Journal articles on the topic 'Paternalism Australia'

Leprosy (Hansen’s disease) was introduced to Australia in the mid-1800s and its story reflects the attitudes of the 19th and 20th centuries, with treatment including segregation, paternalism, and racism. The approaches taken within the Australian states were similar and based on isolating people affected by leprosy, as both a measure to assist the patient but, more importantly, to protect the European society. The most devastating effects of this introduced disease and these approaches were on Indigenous Australians. With the advent of effective antimicrobials, isolation practices were slowly replaced with community-based treatment. However, the term ‘leper’ still evokes negative images in Australian society today.

This article discusses the situation of income support claimants in Australia, constructed as faulty citizens and flawed welfare subjects. Many are on the receiving end of complex, multi-layered forms of surveillance aimed at securing socially responsible and compliant behaviours. In Australia, as in other Western countries, neoliberal economic regimes with their harsh and often repressive treatment of welfare recipients operate in tandem with a burgeoning and costly arsenal of CCTV and other surveillance and governance assemblages. Through a program of ‘Income Management’, initially targeting (mainly) Indigenous welfare recipients in Australia’s Northern Territory, the BasicsCard (administered by Centrelink, on behalf of the Australian Federal Government’s Department of Human Services) is one example of this welfare surveillance. The scheme operates by ‘quarantining’ a percentage of a claimant’s welfare entitlements to be spent by way of the BasicsCard on ‘approved’ items only. The BasicsCard scheme raises significant questions about whether it is possible to encourage people to take responsibility for themselves if they no longer have real control over the most important aspects of their lives. Some Indigenous communities have resisted the BasicsCard, criticising it because the imposition of income management leads to a loss of trust, dignity, and individual agency. Further, income management of individuals by the welfare state contradicts the purported aim that they become less ‘welfare dependent’ and more ‘self-reliant’. In highlighting issues around compulsory income management this paper makes a contribution to the largely under discussed area of income management and the growth of welfare surveillance, with its propensity for function creep, garnering large volumes of data on users approved (and declined) purchasing decisions, complete with dates, amounts, times and locations.

During the twentieth century some Australian states and the U.S. federal government enacted comparable policies that demonstrate how the discourse of protection continued to survive in an era when settler nations were focussed on “assimilating” Indigenous populations. The Australian policy of exemption and the U.S. policy of competency did not represent a true change in direction from past policies of protection. In contrast to the nineteenth century, though, these twentieth-century policies offered protection to only a deserving few. Drawing on records of exemption and competency from New South Wales and Oklahoma in the 1940s and 1950s, this article shows how the policies of exemption and competency ostensibly gave the opportunity for some individuals to prove that they no longer needed the paternalism of colonial governments. They were judged using very different local criteria. In Australia, applicants were mostly judged on whether they engaged in “respectable” use of alcohol; in the United States, applicants were assessed on whether they had “business sense.”

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between nineteenth century English poor law discourse and missionary work in colonial Australia. The text analyses key sites of Christian missionary philanthropy in New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria in the period 1813-1849. It looks at changes in the ethos of one benevolent institution set up for poor whites, the Benevolent Society of New South Wales. Activated by Christian paternalism at its foundation in 1813 the ethos of this institution became dominated by the language of moral reform by the 1830s. The article also examines the first institution established for Indigenous people, the Native Institution at Parramatta, NSW, founded in 1814. Its aims and character will be compared and contrasted with those of the Female and Male Orphan schools for white children. The text considers also how Christian philanthropic visions for the improvement of Indigenous people were affected by factors such as accelerating pastoral expansion, loss of Indigenous food sources and retaliatory violence. Cet article examine la relation entre le discours relatif aux lois sur les pauvres au 19e siècle en Angleterre et le travail missionnaire en Australie coloniale, en se penchant sur les sites clés de la philanthropie chrétienne dans le New South Wales et Victoria durant les années 1813 à 1849. Ainsi, le texte analyse les transformations de l'éthos d'une institution bénévole créée pour s'occuper des pauvres blancs, la Société Bénévole de New South Wales. Alors qu'il était un produit du paternalisme chrétien à sa fondation en 1813, l'ethos de l'institution fut marqué par le langage de la réforme morale vers les années 1830. Le regard se porte également sur la première institution pour les peuples indigènes, la Native Institution at Parramatta, fondée en 1814. Ses buts et son caractère sont comparés et contrastés avec ceux des orphelinats pour filles et garçons blancs. Le texte considère enfin comment les vues philanthropiques chrétiennes pour l'amélioration des peuples indigènes ont été affectées par des facteurs tels que l'expansion pastorale croissante, la perte de nourriture indigène et la violence de représailles.

Legislative responses to the drug problem in Australia have been predominantly penal in character. In the case of heroin, a drug which has assumed a mythic or totemic status among the illicit drugs, the calculated effect of criminal prohibitions has been to worsen the plight of the individual user. Few, if any, attempts have been made in this country to present a rational and principled justification for our current practices. The article presents an analysis of the operation of existing laws as they affect the heroin problem. The question whether these effects can be justified as an example of state paternalism is then discussed. It is argued that existing laws are unprincipled, indefensible and that our primary reliance on the mechanisms of the criminal law has been misplaced.

The UK Supreme Court in Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board adopts an approach to information disclosure in connection with clinical treatment that moves away from medical paternalism towards a more patient-centred approach. In doing so, it reinforces the protection afforded to informed consent and autonomous patient decision making under the law of negligence. However, some commentators have expressed a concern that the widening of the healthcare providers’ duty of disclosure may provide impetus, in future cases, for courts to adopt a more rigorous approach to the application of causation principles. The aim would be to limit liability but, in turn, it would also limit autonomy protection. Such a restrictive approach has recently been adopted in Australia as a result of the High Court decision in Wallace v Kam. This paper considers whether such an approach is likely under English negligence law and discusses case law from both jurisdictions in order to provide a point of comparison from which to scope the post-Montgomery future.

