzins, 2007.Brennan, Claire. "’An Africa on Your Own Front Door Step’: The Development of an Australian Safari.” Journal of Australian Studies 39.3 (2015): 396-410.———. “Crocodile Hunting.” Queensland Historical Atlas (2013): 1-3.———. "Imperial Game: A History of Hunting, Society, Exotic Species and the Environment in New Zealand and Victoria 1840-1901." Dissertation. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2005.Clinch, M.A. “Home on the Range: The Role of the Buffalo in the Northern Territory, 1824–1920.” Northern Perspective 11.2 (1988): 16-27.Cole, Tom. Crocodiles and Other Characters. Chippendale, NSW: Sun Australia, 1992.———. Hell West and Crooked. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1990.———. Riding the Wildman Plains: The Letters and Diaries of Tom Cole 1923-1943. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1992.———. Spears & Smoke Signals: Exciting True Tales by a Buffalo & Croc Shooter. Casuarina, NT: Adventure Pub., 1986.Cowan, Adam. Letter. “A Feeling of Disgust.” Canberra Times 12 Mar. 1971: 2.Crocodile Dundee. Dir. Peter Faiman. Paramount Pictures, 1986.Crump, Barry. Gulf. Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1964.Gay, Edward. “Adventure. Tally-ho after Cape York Crocodiles.” The World’s News (Sydney), 27 Feb. 1954: 15.Nolan, Cynthia. Outback. London: Methuen & Co, 1962.Northeast, Brian. Preface. Crocodile Safari Man: My Tasmanian Childhood in the Great Depression & 50 Years of Desert Safari to the Gulf of Carpentaria 1949-1999. By Keith Adams. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2000. vi-viii.Northern Safari. Dir. Keith Adams. Keith Adams, 1956.Northern Safari. n.d. <http://northernsafari.com/>.Stewart, Allan. The Green Eyes Are Buffaloes. Melbourne: Lansdown, 1969.Stokes, John Lort. Discoveries in Australia: With an Account of the Coasts and Rivers Explored and Surveyed during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle in the Years 1837-38-39-40-41-42-43. By Command of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, Also a Narrative of Captain Owen Stanley's Visits to the Islands in the Arafura Sea. London: T. and W. Boone, 1846.Thompson, Linda. “’You Call That a Knife?’ The Crocodile as a Symbol of Australia”. New Voices, New Visions: Challenging Australian Identities and Legacies. Eds. Catriona Elder and Keith Moore. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2012: 118-134.Warburton, Carl. Buffaloes: Adventure and Discovery in Arnhem Land. Sydney: Angus & Robertson Ltd, 1934.Willey, Keith. Crocodile Hunt. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1966.

IntroductionSydney’s Garden Palace was a magnificent building with a grandeur that dominated the skyline, stretching from the site of the current State Library of New South Wales to the building that now houses the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. The Palace captivated society from its opening in 1879. This article outlines the building of one of Sydney’s early structural icons and how, despite being destroyed by fire after three short years in 1882, it had an enormous impact on the burgeoning colonial community of New South Wales, thus building a physical structure, pride and a suite of memories.Design and ConstructionIn February 1878, the Colonial Secretary’s Office announced that “it is intended to hold under the supervision of the Agricultural Society of New South Wales an international Exhibition in Sydney in August 1879” (Official Record ix). By December the same year it had become clear that the Agricultural Society lacked the resources to complete the project and control passed to the state government. Colonial Architect James Barnet was directed to prepare “plans for a building suitable for an international exhibition, proposed to be built in the Inner Domain” (Official Record xx). Within three days he had submitted a set of drawings for approval. From this point on there was a great sense of urgency to complete the building in less than 10 months for the exhibition opening the following September.The successful contractor was John Young, a highly experienced building contractor who had worked on the Crystal Palace for the 1851 London International Exhibition and locally on the General Post Office and Exhibition Building at Prince Alfred Park (Kent 6). Young was confident, procuring electric lights from London so that work could be carried out 24 hours a day, to ensure that the building was delivered on time. The structure was built, as detailed in the Colonial Record (1881), using over 1 million metres of timber, 2.5 million bricks and 220 tonnes of galvanised corrugated iron. Remarkably the building was designed as a temporary structure to house the Exhibition. At the end of the Exhibition the building was not dismantled as originally planned and was instead repurposed for government office space and served to house, among other things, records and objects of historical significance. Ultimately the provisional building materials used for the Garden Palace were more suited to a temporary structure, in contrast with those used for the more permanent structures built at the same time which are still standing today.The building was an architectural and engineering wonder set in a cathedral-like cruciform design, showcasing a stained-glass skylight in the largest dome in the southern hemisphere (64 metres high and 30 metres in diameter). The total floor space of the exhibition building was three and half hectares, and the area occupied by the Garden Palace and related buildings—including the Fine Arts Gallery, Agricultural Hall, Machinery Hall and 10 restaurants and places of refreshment—was an astounding 14 hectares (Official Record xxxvi). To put the scale of the Garden Palace into contemporary perspective it was approximately twice the size of the Queen Victoria Building that stands on Sydney’s George Street today.Several innovative features set the building apart from other Sydney structures of the day. The rainwater downpipes were enclosed in hollow columns of pine along the aisles, ventilation was provided through the floors and louvered windows (Official Record xxi) while a Whittier’s Steam Elevator enabled visitors to ascend the north tower and take in the harbour views (“Among the Machinery” 70-71). The building dominated the Sydney skyline, serving as a visual anchor point that welcomed visitors arriving in the city by boat:one of the first objects that met our view as, after 12 o’clock, we proceeded up Port Jackson, was the shell of the Exhibition Building which is so rapidly rising on the Domain, and which next September, is to dazzle the eyes of the world with its splendours. (“A ‘Bohemian’s’ Holiday Notes” 2)The DomeThe dome of the Garden Palace was directly above the intersection of the nave and transept and rested on a drum, approximately 30 metres in diameter. The drum featured 36 oval windows which flooded the space below with light. The dome was made of wood covered with corrugated galvanised iron featuring 12 large lattice ribs and 24 smaller ribs bound together with purlins of wood strengthened with iron. At the top of the dome was a lantern and stained glass skylight designed by Messrs. Lyon and Cottier. It was light blue, powdered with golden stars with wooden ribs in red, buff and gold (Notes 6). The painting and decorating of the dome commenced just one month before the exhibition was due to open. The dome was the sixth largest dome in the world at the time. During construction, contractor Mr Young allowed visitors be lifted in a cage to view the building’s progress.During the construction of the Lantern which surmounts the Dome of the Exhibition, visitors have been permitted, through the courtesy of Mr. Young, to ascend in the cage conveying materials for work. This cage is lifted by a single cable, which was constructed specially of picked Manilla hemp, for hoisting into position the heavy timbers used in the construction. The sensation whilst ascending is a most novel one, and must resemble that experienced in ballooning. To see the building sinking slowly beneath you as you successively reach the levels of the galleries, and the roofs of the transept and aisles is an experience never to be forgotten, and it seems a pity that no provision can be made for visitors, on paying a small fee, going up to the dome. (“View from the Lantern of the Dome Exhibition” 8)The ExhibitionInternational Exhibitions presented the opportunity for countries to express their national identities and demonstrate their economic and technological achievements. They allowed countries to showcase the very best examples of contemporary art, handicrafts and the latest technologies particularly in manufacturing (Pont and Proudfoot 231).The Sydney International Exhibition was the ninth International Exhibition and the colony’s first, and was responsible for bringing the world to Sydney at a time when the colony was prosperous and full of potential. The Exhibition—opening on 17 September 1879 and closing on 20 April 1880—had an enormous impact on the community, it boosted the economy and was the catalyst for improving the city’s infrastructure. It was a great source of civic pride.Image 1: The International Exhibition Sydney, 1879-1880, supplement to the Illustrated Sydney News Jan. 1880. Image credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (call no.: DL X8/3)This bird’s eye view of the Garden Palace shows how impressive the main structure was and how much of the Gardens and Domain were occupied by ancillary buildings for the Exhibition. Based on an original drawing by John Thomas Richardson, chief engraver at the Illustrated Sydney News, this lithograph features a key identifying buildings including the Art Gallery, Machinery Hall, and Agricultural Hall. Pens and sheds for livestock can also be seen. The parade ground was used throughout the Exhibition for displays of animals. The first notable display was the International Show of Sheep featuring Australian, French and English sheep; not surprisingly the shearing demonstrations proved to be particularly popular with the community.Approximately 34 countries and their colonies participated in the Exhibition, displaying the very best examples of technology, industry and art laid out in densely packed courts (Barnet n.p.). There were approximately 14,000 exhibits (Official Record c) which included displays of Bohemian glass, tapestries, fine porcelain, fabrics, pyramids of gold, metals, minerals, wood carvings, watches, ethnographic specimens, and heavy machinery. Image 2: “Meet Me under the Dome.” Illustrated Sydney News 1 Nov. 1879: 4. Official records cite that between 19,853 and 24,000 visitors attended the Exhibition on the opening day of 17 September 1879, and over 1.1 million people visited during its seven months of operation. Sizeable numbers considering the population of the colony, at the time, was just over 700,000 (New South Wales Census).The Exhibition helped to create a sense of place and community and was a popular destination for visitors. On crowded days the base of the dome became a favourite meeting place for visitors, so much so that “meet me under the dome” became a common expression in Sydney during the Exhibition (Official Record lxxxiii).Attendance was steady and continuous throughout the course of the Exhibition and, despite exceeding the predicted cost by almost four times, the Exhibition was deemed a resounding success. The Executive Commissioner Mr P.A. Jennings remarked at the closing ceremony:this great undertaking […] marks perhaps the most important epoch that has occurred in our history. In holding this exhibition we have entered into a new arena and a race of progress among the nations of the earth, and have placed ourselves in kindly competition with the most ancient States of the old and new world. (Official Record ciii)Initially the cost of admission was set at 5 shillings and later dropped to 1 shilling. Season tickets for the Exhibition were also available for £3 3s which entitled the holder to unlimited entry during all hours of general admission. Throughout the Exhibition, season ticket holders accounted for 76,278 admissions. The Exhibition boosted the economy and encouraged authorities to improve the city’s services and facilities which helped to build a sense of community as well as pride in the achievement of such a fantastic structure. A steam-powered tramway was installed to transport exhibition-goers around the city, after the Exhibition, the tramway network was expanded and by 1905–1906 the trams were converted to electric traction (Freestone 32).After the exhibition closed, the imposing Garden Palace building was used as office space and storage for various government departments.An Icon DestroyedIn the early hours of 22 September 1882 tragedy struck when the Palace was engulfed by fire (“Destruction of the Garden Palace” 7). The building – and all its contents – destroyed.Image 3: Burning of the Garden Palace from Eaglesfield, Darlinghurst, sketched at 5.55am, Sep 22/82. Image credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (call no.: SSV/137) Many accounts and illustrations of the Garden Palace fire can be found in contemporary newspapers and artworks. A rudimentary drawing by an unknown artist held by the State Library of New South Wales appears to have been created as the Palace was burning. The precise time and location is recorded on the painting, suggesting it was painted from Eaglesfield, a school on Darlinghurst Road. It purveys a sense of immediacy giving some insight into the chaos and heat of the tragedy. A French artist living in Sydney, Lucien Henry, was among those who attempted to capture the fire. His assistant, G.H. Aurousseau, described the event in the Technical Gazette in 1912:Mister Henry went out onto the balcony and watched until the Great Dome toppled in; it was then early morning; he went back to his studio procured a canvas, sat down and painted the whole scene in a most realistic manner, showing the fig trees in the Domain, the flames rising through the towers, the dome falling in and the reflected light of the flames all around. (Technical Gazette 33-35)The painting Henry produced is not the watercolour held by the State Library of New South Wales, however it is interesting to see how people were moved to document the destruction of such an iconic building in the city’s history.What Was Destroyed?The NSW Legislative Assembly debate of 26 September 1882, together with newspapers of the day, documented what was lost in the fire. The Garden Palace housed the foundation collection of the Technological and Sanitary Museum (the precursor to the Powerhouse Museum, now the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences), due to open on 1 December 1882. This collection included significant ethnological specimens such as Australian Indigenous artefacts, many of which were acquired from the Sydney International Exhibition. The Art Society of New South Wales had hung 300 paintings in preparation for their annual art exhibition due to open on 2 October of that year, all of these paintings consumed by fire.The Records of the Crown Lands Occupation Office were lost along with the 1881 Census (though the summary survived). Numerous railway surveys were lost, as were: £7,000 worth of statues, between 20,000 and 30,000 plants and the holdings of the Linnean Society offices and museum housed on the ground floor. The Eastern Suburbs Brass Band performed the day before at the opening of the Eastern Suburbs Horticultural Society Flower show; all the instruments were stored in the Garden Palace and were destroyed. Several Government Departments also lost significant records, including the: Fisheries Office; Mining Department; Harbour and Rivers Department; and, as mentioned, the Census Department.The fire was so ferocious that the windows in the terraces along Macquarie Street cracked with the heat and sheets of corrugated iron were blown as far away as Elizabeth Bay. How Did The Fire Start?No one knows how the fire started on that fateful September morning, and despite an official enquiry no explanation was ever delivered. One theory blamed the wealthy residents of Macquarie Street, disgruntled at losing their harbour views. Another was that it was burnt to destroy records stored in the basement of the building that contained embarrassing details about the convict heritage of many distinguished families. Margaret Lyon, daughter of the Garden Palace decorator John Lyon, wrote in her diary:a gentleman who says a boy told him when he was putting out the domain lights, that he saw a man jump out of the window and immediately after observed smoke, they are advertising for the boy […]. Everyone seems to agree on his point that it has been done on purpose – Today a safe has been found with diamonds, sapphires and emeralds, there were also some papers in it but they were considerably charred. The statue of her majesty or at least what remains of it, for it is completely ruined – the census papers were also ruined, they were ready almost to be sent to the printers, the work of 30 men for 14 months. Valuable government documents, railway and other plans all gone. (MLMSS 1381/Box 1/Item 2) There are many eyewitness accounts of the fire that day. From nightwatchman Mr Frederick Kirchen and his replacement Mr John McKnight, to an emotional description by 14-year-old student Ethel Pockley. Although there were conflicting accounts as to where the fire may have started, it seems likely that the fire started in the basement with flames rising around the statue of Queen Victoria, situated directly under the dome. The coroner did not make a conclusive finding on the cause of the fire but was scathing of the lack of diligence by the authorities in housing such important items in a building that was not well-secured a was a potential fire hazard.Building a ReputationA number of safes were known to have been in the building storing valuables and records. One such safe, a fireproof safe manufactured by Milner and Son of Liverpool, was in the southern corner of the building near the southern tower. The contents of this safe were unscathed in contrast with the contents of other safes, the contents of which were destroyed. The Milner safe was a little discoloured and blistered on the outside but otherwise intact. “The contents included three ledgers, or journals, a few memoranda and a plan of the exhibition”—the glue was slightly melted—the plan was a little discoloured and a few loose papers were a little charred but overall the contents were “sound and unhurt”—what better advertising could one ask for! (“The Garden Palace Fire” 5).barrangal dyara (skin and bones): Rebuilding CommunityThe positive developments for Sydney and the colony that stemmed from the building and its exhibition, such as public transport and community spirit, grew and took new forms. Yet, in the years since 1882 the memory of the Garden Palace and its disaster faded from the consciousness of the Sydney community. The great loss felt by Indigenous communities went unresolved.Image 4: barrangal dyara (skin and bones). Image credit: Sarah Morley.In September 2016 artist Jonathan Jones presented barrangal dyara (skin and bones), a large scale sculptural installation on the site of the Garden Palace Building in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden. The installation was Jones’s response to the immense loss felt throughout Australia with the destruction of countless Aboriginal objects in the fire. The installation featured thousands of bleached white shields made of gypsum that were laid out to show the footprint of the Garden Palace and represent the rubble left after the fire.Based on four typical designs from Aboriginal nations of the south-east, these shields not only raise the chalky bones of the building, but speak to the thousands of shields that would have had cultural presence in this landscape over generations. (Pike 33)ConclusionSydney’s Garden Palace was a stunning addition to the skyline of colonial Sydney. A massive undertaking, the Palace opened, to great acclaim, in 1879 and its effect on the community of Sydney and indeed the colony of New South Wales was sizeable. There were brief discussions, just after the fire, about rebuilding this great structure in a more permanent fashion for the centenary Exhibition in 1888 (“[From Our Own Correspondents] New South Wales” 5). Ultimately, it was decided that this achievement of the colony of New South Wales would be recorded in history, gifting a legacy of national pride and positivity on the one hand, but on the other an example of the destructive colonial impact on Indigenous communities. For many Sydney-siders today this history is as obscured as the original foundations of the physical building. What we build—iconic structures, civic pride, a sense of community—require maintenance and remembering. References“Among the Machinery.” The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser 10 Jan. 1880: 70-71.Aurousseau, G.H. “Lucien Henry: First Lecturer in Art at the Sydney Technical College.” Technical Gazette 2.III (1912): 33-35.Barnet, James. International Exhibition, Sydney, 1880: References to the Plans Showing the Space and Position Occupied by the Various Exhibits in the Garden Palace. Sydney: Colonial Architect’s Office, 1880.“A ‘Bohemian’s’ Holiday Notes.” The Singleton Argus and Upper Hunter General Advocate 23 Apr. 1879: 2.Census Department. New South Wales Census. 1881. 3 Mar. 2017 <http://hccda.ada.edu.au/pages/NSW-1881-census-02_vi>. “Destruction of the Garden Palace.” Sydney Morning Herald 23 Sep. 1882: 7.Freestone, Robert. “Space Society and Urban Reform.” Colonial City, Global City, Sydney’s International Exhibition 1879. Eds. Peter Proudfoot, Roslyn Maguire, and Robert Freestone. Darlinghurst, NSW: Crossing P, 2000. 15-33.“[From Our Own Correspondents] New South Wales.” The Age (Melbourne, Vic.) 30 Sep. 1882: 5.“The Garden Palace Fire.” Sydney Morning Herald 25 Sep. 1882: 5.Illustrated Sydney News and New South Wales Agriculturalist and Grazier 1 Nov. 1879: 4.“International Exhibition.” Australian Town and Country Journal 15 Feb. 1879: 11.Kent, H.C. “Reminiscences of Building Methods in the Seventies under John Young. Lecture.” Architecture: An Australian Magazine of Architecture and the Arts Nov. (1924): 5-13.Lyon, Margaret. Unpublished Manuscript Diary. MLMSS 1381/Box 1/Item 2.New South Wales, Legislative Assembly. Debates 22 Sep. 1882: 542-56.Notes on the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879. Melbourne: Government Printer, 1881.Official Record of the Sydney International Exhibition 1879. Sydney: Government Printer, 1881.Pike, Emma. “barrangal dyara (skin and bones).” Jonathan Jones: barrangal dyara (skin and bones). Eds. Ross Gibson, Jonathan Jones, and Genevieve O’Callaghan. Balmain: Kaldor Public Arts Project, 2016.Pont, Graham, and Peter Proudfoot. “The Technological Movement and the Garden Palace.” Colonial City, Global City, Sydney’s International Exhibition 1879. Eds. Peter Proudfoot, Roslyn Maguire, and Robert Freestone. Darlinghurst, NSW: Crossing Press, 2000. 239-249.“View from the Lantern of the Dome of the Exhibition.” Illustrated Sydney News and New South Wales Agriculturalist and Grazier 9 Aug. 1879: 8.

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).