The compulsory income management or welfare quarantining programmes introduced by Australian governments over the past 11 years have provoked major public contention. One key source of conflict has been around whether these programmes have been introduced via co-design processes enabling the consent of local communities, or alternatively whether they are merely top-down programmes imposed with minimum consultation on specific geographical sites. This article argues that most consultation processes have been limited and tokenistic, and rarely included actual income management participants. An alternative bottom-up community development process is proposed based on the principles such as social inclusion, participation and empowerment.

Our aim in this paper was to investigate the guidelines and laws governing informed consent in the English-speaking world. We noted a recent divergence from medical paternalism within the United Kingdom, highlighted by the Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board ruling of 2015. We investigated the situation in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States of America. We read the national guidance regarding obtaining consent for surgical intervention for each country. We used the references from this guidance to identify the laws that helped inform the guidance, and reviewed the court documents for each case. There has been a trend towards a more patient-focused approach in consent in each country. Surgeons should be aware of the guidance and legal cases so that they can inform patients fully, and prevent legal problems if outdated practices are followed. Cite this article: Bone Joint J 2018;100-B:687–92.

Abstract The pandemic profoundly affected the care of older adults in long term care communities (LTCC) across the world. More than one third of pandemic deaths were linked to nursing homes. Most nations and states had strict guidelines on visitation, with many, especially in the United States, totally prohibiting visitation for over an entire year. Well-intentioned measures to protect through isolation caused a profound ethical tension between safety and self-determination. The aim of the project was to examine this dilemma using a case study and the Madison Collaborative Ethical Reasoning in Action Framework. Eight key questions of fairness, outcomes, rights, responsibilities, character, liberty, empathy, and authority were applied in the context of federal and state mandates in the US and Australia. Results highlighted issues of ageism, paternalism vs empathy, regulatory vs family authority, a focus on short-term outcomes while forfeiting long-term outcomes, community responsibilities to the resident trumped individual resident rights, the potential loss of community character in lieu of basic care provision, a loss of personal freedoms, and the emphasis of physical well-being over holistic well-being. The results of this analysis can inform future policy and provide lessons learned for the future.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to endorse the notion that information is the currency of democracy and explore the question of the public library’s role in promoting democracy through the provision of access to information. Design/methodology/approach A review of the literature and a case study are used. Findings From the early days of the public library, there has been a certain democratic paternalism in librarians’ views on public libraries, and ambivalence about the extent to which these libraries have provided information to the whole population. Despite this finding, the paper explores the public library’s role in providing information; the currency of information. Public libraries can contribute to the renewal of a democratic public sphere by providing free and ready access to knowledge and information, as well as safe and trusted social spaces for the exchange of ideas, creativity, and decision making. Originality/value The paper examines material from the dawn of the public library to current concerns about the role of these libraries in providing access to information, in revitalising citizenship and fostering democracy. It draws on the well-known example of the birth of democracy in South Africa and on discussions of public library neutrality and activism in contemporary France, describing limits on the achievements of libraries in these countries in the context of some current, promising examples from the USA, Britain, Denmark, and Australia.

Changes to the regulation of consumer leases for people on welfare who use Centrepay deductions to make lease payments for household goods, are part of the federal government’s response to a 2016 review of small amount credit contract laws. The review and response do not propose expanding availability of no-interest loans as an alternative to small amount credit contract finance. In 2015, a Bill proposing to exclude consumer leases from Centrepay failed to pass, with opponents objecting to the Bill as paternalistic. Restrictions on consumer spending imposed since 2007 by income management legislation, however, have been supported as necessary paternalism. These conflicting approaches to the protection of people receiving social security benefits from self-harming consumer choices constitute selective paternalism, while failing to deliver financial autonomy and inclusion.

AbstractThis paper will evaluate the obstacles faced by victim-survivors of historical abuse, particularly victim-survivors of forced labour in Magdalene Laundries in Ireland and the stolen wages of Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, in a post-colonial transitional justice framework. First, the paper identifies challenges in contextualising comparative interdisciplinary historical research in terms of transitional justice. Second, the paper considers the economic contribution of unpaid labour in the Australian and Irish contexts and, third, goes on to examine the historical denial of rights and redress in both settings. The paper then evaluates the different challenges in responding to legacies of historical abuse, especially unpaid wages in both states. A final section concludes with the argument that redress provided in both instances represents a form of paternalism perpetuating the colonial approach to governance, rather than the provision of the legal rights of citizens, and that this paternalism has specific implications for women who continue to be marginalised by contemporary regimes.

Human Resource Management (HRM) like many other fields in Business continues to rely largely on trends in the practices strategic objectives in maximising the performance of the employee while understanding them towards the effectiveness of the organisation. The HR Management Trends is the one which is concerned with focusing on the organizational design, system, HR and policies. It is essential that Human Resource Management is operating appropriately and in accordance with the latest trends impacted by ‘Covid19’ and technology to be able to deal with the business life challenges. In the study, current trends of HRM and their implications are identified and evaluated in understanding the present challenges towards better performing organisational activities following the design, system, HR and policies leading to the effectiveness of the company ensuring sustainable competitive advantage. Methodology utilizes the reviewing the current findings on studies coupled with a survey done with senior managers/HR managers of the corporate sector in the world with special reference to Australia. Hence, in addition to the literature review, this study was based on senior line managers and HR managers, and measures a range of subjective and objective outcomes. The analysis confirms the strong positive relationship between HR focused practices and HR effectiveness and it is proven that more the strong HR focused practices leads to higher range of performance outcomes. The associations are mostly stronger for HR effectiveness. There are low levels of agreement between HR and line managers about HR effectiveness and where agreement exists; it is not associated with superior outcomes. According to the study it is revealed that trends including personalisation of individual needs, work-life balance, Trusting issue of technology and leaders, Balancing three bottom-lines via proper managing HR towards CSR and sustainability, attitude towards Development, decreasing of the Employee Experience, withdrawn Paternalism, People Analytics, More expectation out of less effort (smart move), dealing with big innovative technology, HR is about People, HR Innovation Labs mainly resulted by the trends including handling the Covid19 context. This study, therefore, confirms the importance of HR effectiveness by well addressing these upcoming trends including handling the impact of Covid19 towards higher productivity and sustainable competitive advantage through proper managing most valuable live resource: people. It could be safely concluded that impact of coronavirus (Covid19) towards HRM as an accelerator for defining the role of the corporation, remote working, re-skilling, skills based hiring, and the transformation of corporate learning.

In 1941 Ernestine Hill published My Love Must Wait, a biographical novel based on the life of navigator Matthew Flinders. In the same year, Eleanor Dark published The Timeless Land, imagining the arrival of European settlers in the Sydney region from the perspectives of multiple historical figures. In this article we examine how each author represents the important figure of Bennelong, a man of the Wangal people who was kidnapped by Governor Phillip and who later travelled to England with him. While both works can be criticized as essentialist, paternalist or racist, there are significant differences in the ways each author portrays him. We argue that Dark’s decision to narrate some of her novel from the point of view of Bennelong and other Indigenous people enabled different understandings of Australian history for both historians and fiction writers. Dark’s “imaginative leap”, as critic Tom Griffiths has termed it, catalysed a new way of thinking about the 1788 invasion and early decades of the colonization of Australia. The unfinished cultural work undertaken by these novels continues today, as demonstrated by subsequent Australian novels which revisit encounters between Indigenous inhabitants and European colonists, including Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008), and Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party (2011). Like Dark, these authors situate parts of their novels within the consciousness of Indigenous figures from the historical record. We analyse the diverse challenges and possibilities presented by these literary heirs of Eleanor Dark.

This article offers a critical exploration of social studies textbooks and allied curriculum materials used in New South Wales primary schools between 1930 and 1960, and of the way in which these texts positioned, discussed, and assessed Aboriginal Australians. With reference to European commitments to Enlightenment philosophies and social Darwinian views of race and culture, the author argues that Aboriginal peoples were essentialized via a discourse of paternalism and cultural and biological inferiority. Thus othered in narratives of Australian identity and national progress, Aboriginal Australians were ascribed a role as marginalized spectators or as a primitive and disappearing anachronism.

Many governments have intensified conditions on social security payments, implementing new paternalist and neoliberal policy ideals that individualise responsibility for overcoming poverty. This article explores how such policy ideals can operate with a racialised impact in the context of income management, a type of welfare conditionality in Australia that delivers cashless welfare transfers. Income management originally applied only to Indigenous welfare recipients, but has since been expanded. The government’s rationale for the scheme is to limit access to alcohol and other drugs, and promote ‘socially responsible behaviour’. However, empirical evidence indicates that income management in the Northern Territory has not been successful in achieving the government’s policy objectives. Income management is built upon a policy narrative of addiction – those subject to it are portrayed as addicted to welfare payments and to alcohol. This article critiques these depictions and outlines a range of pragmatic, political and ethical concerns about income management.

El objetivo de esta investigación es analizar lo que nos dice la producción científica reunida en la base de datos Scopus sobre la influencia de lo “indígena” en y a través de los medios sociales. Para ello se realizó el análisis bibliométrico de 70 documentos y 52 artículos. Los resultados muestran que el interés de los investigadores por los tópicos que relacionan a lo “indígena” con la nueva ecología mediática ha crecido desde 2013 hasta la fecha de manera progresiva, que Australia cuenta con la mayor producción científica al respecto, y que las implicancias de la participación de lo “indígena” en medios sociales alcanzan lo social, la salud, psicología, tecnología e ingeniería, ciencias ambientales y demás asignaturas. En conclusión, la evidencia científica en Scopus sobre este tema nos dice que hay una evolución positiva de la cuestión indígena que radica en algo más que su visibilidad, pues va evolucionando también con respecto a su ubicuidad y a su glocalidad, manifestación de esto es que avanza del paternalismo hacía el empoderamiento de lo “indígena”

This paper reports on a study that aimed to understand how remote area nurses implemented primary health care principles in the Australian remote health care setting. Twenty-four Registered Nurses and Nurse Practitioners who worked in remote health services without inpatient facilities were interviewed using constructivist grounded theory methods. Findings revealed that nurses in this study aimed to practice in a way that was guided by Indigenous empowerment and social justice. However, some nurses questioned elements of their practice such as ‘chasing’ people for appointments or routine screening required by clinical guidelines that may not reflect the values of Indigenous peoples. Nurses expressed concern that they may be reinforcing past colonising practices and their actions may be considered paternalistic rather than empowering. Nurses in this study wanted to develop partnerships and provide nursing care that aligned with the health and wellbeing expectations of communities. However, ways of communicating the needs of communities and the development of partnerships between health providers and communities need to be developed. The present study calls for further research from the perspective of remote community members in order to develop ways of sharing knowledge about health and wellbeing between remote area nurses and communities.