There have been a number of Australian memoirs written by adoptees over the last twenty years—Robert Dessaix’s A Mother’s Disgrace, Suzanne Chick’s Searching for Charmian, Tom Frame’s Binding Ties:An Experience of Adoption and Reunion in Australia, for example—as well as international adoptee narratives by Betty Jean Lifton, Florence Fisher, and A. M. Homes amongst others. These works form a component of the small but growing field of adoption life writing that includes works by “all members of the adoption triad” (Hipchen and Deans 163): adoptive parents, birthparents, and adoptees. As the broad genre of memoir becomes more theorised and mapped, many sub-genres are emerging (Brien). My own adoptee story (which I am currently composing) could be a further sub-categorisation of the adoptee memoir, that of “late discovery adoptees” (Perl and Markham), those who are either told, or find out, about their adoption in adulthood. When this is part of a life story, secrets and silences are prominent, and digging into these requires using whatever resources can be found. These include cookbooks, recipes written by hand, and the scraps of paper shoved between pages. There are two cookbooks from my adoptive mother’s belongings that I have kept. One of them is titled Miss Tuxford’s Modern Cookery for the Middle Classes: Hints on Modern Gas Stove Cooking, and this was published around 1937 in England. It’s difficult to date this book exactly, as there is no date in my copy, but one of the advertisements (for Bird’s Custard, I think; the page is partly obscured by an Orange Nut Loaf recipe from a Willow baking pan that has been glued onto the page) is headed with a date range of 1837 to 1937. It has that smell of long ago that lingers strongly even now, out of the protective custody of my mother’s storage. Or should I say, out of the range of my adoptive father’s garbage dump zeal. He loved throwing things away, but these were often things that I saw as valuable, or at least of sentimental value, worth keeping for the memories they evoked. Maybe my father didn’t want to remember. My mother was brimming with memories, I discovered after her death, but she did not reveal them during her life. At least, not to me, making objects like these cookbooks precious in my reconstruction of the lives I know so little about, as well as in the grieving process (Gibson).Miss Tuxford (“Diplomée Board of Education, Gold Medallist, etc”) produced numerous editions of her book. My mother’s is now fragile, loose at the spine and browned with age. There are occasional stains showing that the bread and cakes section got the most use, with the pages for main meals of meat and vegetables relatively clean. The author divided her recipes into the main chapters of Soups (lentil, kidney, sheep’s head broth), Sauces (white, espagnol, mushroom), Fish (“It is important that all fish is fresh when cooked” (23)), Meats (roasted, boiled, stuffed; roast rabbit, boiled turkey, scotch collop), Vegetables (creamed beetroot, economical salad dressing, potatoes baked in their skins), Puddings and Sweets (suet pastry, Yorkshire pudding, chocolate tarts, ginger cream), Bread and Cakes (household bread, raspberry sandwich cake, sultana scones, peanut fancies), Icings and Fillings, Invalid Cookery (beef tea, nourishing lemonade, Virol pudding), Jams, Sweetmeats and Pickles (red currant jelly, piccalilli) and Miscellaneous Dishes including Meatless Recipes (cheese omelette, mock white fish, mock duck, mock goose, vegetarian mincemeat). At the back, Miss Tuxford includes sections on gas cooking hints, “specimen household dinners” (206), and household hints. There is then a “Table of Foods in Season” (208–10) taking the reader through the months and the various meats and vegetables available at those times. There is a useful index and finally an advertisement for an oven cleaner on the last page (which is glued to the back cover). There are food and cookery advertisements throughout the book, but my favourite is the one inside the front cover, for Hartley’s jam, featuring two photographs of a little boy. The first shows him looking serious, and slightly anxious, the second wide-eyed and smiling, eager for his jam. The text tells mothers that “there’s nothing like plenty of bread and Hartley’s for a growing boy” (inside front cover). I love the simple appeal to making your little boy happy that is contained within this tiny narrative. Did my mother and father eat this jam when they were small? By 1937, my mother was twenty-one, not yet married, living with her mother in Weston-super-Mare. She was learning secretarial skills—I have her certificate of proficiency in Pitman’s shorthand—and I think she and my father had met by then. Perhaps she thought about when she would be giving her own children Hartley’s jam, or something else prepared from Miss Tuxford’s recipes, like the Christmas puddings, shortbread, or chocolate cake. She would not have imagined that no children would arrive, that twenty-five years of marriage would pass before she held her own baby, and this would be one who was born to another woman. In the one other cookbook I have kept, there are several recipes cut out from newspapers, and a few typed or handwritten recipes hidden within the pages. This is The Main Cookery Book, in its August 1944 reprint, which was written and compiled by Marguerite K. Gompertz and the “Staff of the Main Research Kitchen”. My mother wrote her name and the date she obtained the cookbook (31 January 1945) on the first blank page. She had been married just over five years, and my father may, or may not, have still been in the Royal Air Force. I have only a sketchy knowledge of my adoptive parents. My mother was born in Newent, Gloucestershire, and my father in Bromley, Kent; they were both born during the first world war. My father served as a navigator in the Royal Air Force in the second world war in the 1940s, received head and psychological injuries and was invalided out before the war ended. He spent some time in rehabilitation, there being letters from him to my mother detailing his stay in one hospital in the 1950s. Their life seemed to become less and less secure as the years passed, more chaotic, restless, and unsettled. By the time I came into their lives, they were both nearly fifty, and moving from place to place. Perhaps this is one reason why I have no memory of my mother cooking. I cannot picture her consulting these cookbooks, or anything more modern, or even cutting out the recipes from newspapers and magazines, because I do not remember seeing her do it. She did not talk to me about cooking, we didn’t cook together, and I do not remember her teaching me anything about food or its preparation. This is a gap in my memory that is puzzling. There is evidence—the books and additional paper recipes and stains on the pages—that my mother was involved in the world of the kitchen. This suggests she handled meats, vegetables, and flours, kneaded, chopped, mashed, baked, and boiled all manners of foods. But I cannot remember her doing any of it. I think the cooking must have been a part of her life before me, when she lived in England, her home country, which she loved, and when she still had hope that children would come. It must have then been apparent that her husband was going to need support and care after the war, and I can imagine she came to realise that any dreams she had would need rearranging.What I do remember is that our meals were prepared by my father, and contained no spices, onions, or garlic because he suffered frequently from indigestion and said these ingredients made it worse. He was a big-chested man with small hips who worried he was too heavy and so put himself on diets every other week. For my father, dieting meant not eating anything, which tended to lead to binges on chocolate or cheese or whatever he could grab easily from the fridge.Meals at night followed a pattern. On Sundays we ate roast chicken with vegetables as a treat, then finished it over the next days as a cold accompaniment with salad. Other meals would feature fish fingers, mince, ham, or a cold luncheon meat with either salad or boiled vegetables. Sometimes we would have a tin of peaches in juice or ice cream, or both. No cookbooks were consulted to prepare these meals.What was my mother doing while my father cooked? She must have been in the kitchen too, probably contributing, but I don’t see her there. By the time we came back to Australia permanently in 1974, my father’s working life had come to an end, and he took over the household cookery for something to do, as well as sewing his own clothes, and repairing his own car. He once hoisted the engine out of a Morris Minor with the help of a young mechanic, a rope, and the branch of a poinciana tree. I have three rugs that he wove before I was born, and he made furniture as well. My mother also sewed, and made my school uniforms and other clothes as well as her own skirts and blouses, jackets and pants. Unfortunately, she was fond of crimplene, which came in bright primary colours and smelled of petrol, but didn’t require ironing and dried quickly on the washing line. It didn’t exactly hang on your body, but rather took it over, imposing itself with its shapelessness. The handwritten recipe for salad cream shown on the pink paper is not in my mother’s hand but my father’s. Her correction can be seen to the word “gelatine” at the bottom; she has replaced it with “c’flour” which I assume means cornflour. This recipe actually makes me a liar, because it shows my father writing about using pepper, paprika, and tumeric to make a food item, when I have already said he used no spices. When I knew him, and ate his food, he didn’t. But he had another life for forty-seven years before my birth, and these recipes with their stains and scribbles help me to begin making a picture of both his life, and my mother’s. So much of them is a complete mystery to me, but these scraps of belongings help me inch along in my thinking about them, who they were, and what they meant to me (Turkle).The Main Cookery Book has a similar structure to Miss Tuxford’s, with some variations, like the chapter titled Réchauffés, which deals with dishes using already cooked foodstuffs that only then require reheating, and a chapter on home-made wines. There are also notes at the end of the book on topics such as gas ovens and methods of cooking (boiling, steaming, simmering, and so on). What really interests me about this book are the clippings inserted by my mother, although the printed pages themselves seem relatively clean and uncooked upon. There is a recipe for pickles and chutneys torn from a newspaper, and when I look on the other side I find a context: a note about Charlie Chaplin and the House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee starting its investigations into the influence of Communists on Hollywood. I wonder if my parents talked about these events, or if they went to see Charlie Chaplin’s films. My mother’s diaries from the 1940s include her references to movies—Shirley Temple in Kiss and Tell, Bing Crosby in Road to Utopia—as well as day to day activities and visits to, and from, family and friends, her sinus infections and colds, getting “shock[ed] from paraffin lamp”, food rationing. If my father kept diaries during his earlier years, nothing of them survives. I remember his determined shredding of documents after my mother’s death, and his fear of discovery, that his life’s secrets would be revealed. He did not tell me I had been adopted until I was twenty-three, and rarely spoke of it afterwards. My mother never mentioned it. I look at the recipe for lemon curd. Did my mother ever make this? Did she use margarine instead of butter? We used margarine on sandwiches, as butter was too hard to spread. Once again, I turn over this clipping to read the news, and find no date but an announcement of an exhibition of work by Marc Chagall at the Tate Gallery, the funeral of Sir Geoffrey Fison (who I discover from The Peerage website died in 1948, unmarried, a Baronet and decorated soldier), and a memorial service for Dr. Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian poet and prose writer, during which the Poet Laureate of the time, John Masefield, gave the address. And there was also a note about the latest wills, including that of a reverend who left an estate valued at over £50 000. My maternal adoptive grandmother, who lived in Weston-super-Mare across the road from the beach, and with whom we stayed for several months in 1974, left most of her worldly belongings to my mother and nothing to her son. He seems to have been cut out from her life after she separated from her husband, and her children’s father, sometime in the 1920s. Apparently, my uncle followed his father out to Australia, and his mother never forgave him, refusing to have anything more to do with her son for the rest of her life, not even to see her grandchildren. When I knew her in that brief period in 1974, she was already approaching eighty and showing signs of dementia. But I do remember dancing the Charleston with her in the kitchen, and her helping me bathe my ragdoll Pollyanna in a tub in the garden. The only food I remember at her stone house was afternoon tea with lots of different, exotic cakes, particularly one called Neopolitan, with swirls of red and brown through the moist sponge. My grandmother had a long narrow garden filled with flowers and a greenhouse with tomatoes; she loved that garden, and spent a lot of time nurturing it.My father and his mother-in-law were not each other’s favourite person, and this coloured my mother’s relationship with her, too. We were poor for many years, and the only reason we were able to go to England was because of the generosity of my grandmother, who paid for our airfares. I think my father searched for work while we were there, but whether he was successful or not I do not know. We returned to Australia and I went into grade four at the end of 1974, an outsider of sorts, and bemused by the syllabus, because I had moved around so much. I went to eight different primary schools and two high schools, eventually obtaining a scholarship to a private girls’ school for the last four years. My father was intent on me becoming a doctor, and so my life was largely study, which is another reason why I took little notice of what went on in the kitchen and what appeared on the dining table. I would come home from school and my parents would start meal preparation almost straight away, so we sat down to dinner at about four o’clock during the week, and I started the night’s study at five. I usually worked through until about ten, and then read a novel for a little while before sleep. Every parcel of time was accounted for, and nothing was wasted. This schedule continued throughout those four years of high school, with my father berating me if I didn’t do well at an exam, but also being proud when I did. In grades eight, nine, and ten, I studied home economics, and remember being offered a zucchini to taste because I had never seen one before. I also remember making Greek biscuits of some sort for an exam, and the sieve giving out while I was sifting a large quantity of flour. We learned to cook simple meals of meats and vegetables, and to prepare a full breakfast. We also baked cakes but, when my sponges remained flat, I realised that my strengths might lay elsewhere. This probably also contributed to my lack of interest in cooking. Domestic pursuits were not encouraged at home, although my mother did teach me to sew and knit, resulting in skewed attempts at a shirt dress and a white blouse, and a wildly coloured knitted shoulder bag that I actually liked but which embarrassed my father. There were no such lessons in cakemaking or biscuit baking or any of the recipes from Miss Tuxford. By this time, my mother bought such treats from the supermarket.This other life, this previous life of my parents, a life far away in time and place, was completely unknown to me before my mother’s death. I saw little of them after the revelation of my adoption, not because of this knowledge I then had, but because of my father’s controlling behaviour. I discovered that the rest of my adoptive family, who I hardly knew apart from my maternal grandmother, had always known. It would have been difficult, after all, for my parents to keep such a secret from them. Because of this life of constant moving, my estrangement from my family, and our lack of friends and connections with other people, there was a gap in my experience. As a child, I only knew one grandmother, and only for a relatively brief period of time. I have no grandfatherly memories, and none either of aunts and uncles, only a few fleeting images of a cousin here and there. It was difficult to form friendships as a child when we were only in a place for a limited time. We were always moving on, and left everything behind, to start again in a new suburb, state, country. Continuity and stability were not our trademarks, for reasons that are only slowly making themselves known to me: my father’s mental health problems, his difficult personality, our lack of money, the need to keep my adoption secret.What was that need? From where did it spring? My father always seemed to be a secretive person, an intensely private man, one who had things to hide, and seemed to suffer many mistakes and mishaps and misfortune. At the end, after my mother’s death, we spent two years with each other as he became frailer and moved into a nursing home. It was a truce formed out of necessity, as there was no one else to care for him, so thoroughly had he alienated his family; he had no friends, certainly not in Australia, and only the doctor and helping professionals to talk to most days. My father’s brother John had died some years before, and the whereabouts of his other sibling Gordon were unknown. I discovered that he had died three years previously. Nieces had not heard from my father for decades. My mother’s niece revealed that my mother and she had never met. There is a letter from my mother’s father in the 1960s, probably just before he died, remarking that he would like a photograph of her as they hadn’t seen each other for forty years. None of this was talked about when my mother was alive. It was as if I was somehow separate from their stories, from their history, that it was not suitable for my ears, or that once I came into their lives they wanted to make a new life altogether. At that time, all of their past was stored away. Even my very origins, my tiny past life, were unspoken, and made into a secret. The trouble with secrets, however, is that they hang around, peek out of boxes, lurk in the corners of sentences, and threaten to be revealed by the questions of puzzled strangers, or mistakenly released by knowledgeable relatives. Adoptee memoirs like mine seek to go into those hidden storage boxes and the corners and pages of sources like these seemingly innocent old cookbooks, in the quest to bring these secrets to light. Like Miss Tuxford’s cookbook, with its stains and smudges, or the Main Cookery Book with its pages full of clippings, the revelation of such secrets threaten to tell stories that contradict the official version. ReferencesBrien, Donna Lee. “Pathways into an ‘Elaborate Ecosystem’: Ways of Categorising the Food Memoir”. TEXT (October 2011). 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct11/brien.htm›.Chick, Suzanne. Searching for Charmian. Sydney: Picador, 1995.Dessaix, Robert. A Mother’s Disgrace. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994.Fisher, Florence. The Search for Anna Fisher. New York: Arthur Fields, 1973.Frame, Tom. Binding Ties: An Experience of Adoption and Reunion in Australia. Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, 1999.Gibson, Margaret. Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P, 2008. Gompertz, Marguerite K., and the Staff of the Main Research Kitchen. The Main Cookery Book. 52nd. ed. London: R. & A. Main, 1944. Hipchen, Emily, and Jill Deans. “Introduction. Adoption Life Writing: Origins and Other Ghosts”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 18.2 (2003): 163–70. Special Issue on Adoption.Homes, A. M. The Mistress’s Daughter: A Memoir. London: Granta, 2007.Kiss and Tell. Dir. By Richard Wallace. Columbia Pictures, 1945.Lifton, Betty Jean. Twice Born: Memoirs of An Adopted Daughter. Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1977.Lundy, Darryl, comp. The Peerage: A Genealogical Survey of the Peerage of Britain as well as the Royal Families of Europe. 30 May 2013 ‹http://www.thepeerage.com/p40969.htm#i409684›Perl, Lynne and Shirin Markham. Why Wasn’t I Told? Making Sense of the Late Discovery of Adoption. Bondi: Post Adoption Resource Centre/Benevolent Society of NSW, 1999.Road to Utopia. Dir. By Hal Walker. Paramount, 1946.Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 2011. Tuxford, Miss H. H. Miss Tuxford’s Modern Cookery for the Middle Classes: Hints on Modern Gas Stove Cooking. London: John Heywood, c.1937.

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>.

IntroductionThis article suggests extensions to the place of ‘national collections’ of Australia’s migration histories, and considers the role of regional libraries and museums in collecting, preserving, and making accessible the history of migration. The article describes a recent collaboration between the Bonegilla Migrant Experience site, the Albury LibraryMuseum and the regionally-based Charles Sturt University (CSU) to develop a virtual, three-dimensional tour of Bonegilla, a former migrant arrival centre. Through this, the role of regional collections as keeping places of migration memories and narratives outside of those institutions charged with preserving the nation’s memory is highlighted and explored.What Makes a Nation’s Memory?In 2018 the Australian Research Council (ARC) awarded a Linkage grant to a collaboration between two universities (RMIT and Deakin), and the National Library of Australia, State Library of South Australia, State Library of Victoria, and State Library of New South Wales titled “Representing Multicultural Australia in National and State Libraries” (LP170100222). This Linkage project aimed to “develop a new methodology for evaluating multicultural collections, and new policies and strategies to develop and provide access to these collections” (RMIT Centre for Urban Research).One planned output of the Linkage project was a conference, to be held in early 2019, titled “Collecting for a Society’s Memory: National and State Libraries in Culturally Diverse Societies.” The conference call for papers suggested themes that included an interrogation of the relationship between libraries and ‘the collecting sector’, but with a focus still on National and State Libraries (Boyd). As an aside, the correlation between libraries and memories seemed slightly incongruous here, as archives and museums in particular would also be key in this collecting (and preserving) society’s memory, and also the libraries that exist outside of the national and state capitals.It felt like the project and conference had a definite ‘national’ focus, with the ‘regional’ mentioned only briefly in a suggested theme.At the same time that I was reading this call for papers and about the Linkage, I was part of a CSU Learning and Teaching project to develop online learning materials for students in our Teacher Education programs (history in particular) based around the Bonegilla Migrant Arrival Centre in Wodonga, Victoria. This project uses three-dimensional film technology to bring students to the Centre site, where they can take an interactive, curriculum-based tour of the site. Alongside the interactive online tour, a series of curricula were developed to work with the Australian History Curriculum. I wondered why community-led collections like these in the regions fall to the side in discussions of a ‘national’ (aka institutional) memory, or as part of a representation of a multicultural Australia, such as in this Linkage.Before I start exploring this question I want to acknowledge the limitations of the ARC Linkage framework in terms of the project mentioned above, and that the work that is being done in the “Representing Multicultural Australia in National and State Libraries” project is of value to professional practice and community; in this article I am using the juxtaposition of the two projects as an impetus to interrogate the role of regional collaboration, and to argue for a notion of national memory as a regional collecting concern.Bonegilla: A Contested SiteFrom 1947 through to 1971 over 300,000 migrants to Australia passed through the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre (“Bonegilla”) at a defining time in Australia’s immigration history, as post-World War II migration policies encompassed non-English speaking Europeans displaced by the war (Pennay "Remembering Bonegilla" 43). Bonegilla itself is a small settlement near the Hume Dam, 10 km from the New South Wales town of Albury and the Victorian town of Wodonga. Bonegilla was a former Army Camp repurposed to meet the settlement agendas of multiple Australian governments.New migrants spent weeks and months at Bonegilla, learning English, and securing work. The site was the largest (covering 130 hectares of land) and longest-lasting reception centre in post-war Australia, and has been confirmed bureaucratically as nationally significant, having been added to the National Heritage Register in 2007 (see Pennay “Remembering Bonegilla” for an in-depth discussion of this listing process). Bonegilla has played a part in defining and redefining Australia’s migrant and multicultural history through the years, with Bruce Pennay suggesting thatperhaps Bonegilla has warranted national notice as part of an officially initiated endeavour to develop a more inclusive narrative of nation, for the National Heritage List was almost contemporaneously expanded to include Myall Creek. Perhaps it is exemplary in raising questions about the roles of the nation and the community in reception and training that morph into modern day equivalents. (“Memories and Representations” 46)Given its national significance, both formally and colloquially, Bonegilla has provided rich material for critical thinking around, for example, Australian multicultural identity, migration commemorations and the construction of cultural memory. Alexandra Dellios argues that Bonegilla and its role in Australia’s memory is a contested site, and thatdespite criticisms from historians such as Persian and Ashton regarding Bonegilla’s adherence to a revisionist narrative of multicultural progress, visitor book comments, as well as exchanges and performances at reunions and festivals, demonstrate that visitors take what they will from available frameworks, and fill in the ‘gaps’ according to their own collective memories, needs and expectations. (1075)This recognition of Bonegilla as a significant, albeit “heritage noir” (Pennay, “Memories and Representations” 48), agent of Australia’s heritage and memory makes it a productive site to investigate the question of regional collections and collaborations in constructing a national memory.Recordkeeping: By Government and CommunityThe past decade has seen a growth in the prominence of community archives as places of memory for communities (for example Flinn; Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd; Zavala et al.). This prominence has come through the recognition of community archives as both valid sites of study as well as repositories of memory. In turn, this body of knowledge has offered new ways to think about collection practices outside of the mainstream, where “communities can make collective decisions about what is of enduring value to them, shape collective memory of their own pasts, and control the means through which stories about their past are constructed” (Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez 58). Jimmy Zavala, and colleagues, argue that these collections “challenge hierarchical structures of governance found in mainstream archival institutions” (212), and offer different perspectives to those kept on the official record. By recognising both the official record and the collections developed and developing outside of official repositories, there are opportunities to deepen understandings and interpretations of historical moments in time.There are at least three possible formal keeping places of memories for those who passed through, worked at, or lived alongside Bonegilla: the National Archives of Australia, the Albury LibraryMuseum in Albury, New South Wales, and the Bonegilla Migrant Experience site itself outside of Wodonga. There will of course be records in other national, state, local, and community repositories, along with newspaper articles, people’s homes, and oral lore that contribute to the narrative of Bonegilla memories, but the focus for this article are these three key sites as the main sources of primary source material about the Bonegilla experience.Official administrative and organisational records of activity during Bonegilla’s reception period are held at the National Archives of Australia in the national capital, Canberra; these records contribute to the memory of Bonegilla from a nation-state perspective, building an administrative record of the Centre’s history and of a significant period of migration in Australia’s past. Of note, Bonegilla was the only migrant centre that created its own records on site, and these records form part of the series known as NAA: A2567, NAA A2571 1949–56 and A2572 1957–71 (Hutchison 70). Records of local staff employed at the site will also be included in these administrative files. Very few of these records are publicly accessible online, although work is underway to provide enhanced online and analogue access to the popular arrival cards (NAA A2571 1949-56 and A2572 1957–71) onsite at Bonegilla (Pennay, personal communication) as they are in high demand by visitors to the site, who are often looking for traces of themselves or their families in the official record. The National Archives site Destination Australia is an example of an attempt by the holder of these administrative records to collect personal stories of this period in Australia’s history through an online photograph gallery and story register, but by 2019 less than 150 stories have been published to the site, which was launched in 2014 (National Archives of Australia).This national collection is complemented and enhanced by the Bonegilla Migration Collection at the Albury LibraryMuseum in southern New South Wales, which holds non-government records and memories of life at Bonegilla. This collection “contains over 20 sustained interviews; 357 personal history database entries; over 500 short memory pieces and 700 photographs” (Pennay “Memories and Representations” 45). It is a ‘live’ collection, growing through contributions to the Bonegilla Personal History Register by the migrants and others who experienced the Centre, and through an ongoing relationship with the current Bonegilla Migrant Experience site to act as a collection home for their materials.Alongside the collection in the LibraryMuseum, there is the collection of infrastructure at the Bonegilla Migrant Experience (BME) site itself. These buildings and other assets, and indeed the absence of buildings, plus the interpretative material developed by BME staff, give further depth and meaning to the lived experience of post-war migration to Australia. Whilst both of these collections are housed and managed by local government agencies, I suggest in this article that these collections can still be considered community archives, given the regional setting of the collections, and the community created records included in the collections.The choice to locate Bonegilla in a fairly isolated regional setting was a strategy of the governments of the time (Persian), and in turn has had an impact on how the site is accessed; by who, and how often (see Dellios for a discussion of the visitor numbers over the history of the Bonegilla Migrant Experience over its time as a commemorative and tourist site). The closest cities to Bonegilla, Albury and Wodonga, sit on the border of New South Wales and Victoria, separated by the Murray River and located 300 km from Melbourne and 550 km from Sydney. The ‘twin towns’ work collaboratively on many civic activities, and are an example of a 1970s-era regional development project that in the twenty-first century is still growing, despite the regional setting (Stein 345).This regional setting justifies a consideration of virtual, and online access to what some argue is a site of national memory loaded with place-based connections, with Jayne Persian arguing that “the most successful forays into commemoration of Bonegilla appear to be website-based and institution-led” (81). This sentiment is reflected in the motivation to create further online access points to Bonegilla, such as the one discussed in this article.Enhancing Teaching, Learning, and Public Access to CollectionsIn 2018 these concepts of significant heritage sites, community archives, national records, and an understanding of migration history came together in a regionally-based Teaching and Learning project funded through a CSU internal grant scheme. The scheme, designed to support scholarship and enhance learning and teaching at CSU, funded a small pilot project to pilot a virtual visit to a real-life destination: the Bonegilla Migrant Experience site. The project was designed to provide key teaching and learning material for students in CSU Education courses, and those training to teach history in particular, but also enhance virtual access to the site for the wider public.The project was developed as a partnership between CSU, Albury LibraryMuseum, and Bonegilla Migrant Experience, and formalised through a Memorandum of Understanding with shared intellectual property. The virtual visit includes a three-dimensional walkthrough created using Matterport software, intuitive navigation of the walkthrough, and four embedded videos linked with online investigation guides. The site is intended to help online visitors ‘do history’ by locating and evaluating sources related to a heritage site with many layers and voices, and whose narrative and history is contested and told through many lenses (Grover and Pennay).As you walk through the virtual site, you get a sense of the size and scope of the Migrant Arrival Centre. The current Bonegilla Migrant Experience site sits at Block 19, one of 24 blocks that formed part of the Centre in its peak time. The guiding path takes you through the Reception area and then to the ‘Beginning Place’, a purpose built interpretative structure that “introduces why people came to Australia searching for a new beginning” (Bonegilla site guide). Moving through, you pass markers on the walls and other surfaces that link through to further interpretative materials and investigation guides. These guides are designed to introduce K-10 students and their teachers to practices such as exploring online archives and thematic inquiry learning aligned to the Australian History Curriculum. Each guide is accompanied by teacher support material and further classroom activities.The guides prompt and guide visitors through an investigation of online archives, and other repositories, including sourcing files held by the National Archives of Australia, searching for newspaper accounts of controversial events through the National Library of Australia’s digital repository Trove, and access to personal testimonies of migrants and refugees through the Albury LibraryMuseum Bonegilla Migration Collection. Whilst designed to support teachers and students engaging with the Australian History Curriculum, these resources are available to the public. They provide visitors to the virtual site an opportunity to develop their own critical digital literacy skills and further their understanding of the official records along with the community created records such as those held by the Albury LibraryMuseum.The project partnership developed from existing relationships between cultural heritage professionals in the Albury Wodonga region along with new relationships developed for technology support from local companies. The project also reinforced the role of CSU, with its regional footprint, in being able to connect and activate regionally-based projects for community benefit along with teaching and learning outcomes.Regional CollaborationsLiz Bishoff argues for a “collaboration imperative” when it comes to the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector’s efficacy, and it is the collaborative nature of this project that I draw on in this article. Previous work has also suggested models of convergence, where multiple institutions in the GLAM sector become a single institution (Warren and Matthews 3). In fact the Albury LibraryMuseum is an example of this model. These converged models have been critiqued from resourcing, professionalisation and economic perspectives (see for example Jones; Hider et al.; Wellington), but in some cases for local government agencies especially, they are an effective way of delivering services to communities (Warren and Matthews 9). In the case of this virtual tour, the collaboration between local government and university agencies was temporal for the length of the project, where the pooling of skills, resources, and networks has enabled the development of the resource.In this project, the regional setting has allowed and taken advantage of an intimacy that I argue may not have been possible in a metropolitan or urban setting. The social intimacies of regional town living mean that jobs are often ‘for a long time (if not for life)’, lives intersect in more than a professional context, and that because there are few pathways or options for alternative work opportunities in the GLAM professions, there is a vested interest in progress and success in project-based work. The relationships that underpinned the Bonegilla virtual tour project reflect many of these social intimacies, which included former students, former colleagues, and family relationships.The project has modelled future strategies for collaboration, including open discussions about intellectual property created, the auspicing of financial arrangements and the shared professional skills and knowledge. There has been a significant enhancement of collaborative partnerships between stakeholders, along with further development of professional and personal networks.National Memories: Regional ConcernsThe focus of this article has been on records created about a significant period in Australia’s migration history, and the meaning that these records hold based on who created them, where they are held, and how they are accessed and interpreted. Using the case study of the development of a virtual tour of a significant site—Bonegilla—I have highlighted the value of regional, non-national collections in providing access to and understanding of national memories, and the importance of collaborative practice to working with these collections. These collections sit physically in the regional communities of Albury and Wodonga, along with at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra, where they are cared for by professional staff across the GLAM sector and accessed both physically and virtually by students, researchers, and those whose lives intersected with Bonegilla.From this, I argue that by understanding national and institutional recordkeeping spaces such as the National Archives of Australia as just one example of a place of ‘national memory’, we can make space for regional and community-based repositories as important and valuable sources of records about the lived experience of migration. Extending this further, I suggest a recognition of the role of the regional setting in enabling strong collaborations to make these records visible and accessible.Further research in this area could include exploring the possibility of giving meaning to the place of record creation, especially community records, and oral histories, and how collaborations are enabling this. In contrast to this question, I also suggest an exploration of the role of the Commonwealth staff who created the records during the period of Bonegilla’s existence, and their social and cultural history, to give more meaning and context to the setting of the currently held records.ReferencesBishoff, Liz. “The Collaboration Imperative.” Library Journal 129.1 (2004): 34–35.Boyd, Jodie. “Call for Papers: Collecting for a Society’s Memory: National and State Libraries in Culturally Diverse Societies.” 2018. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/2079324/collecting-society%E2%80%99s-memory-national-and-state-libraries>.Caswell, Michelle, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez. “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing': Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives.” The American Archivist 79.1 (2016): 56–81.Dellios, Alexandra. “Marginal or Mainstream? Migrant Centres as Grassroots and Official Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21.10 (2015): 1068–83.Flinn, Andrew. “Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 28.2 (2007): 151–76.Flinn, Andrew, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd. “Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream.” Archival Science 9.1–2 (2009): 71.Grover, Paul, and Bruce Pennay. “Learning & Teaching Grant Progress Report.” Albury Wodonga: Charles Sturt U, 2019.Hider, Philip, Mary Anne Kennan, Mary Carroll, and Jessie Lymn. “Exploring Potential Barriers to Lam Synergies in the Academy: Institutional Locations and Publishing Outlets.” The Expanding LIS Education Universe (2018): 104.Hutchison, Mary. “Accommodating Strangers: Commonwealth Government Records of Bonegilla and Other Migrant Accommodation Centres.” Public History Review 11 (2004): 63–79.Jones, Michael. “Innovation Study: Challenges and Opportunities for Australia’s Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.” Archives & Manuscripts 43.2 (2015): 149–51.National Archives of Australia. “Snakes in the Laundry... and Other Horrors”. Canberra, 29 May 2014. <http://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/media/media-releases/2014/25.aspx>.Pennay, Bruce. “‘But No One Can Say He Was Hungry’: Memories and Representations of Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre.” History Australia 9.1 (2012): 43–63.———. “Remembering Bonegilla: The Construction of a Public Memory Place at Block 19.” Public History Review 16 (2009): 43–63.Persian, Jayne. “Bonegilla: A Failed Narrative.” History Australia 9.1 (2012): 64–83.RMIT Centre for Urban Research. “Representing Multicultural Australia in National and State Libraries”. 2018. 11 Feb. 2019 <http://cur.org.au/project/representing-multicultural-australia-national-state-libraries/>.Stein, Clara. “The Growth and Development of Albury-Wodonga 1972–2006: United and Divided.” Macquarie U, 2012.Warren, Emily, and Graham Matthews. “Public Libraries, Museums and Physical Convergence: Context, Issues, Opportunities: A Literature Review Part 1.” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (2018): 1–14.Wellington, Shannon. “Building Glamour: Converging Practice between Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum Entities in New Zealand Memory Institutions.” Wellington: Victoria U, 2013.Zavala, Jimmy, Alda Allina Migoni, Michelle Caswell, Noah Geraci, and Marika Cifor. “‘A Process Where We’re All at the Table’: Community Archives Challenging Dominant Modes of Archival Practice.” Archives and Manuscripts 45.3 (2017): 202–15.