On the threshold of the new millennium the world is being changed by the combined forces of globalisation, tribalisation and technological change. A new interdependent planetary society is emerging. This paper describes the nature of this emerging planetary society, the forces which are creating it, and a new paradigm called Planetism which will accompany its birth. The values of Planetism, the values of the 'Spaceship Culture', will dominate by about the year 2020, and will shape the global market place of the early 21st century. The development of Planetism is slowly replacing the Modernist culture which has dominated most of the 20th century. While the urban areas have mostly moved on to Planetism, the cosmonaut culture, most of our rangelands are still dominated by Modernism, the Cowboy Culture. However, every year there are more cosmonauts and fewer cowboys. If we are to improve effective communication between the city and the bush over the management of rangelands, it is important to understand the mindsets of both the city and the bush. While there are cowboys in the city there is a much higher proportion of them in the bush. Much of the conflict over the rangelands is due to the fact that the city looks at the rangelands from a cosmonaut perspective, while the bush looks at the same rangelands from a largely cowboy perspective. Many people in the rangelands see themselves as making a stand against rampant cosmonautisation. Many of the cowboys of the rangelands are still locked into the old modernist mindset, based on the superiority of western values, culture, science and technology and an endlessly expanding frontier. The city has moved on into Post Modernism and is busy synthesising values from a wide range of cultures other than the western dominant culture. The outcome of this synthesis will be Planetist. The people of the cities have become interested in the culture of the Australian Aborigine, whereas those in the bush, while mindful of this culture tend to still look at it with a paternalist and Modernist mindset. The global adoption of the Spaceship Culture and of its paradigm, Planetism, is both inevitable and desirable. We need to adopt processes to reconcile the city and the bush by easing the bush into the world of the cosmonaut, while reassuring the bush that these changes are necessary and are not necessarily threatening. Those in the bush who are taking Custer's Last Stand against perceived threats such as Wik need to be reassured that the future is not so bleak. The dominant mindsets of the bush leadership is engendering a bleak cowboy 'battlers' outlook. While these mindsets persist, reconciliation of city and bush will be difficult. Key words: Modernism, Planetism, cosmonaut, cowboy, indigenous

AbstractContract cheating remains a significant problem for universities and higher education (HE) generally, both within Australia and internationally. In 2020, the Australian Federal Government passed legislation establishing a new criminal offence, criminalising the provision or advertisement of academic cheating services by individuals and businesses. This legislation represents the Australian Government’s formal commitment to a criminal justice response to address the problem of contract cheating behaviour, which seeks to prevent and minimise the use and/or promotion of such cheating services within the higher education sector. This paper provides a political discourse analysis (PDA) and interpretive policy analysis (IPA) of Australian Parliamentary Hansard documents regarding debate of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment (Prohibiting Academic Cheating Services) Bill 2019. Our findings suggest a discord between the putative purpose of this legislation and the way the contract cheating problem has been represented in Australian Parliament. We argue that debates regarding the solution to, or at least how to address contract cheating first need to understand and agree on the problem if they are to meaningfully prevent crime. Our analysis exposes the politicisation of the higher education sector and associated discourse, where concern about contract cheating, in this case, was used as a vehicle to further rationalise ongoing Government paternalism and interference in tertiary institutions, underscoring the need for critical evaluation of criminological interventions.

Through colonial eyes, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are seen as subjects void of agency. They have been treated by the Australian polity as though they are in great need of saving. This paper explores the ways in which well-intended policies and initiatives implemented by successive governments have failed to recognise and support Indigenous Australians as functioning sovereign beings.