In the last months of his life, 86-year-old Albert Facey became a best-selling author and revered cultural figure following the publication of his autobiography, A Fortunate Life. Released on Anzac Day 1981, it was praised for its “plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and un-self-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth” (Semmler) and “extremely powerful description of Gallipoli” (Dutton 16). Within weeks, critic Nancy Keesing declared it an “Enduring Classic.” Within six months, it was announced as the winner of two prestigious non-fiction awards, with judges acknowledging Facey’s “extraordinary memory” and “ability to describe scenes and characters with great precision” (“NBC” 4). A Fortunate Life also transformed the fortunes of its publisher. Founded in 1976 as an independent, not-for-profit publishing house, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (FACP) might have been expected, given the Australian average, to survive for just a few years. Former managing editor Ray Coffey attributes the Press’s ongoing viability, in no small measure, to Facey’s success (King 29). Along with Wendy Jenkins, Coffey edited Facey’s manuscript through to publication; only five months after its release, with demand outstripping the capabilities, FACP licensed Penguin to take over the book’s production and distribution. Adaptations soon followed. In 1984, Kerry Packer’s PBL launched a prospectus for a mini-series, which raised a record $6.3 million (PBL 7–8). Aired in 1986 with a high-rating documentary called The Facey Phenomenon, the series became the most watched television event of the year (Lucas). Syndication of chapters to national and regional newspapers, stage and radio productions, audio- and e-books, abridged editions for young readers, and inclusion on secondary school curricula extended the range and influence of Facey’s life writing. Recently, an option was taken out for a new television series (Fraser).A hundred reprints and two million readers on from initial publication, A Fortunate Life continues to rate among the most appreciated Australian books of all time. Commenting on a reader survey in 2012, writer and critic Marieke Hardy enthused, “I really loved it [. . .] I felt like I was seeing a part of my country and my country’s history through a very human voice . . .” (First Tuesday Book Club). Registering a transformed reading, Hardy’s reference to Australian “history” is unproblematically juxtaposed with amused delight in an autobiography that invents and embellishes: not believing “half” of what Facey wrote, she insists he was foremost a yarn spinner. While the work’s status as a witness account has become less authoritative over time, it seems appreciation of the author’s imagination and literary skill has increased (Williamson). A Fortunate Life has been read more commonly as an uncomplicated, first-hand account, such that editor Wendy Jenkins felt it necessary to refute as an “utter mirage” that memoir is “transferred to the page by an act of perfect dictation.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue of life narratives that some “autobiographical claims [. . .] can be verified or discounted by recourse to documentation outside the text. But autobiographical truth is a different matter” (16). With increased access to archives, especially digitised personnel records, historians have asserted that key elements of Facey’s autobiography are incorrect or “fabricated” (Roberts), including his enlistment in 1914 and participation in the Gallipoli Landing on 25 April 1915. We have researched various sources relevant to Facey’s early years and war service, including hard-copy medical and repatriation records released in 2012, and find A Fortunate Life in a range of ways deviates from “documentation outside of the text,” revealing intriguing, layered storytelling. We agree with Smith and Watson that “autobiographical acts” are “anything but simple or transparent” (63). As “symbolic interactions in the world,” they are “culturally and historically specific” and “engaged in an argument about identity” (63). Inevitably, they are also “fractured by the play of meaning” (63). Our approach, therefore, includes textual analysis of Facey’s drafts alongside the published narrative and his medical records. We do not privilege institutional records as impartial but rather interpret them in terms of their hierarchies and organisation of knowledge. This leads us to speculate on alternative readings of A Fortunate Life as an illness narrative that variously resists and subscribes to dominant cultural plots, tropes, and attitudes. Facey set about writing in earnest in the 1970s and generated (at least) three handwritten drafts, along with a typescript based on the third draft. FACP produced its own working copy from the typescript. Our comparison of the drafts offers insights into the production of Facey’s final text and the otherwise “hidden” roles of editors as transformers and enablers (Munro 1). The notion that a working man with basic literacy could produce a highly readable book in part explains Facey’s enduring appeal. His grandson and literary executor, John Rose, observed in early interviews that Facey was a “natural storyteller” who had related details of his life at every opportunity over a period of more than six decades (McLeod). Jenkins points out that Facey belonged to a vivid oral culture within which he “told and retold stories to himself and others,” so that they eventually “rubbed down into the lines and shapes that would so memorably underpin the extended memoir that became A Fortunate Life.” A mystique was thereby established that “time” was Albert Facey’s “first editor” (Jenkins). The publisher expressly aimed to retain Facey’s voice, content, and meaning, though editing included much correcting of grammar and punctuation, eradication of internal inconsistencies and anomalies, and structural reorganisation into six sections and 68 chapters. We find across Facey’s drafts a broadly similar chronology detailing childhood abandonment, life-threatening incidents, youthful resourcefulness, physical prowess, and participation in the Gallipoli Landing. However, there are also shifts and changed details, including varying descriptions of childhood abuse at a place called Cave Rock; the introduction of (incompatible accounts of) interstate boxing tours in drafts two and three which replace shearing activities in Draft One; divergent tales of Facey as a world-standard athlete, league footballer, expert marksman, and powerful swimmer; and changing stories of enlistment and war service (see Murphy and Nile, “Wounded”; “Naked”).Jenkins edited those sections concerned with childhood and youth, while Coffey attended to Facey’s war and post-war life. Drawing on C.E.W. Bean’s official war history, Coffey introduced specificity to the draft’s otherwise vague descriptions of battle and amended errors, such as Facey’s claim to have witnessed Lord Kitchener on the beach at Gallipoli. Importantly, Coffey suggested the now famous title, “A Fortunate Life,” and encouraged the author to alter the ending. When asked to suggest a title, Facey offered “Cave Rock” (Interview)—the site of his violent abuse and humiliation as a boy. Draft One concluded with Facey’s repatriation from the war and marriage in 1916 (106); Draft Two with a brief account of continuing post-war illness and ultimate defeat: “My war injuries caught up with me again” (107). The submitted typescript concludes: “I have often thought that going to War has caused my life to be wasted” (Typescript 206). This ending differs dramatically from the redemptive vision of the published narrative: “I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled by it when I look back” (412).In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank argues that literary markets exist for stories of “narrative wreckage” (196) that are redeemed by reconciliation, resistance, recovery, or rehabilitation, which is precisely the shape of Facey’s published life story and a source of its popularity. Musing on his post-war experiences in A Fortunate Life, Facey focuses on his ability to transform the material world around him: “I liked the challenge of building up a place from nothing and making a success where another fellow had failed” (409). If Facey’s challenge was building up something from nothing, something he could set to work on and improve, his life-writing might reasonably be regarded as a part of this broader project and desire for transformation, so that editorial interventions helped him realise this purpose. Facey’s narrative was produced within a specific zeitgeist, which historian Joy Damousi notes was signalled by publication in 1974 of Bill Gammage’s influential, multiply-reprinted study of front-line soldiers, The Broken Years, which drew on the letters and diaries of a thousand Great War veterans, and also the release in 1981 of Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, for which Gammage was the historical advisor. The story of Australia’s war now conceptualised fallen soldiers as “innocent victims” (Damousi 101), while survivors were left to “compose” memories consistent with their sacrifice (Thomson 237–54). Viewing Facey’s drafts reminds us that life narratives are works of imagination, that the past is not fixed and memory is created in the present. Facey’s autobiographical efforts and those of his publisher to improve the work’s intelligibility and relevance together constitute an attempt to “objectify the self—to present it as a knowable object—through a narrative that re-structures [. . .] the self as history and conclusions” (Foster 10). Yet, such histories almost invariably leave “a crucial gap” or “censored chapter.” Dennis Foster argues that conceiving of narration as confession, rather than expression, “allows us to see the pathos of the simultaneous pursuit and evasion of meaning” (10); we believe a significant lacuna in Facey’s life writing is intimated by its various transformations.In a defining episode, A Fortunate Life proposes that Facey was taken from Gallipoli on 19 August 1915 due to wounding that day from a shell blast that caused sandbags to fall on him, crush his leg, and hurt him “badly inside,” and a bullet to the shoulder (348). The typescript, however, includes an additional but narratively irreconcilable date of 28 June for the same wounding. The later date, 19 August, was settled on for publication despite the author’s compelling claim for the earlier one: “I had been blown up by a shell and some 7 or 8 sandbags had fallen on top of me, the day was the 28th of June 1915, how I remembered this date, it was the day my brother Roy had been killed by a shell burst.” He adds: “I was very ill for about six weeks after the incident but never reported it to our Battalion doctor because I was afraid he would send me away” (Typescript 205). This account accords with Facey’s first draft and his medical records but is inconsistent with other parts of the typescript that depict an uninjured Facey taking a leading role in fierce fighting throughout July and August. It appears, furthermore, that Facey was not badly wounded at any time. His war service record indicates that he was removed from Gallipoli due to “heart troubles” (Repatriation), which he also claims in his first draft. Facey’s editors did not have ready access to military files in Canberra, while medical files were not released until 2012. There existed, therefore, virtually no opportunity to corroborate the author’s version of events, while the official war history and the records of the State Library of Western Australia, which were consulted, contain no reference to Facey or his war service (Interview). As a consequence, the editors were almost entirely dependent on narrative logic and clarifications by an author whose eyesight and memory had deteriorated to such an extent he was unable to read his amended text. A Fortunate Life depicts men with “nerve sickness” who were not permitted to “stay at the Front because they would be upsetting to the others, especially those who were inclined that way themselves” (350). By cross referencing the draft manuscripts against medical records, we can now perceive that Facey was regarded as one of those nerve cases. According to Facey’s published account, his wounds “baffled” doctors in Egypt and Fremantle (353). His medical records reveal that in September 1915, while hospitalised in Egypt, his “palpitations” were diagnosed as “Tachycardia” triggered by war-induced neuroses that began on 28 June. This suggests that Facey endured seven weeks in the field in this condition, with the implication being that his debility worsened, resulting in his hospitalisation. A diagnosis of “debility,” “nerves,” and “strain” placed Facey in a medical category of “Special Invalids” (Butler 541). Major A.W. Campbell noted in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1916 that the war was creating “many cases of little understood nervous and mental affections, not only where a definite wound has been received, but in many cases where nothing of the sort appears” (323). Enlisted doctors were either physicians or surgeons and sometimes both. None had any experience of trauma on the scale of the First World War. In 1915, Campbell was one of only two Australian doctors with any pre-war experience of “mental diseases” (Lindstrom 30). On staff at the Australian Base Hospital at Heliopolis throughout the Gallipoli campaign, he claimed that at times nerve cases “almost monopolised” the wards under his charge (319). Bearing out Facey’s description, Campbell also reported that affected men “received no sympathy” and, as “carriers of psychic contagion,” were treated as a “source of danger” to themselves and others (323). Credentialed by royal colleges in London and coming under British command, Australian medical teams followed the practice of classifying men presenting “nervous or mental symptoms” as “battle casualties” only if they had also been wounded by “enemy action” (Loughran 106). By contrast, functional disability, with no accompanying physical wounds, was treated as unmanly and a “hysterical” reaction to the pressures of war. Mental debility was something to be feared in the trenches and diagnosis almost invariably invoked charges of predisposition or malingering (Tyquin 148–49). This shifted responsibility (and blame) from the war to the individual. Even as late as the 1950s, medical notes referred to Facey’s condition as being “constitutional” (Repatriation).Facey’s narrative demonstrates awareness of how harshly sufferers were treated. We believe that he defended himself against this with stories of physical injury that his doctors never fully accepted and that he may have experienced conversion disorder, where irreconcilable experience finds somatic expression. His medical diagnosis in 1915 and later life writing establish a causal link with the explosion and his partial burial on 28 June, consistent with opinion at the time that linked concussive blasts with destabilisation of the nervous system (Eager 422). Facey was also badly shaken by exposure to the violence and abjection of war, including hand-to-hand combat and retrieving for burial shattered and often decomposed bodies, and, in particular, by the death of his brother Roy, whose body was blown to pieces on 28 June. (A second brother, Joseph, was killed by multiple bayonet wounds while Facey was convalescing in Egypt.) Such experiences cast a different light on Facey’s observation of men suffering nerves on board the hospital ship: “I have seen men doze off into a light sleep and suddenly jump up shouting, ‘Here they come! Quick! Thousands of them. We’re doomed!’” (350). Facey had escaped the danger of death by explosion or bayonet but at a cost, and the war haunted him for the rest of his days. On disembarkation at Fremantle on 20 November 1915, he was admitted to hospital where he remained on and off for several months. Forty-one other sick and wounded disembarked with him (HMAT). Around one third, experiencing nerve-related illness, had been sent home for rest; while none returned to the war, some of the physically wounded did (War Service Records). During this time, Facey continued to present with “frequent attacks of palpitation and giddiness,” was often “short winded,” and had “heart trouble” (Repatriation). He was discharged from the army in June 1916 but, his drafts suggest, his war never really ended. He began a new life as a wounded Anzac. His dependent and often fractious relationship with the Repatriation Department ended only with his death 66 years later. Historian Marina Larsson persuasively argues that repatriated sick and wounded servicemen from the First World War represented a displaced presence at home. Many led liminal lives of “disenfranchised grief” (80). Stephen Garton observes a distinctive Australian use of repatriation to describe “all policies involved in returning, discharging, pensioning, assisting and training returned men and women, and continuing to assist them throughout their lives” (74). Its primary definition invokes coming home but to repatriate also implies banishment from a place that is not home, so that Facey was in this sense expelled from Gallipoli and, by extension, excluded from the myth of Anzac. Unlike his two brothers, he would not join history as one of the glorious dead; his name would appear on no roll of honour. Return home is not equivalent to restoration of his prior state and identity, for baggage from the other place perpetually weighs. Furthermore, failure to regain health and independence strains hospitality and gratitude for the soldier’s service to King and country. This might be exacerbated where there is no evident or visible injury, creating suspicion of resistance, cowardice, or malingering. Over 26 assessments between 1916 and 1958, when Facey was granted a full war pension, the Repatriation Department observed him as a “neuropathic personality” exhibiting “paroxysmal tachycardia” and “neurocirculatory asthenia.” In 1954, doctors wrote, “We consider the condition is a real handicap and hindrance to his getting employment.” They noted that after “attacks,” Facey had a “busted depressed feeling,” but continued to find “no underlying myocardial disease” (Repatriation) and no validity in Facey’s claims that he had been seriously physically wounded in the war (though A Fortunate Life suggests a happier outcome, where an independent medical panel finally locates the cause of his ongoing illness—rupture of his spleen in the war—which results in an increased war pension). Facey’s condition was, at times, a source of frustration for the doctors and, we suspect, disappointment and shame to him, though this appeared to reduce on both sides when the Repatriation Department began easing proof of disability from the 1950s (Thomson 287), and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs was created in 1976. This had the effect of shifting public and media scrutiny back onto a system that had until then deprived some “innocent victims of the compensation that was their due” (Garton 249). Such changes anticipated the introduction of Post-Traumatic Shock Disorder (PTSD) to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. Revisions to the DSM established a “genealogy of trauma” and “panic disorders” (100, 33), so that diagnoses such as “neuropathic personality” (Echterling, Field, and Stewart 192) and “soldier’s heart,” that is, disorders considered “neurotic,” were “retrospectively reinterpreted” as a form of PTSD. However, Alberti points out that, despite such developments, war-related trauma continues to be contested (80). We propose that Albert Facey spent his adult life troubled by a sense of regret and failure because of his removal from Gallipoli and that he attempted to compensate through storytelling, which included his being an original Anzac and seriously wounded in action. By writing, Facey could shore up his rectitude, work ethic, and sense of loyalty to other servicemen, which became necessary, we believe, because repatriation doctors (and probably others) had doubted him. In 1927 and again in 1933, an examining doctor concluded: “The existence of a disability depends entirely on his own unsupported statements” (Repatriation). We argue that Facey’s Gallipoli experiences transformed his life. By his own account, he enlisted for war as a physically robust and supremely athletic young man and returned nine months later to life-long anxiety and ill-health. Publication transformed him into a national sage, earning him, in his final months, the credibility, empathy, and affirmation he had long sought. Exploring different accounts of Facey, in the shape of his drafts and institutional records, gives rise to new interpretations. In this context, we believe it is time for a new edition of A Fortunate Life that recognises it as a complex testimonial narrative and theorises Facey’s deployment of national legends and motifs in relation to his “wounded storytelling” as well as to shifting cultural and medical conceptualisations and treatments of shame and trauma. ReferencesAlberti, Fay Bound. Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Butler, A.G. Official History of the Australian Medical Services 1814-1918: Vol I Gallipoli, Palestine and New Guinea. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1930.Campbell, A.W. “Remarks on Some Neuroses and Psychoses in War.” Medical Journal of Australia 15 April (1916): 319–23.Damousi, Joy. “Why Do We Get So Emotional about Anzac.” What’s Wrong with Anzac. Ed. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds. Sydney: UNSWP, 2015. 94–109.Dutton, Geoffrey. “Fremantle Arts Centre Press Publicity.” Australian Book Review May (1981): 16.Eager, R. “War Neuroses Occurring in Cases with a Definitive History of Shell Shock.” British Medical Journal 13 Apr. 1918): 422–25.Echterling, L.G., Thomas A. Field, and Anne L. Stewart. “Evolution of PTSD in the DSM.” Future Directions in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Prevention, Diagnosis, and Treatment. Ed. Marilyn P. Safir and Helene S. Wallach. New York: Springer, 2015. 189–212.Facey, A.B. A Fortunate Life. 1981. Ringwood: Penguin, 2005.———. Drafts 1–3. University of Western Australia, Special Collections.———. Transcript. University of Western Australia, Special Collections.First Tuesday Book Club. ABC Splash. 4 Dec. 2012. <http://splash.abc.net.au/home#!/media/1454096/http&>.Foster, Dennis. Confession and Complicity in Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller. London: U of Chicago P, 1995.Fraser, Jane. “CEO Says.” Fremantle Press. 7 July 2015. <https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/c/news/3747-ceo-says-9>.Garton, Stephen. The Cost of War: Australians Return. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1994.HMAT Aeneas. “Report of Passengers for the Port of Fremantle from Ports Beyond the Commonwealth.” 20 Nov. 1915. <http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=9870708&S=1>.“Interview with Ray Coffey.” Personal interview. 6 May 2016. Follow-up correspondence. 12 May 2016.Jenkins, Wendy. “Tales from the Backlist: A Fortunate Life Turns 30.” Fremantle Press, 14 April 2011. <https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/c/bookclubs/574-tales-from-the-backlist-a-fortunate-life-turns-30>.Keesing, Nancy. ‘An Enduring Classic.’ Australian Book Review (May 1981). FACP Press Clippings. Fremantle. n. pag.King, Noel. “‘I Can’t Go On … I’ll Go On’: Interview with Ray Coffey, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 22 Dec. 2004; 24 May 2006.” Westerly 51 (2006): 31–54.Larsson, Marina. “A Disenfranchised Grief: Post War Death and Memorialisation in Australia after the First World War.” Australian Historical Studies 40.1 (2009): 79–95.Lindstrom, Richard. “The Australian Experience of Psychological Casualties in War: 1915-1939.” PhD dissertation. Victoria University, Feb. 1997.Loughran, Tracey. “Shell Shock, Trauma, and the First World War: The Making of a Diagnosis and its Histories.” Journal of the History of Medical and Allied Sciences 67.1 (2012): 99–119.Lucas, Anne. “Curator’s Notes.” A Fortunate Life. Australian Screen. <http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/a-fortunate-life/notes/>.McLeod, Steve. “My Fortunate Life with Grandad.” Western Magazine Dec. (1983): 8.Munro, Craig. Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing. Brunswick: Scribe, 2015.Murphy, Ffion, and Richard Nile. “The Naked Anzac: Exposure and Concealment in A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life.” Southerly 75.3 (2015): 219–37.———. “Wounded Storyteller: Revisiting Albert Facey’s Fortunate Life.” Westerly 60.2 (2015): 87–100.“NBC Book Awards.” Australian Book Review Oct. (1981): 1–4.PBL. Prospectus: A Fortunate Life, the Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Bloke. 1–8.Repatriation Records. Albert Facey. National Archives of Australia.Roberts, Chris. “Turkish Machine Guns at the Landing.” Wartime: Official Magazine of the Australian War Memorial 50 (2010). <https://www.awm.gov.au/wartime/50/roberts_machinegun/>.Semmler, Clement. “The Way We Were before the Good Life.” Courier Mail 10 Oct. 1981. FACP Press Clippings. Fremantle. n. pag.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2001. 2nd ed. U of Minnesota P, 2010.Thomson, Alistair. Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend. 1994. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2013. Tyquin, Michael. Gallipoli, the Medical War: The Australian Army Services in the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915. Kensington: UNSWP, 1993.War Service Records. National Archives of Australia. <http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/NameSearch/Interface/NameSearchForm.aspx>.Williamson, Geordie. “A Fortunate Life.” Copyright Agency. <http://readingaustralia.com.au/essays/a-fortunate-life/>.

When historian Graeme Davison famously declared that “Australia was born urban and quickly grew suburban” (98), he was clearly referring to Melbourne or Sydney, but certainly not Brisbane. Although the Brisbane of 2011 might resemble a contemporary, thriving metropolis, its genealogy is not an urban one. For most of its history, as Gillian Whitlock has noted, Brisbane was “a place where urban industrial society is kept at bay” (80). What distinguishes Brisbane from Australia’s larger southern capital cities is its rapid morphology into a city from a provincial, suburban, town. Indeed it is Brisbane’s distinctive regionalism, with its sub-tropical climate, offering a steamy, fecund backdrop to narratives of the city that has produced a plethora of writing in literary accounts of the city, from author David Malouf through to contemporary writers such as Andrew McGahan, John Birmingham, Venero Armanno, Susan Johnson, and Nick Earls. Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition makes its transformation unique among Australian cities. Its rapid population growth and urban development have changed the way that many people now live in the city. Unlike the larger cities of Sydney or Melbourne, whose inner cities were established on the Victorian model of terrace-row housing on small lots, Brisbane’s early planners eschewed this approach. So, one of the features that gives the city its distinction is the languorous suburban quality of its inner-city areas, where many house blocks are the size of the suburban quarter-acre block, all within coo-ee of the city centre. Other allotments are medium to small in size, and, until recently, housed single dwellings of varying sizes and grandeur. Add to this a sub-tropical climate in which ‘green and growth’ is abundant and the pretty but flimsy timber vernacular housing, and it’s easy to imagine that you might be many kilometres from a major metropolitan centre as you walk around Brisbane’s inner city areas. It is partly this feature that prompted demographer Bernard Salt to declare Brisbane “Australia’s most suburban city” (Salt 5). Prior to urban renewal in the early 1990s, Brisbane was a low-density town with very few apartment blocks; most people lived in standalone houses.From the inception of the first Urban Renewal program in 1992, a joint initiative of the Federal government’s Building Better Cities Program and managed by the Brisbane City Council (BCC), Brisbane’s urban development has undergone significant change. In particular, the city’s Central Business District (CBD) and inner city have experienced intense development and densification with a sharp rise in medium- to high-density apartment dwellings to accommodate the city’s swelling population. Population growth has added to the demand for increased density, and from the period 1995–2006 Brisbane was Australia’s fastest growing city (ABS).Today, parts of Brisbane’s inner city resembles the density of the larger cities of Melbourne and Sydney. Apartment blocks have mushroomed along the riverfront and throughout inner and middle ring suburbs. Brisbane’s population has enthusiastically embraced apartment living, with “empty nesters” leaving their suburban family homes for the city, and apartments have become the affordable option for renters and first home purchasers. A significant increase in urban amenities such as large-scale parklands and river side boardwalks, and a growth in service industries such as cafes, restaurants and bars—a feature of cities the world over—have contributed to the appeal of the city and the changing way that people live in Brisbane.Urbanism demands specific techniques of living—life is different in medium- to high-density dwellings, in populous places, where people live in close proximity to one another. In many ways it’s the antithesis to suburban life, a way of living that, as Davison notes, was established around an ethos of privacy, health, and seclusion and is exemplified in the gated communities seen in the suburbs today. The suburbs are characterised by generosity of space and land, and developed as a refuge and escape from the city, a legacy of the nineteenth-century industrial city’s connection with overcrowding, disease, and disorder. Suburban living flourished in Australia from the eighteenth century and Davison notes how, when Governor Phillip drew up the first town plan for Sydney in 1789, it embodied the aspirations of “decency, good order, health and domestic privacy,” which lie at the heart of suburban ideals (100).The health and moral impetus underpinning the establishment of suburban life—that is, to remove people from overcrowding and the unhygienic conditions of slums—for Davison meant that the suburban ethos was based on a “logic of avoidance” (110). Attempting to banish anything deemed dangerous and offensive, the suburbs were seen to offer a more natural, orderly, and healthy environment. A virtuous and happy life required plenty of room—thus, a garden and the expectation of privacy was paramount.The suburbs as a site of lived experience and cultural meaning is significant for understanding the shift from suburban living to the adoption of medium- to high-density inner-city living in Brisbane. I suggest that the ways in which this shift is captured discursively, particularly in promotional material, are indicative of the suburbs' stronghold on the collective imagination. Reinforcing this perception of Brisbane as a suburban city is a history of literary narratives that have cast Brisbane in ways that set it apart from other Australian cities, and that are to do with its non-urban characteristics. Imaginative and symbolic discourses of place have real and material consequences (Lefebvre), as advertisers are only too well aware. Discursively, city life has been imagined oppositionally from life in the suburbs: the two sites embody different cultural meanings and values. In Australia, the suburbs are frequently a site of derision and satire, characterized as bastions of conformity and materialism (Horne), offering little of value in contrast to the city’s many enchantments and diverse pleasures. In the well-established tradition of satire, “suburban bashing is replete in literature, film and popular culture” (Felton et al xx). From Barry Humphries’s characterisation of Dame Edna Everage, housewife superstar, who first appeared in the 1960s, to the recent television comedy series Kath and Kim, suburbia and its inhabitants are represented as dull-witted, obsessed with trivia, and unworldly. This article does not intend to rehearse the tradition of suburban lampooning; rather, it seeks to illustrate how ideas about suburban living are hard held and how the suburban ethos maintains its grip, particularly in relation to notions of privacy and peace, despite the celebratory discourse around the emerging forms of urbanism in Brisbane.As Brisbane morphed rapidly from a provincial, suburban town to a metropolis throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, a set of metropolitan discourses developed in the local media that presented new ways of inhabiting and imagining the city and offered new affiliations and identifications with the city. In establishing Brisbane’s distinction as a city, marketing material relied heavily on the opposition between the city and the suburbs, implying that urban vitality and diversity rules triumphant over the suburbs’ apparent dullness and homogeneity. In a billboard advertisement for apartments in the urban renewal area of Newstead (2004), images of architectural renderings of the apartments were anchored by the words—“Urban living NOT suburban”—leaving little room for doubt. It is not the design qualities of the apartments or the building itself being promoted here, but a way of life that alludes to utopian ideas of urban life, of enchantment with the city, and implies, with the heavy emphasis of “NOT suburban,” the inferiority of suburban living.The cultural commodification of the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century city has been well documented (Evans; Dear; Zukin; Harvey) and its symbolic value as a commodity is expressed in marketing literature via familiar metropolitan tropes that are frequently amorphous and international. The malleability of such images makes them easily transportable and transposable, and they provided a useful stockpile for promoting a city such as Brisbane that lacked its own urban resources with which to construct a new identity. In the early days of urban renewal, the iconic images and references to powerhouse cities such as New York, London, and even Venice were heavily relied upon. In the latter example, an advertisement promoting Brisbane appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald colour magazine (May 2005). This advertisement represented Brisbane as an antipodean Venice, showing a large reach of the Brisbane river replete with gondolas flanked by the city’s only nineteenth-century riverside building, the Custom’s House. The allusion to traditional European culture is a departure from the usual tropes of “fun and sun” associated with promotions of Queensland, including Brisbane, while the new approach to promoting Brisbane is cognizant of the value of culture in the symbolic and economic hierarchy of the contemporary city. Perhaps equally, the advertisement could be read as ironic, a postmodern self-parodying statement about the city in general. In a nod to the centrality of the spectacle, the advertisement might be a salute to idea of the city as theme park, a pleasure playground and a collective fantasy of escape. Nonetheless, either interpretation presents Brisbane as somewhere else.In other promotional literature for apartment dwellings, suburban living maintains its imaginative grip, evident in a brochure advertising Petrie Point apartments in Brisbane’s urban renewal area of inner-city New Farm (2000). In the brochure, the promise of peace and calm—ideals that have their basis in suburban living—are imposed and promoted as a feature of inner-city living. Paradoxically, while suggesting that a wholesale evacuation and rejection of suburban life is occurring presumably because it is dull, the brochure simultaneously upholds the values of suburbia:Discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers who prefer lounging over latte rather than mowing the quarter acre block, are abandoning suburban living in droves. Instead, hankering after a more cosmopolitan lifestyle without the mind numbing drive to work, they are retreating to the residential mecca, the inner city, for chic shops and a lively dining, arts and theatre culture. (my italics)In the above extract, the rhetoric used to promote and uphold the virtues of a cosmopolitan inner-city life is sabotaged by a language that in many respects capitulates to the ideals of suburban living, and evokes the health and retreat ethos of suburbia. “Lounging” over lattes and “retreating to a residential mecca”[i] allude to precisely the type of suburban living the brochure purports to eschew. Privacy, relaxation, and health is a discourse and, more importantly, a way of living that is in many ways anathema to life in the city. It is a dream-wish that those features most valued about suburban life, can and should somehow be transplanted to the city. In its promotion of urban amenity, the brochure draws upon a somewhat bourgeois collection of cultural amenities and activities such as a (presumably traditional) arts and theatre culture, “lively dining,” and “chic” shops. The appeal to “discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers” has more than a whiff of status and class, an appeal that disavows the contemporary city’s attention to diversity and inclusivity, and frequently the source of promotion of many international cities. In contrast to the suburban sub-text of exclusivity and seclusion in the Petrie Point Apartment’s brochure, is a promotion of Sydney’s inner-city Newtown as a tourist site and spectacle, which makes an appeal to suburban antipathy clear from the outset. The brochure, distributed by NSW Tourism (2000) displays a strong emphasis on Newtown’s cultural and ethnic diversity, and the various forms of cultural consumption on offer. The inner-city suburb’s appeal is based on its re-framing as a site of tourist consumption of diversity and difference in which diversity is central to its performance as a tourist site. It relies on the distinction between “ordinary” suburbs and “cosmopolitan” places:Some cities are cursed with suburbs, but Sydney’s blessed with Newtown — a cosmopolitan neighbourhood of more than 600 stores, 70 restaurants, 42 cafes, theatres, pubs, and entertainment venues, all trading in two streets whose origins lie in the nineteenth century … Newtown is the Catwalk for those with more style than money … a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul, where Milano meets post-punk bohemia, where Max Mara meets Doc Marten, a stage where a petticoat is more likely to be your grandma’s than a Colette Dinnigan designer original (From Sydney Marketing brochure)Its opening oppositional gambit—“some cities are cursed with suburbs”—conveniently elides the fact that like all Australian cities, Sydney is largely suburban and many of Sydney’s suburbs are more ethnically diverse than its inner-city areas. Cabramatta, Fairfield, and most other suburbs have characteristically high numbers of ethnic groups such as Vietnamese, Korean, Lebanese, and so forth. Recent events, however, have helped to reframe these places as problem areas, rather than epicentres of diversity.The mingling of social groups invites the tourist-flâneur to a performance of difference, “a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul (my italics), where Milano meets post-punk bohemia,” and where “the upwardly mobile and down at heel” appear in what is presented as something of a theatrical extravaganza. Newtown is a product, its diversity a commodity. Consumed visually and corporeally via its divergent sights, sounds, smells and tastes (the brochure goes on to state that 70 restaurants offer cuisine from all over the globe), Newtown is a “successful neighbourhood experiment in the new globalism.” The area’s social inequities—which are implicit in the text, referred to as the “down at heel”—are vanquished and celebrated, incorporated into the rhetoric of difference.Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition and culture, as well as its lack of diversity in comparison to Sydney, reveals itself in the first brochure while the Newtown brochure appeals to the idea of a consumer-based cosmopolitanism. As a sociological concept, cosmopolitanism refers to a set of "subjective attitudes, outlooks and practices" broadly characterized as “disposition of openness towards others, people, things and experiences whose origin is non local” (Skrbis and Woodward 1). Clearly cosmopolitan attitudes do not have to be geographically located, but frequently the city is promoted as the site of these values, with the suburbs, apparently, forever looking inward.In the realm of marketing, appeals to the imagination are ubiquitous, but discursive practices can become embedded in everyday life. Despite the growth of urbanism, the increasing take up of metropolitan life and the enduring disdain among some for the suburbs, the hard-held suburban values of peace and privacy have pragmatic implications for the ways in which those values are embedded in people’s expectations of life in the inner city.The exponential growth in apartment living in Brisbane offers different ways of living to the suburban house. For a sub-tropical city where "life on the verandah" is a significant feature of the Queenslander house with its front and exterior verandahs, in the suburbs, a reasonable degree of privacy is assured. Much of Brisbane’s vernacular and contemporary housing is sensitive to this indoor-outdoor style of living, a distinct feature and appeal of everyday life in many suburbs. When "life on the verandah" is adapted to inner-city apartment buildings, expectations that indoor-outdoor living can be maintained in the same way can be problematic. In the inner city, life on the verandah may challenge expectations about privacy, noise and visual elements. While the Brisbane City Plan 2000 attempts to deal with privacy issues by mandating privacy screenings on verandahs, and the side screening of windows to prevent overlooking neighbours, there is ample evidence that attitudinal change is difficult. The exchange of a suburban lifestyle for an urban one, with the exposure to urbanity’s complexity, potential chaos and noise, can be confronting. In the Urban Renewal area and entertainment precinct of Fortitude Valley, during the late 1990s, several newly arrived residents mounted a vigorous campaign to the Brisbane City Council (BCC) and State government to have noise levels reduced from local nightclubs and bars. Fortitude Valley—the Valley, as it is known locally—had long been Brisbane’s main area for nightclubs, bars and brothels. A small precinct bounded by two major one-way roads, it was the locus of the infamous ABC 4 Corners “Moonlight State” report, which exposed the lines of corruption between politicians, police, and the judiciary of the former Bjelke-Petersen government (1974–1987) and who met in the Valley’s bars and brothels. The Valley was notorious for Brisbanites as the only place in a provincial, suburban town that resembled the seedy side of life associated with big cities. The BCC’s Urban Renewal Task Force and associated developers initially had a tough task convincing people that the area had been transformed. But as more amenity was established, and old buildings were converted to warehouse-style living in the pattern of gentrification the world over, people started moving in to the area from the suburbs and interstate (Felton). One of the resident campaigners against noise had purchased an apartment in the Sun Building, a former newspaper house and in which one of the apartment walls directly abutted the adjoining and popular nightclub, The Press Club. The Valley’s location as a music venue was supported by the BCC, who initially responded to residents’ noise complaints with its “loud and proud” campaign (Valley Metro). The focus of the campaign was to alert people moving into the newly converted apartments in the Valley to the existing use of the neighbourhood by musicians and music clubs. In another iteration of this campaign, the BCC worked with owners of music venues to ensure the area remains a viable music precinct while implementing restrictions on noise levels. Residents who objected to nightclub noise clearly failed to consider the impact of moving into an area that was already well known, even a decade ago, as the city’s premier precinct for music and entertainment venues. Since that time, the Valley has become Australia’s only regulated and promoted music precinct.The shift from suburban to urban living requires people to live in very different ways. Thrust into close proximity with strangers amongst a diverse population, residents can be confronted with a myriad of sensory inputs—to a cacophony of noise, sights, smells (Allon and Anderson). Expectations of order, retreat, and privacy inevitably come into conflict with urbanism’s inherent messiness. The contested nature of urban space is expressed in neighbour disputes, complaints about noise and visual amenity, and sometimes in eruptions of street violence. There is no shortage of examples in the Brisbane’s Urban Renewal areas such as Fortitude Valley, where acts of homophobia, racism, and other less destructive conflicts continue to be a frequent occurrence. While the refashioned discursive Brisbane is re-presented as cool, cultured, and creative, the tensions of urbanism and tests to civility remain in a process of constant negotiation. This is the way the city’s past disrupts and resists its cool new surface.[i] The use of the word mecca in the brochure occurred prior to 11 September 2001.ReferencesAllon, Fiona, and Kay Anderson. "Sentient Sydney." In Passionate City: An International Symposium. Melbourne: RMIT, School of Media Communication, 2004. 89–97.Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Regional Population Growth, Australia, 1996-2006.Birmingham, John. "The Lost City of Vegas: David Malouf’s Old Brisbane." Hot Iron Corrugated Sky. Ed. R. Sheahan-Bright and S. Glover. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. xx–xx.Davison, Graeme. "The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb." Suburban Dreaming: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Australian Cities. Ed. L. Johnson. Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1994. xx–xx.Dear, Michael. The Postmodern Urban Condition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.Evans, Graeme. “Hard-Branding the Cultural City—From Prado to Prada.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27.2 (2003): 417–40.Evans, Raymond, and Carole Ferrier, eds. Radical Brisbane. Melbourne: The Vulgar Press, 2004.Felton, Emma, Christy Collis, and Phil Graham. “Making Connections: Creative Industries Networks in Outer Urban Locations.” Australian Geographer 14.1 (Mar. 2010): 57–70.Felton, Emma. Emerging Urbanism: A Social and Cultural Study of Urban Change in Brisbane. PhD thesis. Brisbane: Griffith University, 2007.Glover, Stuart, and Stuart Cunningham. "The New Brisbane." Artlink 23.2 (2003): 16–23. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Horne, Donald. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties. Ringwood: Penguin, 1964.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.Malouf, David. Johnno. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975. ---. 12 Edmondstone Street. London: Penguin, 1986.NSW Tourism. Sydney City 2000. Sydney, 2000.Salt, Bernard. Cinderella City: A Vision of Brisbane’s Rise to Prominence. Sydney: Austcorp, 2005.Skrbis, Zlatko, and Ian Woodward. “The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitanism Openness.” Sociological Review (2007): 1-14.Valley Metro. 1 May 2011 < http://www.valleymetro.com.au/the_valley.aspx >.Whitlock, Gillian. “Queensland: The State of the Art on the 'Last Frontier.’" Westerly 29.2 (1984): 85–90.Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1995.

This paper will discuss the way in which the creative component of my thesis Hannah’s Place uses a style of neo-historical fiction to find ‘good’ narratives in (once) ‘bad’ women, keeping with the theme, here paraphrased as: The work of any researcher in the humanities is to…challenge what is simply thought of as bad or good, to complicate essentialist categories and question passively accepted thinking. As a way of expanding this statement, I would like to begin by considering the following quote from Barthes on the nature of research. I believe he identifies the type of research that I have been involved with as a PhD candidate producing a ‘creative’ thesis in the field of Communications. What is a piece of research? To find out, we would need to have some idea of what a ‘result’ is. What is it that one finds? What is it one wants to find? What is missing? In what axiomatic field will the fact isolated, the meaning brought out, the statistical discovery be placed? No doubt it depends each time on the particular science approached, but from the moment a piece of research concerns the text (and the text extends very much further than the literary work) the research itself becomes text, production: to it, any ‘result’ is literally im-pertinent. Research is then the name which prudently, under the constraint of certain social conditions, we give to the activity of writing: research here moves on the side of writing, is an adventure of the signifier. (Barthes 198) My thesis sits within the theoretical framework of postmodern literature as a new form of the genre that has been termed ‘historical fiction’. Although the novel breaks away from and challenges the concept of the traditional ‘saga’ style of narrative, or ‘grand narrative’ within historical fiction, it is no less concerned with events of the past and the idea of past experience. It departs from traditional historical fiction in that it foregrounds not only an imagined fictional past world created when the novel is read, but also the actual archival documents, the pieces of text from the past from which traditional history is made, and which here have been used to create that world–‘sparking points’ for the fictional narrative. These archival documents are used within the work as intertextual elements that frame, and, in turn, are framed by the transworld characters’ homodiegetic narrations. The term ‘transworld character’ has been attributed to Umberto Eco and refers to any real world personages found within a fictional text. Eco defines it as the ‘identity of a given individual through worlds (transworld identity)…where the possible world is a possible state of affairs expressed by a set of relevant propositions [either true or untrue which] outlines a set of possible individuals along with their properties’ (219). Umberto Eco also considers that a problem of transworld identity is ‘to single out something as persistent through alternative states of affairs’ (230). In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale also puts forward a number of definitions for ‘transworld identity’. For my purposes, I take it to mean both that defined by Eco but also the literary device, as defined by McHale, of ‘borrowing a character from another text’ (57). It is McHale who elaborates on the concept as it relates to historical fiction when he states: All historical novels, even the most traditional, typically involve some violation of ontological boundaries. For instance they often claim ‘transworld identity’ between characters in their projected worlds and real-world historical figures (16-17). Interestingly for the type of fiction that I am attempting to write, McHale also takes the idea into another area when he discusses the ontological levels of the historical dimension that transworld identities may undergo. Entities can change their ontological status in the course of history, in effect migrating from one ontological realm or level to another. For instance, real world entities and happenings can undergo ‘mythification’, moving from the profane realm to the realm of the sacred (36). For transworld identities, such as those within my novel, this may mean a change in status between the past, where they were stereotyped and categorised as ‘bad’ in contemporary newspapers (my intertext elements), to something in the present approaching ‘good’, or at least a more rounded female identity within a fictional world. The introduced textual elements which I foreground in my novel are those things most often hidden from view within the mimetic and hermeneutic worlds of traditional historical fiction. The sources re-textualised within my novel are both ‘real’ items from our past, and representations and interpretations of past events. The female transworld characters’ stories in this novel are imaginative re-interpretations. Therefore, both the fictional stories, as well as their sources, are textual interpretations of prior events. In this way, the novel plays with the idea of historical ‘fact’ and historical ‘fiction’. It blurs their boundaries. It gives textual equality to each in order to bring a form of textual agency to those marginalised groups defined by PF Bradley as the ‘host of jarring witnesses, [of history] a chaos of disjoined and discrepant narrations’ (Bradley in Holton 11): In the past in Australia these were lower class women, Aboriginals, the Irish, the illiterate, and poor agricultural immigrants whose labour was excess to Britain’s needs. Hannah’s Place – A Brief Synopsis Six individual women’s stories, embedded in or ‘framed’ by a fictional topographic artist’s journal, recount ‘real’ events from Australia’s colonial past. The journal is set in 1845; a few years after convict transportation to Australia’s eastern states ceased, and the year of the first art exhibition held in the colony. That same year, Leichhardt’s expedition arrived at Port Essington in Australia’s far north, after 12 months inland exploration, while in the far south the immigrant ship Cataraqui was wrecked one day short of arrival at Melbourne’s Port Phillip with the drowning of all but one of the 369 immigrants and 38 of the 46 sailors on board. Each chapter title takes the form of the title of a topographic sketch as a way of placing the text ‘visually’ within the artist’s journal narrative. The six women’s stories are: New South Wales at Last (Woman on a Boat): A woman arrives with a sick toddler to tent accommodation for poor immigrants in Sydney, after a three month sea voyage and the shipboard birth, death, and burial at sea of her baby daughter. Yarramundi Homestead, as Seen from the East: An ill-treated Irish servant girl on a squatter’s run awaits the arrival of her fiancée, travelling on board the immigrant ship Cataraqui. In the Vale of Hartley: In the Blue Mountains, an emancipist sawyer who previously murdered three people, violently beats to death his lover, Caroline Collitts, the seventeen-year-old sister of Maria, his fifteen-year-old wife. She Being Dead Yet Speaketh: In Goulburn, Annie Brownlow, a pretty 24-year-old mother of three is executed by a convict executioner for the accidental ‘murder’, while drunk, of her adulterous husband. The Eldest Daughter: The isolated wife of a small settler gives birth, assisted by Lottie, her eldest daughter, and Merrung, an Aboriginal midwife. On Wednesday Last, at Mr Ley’s Coach and Horses Hotel: In Bathurst, a vagrant alcoholic, Hannah Simpson, dies on the floor of a dodgy boarding house after a night and a day of falling into fits and ranting about her lifetime of 30 years migration. Historiographic Metafiction Has been defined by Linda Hutcheon as ‘Fiction which keeps distinct its formal auto-representation from its historical context and in so doing problematises the very possibility of historical knowledge… There is no reconciliation, no dialectic…just unresolved contradiction’ (106). Unresolved contradiction is one of the themes that surfaces in my novel because of the juxtaposition of archival documents (past text ‘facts’) alongside fictional narrative. Historiographic metafiction can usefully be employed as a means of challenging prior patriarchal narratives written about marginalised women. It allows the freedom to create a space for a new understanding of silenced women’s lives. My novel seeks to illuminate and problematise the previously ‘seamless’ genre of hical fiction by the use of (narrative) techniques such as: collage and juxtaposition, intertextuality, framing, embedded narrative, linked stories, and footnote intertext of archival material. Juxtaposition of the fiction against elements from prior non-fiction texts, clearly enunciated as being those same actual historical sources upon which the fiction is based, reinforces this novel as a work of fiction. Yet this strategy also reminds us that the historical narrative created is provisional, residing within the fictional text and in the gaps between the fictional text and the non-fictional intertext. At the same time, the clear narrativity, the suspenseful and sensationalised text of the archival non-fiction, brings them into question because of their place alongside the fiction. A reading of the novel questions the truthfulness or degree of reliability of past textual ‘facts’ as accurate records of real women’s life events. It does this by the use of a parallel narrative, which articulates characters whose moments of ‘breaking frame’ challenge those same past texts. Their ‘fiction’ as characters is reinforced by their existence as ‘objects’ of narration within the archival texts. Both the archival texts and the fiction can be seen as ‘unreliable’. The novel uses ex-centric transworld characters and embedded intertextual ‘fragments’ to create a covert self-reflexivity. It also confuses and disrupts narrative temporality and linearity of plot in two ways. It juxtaposes ‘real’ (intertextual element) dates alongside conflicting or unknown periods of time from the fictional narrative; and, within the artist’s journal, it has a minimal use of expected temporal ‘signposts’. These ‘signposts’ of year dates, months, or days of the week are those things that would be most expected in an authentic travel narrative. In this way, the women’s stories subvert the idea, inherent in previous forms of ‘historical’ fiction, of a single point of view or ‘take’ on history that one or two main characters may hold. The use of intertext results in a continued restating of multiple, conflicting (gender, race, and class) points of view. Ultimately no one ‘correct’ reading of the past gains in supremacy over any other. This narrative construct rearticulates the idea that the past, as does the present, comprises different points of view, not all of which conform to the ‘correct’ view created by the political, social and economic ‘factors’ dominant at the time those events happen. For colonial Australia, this single point of view gave us the myth of heroic (white male) pioneers and positioned women such as some of those within my fiction as ‘bad’. The fictional text challenges that of the male ‘gaze’, which constructed these women as ‘objects’. Examples of this from the newspaper articles are: A younger sister of Caroline Collit, married John Walsh, the convict at present under sentence of death in Bathurst gaol, and, it appears, continued to live with him up till the time of her sister’s murder; but she, as well as her sister Caroline, since the trial, have been ascertained to have borne very loose characters, which is fully established by the fact, that both before and after Walsh had married the younger sister, Caroline cohabited with him and had in fact been for a considerable time living with him, under the same roof with her sister, and in a state of separation from her own husband (Collit). Sydney Morning Herald, April 27, 1842, The Mount Victoria Murder. About twelve months after her marriage, her mother who was a notorious drunkard hanged herself in her own house… Sydney Morning Herald, April 27, 1842, The Mount Victoria Murder. And when we further reflect that the perpetrator of that deed of blood was a woman our horror is, if possible, much augmented. Yes! A woman and one who ought to have been in as much as the means were assuredly in the power of her family-an ornament to her sex and station. She has been cut off in the midst of her days by the hands of the common executioner. And to add to our distress at this sad event she to whose tragic end I am referring was a wife and a mother. It was her hand which struck the blow that rendered her children orphans and brought her to an ignominious end… The Goulburn Herald, October 20, 1855, Funeral sermon on Mary Ann Brownlow. His wife had been drinking and created an altercation on account of his having sold [her] lease; she asked him to drink, but he refused, when she replied “You can go and drink with your fancywoman”. She came after him as he was going away and stabbed him…..she did it from jealousy, although he had never given her any cause for jealousy. The Goulburn Herald, Saturday, September 15, 1855, Tuesday, September 11, Wilful Murder. She was always most obedient and quiet in her conduct, and her melancholy winning manners soon procured her the sympathy of all who came in contact with her. She became deeply impressed with the sinfulness of her previous life… The Goulburn Herald, October 13, 1855, Execution of Mary Ann Brownlow. [Police] had known the deceased who was a confirmed drunkard and an abandoned woman without any home or place of abode; did not believe she had any proper means of support…The Bathurst Times, November 1871. It is the oppositional and strong narrative ‘voice’ that elicits sympathies for and with