Each community’s title deed carries the indelible blood stains of our ancestors. (Watson, "Howard’s End" 2)IntroductionAccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term coalition comes from the Latin coalescere or ‘coalesce’, meaning “come or bring together to form one mass or whole”. Coalesce refers to the unity affirmed as something grows: co – “together”, alesce – “to grow up”. While coalition is commonly associated with formalised alliances and political strategy in the name of self-interest and common goals, this paper will draw as well on the broader etymological understanding of coalition as “growing together” in order to discuss the Australian government’s recent changes to land rights legislation, the 2007 Emergency Intervention into the Northern Territory, and its decision to use Indigenous land in the Northern Territory as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. What unites these distinct cases is the role of the Australian nation-state in asserting its sovereign right to decide, something Giorgio Agamben notes is the primary indicator of sovereign right and power (Agamben). As Fiona McAllan has argued in relation to the Northern Territory Intervention: “Various forces that had been coalescing and captivating the moral, imaginary centre were now contributing to a spectacular enactment of a sovereign rescue mission” (par. 18). Different visions of “growing together”, and different coalitional strategies, are played out in public debate and policy formation. This paper will argue that each of these cases represents an alliance between successive, oppositional governments - and the nourishment of neoliberal imperatives - over and against the interests of some of the Indigenous communities, especially with relation to land rights. A critical stance is taken in relation to the alterations to land rights laws over the past five years and with the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention, hereinafter referred to as the Intervention, firstly by the Howard Liberal Coalition Government and later continued, in what Anthony Lambert has usefully termed a “postcoalitional” fashion, by the Rudd Labor Government. By this, Lambert refers to the manner in which dominant relations of power continue despite the apparent collapse of old political coalitions and even in the face of seemingly progressive symbolic and material change. It is not the intention of this paper to locate Indigenous people in opposition to models of economic development aligned with neoliberalism. There are examples of productive relations between Indigenous communities and mining companies, in which Indigenous people retain control over decision-making and utilise Land Council’s to negotiate effectively. Major mining company Rio Tinto, for example, initiated an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Policy platform in the mid-1990s (Rio Tinto). Moreover, there are diverse perspectives within the Indigenous community regarding social and economic reform governed by neoliberal agendas as well as government initiatives such as the Intervention, motivated by a concern for the abuse of children, as outlined in The Little Children Are Sacred Report (Wild & Anderson; hereinafter Little Children). Indeed, there is no agreement on whether or not the Intervention had anything to do with land rights. On the one hand, Noel Pearson has strongly opposed this assertion: “I've got as much objections as anybody to the ideological prejudices of the Howard Government in relation to land, but this question is not about a 'land grab'. The Anderson Wild Report tells us about the scale of Aboriginal children's neglect and abuse" (ABC). Marcia Langton has agreed with this stating that “There's a cynical view afoot that the emergency intervention was a political ploy - a Trojan Horse - to sneak through land grabs and some gratuitous black head-kicking disguised as concern for children. These conspiracy theories abound, and they are mostly ridiculous” (Langton). Patrick Dodson on the other hand, has argued that yes, of course, the children remain the highest priority, but that this “is undermined by the Government's heavy-handed authoritarian intervention and its ideological and deceptive land reform agenda” (Dodson). WhitenessOne way to frame this issue is to look at it through the lens of critical race and whiteness theory. Is it possible that the interests of whiteness are at play in the coalitions of corporate/private enterprise and political interests in the Northern Territory, in the coupling of social conservatism and economic rationalism? Using this framework allows us to identify the partial interests at play and the implications of this for discussions in Australia around sovereignty and self-determination, as well as providing a discursive framework through which to understand how these coalitional interests represent a specific understanding of progress, growth and development. Whiteness theory takes an empirically informed stance in order to critique the operation of unequal power relations and discriminatory practices imbued in racialised structures. Whiteness and critical race theory take the twin interests of racial privileging and racial discrimination and discuss their historical and on-going relevance for law, philosophy, representation, media, politics and policy. Foregrounding contemporary analysis in whiteness studies is the central role of race in the development of the Australian nation, most evident in the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous lands, cultures and lives, which occurred initially prior to Federation, as well as following. Cheryl Harris’s landmark paper “Whiteness as Property” argues, in the context of the US, that “the origins of property rights ... are rooted in racial domination” and that the “interaction between conceptions of race and property ... played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination” (Harris 1716).Reiterating the logic of racial inferiority and the assumption of a lack of rationality and civility, Indigenous people were named in the Australian Constitution as “flora and fauna” – which was not overturned until a national referendum in 1967. This, coupled with the logic of terra nullius represents the racist foundational logic of Australian statehood. As is well known, terra nullius declared that the land belonged to no-one, denying Indigenous people property rights over land. Whiteness, Moreton-Robinson contends, “is constitutive of the epistemology of the West; it is an invisible regime of power that secures hegemony through discourse and has material effects in everyday life” (Whiteness 75).In addition to analysing racial power structures, critical race theory has presented studies into the link between race, whiteness and neoliberalism. Roberts and Mahtami argue that it is not just that neoliberalism has racialised effects, rather that neoliberalism and its underlying philosophy is “fundamentally raced and produces racialized bodies” (248; also see Goldberg Threat). The effect of the free market on state sovereignty has been hotly debated too. Aihwa Ong contends that neoliberalism produces particular relationships between the state and non-state corporations, as well as determining the role of individuals within the body-politic. Ong specifies:Market-driven logic induces the co-ordination of political policies with the corporate interests, so that developmental discussions favour the fragmentation of the national space into various contiguous zones, and promote the differential regulation of the populations who can be connected to or disconnected from global circuits of capital. (Ong, Neoliberalism 77)So how is whiteness relevant to a discussion of land reform, and to the changes to land rights passed along with Intervention legislation in 2007? Irene Watson cites the former Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, who opposed the progressive individual with what he termed the “failed collective.” Watson asserts that in the debates around land leasing and the Intervention, “Aboriginal law and traditional roles and responsibilities for caring and belonging to country are transformed into the cause for community violence” (Sovereign Spaces 34). The effects of this, I will argue, are twofold and move beyond a moral or social agenda in the strictest sense of the terms: firstly to promote, and make more accessible, the possibility of private and government coalitions in relation to Indigenous lands, and secondly, to reinforce the sovereignty of the state, recognised in the capacity to make decisions. It is here that