the women’s situations. The fictional narratives were written to challenge unsympathetic pre-existing narratives found within the archival intertexts. This male ‘voice’ was one that narrated and positioned women such that they adhered to pre-existing notions of morality; what it meant to be a ‘good’ woman (like Mary Ann Brownlow, reformed in gaol but still sentenced to death) or a ‘bad’ woman (Mary Ann again as the murdering drunken vengeful wife, stabbing her husband in a jealous rage). ‘Reading between the lines’ of history in this way, creating fictional stories and juxtaposing them against the non-fiction prior articulations of those same events, is an opportunity to make use of narrative structure in order to destabilise established constructs of our colonial past. For example, the trope of Australia’s colonial settler women as exampled in the notion of Anne Summers of colonial women as either God’s police or damned whores. ‘A Particularly rigid dualistic notion of women’s function in colonial society was embodied in two stereotypes….that women are either good [God’s police] or evil [Damned whores]’ (67). With this dualism in mind, it is also useful here to consider the assumption made by Veeser in laying the ground work for New Historicism, that ‘no discourse imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths or expresses unalterable human nature’ (2). In a discussion of the ideas of Brian McHale, Middleton and Woods acknowledge McHale’s point of view that readers do recognise the degree to which all knowledge of the past is a construction. They make the claim that ‘the postmodern novelist answers that sense of dislocation and loss…by wrapping ruins of earlier textualities around the narrative’ (66). This to my mind is a call for the type of intertextuality that I have attempted in my thesis. The senses of dislocation and loss found when we attempt to narrativise history are embodied in the structure of the creative component of my thesis. Yet it could also be argued that the cultural complexity of colonial Australia, with women as the subjugated ‘other’ of a disempowered voice has only been constructed by and from within the present. The ‘real’ women from whose lives these stories are imagined could not have perceived their lives within the frames (class, gender, post coloniality) that we now understand in the same way that we as educated westerners cannot totally perceive a tribal culture’s view of the cosmos as a real ‘fact’. However, a fictional re-articulation of historical ‘facts’, using a framework of postmodern neo-historical fiction, allows archival documents to be understood as the traces of women to whom those documented facts once referred. The archival record becomes once again a thing that describes a world of women. It is within these archival micro-histories of illiterate lower-class women that we find shards of our hidden past. By fictionally imagining a possible narrative of their lives we, as the author/reader nexus which creates the image of who these transworld characters were, allow for things that existed in the past as possibility. The fictionalised stories, based on fragments of ‘facts’ from the past, are a way of invoking what could have once existed. In this way the stories partake of the Bernstein and Morson concept of ‘sideshadowing’. Sideshadowing admits, in addition to actualities and impossibilities, a middle realm of real possibilities that could have happened even if they did not. Things could have been different from the way they were, there are real alternatives to the present we know, and the future admits of various possibilities… sideshadowing deepens our sense of the openness of time. It has profound implications for our understanding of history and of our own lives (Morson 6). The possibilities that sideshadowing their lives invokes in these stories ‘alters the way that we think about earlier events and the narrative models used to describe them’ (Morson 7). We alter our view of the women, as initially described in the archival record, because we now perceive the narrative through which these events and therefore ‘lives’ of the women were written, as merely ‘one possibility’ of many that may have occurred. Sideshadowing alternate possibilities gives us a way out of that patriarchal hegemony into a more multi-dimensional and non-linear view of female lives in 19th Century Australia. Sideshadowing allows for the ‘non-closure’ within female narratives that these fragments of women’s lives represent. It is this which is at the core of the novel—an historiographic metafictional challenging by the fictional ‘voices’ of female transworld characters. In this work, they narrate from a female perspective the might-have-been alternative of that previously considered as an historical, legitimate account of the past. Barthes and Bakhtin Readers of this type of historiographic metafiction have the freedom to recreate an historical fictional world. By virtue of the use of self-reflexivity and intertext they participate in a fictional world constructed by themselves from the author(s) of the text(s) and the intertext, and the original women’s voices used as quotations by the intertext’s (male) author. This world is based upon their construction of a past created from the author’s research, the author’s subjectivity (from within and by disciplinary discourse), by the author(s) choice of ‘signifiers’ and the meanings that these choices create within the reader’s subjectivity (itself formed out of their individual cultural and social milieu). This idea echoes Barthes concept of the ‘death of the author’, such that: As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself; this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. (142) When entering into the world created by this style of historical fiction the reader also enters into a world of previous ‘texts’ (or intertexts) and the multitude of voices inherent in them. This is the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia, that ‘every utterance contains within it the trace of other utterances, both in the past and in the future’ (263). The narrative formed thus becomes one of multiple ‘truths’ and therefore multiple histories. Once written as ‘bad’, the women are now perceived as ‘good’ characters and the ‘bad’ events that occurred around them and to them make up ‘good’ elements of plot, structure, characterisation and voice for a fictionalised version of a past possibility. Bad women make good reading. Conclusion This type of narrative structure allows for the limits of the silenced ‘voice’ of the past, and therefore an understanding of marginalised groups within hegemonic grand narratives, to be approached. It seems to me no surprise that neo-historical fiction is used more when the subjects written about are members of marginalised groups. Silenced voices need to be heard. Because these women left no written account of their experiences, and because we can never experience the society within which their identities were formed, we will never know their ‘identity’ as they experienced it. Fictional self-narrated stories of transworld characters allows for a transformation of the women away from an identity created by the moralising, stereotyped descriptions in the newspapers towards a more fully developed sense of female identity. Third-hand male accounts written for the (then) newspaper readers consumption (and for us as occupiers of the ‘future’) are a construct of one possible identity only. They do not reflect the women’s reality. Adding another fictional ‘identity’ through an imagined self-narrated account deconstructs that limited ‘identity’ formed through the male ‘gaze’. It does so because of the ability of fiction to allow the reader to create a fictional world which can be experienced imaginatively and from within their own subjectivity. Rather than something passively recorded, literature offers history as a permanent reactivation of the past in a critique of the present, and at the level of content offers a textual anamnesis for the hitherto ignored, unacknowledged or repressed pasts marginalised by the dominant histories. (Middleton and Woods 77) References Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Michael Holquist. Ed. Caryl Emerson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath, eds. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington and London: Indiana UP, 1979. Holton, Robert. Jarring Witnesses: Modern Fiction and the Representation of History. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen, 1987. Middleton, Peter, and Tim Woods. Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000. Morson, Gary Saul. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police. Ringwood Vic: Penguin Books, 1994. Veeser, H. Aram. The New Historicism. London: Routledge, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lowes, Elanna Herbert. "Transgressive Women, Transworld Women: The Once ‘Bad’ Can Make ‘Good’ Narratives." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/04-herbertlowes.php>. APA Style Lowes, E. (Feb. 2005) "Transgressive Women, Transworld Women: The Once ‘Bad’ Can Make ‘Good’ Narratives," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/04-herbertlowes.php>.

The Leichhardt Highway is a six hundred-kilometre stretch of sealed inland road that joins the Australian Queensland border town of Goondiwindi with the Capricorn Highway, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Named after the young Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, part of this roadway follows the route his party took as they crossed northern Australia from Morton Bay (Brisbane) to Port Essington (near Darwin). Ignoring the usual colonial practice of honouring the powerful and aristocratic, Leichhardt named the noteworthy features along this route after his supporters and fellow expeditioners. Many of these names are still in use and a series of public monuments have also been erected in the intervening century and a half to commemorate this journey. Unlike Leichhardt, who survived his epic trip, some contemporary travellers who navigate the remote roadway named in his honour do not arrive at their final destinations. Memorials to these violently interrupted lives line the highway, many enigmatically located in places where there is no obvious explanation for the lethal violence that occurred there. This examination profiles the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. All humans know that death awaits them (Morell). Yet, despite this, and the unprecedented torrent of images of death and dying saturating news, television, and social media (Duwe; Sumiala; Bisceglio), Gorer’s mid-century ideas about the denial of death and Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning description of the purpose of human civilization as a defence against this knowledge remains current in the contemporary trope that individuals (at least in the West) deny their mortality. Contributing to this enigmatic situation is how many deny the realities of aging and bodily decay—the promise of the “life extension” industries (Hall)—and are shielded from death by hospitals, palliative care providers, and the multimillion dollar funeral industry (Kiernan). Drawing on Piatti-Farnell’s concept of popular culture artefacts as “haunted/haunting” texts, the below describes how memorials to the dead can powerfully reconnect those who experience them with death’s reality, by providing an “encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience” (Piatti-Farnell). While certainly very different to the “sublime” iconic Gothic structure, the Gothic ruin that Summers argued could be seen as “a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret” (407), these memorials do function in both this way as melancholy/regret-inducing relics as well as in Piatti-Farnell’s sense of bringing the dead into everyday consciousness. Such memorialising activity also evokes one of Spooner’s features of the Gothic, by acknowledging “the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present” (8).Ludwig Leichhardt and His HighwayWhen Leichhardt returned to Sydney in 1846 from his 18-month journey across northern Australia, he was greeted with surprise and then acclaim. Having mounted his expedition without any backing from influential figures in the colony, his party was presumed lost only weeks after its departure. Yet, once Leichhardt and almost all his expedition returned, he was hailed “Prince of Explorers” (Erdos). When awarding him a significant purse raised by public subscription, then Speaker of the Legislative Council voiced what he believed would be the explorer’s lasting memorial —the public memory of his achievement: “the undying glory of having your name enrolled amongst those of the great men whose genius and enterprise have impelled them to seek for fame in the prosecution of geographical science” (ctd. Leichhardt 539). Despite this acclaim, Leichhardt was a controversial figure in his day; his future prestige not enhanced by his Prussian/Germanic background or his disappearance two years later attempting to cross the continent. What troubled the colonial political class, however, was his transgressive act of naming features along his route after commoners rather than the colony’s aristocrats. Today, the Leichhardt Highway closely follows Leichhardt’s 1844-45 route for some 130 kilometres from Miles, north through Wandoan to Taroom. In the first weeks of his journey, Leichhardt named 16 features in this area: 6 of the more major of these after the men in his party—including the Aboriginal man ‘Charley’ and boy John Murphy—4 more after the tradesmen and other non-aristocratic sponsors of his venture, and the remainder either in memory of the journey’s quotidian events or natural features there found. What we now accept as traditional memorialising practice could in this case be termed as Gothic, in that it upset the rational, normal order of its day, and by honouring humble shopkeepers, blacksmiths and Indigenous individuals, revealed the “disturbance and ambivalence” (Botting 4) that underlay colonial class relations (Macintyre). On 1 December 1844, Leichhardt also memorialised his own past, referencing the Gothic in naming a watercourse The Creek of the Ruined Castles due to the “high sandstone rocks, fissured and broken like pillars and walls and the high gates of the ruined castles of Germany” (57). Leichhardt also disturbed and disfigured the nature he so admired, famously carving his initials deep into trees along his route—a number of which still exist, including the so-called Leichhardt Tree, a large coolibah in Taroom’s main street. Leichhardt also wrote his own memorial, keeping detailed records of his experiences—both good and more regretful—in the form of field books, notebooks and letters, with his major volume about this expedition published in London in 1847. Leichhardt’s journey has since been memorialised in various ways along the route. The Leichhardt Tree has been further defaced with numerous plaques nailed into its ancient bark, and the town’s federal government-funded Bicentennial project raised a formal memorial—a large sandstone slab laid with three bronze plaques—in the newly-named Ludwig Leichhardt Park. Leichhardt’s name also adorns many sites both along, and outside, the routes of his expeditions. While these fittingly include natural features such as the Leichhardt River in north-west Queensland (named in 1856 by Augustus Gregory who crossed it by searching for traces of the explorer’s ill-fated 1848 expedition), there are also many businesses across Queensland and the Northern Territory less appropriately carrying his name. More somber monuments to Leichhardt’s legacy also resulted from this journey. The first of these was the white settlement that followed his declaration that the countryside he moved through was well endowed with fertile soils. With squatters and settlers moving in and land taken up before Leichhardt had even arrived back in Sydney, the local Yeeman people were displaced, mistreated and completely eradicated within a decade (Elder). Mid-twentieth century, Patrick White’s literary reincarnation, Voss of the eponymous novel, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker have enshrined in popular memory not only the difficult (and often described as Gothic) nature of the landscape through which Leichhardt travelled (Adams; Mollinson, and Bonham), but also the distinctive and contrary blend of intelligence, spiritual mysticism, recklessness, and stoicism Leichhardt brought to his task. Roadside Memorials Today, the Leichhardt Highway is also lined with a series of roadside shrines to those who have died much more recently. While, like centotaphs, tombstones, and cemeteries, these memorialise the dead, they differ in usually marking the exact location that death occurred. In 43 BC, Cicero articulated the idea of the dead living in memory, “The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living” (93), yet Nelson is one of very few contemporary writers to link roadside memorials to elements of Gothic sensibility. Such constructions can, however, be described as Gothic, in that they make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering. These are also enigmatic sites. Traffic levels are generally low along the flat or gently undulating terrain and many of these memorials are located in locations where there is no obvious explanation for the violence that occurred there. They are loci of contradictions, in that they are both more private than other memorials, in being designed, and often made and erected, by family and friends of the deceased, and yet more public, visible to all who pass by (Campbell). Cemeteries are set apart from their surroundings; the roadside memorial is, in contrast, usually in open view along a thoroughfare. In further contrast to cemeteries, which contain many relatively standardised gravesites, individual roadside memorials encapsulate and express not only the vivid grief of family and friends but also—when they include vehicle wreckage or personal artefacts from the fatal incident—provide concrete evidence of the trauma that occurred. While the majority of individuals interned in cemeteries are long dead, roadside memorials mark relatively contemporary deaths, some so recent that there may still be tyre marks, debris and bloodstains marking the scene. In 2008, when I was regularly travelling this roadway, I documented, and researched, the six then extant memorial sites that marked the locations of ten fatalities from 1999 to 2006. (These were all still in place in mid-2014.) The fatal incidents are very diverse. While half involved trucks and/or road trains, at least three were single vehicle incidents, and the deceased ranged from 13 to 84 years of age. Excell argues that scholarship on roadside memorials should focus on “addressing the diversity of the material culture” (‘Contemporary Deathscapes’) and, in these terms, the Leichhardt Highway memorials vary from simple crosses to complex installations. All include crosses (mostly, but not exclusively, white), and almost all are inscribed with the name and birth/death dates of the deceased. Most include flowers or other plants (sometimes fresh but more often plastic), but sometimes also a range of relics from the crash and/or personal artefacts. These are, thus, unsettling sights, not least in the striking contrast they provide with the highway and surrounding road reserve. The specific location is a key component of their ability to re-sensitise viewers to the dangers of the route they are travelling. The first memorial travelling northwards, for instance, is situated at the very point at which the highway begins, some 18 kilometres from Goondiwindi. Two small white crosses decorated with plastic flowers are set poignantly close together. The inscriptions can also function as a means of mobilising connection with these dead strangers—a way of building Secomb’s “haunted community”, whereby community in the post-colonial age can only be built once past “murderous death” (131) is acknowledged. This memorial is inscribed with “Cec Hann 06 / A Good Bloke / A Good hoarseman [sic]” and “Pat Hann / A Good Woman” to tragically commemorate the deaths of an 84-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife from South Australia who died in the early afternoon of 5 June 2006 when their Ford Falcon, towing a caravan, pulled onto the highway and was hit by a prime mover pulling two trailers (Queensland Police, ‘Double Fatality’; Jones, and McColl). Further north along the highway are two memorials marking the most inexplicable of road deaths: the single vehicle fatality (Connolly, Cullen, and McTigue). Darren Ammenhauser, aged 29, is remembered with a single white cross with flowers and plaque attached to a post, inscribed hopefully, “Darren Ammenhauser 1971-2000 At Rest.” Further again, at Billa Billa Creek, a beautifully crafted metal cross attached to a fence is inscribed with the text, “Kenneth J. Forrester / RIP Jack / 21.10.25 – 27.4.05” marking the death of the 79-year-old driver whose vehicle veered off the highway to collide with a culvert on the creek. It was reported that the vehicle rolled over several times before coming to rest on its wheels and that Forrester was dead when the police arrived (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Traffic Incident’). More complex memorials recollect both single and multiple deaths. One, set on both sides of the road, maps the physical trajectory of the fatal smash. This memorial comprises white crosses on both sides of road, attached to a tree on one side, and a number of ancillary sites including damaged tyres with crosses placed inside them on both sides of the road. Simple inscriptions relay the inability of such words to express real grief: “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed” and “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed / Forever in our hearts.” The oldest and most complex memorial on the route, commemorating the death of four individuals on 18 June 1999, is also situated on both sides of the road, marking the collision of two vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One memorial to a 62-year-old man comprises a cross with flowers, personal and automotive relics, and a plaque set inside a wooden fence and simply inscribed “John Henry Keenan / 23-11-1936–18-06-1999”. The second memorial contains three white crosses set side-by-side, together with flowers and relics, and reveals that members of three generations of the same family died at this location: “Raymond Campbell ‘Butch’ / 26-3-67–18-6-99” (32 years of age), “Lorraine Margaret Campbell ‘Lloydie’ / 29-11-46–18-6-99” (53 years), and “Raymond Jon Campbell RJ / 28-1-86–18-6-99” (13 years). The final memorial on this stretch of highway is dedicated to Jason John Zupp of Toowoomba who died two weeks before Christmas 2005. This consists of a white cross, decorated with flowers and inscribed: “Jason John Zupp / Loved & missed by all”—a phrase echoed in his newspaper obituary. The police media statement noted that, “at 11.24pm a prime mover carrying four empty trailers [stacked two high] has rolled on the Leichhardt Highway 17km north of Taroom” (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Truck Accident’). The roadside memorial was placed alongside a ditch on a straight stretch of road where the body was found. The coroner’s report adds the following chilling information: “Mr Zupp was thrown out of the cabin and his body was found near the cabin. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had applied the brakes or in any way tried to prevent the crash … Jason was not wearing his seatbelt” (Cornack 5, 6). Cornack also remarked the truck was over length, the brakes had not been properly adjusted, and the trip that Zupp had undertaken could not been lawfully completed according to fatigue management regulations then in place (8). Although poignant and highly visible due to these memorials, these deaths form a small part of Australia’s road toll, and underscore our ambivalent relationship with the automobile, where road death is accepted as a necessary side-effect of the freedom of movement the technology offers (Ladd). These memorials thus animate highways as Gothic landscapes due to the “multifaceted” (Haider 56) nature of the fear, terror and horror their acknowledgement can bring. Since 1981, there have been, for instance, between some 1,600 and 3,300 road deaths each year in Australia and, while there is evidence of a long term downward trend, the number of deaths per annum has not changed markedly since 1991 (DITRDLG 1, 2), and has risen in some years since then. The U.S.A. marked its millionth road death in 1951 (Ladd) along the way to over 3,000,000 during the 20th century (Advocates). These deaths are far reaching, with U.K. research suggesting that each death there leaves an average of 6 people significantly affected, and that there are some 10 to 20 per cent of mourners who experience more complicated grief and longer term negative affects during this difficult time (‘Pathways Through Grief’). As the placing of roadside memorials has become a common occurrence the world over (Klaassens, Groote, and Vanclay; Grider; Cohen), these are now considered, in MacConville’s opinion, not only “an appropriate, but also an expected response to tragedy”. Hockey and Draper have explored the therapeutic value of the maintenance of “‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead” (3). This is, however, only one explanation for the reasons that individuals erect roadside memorials with research suggesting roadside memorials perform two main purposes in their linking of the past with the present—as not only sites of grieving and remembrance, but also of warning (Hartig, and Dunn; Everett; Excell, Roadside Memorials; MacConville). Clark adds that by “localis[ing] and personalis[ing] the road dead,” roadside memorials raise the profile of road trauma by connecting the emotionless statistics of road death directly to individual tragedy. They, thus, transform the highway into not only into a site of past horror, but one in which pain and terror could still happen, and happen at any moment. Despite their increasing commonality and their recognition as cultural artefacts, these memorials thus occupy “an uncomfortable place” both in terms of public policy and for some individuals (Lowe). While in some states of the U.S.A. and in Ireland the erection of such memorials is facilitated by local authorities as components of road safety campaigns, in the U.K. there appears to be “a growing official opposition to the erection of memorials” (MacConville). Criticism has focused on the dangers (of distraction and obstruction) these structures pose to passing traffic and pedestrians, while others protest their erection on aesthetic grounds and even claim memorials can lower property values (Everett). While many ascertain a sense of hope and purpose in the physical act of creating such shrines (see, for instance, Grider; Davies), they form an uncanny presence along the highway and can provide dangerous psychological territory for the viewer (Brien). Alongside the townships, tourist sites, motels, and petrol stations vying to attract customers, they stain the roadway with the unmistakable sign that a violent death has happened—bringing death, and the dead, to the fore as a component of these journeys, and destabilising prominent cultural narratives of technological progress and safety (Richter, Barach, Ben-Michael, and Berman).Conclusion This investigation has followed Goddu who proposes that a Gothic text “registers its culture’s contradictions” (3) and, in profiling these memorials as “intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (Goddu 3) has proposed memorials as Gothic artefacts that can both disturb and reveal. Roadside memorials are, indeed, so loaded with emotional content that their close contemplation can be traumatising (Brien), yet they are inescapable while navigating the roadway. Part of their power resides in their ability to re-animate those persons killed in these violent in the minds of those viewing these memorials. In this way, these individuals are reincarnated as ghostly presences along the highway, forming channels via which the traveller can not only make human contact with the dead, but also come to recognise and ponder their own sense of mortality. While roadside memorials are thus like civic war memorials in bringing untimely death to the forefront of public view, roadside memorials provide a much more raw expression of the chaotic, anarchic and traumatic moment that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. While traditional memorials—such as those dedicated by, and to, Leichhardt—moreover, pay homage to the vitality of the lives of those they commemorate, roadside memorials not only acknowledge the alarming circumstances of unexpected death but also stand testament to the power of the paradox of the incontrovertibility of sudden death versus our lack of ability to postpone it. In this way, further research into these and other examples of Gothic memorialising practice has much to offer various areas of cultural study in Australia.ReferencesAdams, Brian. Sidney Nolan: Such Is Life. Hawthorn, Vic.: Hutchinson, 1987. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities & Fatality Rate: 1899-2003.” 2004. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Bisceglio, Paul. “How Social Media Is Changing the Way We Approach Death.” The Atlantic 20 Aug. 2013. Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. 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There’s always this never-ending discussion about the curator who imposes meaning or imposes the concept of art, of what art is. I think this is the wrong opposition. Every artwork produces its concept, or a concept of what art is. And the role of the curator is not to produce a concept of art but to invent, to fabricate, elaborate reading grids or coexistence grids between them.(Nicolas Bourriaud quoted in Bourriaud, Lunghi, O’Neill, and Ruf 91–92)In 2010 at a conference in Rotterdam, Nicolas Bourriaud, Enrico Lunghi, Paul O’Neill, and Beatrix Ruf discussed the question, “Is the curator per definition a political animal?” This paper draws on their discussion when posing the reverse scenario—is the political animal per definition a curator in the context of the development of large-scale public policy? In exploring this question, I suggest that recent conceptual discussions centring on “the curatorial turn” in the arena of the creative arts provide a useful framework for understanding and managing opportunities and pitfalls in policymaking that is influenced by news media. Such a conceptual understanding is important. My empirical research has identified a transport policy arena that is changing due to news media scrutiny in Sydney, Australia. My findings are that the discourses arising and circulating in the public and the news media wield considerable influence. I posit in this paper the view that recent academic discussion of curatorial practices could identify more effective and successful approaches to policy development and implementation. I also question whether some of the key problems highlighted by commentary on the curatorial turn, such as the silencing of the voice of the artist, find parallels in policy as the influence of the bureaucrat or technical expert is diminished by the rise of the politician as curator in mediatised policy. The Political AnimalPaul O’Neill defines a political animal: “to be a passionate and human visionary—someone who bridges gaps, negotiates the impossible in order to generate change, even slight change, movements, a shivering” (Bourriaud et al. 90). O’Neill’s definition is a different definition from Aristotle’s famous assertion that humans (collectively) are the “political animal” because they are the only animals to possess speech (Danta and Vardoulakis 3). The essence of O’Neill’s definition shifts from the Aristotelian view that all humans are political, towards what Chris Danta and Dimitris Vardoulakis (4) refer to as “the consumption of the political by politics,” where the domain of the political is the realm of the elite few rather than innately human as Aristotle suggests. Moreover, there is a suggestion in O’Neill’s definition that the “political animal” is the consummate politician, creating change against great opposition. I suggest that this idea of struggle and adversity in O’Neill’s definition echoes policy development’s own “turn” of the early 1990s, “the argumentative turn in policy analysis and planning” (Fischer and Forester 43). The Argumentative Turn The argumentative turn in policy analysis and planning is premised on the assertion that “policy is made of language” (Majone 1). It represents a seismic shift in previously championed academic conceptions of policy analysis—decisionism, rationality, the economic model of choice, and other models that advocate measured, rational, and objective policy development processes. The argumentative turn highlights the importance of communication in policy development. Prior to this turn, policy analysts considered formal communication to be something that happened after policy elites had completed the scientific, objective, analytical, and rational work. Communication was perceived as being the process of “seducing” or the “‘mere words’ that add gloss to the important stuff” (Throgmorton 117–19). Communication had meant selling or “spinning” the policy—a task often left to the devices of the public relations industry by the “less scrupulous” policymaker (Dryzek 227).The new line of inquiry posits the alternative view that, far from communication being peripheral, “the policy process is constituted by and mediated through communicative practices” (Fischer and Gottweis 2). Thanks largely to the work of Deborah Stone and Giandomenico Majone, academics began to ask, “What if our language does not simply mirror or picture the world but instead profoundly shapes our view of it in the first place?” (Fischer and Forester 1). The importance of this turn to the argument, I posit in this paper, is illustrated by Stone when she contends that the communication of conflicting views and interests create a world where paradoxical positions on policy are inevitable. Stone states, “Ask a politician to define a problem and he will probably draw a battlefield and tell you who stands on which side. The analytical language of politics includes ‘for and against,’ ‘supporters and enemies,’ ‘our side and their side’” (166). Stone describes a policymaking process that is inherently difficult. Her ideas echo O’Neill’s intonation that in order for movement or even infinitesimal change it is the negotiation of the impossible that makes a political animal. The Mediatisation of Sydney Transport Stone and Majone speak only cursorily of the media in policy development. However, in recent years academics have increasingly contended that “mediatisation” be recognised as referring to the increasing influence of media in social, cultural, and political spheres (Deacon and Stanyer; Strömbäck and Esser; Shehata and Strömbäck). My own research into the influence of mediatisation on transport policy and projects in Sydney has centred more specifically on the influence of news media. My focus has been a trend towards news media influence in Australian politics and policy that has been observed by academics for more than a decade (Craig; Young; Ward, PR State; Ward, Public Affair; Ward, Power). My research entailed two case study projects, the failed Sydney CBD Metro (SCM) rail line and a North West Rail Link (NWR) currently under construction. Data-gathering included a news media study of 180 relevant print articles; 30 expert interviews with respondents from politics, the bureaucracy, transport planning, news media, and public relations, whose work related to transport (with a number working on the case study projects); and surveys, interviews, and focus groups with 149 public respondents. The research identified projects whose contrasting fortunes tell a significant story in relation to the influence of news media. The SCM, despite being a project deemed to be of considerable merit by the majority of expert respondents, was, as stated by a transport planner who worked on the project, “poorly sold,” which “turned it into a project that was very easy to ridicule.” Following a resulting period of intense news media criticism, the SCM was abandoned. As a transport reporter for a daily newspaper asserts in an interview, the prevailing view in the news media is that the project “was done on the back of an envelope.” According to experts with knowledge of the SCM, that years of planning had been undertaken was not properly presented to the public. Conversely, the experts I interviewed deem the NWR to be a low-priority project for Sydney. As a former chief of staff within both federal and state government departments including transport states, “if you are going to put money into anything in Sydney it would not be the NWR.” However, in the project’s favour is an overwhelming dominant public and media discourse that I label The north-west of Sydney is overdue rail transport. A communications respondent contends in an interview that because the NWR has “been talked about for so long” it holds “the right sighting, if you like, in people’s minds,” in other words, the media and the public have become used to the idea of the project.Ultimately, my findings, dealt with in more detail elsewhere (Richardson), suggest that powerful news media and public discourses, if not managed effectively, can be highly problematic for policymaking. This was found to be the case for the failure of the SCM. It is with this finding that I assert that the concept of curating the discourses surrounding a policy arena could hold considerable merit as a conceptual framework for discourse management. The Curatorial Turn in Policy Development? I was alerted to the idea of curating mediatised policy development during an expert interview for my empirical research. The respondent, chief editor of a Sydney newspaper, stated that, with an overwhelming mountain of information, news, views, and commentary being generated daily through the likes of the Internet and social media, the public needs curators to sift and sort the most important themes and arguments. The expert suggested this is now part of a journalist’s role. The idea of journalists as curators is far from new (Bakker 596). Nor is it the purpose of this paper. However, what struck me in this notion of curating was the critical role of sifting, sorting and ultimately selecting which themes, ideas, or pieces of information are privileged in myriad choices. My own empirical research was indicating that the management of highly influential news media and public discourses surrounding transport infrastructure also involved a considerable level of selection. Therefore, I hypothesised that the concept of curating might aid the managing of discourses when it comes to communicating for successful policy and project development that is subject to news media scrutiny. Research into scholarship has indicated that the concept of “the curatorial turn” is significant to this hypothesis. Since the 1960s the role of curator in art exhibition has shifted from that of “caretaker” for a collection to the shaper of an exhibition (O’Neill, “Turn”; O’Neill, Culture). Central to this shift is “the changing perception of the curator as carer to a curator who has a more creative and active part to play within the production of art itself” (O’Neill, Turn 243). Some commentators go so far as to suggest that curators have become cultural agents that “participate in the production of cultural value” (244). The curator’s role in exhibition design has also been equated to that of an author or auteur that drives an exhibition’s meaning (251–52). Why is this important for policy development? It is my view that there is certainly merit to viewing a significant part of the role of the political animal in policymaking as the curator of public and media discourse. As Beatrix Ruf suggests, the role of the curator is to create a “freedom for things to happen” within “a societal context” that not only takes into account the needs of the “artist” but also the “audience” (Bourriaud et al. 91). If we were to substitute bureaucrat for artist and media/public for audience then Ruf’s suggestion seems particularly relevant for the communication of policy. To return to Bourriaud’s quote that began this paper, perhaps the role of the curator/policymaker is not solely to produce a policy “but to invent, to fabricate, elaborate reading grids or coexistence grids,” to manage the discourses that influence the policy arena (Bourriaud et al. 92). Furthermore, the answer to why the concept of the curatorial turn seems relevant to policy development requires consideration not only of the rise of the voice and influence of the curator/policymaker but also of those at whose expense this shift has occurred. Through the rise of the curator the voice of the artist has dimmed. As the exhibition is elevated to “the status of quasi-artwork,” individual artworks themselves become simply “a useful fragment” (O’Neill, “Turn” 253). One of the underlying tensions of the curatorial turn is the rise of actors that are not practicing artists themselves. In other words, the producers of art, the artists, have less influence over their own practice. In New South Wales (NSW), we have witnessed a similar scenario with the steady rise of the voice and influence of the politician (and political adviser), at the expense of the public service. This loss of bureaucratic power was embedded structurally in the mid-1970s when Premier Neville Wran established the Ministerial Advisory Unit (MAU) to oversee NSW state government decisions. A respondent for my research states that when he began his career as a public servant: politicians didn’t really have a lot of ideas about things … the public service really ran the place … [Premier Wran] said, ‘this isn’t good enough. I’m being manipulated by the government departments. I’m going to set up something called the MAU which is politically appointed as a countervailing force to the bureaucracy to get the advice that I want.’The respondent infers a power grab by political actors to stymie the influence of the bureaucracy. This view is shared by several expert respondents for my research, as well as being substantiated by historian John Gunn (503). One of the clear results of the structural change has been that a politically driven media focus is now embedded in the structure of government policy and project decision-making. Instead of taking its lead from priorities emanating from the community, the bureaucracy is instead left with little choice but to look to the minister for guidance. As a project management consultant to government states in an interview:I think today the bureaucrat who makes the hard administrative decisions, the management decisions, is basically outweighed by communications, public relations, media relations director … the politicians are poll driven not policy driven. The respondent makes a point with which former politician Lindsay Tanner (Tanner) and academic Ian Ward (Ward, Power) agree—Australian politicians are increasingly structuring their operations around news media. The bureaucracy has become less relevant to policymaking as a result. My empirical research indicates this. The SCM and the NWR were highly publicised projects where the views of transport experts were largely ignored. They represent cases where the voice of the experts/artists had been completely suppressed by the voice of the politician/curator. I contend that this is where key questions of the role of the politician and the curator converge. Experts interviewed for my research express concerns that policymaking has been altered by structural changes to the bureaucracy. Similarly, some academics concerned with the rise of the curator question whether the shift will change the very nature of art (O’Neill, Cultures). A shared concern of the art world and those witnessing the policy arena in NSW is that the thoughts and ideas of those that do are being overshadowed by the views of those who talk. In terms of curatorial practice, O’Neill (Cultures) cites the views of Mick Wilson, who speaks of the rise of the “Foucauldian moment” and the “ubiquitous appeal of the term ‘discourse’ as a word to conjure and perform power,” where “even talking is doing something.” As O’Neill contends, “at this extreme, the discursive stands in the place of ‘doing’ within discourses on curatorial practice” (43). O’Neill submits Wilson’s point as an extreme view within the curatorial turn. However, the concern for the art world should be similar to the one experienced in the policy arena. Technical advice from the bureaucracy (doers) to ministers (talkers) has changed. In an interview with me, a partner in one of Australia’s leading architectural and planning practices contends that the technical advice of the bureaucracy to ministers is not as “fearless and robust” as it once was. Furthermore, he is concerned that planners have lost their influence as ministers now look to political advisers rather than technical advisers for direction. He states, “now what happens is most advisors to ministers are political advisers and they will give political advice … the planning advice hasn’t come from the planners.” The ultimate concern is that, through a silencing of the technical expert, policymaking is losing a vital layer of experience and knowledge that can only be to the detriment of the practice and its beneficiaries, the public. The closer one looks, the more evident the similarities between curating and policy development become. Acute budgetary limitations exist. There is an increased reliance on public funding. Large-scale curating, like policy development, involves “a negotiation of the relationship between public and private interests” (Ruf in Bourriaud et al. 90). There is also a tension between short- and long-term outlooks as well as local and global perspectives (Lunghi in Bourriaud et al. 97). And, significantly for my argument for the privileging of the concept of curating of discourse in policy, curating has also been called “a battlefield of ideas in which the public (or audience) has become ‘the big Other’” in that “everything that cannot find its audience, its public, is highly suspicious or very problematic” (Bourriaud in Bourriaud et al. 96–97). The closer the inspection, the starker the similarities of each pursuit. Lessons, Ramifications and Conclusions What can policymakers learn from the curatorial turn? For policymaking, it seems that the argumentative turn, the rise of news mediatisation, the strengthening of power and influence of the politician, and the “Foucauldian moment” have seen the rise of the discursive in place of doing that some quarters identify as being the case with the curatorial turn (O’Neill, Cultures). Therefore, it would be pertinent for policymakers to heed Bourriaud’s statement that began this paper: “the role of the curator is not to produce a concept of art (or policy) but to invent, to fabricate, elaborate reading grids or coexistence grids between them” (Bourriaud et al. 92). Is such a method of curating discourse the way forward for the political animal that seeks to achieve the politically “impossible” in policymaking? Perhaps for policymaking the importance of the concept of curating holds both opportunity and a warning. The opportunity, exemplified by the success of the NWR and the failure of the SCM projects in Sydney, is in accepting the role of media and public discourses in policy development so that they may be more thoroughly investigated and understood before being more effectively folded into the policymaking process. The warning lies in the concerns the curatorial turn has raised over the demise of the artist in light of the rise of discourse. The voice of the technical expert appears to be fading. How do we effectively curate discourses as well as restore the bureaucrat to former levels of robust fearlessness? I dare say it will take a political animal to do either. ReferencesBakker, Piet. “Mr Gates Returns.” Journalism Studies 15.5 (2014): 596–606.Bourriaud, Nicolas, Enrico Lunghi, Paul O’Neill, and Beatrix Ruf. “Is the Curator per Definition a Political Animal?” Rotterdam Dialogues: The Critics, the Curators, the Artists. Eds. Zoe Gray, Miriam Kathrein, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Monika Szewczyk, and Ariadne Urlus. Rotterdam: Witte de With Publishers, 2010. 87–99. Craig, Geoffrey. The Media, Politics and Public Life. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2004.Danta, Chris, and Dimitris Vardoulakis. “The Political Animal.” SubStance 37.3 (2008): 3–6. Dryzek, John S. “Policy Analysis and Planning: From Science to Argument.” The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. Eds. Frank Fischer and John Forester. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. 213–32.Fischer, Frank, and John Forester. “Editors’ Introduction.” The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. Eds. Frank Fischer and John Forester. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. 1–17.Fischer, Frank, and Herbert Gottweis. Argumentative Turn Revisited: Public Policy as Communicative Practice. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012.Gunn, John. Along Parallel Lines: A History of the Railways of New South Wales. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1989.Majone, Giandomenico. Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.O’Neill, Paul. “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse.” The Biennial Reader. Eds. Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Solvig Øvstebø. Bergen, Norway: Bergen Kunsthall, 2007. 240–59.———. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Cultures. Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 2012.Richardson, Nicholas. “Political Upheaval in Australia: Media, Foucault and Shocking Policy.” Media International Australia. Forthcoming.Shehata, Adam, and Jesper Strömbäck. “Mediation of Political Realities: Media as Crucial Sources of Information.” Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. Eds. Frank Esser and Jesper Strömbäck. Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 93–112. Stone, Deborah. Policy Paradox and Political Reason. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1988.Strömbäck, Jesper, and Frank Esser. “Mediatization of Politics: Towards a Theoretical Framework.” Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. Eds. Frank Esser and Jesper Strömbäck. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 3–28.Tanner, Lindsay. Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy. Carlton North, Victoria: Scribe, 2011.Throgmorton, James A. “Survey Research as Rhetorical Trope: Electric Power Planning in Chicago.” The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. Eds. Frank Fischer and John Forester. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. 117–44.Ward, Ian. “An Australian PR State?” Australian Journal of Communication 30.1 (2003): 25–42. ———. “Lobbying as a Public Affair: PR and Politics in Australia.” Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship. ANZCA: Brisbane, 2009. 1039–56. ‹http://www.anzca.net/documents/anzca-09-1/refereed-proceedings-2009-1/79-lobbying-as-a-public-affair-pr-and-politics-in-australia-1/file.html›.———. “The New and Old Media, Power and Politics.” Government, Politics, Power and Policy in Australia. Eds. Dennis Woodward, Andrew Parkin, and John Summers. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson, 2010. 374–93.Young, Sally. “Killing Competition: Restricting Access to Political Communication Channels in Australia.” AQ: Journal of Contemporary Analysis 75.3 (2003): 9–15.

The traditional German tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin inhabits an ambiguous narrative borderland, a liminal space between fact and fiction, fantasy and horror, concrete details and elusive mystery. In his study of the Pied Piper in Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature, Wolfgang Mieder describes how manuscripts and other evidence appear to confirm the historical base of the story. Precise details from a fifteenth-century manuscript, based on earlier sources, specify that in 1284 on the 26th of June, the feast-day of Saints John and Paul, 130 children from Hamelin were led away by a piper clothed in many colours to the Koppen Hill, and there vanished (Mieder 48). Later manuscripts add details familiar today, such as a plague of rats and a broken bargain with burghers as a motive for the Piper’s actions, while in the seventeenth century the first English-language version advances what might also be the first attempt at a “rational” explanation for the children’s disappearance, claiming that they were taken to Transylvania. The uncommon pairing of such precise factual detail with enigmatic mystery has encouraged many theories. These have ranged from references to the Children’s Crusade, or other religious fervours, to the devastation caused by the Black Death, from the colonisation of Romania by young German migrants to a murderous rampage by a paedophile. Fictional interpretations of the story have multiplied, with the classic versions of the Brothers Grimm and Robert Browning being most widely known, but with contemporary creators exploring the theme too. This includes interpretations in Hamelin itself. On 26 June 2015, in Hamelin Museum, I watched a wordless five-minute play, entirely performed not by humans but by animatronic stylised figures built out of scrap iron, against a montage of multilingual, confused voices and eerie music, with the vanished children represented by a long line of small empty shirts floating by. The uncanny, liminal nature of the story was perfectly captured. Australia is a world away from German fairy tale mysteries, historically, geographically, and culturally. Yet, as Lisa M. Fiander has persuasively argued, contemporary Australian fiction has been more influenced by fairy tales than might be assumed, and in this essay it is proposed that major motifs from the Pied Piper appear in several Australian novels, transformed not only by distance of setting and time from that of the original narrative, but also by elements specific to the Australian imaginative space. These motifs are lost children, the enigmatic figure of the Piper himself, and the power of a very particular place (as Hamelin and its Koppen Hill are particularised in the original tale). Three major Australian novels will be examined in this essay: Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), Christopher Koch’s The Doubleman (1985), and Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day (2011). Dubosarsky’s novel was written for children; both Koch’s and Lindsay’s novels were published as adult fiction. In each of these works of fiction, the original tale’s motifs have been developed and transformed to express unique evocations of the Pied Piper theme. As noted by Fiander, fiction writers are “most likely to draw upon fairy tales when they are framing, in writing, a subject that generates anxiety in their culture” (158). Her analysis is about anxieties of place within Australian fiction, but this insight could be usefully extended to the motifs which I have identified as inherent in the Pied Piper story. Prominent among these is the lost children motif, whose importance in the Australian imagination has been well-established by scholars such as Peter Pierce. Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety explores this preoccupation from the earliest beginnings of European settlement, through analysis of fiction, newspaper reports, paintings, and films. As Pierce observed in a later interview in the Sydney Morning Herald (Knox), over time the focus changed from rural children and the nineteenth-century fear of the vast impersonal nature of the bush, where children of colonists could easily get lost, to urban children and the contemporary fear of human predators.In each of the three novels under examination in this essay, lost children—whether literal or metaphorical—feature prominently. Writer Carmel Bird, whose fiction has also frequently centred on the theme of the lost child, observes in “Dreaming the Place” that the lost child, the stolen child – this must be a narrative that is lodged in the heart and imagination, nightmare and dream, of all human beings. In Australia the nightmare became reality. The child is the future, and if the child goes, there can be no future. The true stories and the folk tales on this theme are mirror images of each other. (7) The motif of lost children—and of children in danger—is not unique to the Pied Piper. Other fairy tales, such as Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, contain it, and it is those antecedents which Bird cites in her essay. But within the Pied Piper story it has three features which distinguish it from other traditional tales. First, unlike in the classic versions of Hansel and Gretel or Red Riding Hood, the children do not return. Neither are there bodies to find. The children have vanished into thin air, never to be seen again. Second, it is not only parents who have lost them, but an entire community whose future has been snatched away: a community once safe, ordered, even complacent, traumatised by loss. The lack of hope, of a happy ending for anyone, is striking. And thirdly, the children are not lost or abandoned or even, strictly speaking, stolen: they are lured away, semi-willingly, by the central yet curiously marginal figure of the Piper himself. In the original story there is no mention of motive and no indication of malice on the part of the Piper. There is only his inexplicable presence, a figure out of fairy folklore appearing in the midst of concrete historical dates and numbers. Clearly, he links to the liminal, complex world of the fairies, found in folklore around the world—beings from a world close to the human one, yet alien. Whimsical and unpredictable by human standards, such beings are nevertheless bound by mysteriously arbitrary rules and taboos, and haunt the borders of the human world, disturbing its rational edges and transforming lives forever. It is this sense of disturbance, that enchanting yet frightening sudden shifting of the border of reality and of the comforting order of things, the essence of transformation itself, which can also be seen at the core of the three novels under examination in this essay, with the Piper represented in each of them but in different ways. The third motif within the Pied Piper is a focus on place as a source of uncanny power, a theme which particularly resonates within an Australian context. Fiander argues that if contemporary British fiction writers use fairy tale to explore questions of community and alienation, and Canadian fiction writers use it to explore questions of identity, then Australian writers use it to explore the unease of place. She writes of the enduring legacy of Australia’s history “as a settler colony which invests the landscape with strangeness for many protagonists” (157). Furthermore, she suggests that “when Australian fiction writers, using fairy tales, describe the landscape as divorced from reality, they might be signalling anxiety about their own connection with the land which had already seen tens of thousands of years of occupation when Captain James Cook ‘found’ it in 1770” (160). I would argue, however, that in the case of the Pied Piper motifs, it is less clear that it is solely settler anxieties which are driving the depiction of the power of place in these three novels. There is no divorce from reality here, but rather an eruption of the metaphysical potency of place within the usual, “normal” order of reality. This follows the pattern of the original tale, where the Piper and all the children, except for one or two stragglers, disappear at Koppen Hill, vanishing literally into the hill itself. In traditional European folklore, hollow hills are associated with fairies and their uncanny power, but other places, especially those of water—springs, streams, even the sea—may also be associated with their liminal world (in the original tale, the River Weser is another important locus for power). In Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, it is another outcrop in the landscape which holds that power and claims the “lost children.” Inspired partly by a painting by nineteenth-century Australian artist William Ford, titled At the Hanging Rock (1875), depicting a group of elegant people picnicking in the bush, this influential novel, which inspired an equally successful film adaptation, revolves around an incident in 1900 when four girls from Appleyard College, an exclusive school in Victoria, disappear with one of their teachers whilst climbing Hanging Rock, where they have gone for a picnic. Only one of their number, a girl called Irma, is ever found, and she has no memory of how and why she found herself on the Rock, and what has happened to the others. This inexplicable event is the precursor to a string of tragedies which leads to the violent deaths of several people, and which transforms the sleepy and apparently content little community around Appleyard College into a centre of loss, horror, and scandal.Told in a way which makes it appear that the novelist is merely recounting a true story—Lindsay even tells readers in an author’s note that they must decide for themselves if it is fact or fiction—Picnic at Hanging Rock shares the disturbingly liminal fact-fiction territory of the Piper tale. Many readers did in fact believe that the novel was based on historical events and combed newspaper files, attempting to propound ingenious “rational” explanations for what happened on the Rock. Picnic at Hanging Rock has been the subject of many studies, with the novel being analysed through various prisms, including the Gothic, the pastoral, historiography, and philosophy. In “Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush,” Kathleen Steele has depicted Picnic at Hanging Rock as embodying the idea that “Ordered ‘civilisation’ cannot overcome the gothic landscapes of settler imaginations: landscapes where time and people disappear” (44). She proposes that Lindsay intimates that the landscape swallows the “lost children” of the novel because there is a great absence in that place: that of Aboriginal people. In this reading of the novel, it is that absence which becomes, in a sense, a malevolent presence that will reach out beyond the initial disappearance of the three people on the Rock to destroy the bonds that held the settler community together. It is a powerfully-made argument, which has been taken up by other scholars and writers, including studies which link the theme of the novel with real-life lost-children cases such as that of Azaria Chamberlain, who disappeared near another “Rock” of great Indigenous metaphysical potency—Uluru, or Ayers Rock. However, to date there has been little exploration of the fairy tale quality of the novel, and none at all of the striking ways in which it evokes Pied Piper motifs, whilst transforming them to suit the exigencies of its particular narrative world. The motif of lost children disappearing from an ordered, safe, even complacent community into a place of mysterious power is extended into an exploration of the continued effects of those disappearances, depicting the disastrous impact on those left behind and the wider community in a way that the original tale does not. There is no literal Pied Piper figure in this novel, though various theories are evoked by characters as to who might have lured the girls and their teacher, and who might be responsible for the disappearances. Instead, there is a powerful atmosphere of inevitability and enchantment within the landscape itself which both illustrates the potency of place, and exemplifies the Piper’s hold on his followers. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, place and Piper are synonymous: the Piper has been transformed into the land itself. Yet this is not the “vast impersonal bush,” nor is it malevolent or vengeful. It is a living, seductive metaphysical presence: “Everything, if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete . . .” (Lindsay 35). Just as in the original tale, the lost children follow the “Piper” willingly, without regret. Their disappearance is a happiness to them, in that moment, as it is for the lost children of Hamelin, and quite unlike how it must be for those torn apart by that loss—the community around Appleyard, the townspeople of Hamelin. Music, long associated with fairy “takings,” is also a subtle feature of the story. In the novel, just before the luring, Irma hears a sound like the beating of far-off drums. In the film, which more overtly evokes fairy tale elements than does the novel, it is noteworthy that the music at that point is based on traditional tunes for Pan-pipes, played by the great Romanian piper Gheorge Zamfir. The ending of the novel, with questions left unanswered, and lives blighted by the forever-inexplicable, may be seen as also following the trajectory of the original tale. Readers as much as the fictional characters are left with an enigma that continues to perplex and inspire. Picnic at Hanging Rock was one of the inspirations for another significant Australian fiction, this time a contemporary novel for children. Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day (2011) is an elegant and subtle short novel, set in Sydney at an exclusive girls’ school, in 1967. Like the earlier novel, The Golden Day is also partly inspired by visual art, in this case the Schoolgirl series of paintings by Charles Blackman. Combining a fairy tale atmosphere with historical details—the Vietnam War, the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the drowning of Harold Holt—the story is told through the eyes of several girls, especially one, known as Cubby. The Golden Day echoes the core narrative patterns of the earlier novel, but intriguingly transformed: a group of young girls goes with their teacher on an outing to a mysterious place (in this case, a cave on the beach—note the potent elements of rock and water, combined), and something inexplicable happens which results in a disappearance. Only this time, the girls are much younger than the characters of Lindsay’s novel, pre-pubertal in fact at eleven years old, and it is their teacher, a young, idealistic woman known only as Miss Renshaw, who disappears, apparently into thin air, with only an amber bead from her necklace ever found. But it is not only Miss Renshaw who vanishes: the other is a poet and gardener named Morgan who is also Miss Renshaw’s secret lover. Later, with the revelation of a dark past, he is suspected in absentia of being responsible for Miss Renshaw’s vanishment, with implications of rape and murder, though her body is never found. Morgan, who could partly figure as the Piper, is described early on in the novel as having “beautiful eyes, soft, brown, wet with tears, like a stuffed toy” (Dubosarsky 11). This disarming image may seem a world away from the ambiguously disturbing figure of the legendary Piper, yet not only does it fit with the children’s naïve perception of the world, it also echoes the fact that the children in the original story were not afraid of the Piper, but followed him willingly. However, that is complicated by the fact that Morgan does not lure the children; it is Miss Renshaw who follows him—and the children follow her, who could be seen as the other half of the Piper. The Golden Day similarly transforms the other Piper motifs in its own original way. The children are only literally lost for a short time, when their teacher vanishes and they are left to make their own way back from the cave; yet it could be argued that metaphorically, the girls are “lost” to childhood from that moment, in terms of never being able to go back to the state of innocence in which they were before that day. Their safe, ordered school community will never be the same again, haunted by the inexplicability of the events of that day. Meanwhile, the exploration of Australian place—the depiction of the Memorial Gardens where Miss Renshaw enjoins them to write poetry, the uncomfortable descent over rocks to the beach, and the fateful cave—is made through the eyes of children, not the adolescents and adults of Picnic at Hanging Rock. The girls are not yet in that liminal space which is adolescence and so their impressions of what the places represent are immediate, instinctive, yet confused. They don’t like the cave and can’t wait to get out of it, whereas the beach inspires them with a sense of freedom and the gardens with a sense of enchantment. But in each place, those feelings are mixed both with ordinary concerns and with seemingly random associations that are nevertheless potently evocative. For example, in the cave, Cubby senses a threateningly weightless atmosphere, a feeling of reality shifting, which she associates, apparently confusedly, with the hanging of Ronald Ryan, reported that very day. In this way, Dubosarsky subtly gestures towards the sinister inevitability of the following events, and creates a growing tension that will eventually fade but never fully dissipate. At the end, the novel takes an unexpected turn which is as destabilising as the ending of the Pied Piper story, and as open-ended in its transformative effects as the original tale: “And at that moment Cubby realised she was not going to turn into the person she had thought she would become. There was something inside her head now that would make her a different person, though she scarcely understood what it was” (Dubosarsky 148). The eruption of the uncanny into ordinary life will never leave her now, as it will never leave the other girls who followed Miss Renshaw and Morgan into the literally hollow hill of the cave and emerged alone into a transformed world. It isn’t just childhood that Cubby has lost but also any possibility of a comforting sense of the firm borders of reality. As in the Pied Piper, ambiguity and loss combine to create questions which cannot be logically answered, only dimly apprehended.Christopher Koch’s 1985 novel The Doubleman, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, also explores the power of place and the motif of lost children, but unlike the other two novels examined in this essay depicts an actual “incarnated” Piper motif in the mysteriously powerful figure of Clive Broderick, brilliant guitarist and charismatic teacher/guru, whose office, significantly, is situated in a subterranean space of knowledge—a basement room beneath a bookshop. Both central yet peripheral to the main action of the novel, touched with hints of the supernatural which never veer into overt fantasy, Broderick remains an enigma to the end. Set, like The Golden Day, in the 1960s, The Doubleman is narrated in the first person by Richard Miller, in adulthood a producer of a successful folk-rock group, the Rymers, but in childhood an imaginative, troubled polio survivor, with a crutch and a limp. It is noteworthy here that in the Grimms’ version of the Pied Piper, two children are left behind, despite following the Piper: one is blind, one is lame. And it is the lame boy who tells the townspeople what he glimpsed at Koppen Hill. In creating the character of Broderick, the author blends the traditional tropes of the Piper figure with Mephistophelian overtones and a strong influence from fairy lore, specifically the idea of the “doubleman,” here drawn from the writings of seventeenth-century Scottish