the explicit reiteration of what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls “white possession” is clearly evidenced (The Possessive Logic). Sovereign Interventions In the Northern Territory 50% of land is owned by Indigenous people under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 (ALRA) (NT). This law gives Indigenous people control, mediated via land councils, over their lands. It is the contention of this paper that the rights enabled through this law have been eroded in recent times in the coalescing interests of government and private enterprise via, broadly, land rights reform measures. In August 2007 the government passed a number of laws that overturned aspects of the Racial Discrimination Act 197 5(RDA), including the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007 and the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment (Township Leasing) Bill 2007. Ostensibly these laws were a response to evidence of alarming levels of child abuse in remote Indigenous communities, which has been compiled in the special report Little Children, co-chaired by Rex Wild QC and Patricia Anderson. This report argued that urgent but culturally appropriate strategies were required in order to assist the local communities in tackling the issues. The recommendations of the report did not include military intervention, and instead prioritised the need to support and work in dialogue with local Indigenous people and organisations who were already attempting, with extremely limited resources, to challenge the problem. Specifically it stated that:The thrust of our recommendations, which are designed to advise the NT government on how it can help support communities to effectively prevent and tackle child sexual abuse, is for there to be consultation with, and ownership by the local communities, of these solutions. (Wild & Anderson 23) Instead, the Federal Coalition government, with support from the opposition Labor Party, initiated a large scale intervention, which included the deployment of the military, to install order and assist medical personnel to carry out compulsory health checks on minors. The intervention affected 73 communities with populations of over 200 Aboriginal men, women and children (Altman, Neo-Paternalism 8). The reality of high levels of domestic and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities requires urgent and diligent attention, but it is not the space of this paper to unpack the media spectacle or the politically determined response to these serious issues, or the considered and careful reports such as the one cited above. While the report specifies the need for local solutions and local control of the process and decision-making, the Federal Liberal Coalition government’s intervention, and the current Labor government’s faithfulness to these, has been centralised and external, imposed upon communities. Rebecca Stringer argues that the Trojan horse thesis indicates what is at stake in this Intervention, while also pinpointing its main weakness. That is, the counter-intuitive links its architects make between addressing child sexual abuse and re-litigating Indigenous land tenure and governance arrangements in a manner that undermines Aboriginal sovereignty and further opens Aboriginal lands to private interests among the mining, nuclear power, tourism, property development and labour brokerage industries. (par. 8)Alongside welfare quarantining for all Indigenous people, was a decision by parliament to overturn the “permit system”, a legal protocol provided by the ALRA and in place so as to enable Indigenous peoples the right to refuse and grant entry to strangers wanting to access their lands. To place this in a broader context of land rights reform, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 2006, created the possibility of 99 year individual leases, at the expense of communal ownership. The legislation operates as a way of individualising the land arrangements in remote Indigenous communities by opening communal land up as private plots able to be bought by Aboriginal people or any other interested party. Indeed, according to Leon Terrill, land reform in Australia over the past 10 years reflects an attempt to return control of decision-making to government bureaucracy, even as governments have downplayed this aspect. Terrill argues that Township Leasing (enabled via the 2006 legislation), takes “wholesale decision-making about land use” away from Traditional Owners and instead places it in the hands of a government entity called the Executive Director of Township Leasing (3). With the passage of legislation around the Intervention, five year leases were created to enable the Commonwealth “administrative control” over the communities affected (Terrill 3). Finally, under the current changes it is unlikely that more than a small percentage of Aboriginal people will be able to access individual land leasing. Moreover, the argument has been presented that these reforms reflect a broader project aimed at replacing communal land ownership arrangements. This agenda has been justified at a rhetorical level via the demonization of communal land ownership arrangements. Helen Hughes and Jenness Warin, researchers at the rightwing think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), released a report entitled A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote Communities, in which they argue that there is a direct casual link between communal ownership and economic underdevelopment: “Communal ownership of land, royalties and other resources is the principle cause of the lack of economic development in remote areas” (in Norberry & Gardiner-Garden 8). In 2005, then Prime Minister, John Howard, publicly introduced the government’s ambition to alter the structure of Indigenous land arrangements, couching his agenda in the language of “equal opportunity”. I believe there’s a case for reviewing the whole issue of Aboriginal land title in the sense of looking more towards private recognition …, I’m talking about giving them the same opportunities as the rest of their fellow Australians. (Watson, "Howard’s End" 1)Scholars of critical race theory have argued that the language of equality, usually tied to liberalism (though not always) masks racial inequality and even results in “camouflaged racism” (Davis 61). David Theo Goldberg notes that, “the racial status-quo - racial exclusions and privileges favouring for the most part middle - and upper class whites - is maintained by formalising equality through states of legal and administrative science” (Racial State 222). While Howard and his coalition of supporters have associated communal title with disadvantage and called for the equality to be found in individual leases (Dodson), Altman has argued that there is no logical link between forms of communal land ownership and incidences of sexual abuse, and indeed, the government’s use of sexual abuse disingenuously disguises it’s imperative to alter the land ownership arrangements: “Given the proposed changes to the ALRA are in no way associated with child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities […] there is therefore no pressing urgency to pass the amendments.” (Altman National Emergency, 3) In the case of the Intervention, land rights reforms have affected the continued dispossession of Indigenous people in the interests of “commercial development” (Altman Neo-Paternalism 8). In light of this it can be argued that what is occurring conforms to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has highlighted as the “possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty” (Possessive Logic). White sovereignty, under the banner of benevolent paternalism overturns the authority it has conceded to local Indigenous communities. This is realised via township leases, five year leases, housing leases and other measures, stripping them of the right to refuse the government and private enterprise entry into their lands (effectively the right of control and decision-making), and opening them up to, as Stringer argues, a range of commercial and government interests. Future Concerns and Concluding NotesThe etymological root of coalition is coalesce, inferring the broad ambition to “grow together”. In the issues outlined above, growing together is dominated by neoliberal interests, or what Stringer has termed “assimilatory neoliberation”. The issue extends beyond a social and economic assimilationism project and into a political and legal “land grab”, because, as Ong notes, the neoliberal agenda aligns itself with the nation-state. This coalitional