pastor, the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle. Kirk’s 1691 book The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies is the earliest known serious attempt at objective description of the fairy beliefs of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. His own precisely dated life-story and ambiguous end—it is said he did not die but is forever a prisoner of the fairies—has eerie parallels to the Piper story. “And there is the uncanny, powerful and ambiguous fact of the matter. Here is a man, named, born, lived, who lived a fairy story, really lived it: and in the popular imagination, he lives still” (Masson).Both in his creative and his non-fiction work Koch frequently evoked what he called “the Otherland,” which he depicted as a liminal, ambiguous, destabilising but nevertheless very real and potent presence only thinly veiled by the everyday world. This Otherland is not the same in all his fictions, but is always part of an actual place, whether that be Java in The Year of Living Dangerously, Hobart and Sydney in The Doubleman, Tasmania, Vietnam and Cambodia in Highways to a War, and Ireland and Tasmania in Out of Ireland. It is this sense of the “Otherland” below the surface, a fairy tale, mythical realm beyond logic or explanation, which gives his work its distinctive and particular power. And in The Doubleman, this motif, set within a vividly evoked real world, complete with precise period detail, transforms the Piper figure into one which could easily appear in a Hobart lane, yet which loses none of its uncanny potency. As Noel Henricksen writes in his study of Koch’s work, Island and Otherland, “Behind the membrane of Hobart is Otherland, its manifestations a spectrum stretched between the mystical and the spiritually perverted” (213).This is Broderick’s first appearance, described through twelve-year-old Richard Miller’s eyes: Tall and thin in his long dark overcoat, he studied me for the whole way as he approached, his face absolutely serious . . . The man made me uneasy to a degree for which there seemed to be no explanation . . . I was troubled by the notion that he was no ordinary man going to work at all: that he was not like other people, and that his interest couldn’t be explained so simply. (Koch, Doubleman 3)That first encounter is followed by another, more disturbing still, when Broderick speaks to the boy, eyes fixed on him: “. . . hooded by drooping lids, they were entirely without sympathy, yet nevertheless interested, and formidably intelligent” (5).The sense of danger that Broderick evokes in the boy could be explained by a sinister hint of paedophilia. But though Broderick is a predator of sorts on young people, nothing is what it seems; no rational explanation encompasses the strange effect of his presence. It is not until Richard is a young man, in the company of his musical friend Brian Brady, that he comes across Broderick again. The two young men are looking in the window of a music shop, when Broderick appears beside them, and as Richard observes, just as in a fairy tale, “He didn’t seem to have changed or aged . . .” (44). But the shock of his sudden re-appearance is mixed with something else now, as Broderick engages Brady in conversation, ignoring Richard, “. . . as though I had failed some test, all that time ago, and the man had no further use for me” (45).What happens next, as Broderick demonstrates his musical prowess, becomes Brady’s teacher, and introduces them to his disciple, young bass player Darcy Burr, will change the young men’s lives forever and set them on a path that leads both to great success and to living nightmare, even after Broderick’s apparent disappearance, for Burr will take on the Piper’s mantle. Koch’s depiction of the lost children motif is distinctively different to the other two novels examined in this essay. Their fate is not so much a mystery as a tragedy and a warning. The lost children of The Doubleman are also lost children of the sixties, bright, talented young people drawn through drugs, immersive music, and half-baked mysticism into darkness and horrifying violence. In his essay “California Dreaming,” published in the collection Crossing the Gap, Koch wrote about this subterranean aspect of the sixties, drawing a connection between it and such real-life sinister “Pipers” as Charles Manson (60). Broderick and Burr are not the same as the serial killer Manson, of course; but the spell they cast over the “lost children” who follow them is only different in degree, not in kind. In the end of the novel, the spell is broken and the world is again transformed. Yet fittingly it is a melancholy transformation: an end of childhood dreams of imaginative potential, as well as dangerous illusions: “And I knew now that it was all gone—like Harrigan Street, and Broderick, and the district of Second-Hand” (Koch, Doubleman 357). The power of place, the last of the Piper motifs, is also deeply embedded in The Doubleman. In fact, as with the idea of Otherland, place—or Island, as Henricksen evocatively puts it—is a recurring theme in Koch’s work. He identified primarily and specifically as a Tasmanian writer rather than as simply Australian, pointing out in an essay, “The Lost Hemisphere,” that because of its landscape and latitude, different to the mainland of Australia, Tasmania “genuinely belongs to a different region from the continent” (Crossing the Gap 92). In The Doubleman, Richard Miller imbues his familiar and deeply loved home landscape with great mystical power, a power which is both inherent within it as it is, but also expressive of the Otherland. In “A Tasmanian Tone,” another essay from Crossing the Gap, Koch describes that tone as springing “from a sense of waiting in the landscape: the tense yet serene expectancy of some nameless revelation” (118). But Koch could also write evocatively of landscapes other than Tasmanian ones. The unnerving climax of The Doubleman takes place in Sydney—significantly, as in The Golden Day, in a liminal, metaphysically charged place of rocks and water. That place, which is real, is called Point Piper. In conclusion, the original tale’s three main motifs—lost children, the enigma of the Piper, and the power of place—have been explored in distinctive ways in each of the three novels examined in this article. Contemporary Australia may be a world away from medieval Germany, but the uncanny liminality and capacious ambiguity of the Pied Piper tale has made it resonate potently within these major Australian fictions. Transformed and transformative within the Australian imagination, the theme of the Pied Piper threads like a faintly-heard snatch of unearthly music through the apparently mimetic realism of the novels, destabilising readers’ expectations and leaving them with subversively unanswered questions. ReferencesBird, Carmel. “Dreaming the Place: An Exploration of Antipodean Narratives.” Griffith Review 42 (2013). 1 May 2016 <https://griffithreview.com/articles/dreaming-the-place/>.Dubosarsky, Ursula. The Golden Day. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011.Fiander, Lisa M. “Writing in A Fairy Story Landscape: Fairy Tales and Contemporary Australian Fiction.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 2 (2003). 30 April 2016 <http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/index>.Henricksen, Noel. Island and Otherland: Christopher Koch and His Books. Melbourne: Educare, 2003.Knox, Malcolm. “A Country of Lost Children.” Sydney Morning Herald 15 Aug. 2009. 1 May 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-country-of-lost-children-20090814-el8d.html>.Koch, Christopher. The Doubleman. 1985. Sydney: Minerva, 1996.Koch, Christopher. Crossing the Gap: Memories and Reflections. 1987. Sydney: Vintage, 2000. Lindsay, Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock. 1967. Melbourne: Penguin, 1977.Masson, Sophie. “Captive in Fairyland: The Strange Case of Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle.” Nation and Federation in the Celtic World: Papers from the Fourth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies, University of Sydney, June–July 2001. Ed. Pamela O’Neil. Sydney: University of Sydney Celtic Studies Foundation, 2003. Mieder, Wolfgang. “The Pied Piper: Origin, History, and Survival of a Legend.” Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature. 1987. London: Routledge Revivals, 2015.Pierce, Peter. The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Steele, Kathleen. “Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush: Gothic Landscapes in Bush Studies and Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Colloquy 20 (2010): 33–56. 27 July 2016 <http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/wp-content/arts/files/colloquy/colloquy_issue_20_december_2010/steele.pdf>.

Australia in Maps is a compilation of cartography taken from the collection of over 600,000 maps held at the Australian National Library. Included in this collection are military maps, coastal maps and modern-day maps for tourists. The map of the eastern coast of ‘New Holland’ drawn by James Cook when he ‘discovered’ Australia in 1770 is included. Also published is Eddie Koiki Mabo’s map drawn on a hole-punched piece of paper showing traditional land holdings in the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait. This map became a key document in Eddie Mabo’s fight for native title recognition, a fight which became the precursor to native title rights as they are known today. The inclusion of these two drawings in a collection of maps defining Australia as a country illustrates the dichotomies and contradictions which exist in a colonial nation. It is now fifteen years since the Native Title Act 1994 (Commonwealth) was developed in response to the Mabo cases in order to recognise Indigenous customary law and traditional relationships to the land over certain (restricted) parts of Australia. It is 220 years since the First Fleet arrived and Indigenous land was (and remains) illegally possessed through the process of colonisation (Moreton-Robinson Australia). Questions surrounding ‘country’ – who owns it, has rights to use it, to live on it, to develop or protect it – are still contested and contentious today. In part, this contention arises out of the radically different conceptions of ‘country’ held by, in its simplest sense, Indigenous nations and colonisers. For Indigenous Australians the land has a spiritual significance that I, as a non-Indigenous person, cannot properly understand as a result of the different ways in which relationships to land are made available. The ways of understanding the world through which my identity as a non-Indigenous person are made intelligible, by contrast, see ‘country’ as there to be ‘developed’ and exploited. Within colonial logic, discourses of development and the productive use of resources function as what Wetherell and Potter term “rhetorically self-sufficient” in that they are principles which are considered to be beyond question (177). As Vincent Tucker states; “The myth of development is elevated to the status of natural law, objective reality and evolutionary necessity. In the process all other world views are devalued and dismissed as ‘primitive’, ‘backward’, ‘irrational’ or ‘naïve’” (1). It was this precise way of thinking which was able to justify colonisation in the first place. Australia was seen as terra nullius; an empty and un-developed land not recognized as inhabited. Indigenous people were incorrectly perceived as individuals who did not use the land in an efficient manner, rather than as individual nations who engaged with the land in ways that were not intelligible to the colonial eye. This paper considers the tensions inherent in definitions of ‘country’ and the way these tensions are played out through native title claims as white, colonial Australia attempts to recognise (and limit) Indigenous rights to land. It examines such tensions as they appear in the media as an example of how native title issues are made intelligible to the non-Indigenous general public who may otherwise have little knowledge or experience of native title issues. It has been well-documented that the news media play an important role in further disseminating those discourses which dominate in a society, and therefore frequently supports the interests of those in positions of power (Fowler; Hall et. al.). As Stuart Hall argues, this means that the media often reproduces a conservative status quo which in many cases is simply reflective of the positions held by other powerful institutions in society, in this case government, and mining and other commercial interests. This has been found to be the case in past analysis of media coverage of native title, such as work completed by Meadows (which found that media coverage of native title issues focused largely on non-Indigenous perspectives) and Hartley and McKee (who found that media coverage of native title negotiations frequently focused on bureaucratic issues rather than the rights of Indigenous peoples to oppose ‘developments’ on their land). This paper aims to build on this work, and to map the way in which native title, an ongoing issue for many Indigenous groups, figures in a mainstream newspaper at a time when there has not been much mainstream public interest in the process. In order to do this, this paper considered articles which appeared in Australia’s only national newspaper – The Australian – over the six months preceding the start of July 2008. Several main themes ran through these articles, examples of which are provided in the relevant sections. These included: economic interests in native title issues, discourses of white ownership and control of the land, and rhetorical devices which reinforced the battle-like nature of native title negotiations rather than emphasised the rights of Indigenous Australians to their lands. Native Title: Some Definitions and Some Problems The concept of native title itself can be a difficult one to grasp and therefore a brief definition is called for here. According to the National Native Title Tribunal (NNTT) website (www.nntt.gov.au), native title is the recognition by Australian law that some Indigenous people have rights and interests to their land that come from their traditional laws and customs. The native title rights and interests held by particular Indigenous people will depend on both their traditional laws and customs and what interests are held by others in the area concerned. Generally speaking, native title must give way to the rights held by others. Native title is therefore recognised as existing on the basis of certain laws and customs which have been maintained over an area of land despite the disruption caused by colonisation. As such, if native title is to be recognised over an area of country, Indigenous communities have to argue that their cultures and connection with the land have survived colonisation. As the Maori Land Court Chief Judge Joe Williams argues: In Australia the surviving title approach […] requires the Indigenous community to prove in a court or tribunal that colonisation caused them no material injury. This is necessary because, the greater the injury, the smaller the surviving bundle of rights. Communities who were forced off their land lose it. Those whose traditions and languages were beaten out of them at state sponsored mission schools lose all of the resources owned within the matrix of that language and those traditions. This is a perverse result. In reality, of course, colonisation was the greatest calamity in the history of these people on this land. Surviving title asks aboriginal people to pretend that it was not. To prove in court that colonisation caused them no material injury. Communities who were forced off their land are the same communities who are more likely to lose it. As found in previous research (Meadows), these inherent difficulties of the native title process were widely overlooked in recent media reports of native title issues published in The Australian. Due to recent suggestions made by Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin for changes to be made to the native title system, The Australian did include reports on the need to ensure that traditional owners share the economic profits of the mining boom. This was seen in an article by Karvelas and Murphy entitled “Labor to Overhaul Native Title Law”. The article states that: Fifteen years after the passage of the historic Mabo legislation, the Rudd Government has flagged sweeping changes to native title to ensure the benefits of the mining boom flow to Aboriginal communities and are not locked up in trusts or frittered away. Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin, delivering the third annual Eddie Mabo Lecture in Townsville, said yesterday that native title legislation was too complex and had failed to deliver money to remote Aboriginal communities, despite lucrative agreements with mining companies. (1) Whilst this passage appears supportive of Indigenous Australians in that it argues for their right to share in economic gains made through ‘developments’ on their country, the use of phrases such as ‘frittered away’ imply that Indigenous Australians have made poor use of their ‘lucrative agreements’, and therefore require further intervention in their lives in order to better manage their financial situations. Such an argument further implies that the fact that many remote Indigenous communities continue to live in poverty is the fault of Indigenous Australians’ mismanagement of funds from native title agreements rather than from governmental neglect, thereby locating the blame once more in the hands of Indigenous people rather than in a colonial system of dispossession and regulation. Whilst the extract does continue to state that native title legislation is too complex and has ‘failed to deliver money to remote Aboriginal communities’, the article does not go on to consider other areas in which native title is failing Indigenous people, such as reporting the protection of sacred and ceremonial sites, and provisions for Indigenous peoples to be consulted about developments on their land to which they may be opposed. Whilst native title agreements with companies may contain provisions for these issues, it is rare that there is any regulation for whether or not these provisions are met after an agreement is made (Faircheallaigh). These issues almost never appeared in the media which instead focused on the economic benefits (or lack thereof) stemming from the land rather than the sovereign rights of traditional owners to their country. There are many other difficulties inherent in the native title legislation for Indigenous peoples. It is worth discussing some of these difficulties as they provide an image of the ways in which ‘country’ is conceived of at the intersection of a Western legal system attempting to encompass Indigenous relations to land. The first of these difficulties relates to the way in which Indigenous people are required to delineate the boundaries of the country which they are claiming. Applications for native title over an area of land require strict outlining of boundaries for land under consideration, in accordance with a Western system of mapping country. The creation of such boundaries requires Indigenous peoples to define their country in Western terms rather than Indigenous ones, and in many cases proves quite difficult as areas of traditional lands may be unavailable to claim (Neate). Such differences in understandings of country mean that “for Indigenous peoples, the recognition of their indigenous title, should it be afforded, may bear little resemblance to, or reflect minimally on, their own conceptualisation of their relations to country” (Glaskin 67). Instead, existing as it does within a Western legal system and subject to Western determinations, native title forces Indigenous people to define themselves and their land within white conceptions of country (Moreton-Robinson Possessive). In fact, the entire concept of native title has been criticized by many Indigenous commentators as a denial of Indigenous sovereignty over the land, with the result of the Mabo case meaning that “Indigenous people did not lose their native title rights but were stripped of their sovereign rights to manage their own affairs, to live according to their own laws, and to own and control the resources on their lands” (Falk and Martin 38). As such, Falk and Martin argue that The Native Title Act amounts to a complete denial of Aboriginal sovereignty so that Indigenous people are forced to live under a colonial regime which is able to control and regulate their lives and access to country. This is commented upon by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, who writes that: What Indigenous people have been given, by way of white benevolence, is a white-constructed from of ‘Indigenous’ proprietary rights that are not epistemologically and ontologically grounded in Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty. Indigenous land ownership, under these legislative regimes, amounts to little more than a mode of land tenure that enables a circumscribed form of autonomy and governance with minimum control and ownership of resources, on or below the ground, thus entrenching economic dependence on the nation state. (Moreton-Robinson Sovereign Subjects 4) The native title laws in place in Australia restrict Indigenous peoples to existing within white frameworks of knowledge. Within the space of The Native Title Act there is no room for recognition of Indigenous sovereignty whereby Indigenous peoples can make decisions for themselves and control their own lands (Falk and Martin). These tensions within definitions of ‘country’ and sovereignty over land were reflected in the media articles examined, primarily in terms of the way in which ‘country’ was related to and used. This was evident in an article entitled “An Economic Vision” with a tag-line “Native Title Reforms offer Communities a Fresh Start”: Central to such a success story is the determination of indigenous people to help themselves. Such a business-like, forward-thinking approach is also evident in Kimberley Land Council executive director Wayne Bergmann's negotiations with some of the world's biggest resource companies […] With at least 45 per cent of Kimberley land subject to native title, Mr Bergmann, a qualified lawyer, is acutely aware of the royalties and employment potential. Communities are also benefitting from the largesse of Australia’s richest man, miner Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, whose job training courses and other initiatives are designed to help the local people, in his words, become “wonderful participating Australians.” (15) Again, this article focuses on the economic benefits to be made from native title agreements with mining companies rather than other concerns with the use of Indigenous areas of country. The use of the quote from Forrest serves to imply that Indigenous peoples are not “wonderful participating Australians” unless they are able to contribute in an economic sense, and overlooks many contributions made by Indigenous peoples in other areas such as environmental protection. Such definitions also measure ‘success’ in Western terms rather than Indigenous ones and force Indigenous peoples into a relationship to country based on Western notions of resource extraction and profit rather than Indigenous notions of custodianship and sustainability. This construction of Indigenous economic involvement as only rendered valid on particular terms echoes findings from previous work on constructions of Indigenous people in the media, such as that by LeCouteur, Rapley and Augoustinos. Theorising ‘Country’ The examples provided above illustrate the fact that the rhetoric and dichotomies of ‘country’ are at the very heart of the native title process. The process of recognising Indigenous rights to land through native title invites the question of how ‘country’ is conceived in the first place. Goodall writes that there are tensions within definitions of ‘country’ which indicate the ongoing presence of Indigenous people’s connections to their land despite colonisation. She writes that the word ‘country’: may seem a self-evident description of rural economy and society, with associations of middle-class gentility as well as being the antonym of the city. Yet in Australia there is another dimension altogether. Aboriginal land-owners traditionally identify themselves by the name of the land for which they were the custodians. These lands are often called, in today’s Aboriginal English, their ‘country’. This gives the word a tense and resonating echo each time it is used to describe rural-settler society and land. (162) Yet the distinctions usually drawn between those defined as ‘country’ people or ‘locals’ and the traditional Indigenous people of the area suggest that, as Schlunke states, in many cases Indigenous people are “too local to be ‘local’” (43). In other words, if white belonging and rights to an area of country are to be normalised, the prior claims of traditional owners are not able to be considered. As such, Indigenous belonging becomes too confronting as it disrupts the ways in which other ‘country’ people relate to their land as legitimately theirs. In the media, constructions of ‘country’ frequently fell within a colonial definition of country which overlooked Indigenous peoples. In many of these articles land was normatively constructed as belonging to the crown or the state. This was evidenced in phrases such as, “The proceedings [of the Noongar native title claim over the South Western corner of Australia] have been watched closely by other states in the expectation they might encounter similar claims over their capital cities” (Buckley-Carr 2). Use of the word their implies that the states (which are divisions of land created by colonisation) have prior claim to ‘their’ capital cities and that they rightfully belong to the government rather than to traditional owners. Such definitions of ‘country’ reflect European rather than Indigenous notions of boundaries and possession. This is also reflected in media reports of native title in the widespread use of European names for areas of land and landmarks as opposed to their traditional Indigenous names. When the media reported on a native title claim over an area of land the European name for the country was used rather than, for example, the Indigenous name followed by a geographical description of where that land is situated. Customs such as this reflect a country which is still bound up in European definitions of land rather than Indigenous ones (Goodall 167; Schlunke 47-48), and also indicate that the media is reporting for a white audience rather than for an Indigenous one whom it would affect the most. Native title debates have also “shown the depth of belief within much of rural and regional Australia that rural space is most rightfully agricultural space” (Lockie 27). This construction of rural Australia is reflective of the broader national imagining of the country as a nation (Anderson), in which Australia is considered rich in resources from which to derive profit. Within these discourses the future of the nation is seen as lying in the ‘development’ of natural resources. As such, native title agreements with industry have often been depicted in the media as obstacles to be overcome by companies rather than a way of allowing Indigenous people control over their own lands. This often appears in the media in the form of metaphors of ‘war’ for agreements for use of Indigenous land, such as development being “frustrated” by native title (Bromby) and companies being “embattled” by native title issues (Wilson). Such metaphors illustrate the adversarial nature of native title claims both for recognition of the land in the first place and often in subsequent dealings with resource companies. This was also seen in reports of company progress which would include native title claims in a list of other factors affecting stock prices (such as weak drilling results and the price of metals), as if Indigenous claims to land were just another hurdle to profit-making (“Pilbara Lures”). Conclusion As far as the native title process is concerned, the answers to the questions considered at the start of this paper remain within Western definitions. Native title exists firmly within a Western system of law which requires Indigenous people to define and depict their land within non-Indigenous definitions and understandings of ‘country’. These debates are also frequently played out in the media in ways which reflect colonial values of using and harvesting country rather than Indigenous ones of protecting it. The media rarely consider the complexities of a system which requires Indigenous peoples to conceive of their land through boundaries and definitions not congruent with their own understandings. The issues surrounding native title draw attention to the need for alternative definitions of ‘country’ to enter the mainstream Australian consciousness. These need to encompass Indigenous understandings of ‘country’ and to acknowledge the violence of Australia’s colonial history. Similarly, the concept of native title needs to reflect Indigenous notions of country and allow traditional owners to define their land for themselves. In order to achieve these goals and overcome some of the obstacles to recognising Indigenous sovereignty over Australia the media needs to play a part in reorienting concepts of country from only those definitions which fit within a white framework of experiencing the world and prioritise Indigenous relations and experiences of country. If discourses of resource extraction were replaced with discourses of sustainability, if discourses of economic gains were replaced with respect for the land, and if discourses of white control over Indigenous lives in the form of native title reform were replaced with discourses of Indigenous sovereignty, then perhaps some ground could be made to creating an Australia which is not still in the process of colonising and denying the rights of its First Nations peoples. The tensions which exist in definitions and understandings of ‘country’ echo the tensions which exist in Australia’s historical narratives and memories. The denied knowledge of the violence of colonisation and the rights of Indigenous peoples to remain on their land all haunt a native title system which requires Indigenous Australians to minimise the effect this violence had on their lives, their families and communities and their values and customs. As Katrina Schlunke writes when she confronts the realisation that her family’s land could be the same land on which Indigenous people were massacred: “The irony of fears of losing one’s backyard to a Native Title claim are achingly rich. Isn’t something already lost to the idea of ‘Freehold Title’ when you live over unremembered graves? What is free? What are you to hold?” (151). If the rights of Indigenous Australians to their country are truly to be recognised, mainstream Australia needs to seriously consider such questions and whether or not the concept of ‘native title’ as it exists today is able to answer them. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Damien Riggs and Andrew Gorman-Murray for all their help and support with this paper, and Braden Schiller for his encouragement and help with proof-reading. I would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their insightful comments. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. “An Economic Vision.” The Australian 23 May 2008. Bromby, Robin. “Areva deal fails to lift Murchison.” The Australian 30 June 2008: 33. Buckley-Carr, Alana. “Ruling on Native Title Overturned.” The Australian 24 April 2008: 2. Faircheallaigh, Ciaran. “Native Title and Agreement Making in the Mining Industry: Focusing on Outcomes for Indigenous Peoples.” Land, Rights, Laws: Issues of Native Title 2, (2004). 20 June 2008 http://ntru.aiatsis.gov.au/ntpapers/ipv2n25.pdf Falk, Philip and Gary Martin. “Misconstruing Indigenous Sovereignty: Maintaining the Fabric of Australian Law.” Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters. Ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Allen and Unwin, 2007. 33-46. Fowler, Roger. Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routledge, 1991. Glaskin, Katie. “Native Title and the ‘Bundle of Rights’ Model: Implications for the Recognition of Aboriginal Relations to Country.” Anthropological Forum 13.1 (2003): 67-88. Goodall, Heather. “Telling Country: Memory, Modernity and Narratives in Rural Australia.” History Workshop Journal 47 (1999): 161-190. Hall, Stuart, Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the state, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan, 1978. Hartley, John, and Alan McKee. The Indigenous Public Sphere: The Reporting and Reception of Aboriginal Issues in the Australian Media. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Karvelas, Patricia and Padraic Murphy. “Labor to Overhaul Native Title Laws.” The Australian, 22 May 2008: 1. LeCouteur, Amanda, Mark Rapley and Martha Augoustinos. “This Very Difficult Debate about Wik: Stake, Voice and the Management of Category Membership in Race Politics.” British Journal of Social Psychology 40 (2001): 35-57. Lockie, Stewart. “Crisis and Conflict: Shifting Discourses of Rural and Regional Australia.” Land of Discontent: The Dynamics of Change in Rural and Regional Australia. Ed. Bill Pritchard and Phil McManus. Kensington: UNSW P, 2000. 14-32. Meadows, Michael. “Deals and Victories: Newspaper Coverage of Native Title in Australia and Canada.” Australian Journalism Review 22.1 (2000): 81-105. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “I still call Australia Home: Aboriginal Belonging and Place in a White Postcolonising Nation.” Uprooting/Regrounding: Questions of Home and Migration. Eds. S Ahmed et.al. Oxford: Berg, 2003. 23-40. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty: The High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision.” Borderlands e-Journal 3.2 (2004). 20 June 2008. http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/moreton_possessive.htm Morteton-Robinson, Aileen. Ed. Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters. Allen and Unwin, 2007. Neate, Graham. “Mapping Landscapes of the Mind: A Cadastral Conundrum in the Native Title Era.” Conference on Land Tenure and Cadastral Infrastructures for Sustainable Development, Melbourne, Australia (1999). 20 July 2008. http://www.sli.unimelb.edu.au/UNConf99/sessions/session5/neate.pdf O’Connor, Maura. Australia in Maps: Great Maps in Australia’s History from the National Library’s Collection. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2007. “Pilbara Lures Explorer with Promise of Metal Riches.” The Australian. 28 May 2008: Finance 2. Schlunke, Katrina. Bluff Rock: An Autobiography of a Massacre. Fremantle: Curtin U Books, 2005. “The National Native Title Tribunal.” Exactly What is Native Title? 29 July 2008. http://www.nntt.gov.au/What-Is-Native-Title/Pages/What-is-Native-Title.aspx The National Native Title Tribunal Fact Sheet. What is Native Title? 29 July 2008. http://www.nntt.gov.au Path; Publications-And-Research; Publications; Fact Sheets. Tucker, Vincent. “The Myth of Development: A Critique of Eurocentric Discourse.” Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm. Ed. Ronaldo Munck, Denis O'Hearn. Zed Books, 1999. 1-26. Wetherell, Margaret, and Jonathan Potter. Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Williams, Joe. “Confessions of a Native Title Judge: Reflections on the Role of Transitional Justice in the Transformation of Indigeneity.” Land, Rights, Laws: Issues of Native Title 3, (2008). 20 July 2008. http://ntru.aiatsis.gov.au/publications/issue_papers.html Wilson, Nigel. “Go with the Flow.” The Australian, 29 March 2008: 1.