arrangement of neoliberal and governmental interests reiterates “white possession” (Moreton-Robinson, The Possessive Logic). This is evidenced in the position of the current Labor government decision to uphold the nomination of Muckaty as a radioactive waste repository site in Australia (Stokes). In 2007, the Northern Land Council (NLC) nominated Muckaty Station to be the site for waste disposal. This decision cannot be read outside the context of Maralinga, in the South Australian desert, a site where experiments involving nuclear technology were conducted in the 1960s. As John Keane recounts, the Australian government permitted the British government to conduct tests, dispossessing the local Aboriginal group, the Tjarutja, and employing a single patrol officer “the job of monitoring the movements of the Aborigines and quarantining them in settlements” (Keane). Situated within this historical colonial context, in 2006, under a John Howard led Liberal Coalition, the government passed the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act (CRWMA), a law which effectively overrode the rulings of the Northern Territory government in relation decisions regarding nuclear waste disposal, as well as overriding the rights of traditional Aboriginal owners and the validity of sacred sites. The Australian Labor government has sought to alter the CRWMA in order to reinstate the importance of following due process in the nomination process of land. However, it left the proposed site of Muckaty as confirmed, and the new bill, titled National Radioactive Waste Management retains many of the same characteristics of the Howard government legislation. In 2010, 57 traditional owners from Muckaty and surrounding areas signed a petition stating their opposition to the disposal site (the case is currently in the Federal Court). At a time when nuclear power has come back onto the radar as a possible solution to the energy crisis and climate change, questions concerning the investments of government and its loyalties should be asked. As Malcolm Knox has written “the nuclear industry has become evangelical about the dangers of global warming” (Knox). While nuclear is a “cleaner” energy than coal, until better methods are designed for processing its waste, larger amounts of it will be produced, requiring lands that can hold it for the desired timeframes. For Australia, this demands attention to the politics and ethics of waste disposal. Such an issue is already being played out, before nuclear has even been signed off as a solution to climate change, with the need to find a disposal site to accommodate already existing uranium exported to Europe and destined to return as waste to Australia in 2014. The decision to go ahead with Muckaty against the wishes of the voices of local Indigenous people may open the way for the co-opting of a discourse of environmentalism by political and business groups to promote the development and expansion of nuclear power as an alternative to coal and oil for energy production; dumping waste on Indigenous lands becomes part of the solution to climate change. During the 2010 Australian election, Greens Leader Bob Brown played upon the word coalition to suggest that the Liberal National Party were in COALition with the mining industry over the proposed Mining Tax – the Liberal Coalition opposed any mining tax (Brown). Here Brown highlights the alliance of political agendas and business or corporate interests quite succinctly. Like Brown’s COALition, will government (of either major party) form a coalition with the nuclear power stakeholders?This paper has attempted to bring to light what Dodson has identified as “an alliance of established conservative forces...with more recent and strident ideological thinking associated with free market economics and notions of individual responsibility” and the implications of this alliance for land rights (Dodson). It is important to ask critical questions about the vision of “growing together” being promoted via the coalition of conservative, neoliberal, private and government interests.Acknowledgements Many thanks to the reviewers of this article for their useful suggestions. ReferencesAustralian Broadcasting Authority. “Noel Pearson Discusses the Issues Faced by Indigenous Communities.” Lateline 26 June 2007. 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s1962844.htm>. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Altman, Jon. “The ‘National Emergency’ and Land Rights Reform: Separating Fact from Fiction.” A Briefing Paper for Oxfam Australia, 2007. 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.oxfam.org.au/resources/filestore/originals/OAus-EmergencyLandRights-0807.pdf>. Altman, Jon. “The Howard Government’s Northern Territory Intervention: Are Neo-Paternalism and Indigenous Development Compatible?” Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research Topical Issue 16 (2007). 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://caepr.anu.edu.au/system/files/Publications/topical/Altman_AIATSIS.pdf>. Brown, Bob. “Senator Bob Brown National Pre-Election Press Club Address.” 2010. 18 Aug. 2010 ‹http://greens.org.au/content/senator-bob-brown-pre-election-national-press-club-address>. Davis, Angela. The Angela Davis Reader. Ed. J. James, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Dodson, Patrick. “An Entire Culture Is at Stake.” Opinion. The Age, 14 July 2007: 4. Goldberg, David Theo. The Racial State. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002.———. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Neoliberalism. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2008. Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106.8 (1993): 1709-1795. Keane, John. “Maralinga’s Afterlife.” Feature Article. The Age, 11 May 2003. 24 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/11/1052280486255.html>. Knox, Malcolm. “Nuclear Dawn.” The Monthly 56 (May 2010). Lambert, Anthony. “Rainbow Blindness: Same-Sex Partnerships in Post-Coalitional Australia.” M/C Journal 13.6 (2010). Langton, Marcia. “It’s Time to Stop Playing Politics with Vulnerable Lives.” Opinion. Sydney Morning Herald, 30 Nov. 2007: 2. McAllan, Fiona. “Customary Appropriations.” borderlands ejournal 6.3 (2007). 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no3_2007/mcallan_appropriations.htm>. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty: The High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision.” borderlands e-journal 3.2 (2004). 1 Aug. 2007 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/moreton_possessive.htm>. ———. “Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous Representation.” Whitening Race. Ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 75-89. Norberry, J., and J. Gardiner-Garden. Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment Bill 2006. Australian Parliamentary Library Bills Digest 158 (19 June 2006). Ong, Aihwa. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 75-97.Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd. ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Rio Tinto. "Rio Tinto Aboriginal Policy and Programme Briefing Note." June 2007. 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.aboriginalfund.riotinto.com/common/pdf/Aboriginal%20Policy%20and%20Programs%20-%20June%202007.pdf>. Roberts, David J., and Mielle Mahtami. “Neoliberalising Race, Racing Neoliberalism: Placing 'Race' in Neoliberal Discourses.” Antipode 42.2 (2010): 248-257. Stringer, Rebecca. “A Nightmare of the Neocolonial Kind: Politics of Suffering in Howard's Northern Territory Intervention.” borderlands ejournal 6.2 (2007). 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no2_2007/stringer_intervention.htm>.Stokes, Dianne. "Muckaty." n.d. 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.timbonham.com/slideshows/Muckaty/>. Terrill, Leon. “Indigenous Land Reform: What Is the Real Aim of Land Reform?” Edited version of a presentation provided at the 2010 National Native Title Conference, 2010. Watson, Irene. “Sovereign Spaces, Caring for Country and the Homeless Position of Aboriginal Peoples.” South Atlantic Quarterly 108.1 (2009): 27-51. Watson, Nicole. “Howard’s End: The Real Agenda behind the Proposed Review of Indigenous Land Titles.” Australian Indigenous Law Reporter 9.4 (2005). ‹http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AILR/2005/64.html>.Wild, R., and P. Anderson. Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarie: The Little Children Are Sacred. Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. Northern Territory: Northern Territory Government, 2007.