Introduction Gore Vidal, the famous writer and literary critic, was recently buried next to his long-term partner, Howard Austen. The couple, who met in the 1950s, had lived together happily for decades. They were in many ways the kind of same-sex couple frequently valorised in contemporary gay marriage campaigns. Vidal and Austen, however, could not serve as emblematic figures for this campaign, and not only because the two men had no interest in marriage. Vidal, who reportedly had over a hundred lovers, both male and female, once attributed the longevity of their relationship to its platonic nature; both men continued to sleep with other people, and they reportedly stopped having sex with each other after they moved in together (Vidal, Palimpsest, 131–32). A relationship that decoupled monogamy, romance, companionship, and sexuality, and reconnected them in a way that challenged the accepted truths of institutionalised marriage, stands as an implicit questioning of the way in which gay marriage campaigns construct the possibilities for life, love, and sex. It is this questioning that we draw out in this article. In his writing, Vidal also offers a perspective that challenges the assumptions and certainties of contemporary politics around gay marriage. In 1981, he wrote “Some Jews and the Gays” in response to an article entitled “The Boys on the Beach” by conservative Jewish writer Midge Decter. Vidal’s riposte to Decter’s depiction of the snide superiority of the “boys” who disturbed her beachside family holidays highlighted the lack of solidarity conservative members of the Jewish community displayed towards another persecuted minority. From Vidal’s perspective, this was because Decter could not conceive of gay identity as anything other than pathological: Since homosexualists choose to be the way they are out of idle hatefulness, it has been a mistake to allow them to come out of the closet to the extent that they have, but now that they are out (which most are not), they will have no choice but to face up to their essential hatefulness and abnormality and so be driven to kill themselves with promiscuity, drugs, S-M, and suicide. (Vidal, Some Gays) In response, Vidal made a strong case for solidarity between Jews, African-Americans, and what he termed “homosexualists” (or “same-sexers”). More importantly for our argument, he also contested Decter’s depiction of the typical homosexual: To begin to get at the truth about homosexualists, one must realise that the majority of those millions of Americans who prefer same-sex to other-sex are obliged, sometimes willingly and happily but often not, to marry and have children and to conform to the guidelines set down by the heterosexual dictatorship. (Vidal, Some Gays) According to Vidal, Decter’s article applied only to a relatively privileged section of homosexualists who were able to be “self-ghettoized”, and who, despite Decter’s paranoid fantasies, lived lives perfectly “indifferent to the world of the other-sexers.” In the thirty years since the publication of “Some Jews and the Gays” much has clearly changed. It is unlikely that even a conservative publication would publish an article that depicts all homosexualists as marked by idle hatefulness. However, Decter’s self-hating homosexualist continues to haunt contemporary debates about same-sex marriage, albeit in sublimated form. Critiques of gay marriage campaigns, which are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, often focus on the politics of inclusion and exclusion, whether on the terrain of gender (non)conformity (Spade), or the campaigns’ implicit and racialised assumption of a white, middle-class homosexual couple as the subject of their efforts (Riggs; Farrow). While our article is indebted to these critiques, our argument is focused more specifically on the unintended effect of the Australian debate about same-sex marriage, namely the (re)creation of the married couple’s other in the form of the adolescent, promiscuous, and unhappy homosexual. It is here that we find the source of our title, also chosen in tribute to Vidal, who in his life and writing disrupts this dichotomy. We argue that the construction of the respectable white middle-class same-sexer who sits at the centre of gay marriage discourse relies on a contemporary manifestation of the self-hating homosexualist – the sexually irresponsible queer constructed in contrast to the responsible gay. The first half of this article traces this construction. In the second section, we argue that this process cannot be divorced from the ways that advocates of same-sex marriage depict the institution of marriage. While critics such as Judith Butler have attempted to separate arguments against homophobic discrimination from the need to advocate for marriage, we argue that the two are intrinsically linked in marriage equality campaigns. These campaigns seek to erase both the explicit critique of marriage found in Vidal’s article and the implicit possibility of living otherwise found in his life. Instead of a heterosexual dictatorship that can be successfully avoided, marriage is proclaimed to be not only benign but the only institution capable of saving self-hating queers from misery by turning them into respectable gay married couples. This is, therefore, not an article about today’s Midge Decters, but about how contemporary same-sex marriage supporters rely on a characterisation of those of us who would or could not choose to marry as, to return to Vidal (Some Jews), “somehow evil or inadequate or dangerous.” As queer people who continue to question both the desirability and inevitability of marriage, we are ultimately concerned with thinking through the political consequences of the same-sex marriage campaign’s obsessive focus on normative sexuality and on the supposedly restorative function of the institution of marriage itself. Hateful Queers and Patient Gays Contemporary supporters of gay marriage, like Vidal so many years earlier, do often oppose conservative attempts to label homosexualists as inherently pathological. Tim Wright, the former convenor of “Equal Love,” one of Australia’s primary same-sex marriage campaign groups, directly addressing this in an opinion piece for Melbourne’s The Age newspaper, writes, “Every so often, we hear them in the media calling homosexuals promiscuous or sick.” Disputing this characterisation, Wright supplants it with an image of patient lesbians and gay men “standing at the altar.” Unlike Vidal, however, Wright implicitly accepts the link between promiscuity and pathology. For Wright, homosexuals are not sick precisely because, and only to the extent that they accept, a forlorn chastity, waiting for their respectable monogamous sexuality to be sanctified through matrimony. A shared moral framework based upon conservative norms is a notable feature of same-sex marriage debates. Former Rainbow Labor convenor Ryan Heath articulates this most clearly in his 2010 Griffith Review article, excerpts of which also appeared in the metropolitan Fairfax newspapers. In this article, Heath argues that marriage equality would provide a much-needed dose of responsibility to “balance” the rights that Australia has accorded to homosexuals. For Heath, Australia’s gay and lesbian communities have been given sexual freedoms by an indulgent adult (heterosexual) society, but are not sufficiently mature to develop the social responsibilities that go with them: “Like teenagers getting their hands on booze and cars and freedom from parental surveillance for the first time, Australia’s gay and lesbian communities have enthusiastically taken up their new rights.” For Heath, the immaturity of the (adult) gay community, with its lack of married role models, results in profound effects for same-sex attracted youth: Consider what the absence of role models, development paths, and stability might do to those who cannot marry. Is there no connection between this and the disproportionate numbers of suicides and risky and addictive behaviours found in gay communities? It is this immaturity, rather than the more typically blamed homophobic prejudice, bullying or persecution, that is for Heath the cause of the social problems that disproportionately affect same-sex attracted adolescents. Heath continues, asking why, after journalist Jonathan Rauch, any parent would want to “condemn their child to…‘a partnerless life in a sexual underworld’.” His appeal to well-meaning parental desires for the security and happiness of children echoes countless insidious commentaries about the tragedy of homosexual existence, such as Decter’s above. These same commentaries continue to be used to justify exclusionary and even violent reactions by families and communities when children reveal their (non-heterosexual) sexualities. As for so many social conservatives, for Heath it is inconceivable to view a partnerless life as anything other than tragedy. Like Wright, he is also convinced that if one must be partnerless it is far better to be forlornly chaste than to participate in an “underworld” focused primarily on promiscuous sex. The opinions of those condemned to this purgatorial realm, either through compulsion or their own immaturity, are of little interest to Heath. When he states that “No families and couples I have interviewed in my research on the topic want this insecure existence,” we are to understand that it is only the desires of these responsible adults that matter. In this way, Heath explicitly invokes the image of what Mariana Valverde has called the “respectable same-sex couple”, homosexualists who are socially acceptable because being “same-sex” is the only thing that differentiates them from the white, middle-class norm that continues to sit at the heart of Australian politics. Heath goes on to describe marriage as the best “social safety net”, adopting the fiscal rhetoric of conservatives such as former federal leader of the Liberal party, Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull argued in 2012’s annual Michael Kirby lecture (a lecture organised by Southern Cross University’s School of Law and Justice in tribute to the retired gay High Court justice) that same-sex marriage would save the state money, as other relationship recognition such as the 2008 Rudd reforms have. In one of the few passages widely reported from his speech he states: “There will plainly be less demand for social services, medical expenses, hospital care if people, especially older people, like Michael [Kirby] and [partner] Johan, live together as opposed to being in lonely isolation consoled only by their respective cats.” Same-sex marriage is not simply a fight for equality but a fight to rescue homosexualists from the immiserated and emotionally impoverished lives that they, through their lack of maturity, have constructed for themselves, and which, after a brief sojourn in the sexual underworld, can only end in a lonely feline-focused existence funded by the responsible citizens that constitute the bulk of society. We are told by gay marriage advocates that the acceptance of proper adult relationships and responsibilities will not only cure the self-hatred of same-sexers, but simultaneously end the hatred expressed through homophobia and bullying. In the most recent Victorian state election, for example, the Greens ran an online Q&A session about their policies and positions in which they wrote the following in response to a question on relationship recognition: “It would create a more harmonious, less discriminatory society, more tolerant of diversity. It would also probably reduce bullying against same-sex attracted teenagers and lower the suicide rate.” This common position has been carefully unpicked by Rob Cover, who argues that while there may be benefits for the health of some adults in recognition of same-sex marriage, there is absolutely no evidence of a connection between this and youth suicide. He writes: “We are yet to have evidence that there are any direct benefits for younger persons who are struggling to cope with being bullied, humiliated, shamed and cannot (yet) envisage a liveable life and a happy future—let alone a marriage ceremony.” While same-sex marriage advocates consider themselves to be speaking for these same-sex attracted youth, offering them a happy future in the form of a wedding, Cover reminds us that these are not the same thing. As we have shown here, this is not a process of simple exclusion, but an erasure of the possibility of a life outside of heteronormative or “respectable”, coupledom. The “respectable same-sex couple”, like its respectable heterosexual counterpart, not only denies the possibility of full participation in adult society to those without partners but also refuses the lived experience of the many people like Vidal and Austen who do not accept the absolute equation of domesticity, responsibility, and sexual monogamy that the institution of marriage represents. A Good Institution? The connection between marriage and the mythical end of homophobia is not about evidence, as Cover rightly points out. Instead it is based on an ideological construction of marriage as an inherently valuable institution. Alongside this characterisation of marriage as a magical solution to homophobia and other social ills, comes the branding of other models of living, loving and having sex as inherently inferior and potentially harmful. In this, the rhetoric of conservatives and same-sex marriage advocates becomes disturbingly similar. Margaret Andrews, the wife of former Howard minister Kevin and a prominent (straight) marriage advocate, featured in the news a couple of years ago after making a public homophobic outburst directed at (queer) writer Benjamin Law. In response, Andrews outlined what for her were the clearly evident benefits of marriage: “For centuries, marriage has provided order, stability, and nurture for both adults and children. Indeed, the status of our marriages influences our well-being at least as much as the state of our finances.” Despite being on the apparent opposite of the debate, Amanda Villis and Danielle Hewitt from Doctors for Marriage Equality agree with Andrews about health benefits, including, significantly, those linked to sexual behaviour: It is also well known that people in long term monogamous relationships engage in far less risky sexual behaviour and therefore have significantly lower rates of sexually transmitted infections. Therefore legalisation of same sex marriage can lead to a reduction in the rates of sexually transmitted disease by decreasing stigma and discrimination and also promoting long term, monogamous relationships as an option for LGBTI persons. Here same-sex marriage is of benefit precisely because it eradicates the social risks of contagion and disease attributed to risky and promiscuous queers. To the extent that queers continue to suffer it can be attributed to the moral deficiency of their current lifestyle. This results in the need to “promote” marriage and marriage-like relationships. However, this need for promotion denies that marriage itself could be subject to discussion or debate and constructs it as both permanent and inevitable. Any discussion which might question the valuation of marriage is forestalled through the rhetoric of choice, as in the following example from a contributor to the “Equal Love” website: We understand that not everyone will want to get married, but there is no denying that marriage is a fundamental institution in Australian society. The right to be married should therefore be available to all those who choose to pursue it. It is a right that we chose to exercise. (Cole) This seemingly innocuous language of choice performs a number of functions. The first is that it seeks to disallow political debates about marriage by simply reducing critiques of the institution to a decision not to partake in it. In a process mirroring the construction of queers as inherently immature and adolescent, as discussed in the previous section, this move brands political critiques of marriage as historical remnants of an immature radicalism that has been trumped by liberal maturity. The contribution of Alyena Mohummadally and Catherine Roberts to Speak Now highlights this clearly. In this piece, Roberts is described as having used “radical feminism” as a teenage attempt to fill a “void” left by the lack of religion in her life. The teenage Roberts considered marriage “a patriarchal institution to be dismantled” (134). However, ten years later, now happily living with her partner, Roberts finds that “the very institutions she once riled against were those she now sought to be a part of” (137). Roberts’ marriage conversion, explained through a desire for recognition from Mohummadally’s Muslim family, is presented as simply a logical part of growing up, leaving behind the teenage commitment to radical politics along with the teenage attraction to “bars and nightclubs.” Not coincidentally, “life and love” taught Roberts to leave both of these things behind (134). The second consequence of arguments based on choice is that the possibility of any other terrain of choice is erased. This rhetoric thus gives marriage a false permanence and stability, failing to recognise that social institutions are vulnerable to change, and potentially to crisis. Beyond the same-sex marriage debates, the last fifty years have demonstrated the vulnerability of marriage to social change. Rising divorce rates, increasing acceptance of de facto relationships and the social recognition of domestic violence and rape within marriage have altered marriage inescapably, and forced questions about its inevitability (see: Stacey). This fact is recognised by conservatives, such as gay marriage opponent Patrick Parkinson who stated in a recent opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald that a “heartening aspect” of the “otherwise divisive” debate around gay marriage is that it has marked a “turnaround” in support for marriage, particularly among feminists, gays and other progressives. Malcolm Turnbull also explains his transition to support for same-sex marriage rights on the basis of this very premise: “I am very firmly of the view that families are the foundation of our society and that we would be a stronger society if more people were married, and by that I mean formally, legally married, and fewer were divorced.” He continued, “Are not the gays who seek the right to marry, to formalise their commitment to each other, holding up a mirror to the heterosexuals who are marrying less frequently and divorcing more often?” As Parkinson and Turnbull note, the decision to prioritise marriage is a decision to not only accept the fundamental nature of marriage as a social institution but to further universalise it as a social norm against the historical trends away from such normalisation. This is also acknowledged by campaign group Australian Marriage Equality who suggests that people like Parkinson and Turnbull who are “concerned about the preservation of marriage may do best to focus on ways to increase its appeal amongst the current population, rather than direct their energies towards the exclusion of a select group of individuals from its privileges.” Rather than challenging conservatism then, the gay marriage campaign aligns itself with Turnbull and Parkinson against the possibility of living otherwise embodied in the shadowy figure of the sexually irresponsible queer. The connection between ideological support for marriage and the construction of the “respectable homosexual couple” is made explicit by Heath in the essay quoted earlier. It is, he says, part of “the pattern of Western liberal history” to include “in an institution good people who make a good case to join.” The struggle for gay marriage, he argues, is linked to that of “workers to own property, Indigenous Australians to be citizens, women to vote.” By including these examples, Heath implicitly highlights the assimilationist dimension of this campaign, a dimension which has been importantly emphasised by Damien Riggs. Heath’s formulation denies the possibility of Indigenous sovereignty beyond assimilationist incorporation into the Australian state, just as it denies the possibility of a life of satisfying love and sex beyond marriage. More generally, Heath fails to acknowledge that none of these histories have disrupted the fundamental power dynamics at play: the benefits of property ownership accrue disproportionately to the rich, those of citizenship to white Australians, and political power remains primarily in the hands of men. Despite the protestations of gay marriage advocates there is no reason to believe that access to marriage would end homophobia while racism, class-based exploitation, and institutional sexism continue. This too, is part of the pattern of Western liberal history. Conclusion Our intention here is not to produce an anti-marriage manifesto—there are many excellent ones out there (see: Conrad)—but rather to note that gay marriage campaigns are not as historically innocuous as they present themselves to be. We are concerned that the rush to enter fully into institutions that, while changed, remain synonymous with normative (hetero)sexuality, has two unintended but nonetheless concerning consequences. Gay marriage advocates risk not only the discarding of a vision in which people may choose to not worship at the altar of the nuclear family, they also reanimate a new version of Decter’s self-hating gay. Political blogger Tim Dunlop encapsulates the political logic of gay marriage campaigns when he says, rather optimistically, that barring homosexualists from marriage “is the last socially acceptable way of saying you are not like us, you do not count, you matter less.” An alternative view proffered here is that saying yes to gay marriage risks abandoning a project that says we do not wish to be like you, not because we matter less, but because we see the possibility of different lives, and we refuse to accept a normative political logic that brands those lives as inferior. In casting this critique as adolescent, as something that a mature community should have grown out of, the same-sex marriage campaign rejects what we see as the most important social contributions that “same-sexers” have made. Where we think Vidal was mistaken back in 1981 was in his assertion that we “same-sexers” have been simply indifferent to the world of the “other-sexers.” We have also turned a critical eye upon “heterosexualist” existence, offering important critiques of a so-called adult or responsible life. It is this history that queer writer Sara Ahmed reminds us of, when she celebrates the angry queer at the family dinner table who refuses to simply succumb to a coercive demand to be happy and pleasant. A similar refusal can be found in queer critiques of the “dead citizenship” of heterosexuality, described by José Esteban Muñoz as: a modality of citizenship that is predicated on negation of liveness or presentness on behalf of a routinized investment in futurity. This narrative of futurity is most familiar to those who live outside of it. It is the story of the [sic] nation's all-consuming investment in the nuclear family, and its particular obsession with the children, an investment that instantly translates into the (monological) future. (399) In the clamour to fully assert their membership in the world of adult citizenship, same-sex marriage advocates negate the potential liveness and presentness of queer experience, opting instead for the routinised futurity that Muñoz warns against. Imagining ourselves as forlorn figures, standing with tear-stained cheeks and quivering lips at the altar, waiting for normative relationships and responsible citizenship is not the only option. Like Vidal and Austen, with whom we began, queers are already living, loving, and fucking, in and above our sexual underworlds, imagining that just possibly there may be other ways to live, both in the present and in constructing different futures. References Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 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