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

Abstract This article explores Indigenous removal as a trans-imperial phenomenon through the writings of U.S. superintendent of Indian affairs, Thomas McKenney, and three of his British imperial counterparts—George Arthur, Charles La Trobe, and Francis Bond Head—all of whom declared themselves committed to ameliorating the condition of Indigenous people and concluded that this project necessitated Indigenous removal from proximity to British or U.S. settler populations. All four men employed stereotyped paternalistic imaginings to justify removal as the humanitarian duty of the self-proclaimed “civilized” toward Indigenous people. Yet their writing about their own proximity to actual Indigenous people—in spaces that in the 1820s and 1830s comprised the “Wests” of Anglophone expansion in North America and Australia—also reveal Indigenous bodily realities and political imperatives that instead posed dangers to these “civilized” men and their paternal schemas. Although these four Anglo-American men’s rendering of such dangerous proximities do not, of course, fully explain the causes and horrors of removal policies, they suggest the need to look at the intimate spaces of Anglo-American imperial reach to reveal otherwise unacknowledged reasons why those proclaiming genuine concern for Indigenous wellbeing would support the stark subjugation and segregation of Indigenous removal.

“Live free or die!” (New Hampshire State motto) Should individuals be free to make lifestyle decisions (such as what, when and how much to eat and how much physical activity to take), without undue interference from the state, even when their decisions may lead to negative consequences (obesity, heart disease, diabetes)? The UN Declaration of Human Rights enshrines the belief that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. The philosophy of Libertarianism (Locke) proposes that rights can be negative (e.g. the freedom to be free from outside interference) as well as positive (e.g. the right to certain benefits supplied by others). Robert Nozick, a proponent of Libertarianism, has argued that we have the right to make informed decisions about our lives without unnecessary interference. This entitlement requires that we exercise our rights only as far as they do not infringe the rights of others. The popular notion of the “Nanny State” (often used derogatively) is discussed, and the metaphor is extended to draw on the Super Nanny phenomenon, a reality television series that has been shown in numerous countries including the UK, the US, and Australia. It is argued in this paper that social marketing, when done well, can help create a “Super Nanny State” (implying positive connotations). In the “Nanny State” people are told what to do; in the “Super Nanny State” people are empowered to make healthier decisions. Social marketing applies commercial marketing principles to “sell” ideas (rather than goods or services) with the aim of improving the welfare of individuals and/or society. Where the common good may not be easily discerned, Donovan and Henley recommended using the UN Declaration of Human Rights as the baseline reference point. Social marketing is frequently used to persuade individuals to make healthier lifestyle decisions such as “eat less [saturated] fat”, “eat two fruits and five veg a day”, “find thirty minutes of physical activity a day”. Recent medical gains in immunisation, sanitation and treating infectious diseases mean that the health of a population can now be more improved by influencing lifestyle decisions than by treating illness (Rothschild). Social marketing activities worldwide are directed at influencing lifestyle decisions to prevent or minimise lifestyle diseases. “Globesity” is the new epidemic (Kline). Approximately one billion people globally are overweight or obese (compared to 850 million who are underweight); most worryingly, about 10% of children worldwide are now overweight or obese with rising incidence of type 2 diabetes in this population (Yach, Stuckler, and Brownwell). “Nanny state” is a term people often use derogatively to refer to government intervention (see Henley and Jackson). Knag (405) made a distinction between old-style, authoritarian “paternalism”, which chastised the individual using laws and sanctions, and a newer “maternalism” or “nanny state” which smothers the individual with “education and therapy (or rather, propaganda and regulation)”. Knag’s use of the term “Nanny State” still has pejorative connotations. In the “Nanny State”, governments are seen as using the tool of social marketing to tell people what they should and shouldn’t do, as if they were children being supervised by a nanny. At the extreme, people may be afraid that social marketing could be used by the State as a way to control the thoughts of the vulnerable, a view expressed some years ago by participants in a survey of attitudes towards social marketing (Laczniak, Lusch, and Murphy). More recently, the debate is more likely to focus on why social marketing often appears to be ineffective, rather than frighteningly effective (Hastings, Stead, and Macintosh). Another concern is the high level of fear being generated by much of the social marketing effort (Hastings and MacFadyen; Henley). It is as if nanny thinks she must scream at her children all the time to warn them that they will die if they don’t listen to her. However, by extension, I am suggesting that the “Super Nanny State” metaphor could have positive associations, with an authoritative (rather than authoritarian) parenting figure, one who explains appropriate sanctions (laws and regulations) but who is also capable of informing, inspiring and empowering. Still, the Libertarian ethical viewpoint would question whether governments, through social marketers, have the right to try to influence people’s lifestyle decisions such as what and how much to eat, how much to exercise, etc. In the rise of the “Nanny State”, Holt argued that governments are extending the range of their regulatory powers, restricting free markets and intruding into areas of personal responsibility, all under the guise of acting for the public’s good. A number of arguments, discussed below, can be proposed to justify interference by the State in the lifestyle decisions of individuals. The Economic Argument One argument that is often quoted to justify interference by the State is that the economic costs of allowing unsafe/unhealthy behaviours have to be borne by the community. It has been estimated in the US that medical costs relating to diabetes (which is associated directly with obesity) increased from $44 billion to $92 billion in five years (Yach, et al). The economic argument can be useful for persuading governments to invest in prevention but is not sufficient as a fundamental justification for interference. If we say that we want people to eat more healthily because their health costs will be burdensome to the community, we imply that we would not ask them to do so if their health costs were not burdensome, even if they were dying prematurely as a result. The studies relating to the economic costs of obesity have not been as extensive as those relating to the economic costs of tobacco (Yach, et al), where some have argued that prematurely dying of smoking-related diseases is less costly to the State than the costs incurred in living to old age (Barendregt, et al). This conclusion has been disputed (Rasmussen et al), but even if true, would not provide sufficient justification to cease tobacco control efforts. Similarly, I think people would expect social marketing efforts relating to nutrition and physical activity to continue even if an economic analysis showed that people dying prematurely from obesity-related illnesses were costing the State less overall in health care costs than people living an additional twenty years. The Consumer Protection Argument Some degree of interference by the State is desirable and often necessary because people are not entirely self-reliant in every circumstance (Mead). The social determinants of health (Marmot and Wilkinson) are sufficiently well-understood to justify government regulation to reduce inequalities in housing, education, access to health services, etc. Implicit in the criticism that the “Nanny State” treats people like children is the assumption that children are treated without dignity and respect. The positive parent or “Super Nanny” treats children with respect but recognises their vulnerability in unfamiliar or dangerous contexts. A survey of opinion in the UK in 2004 by the King’s Fund, an independent think tank, found that the public generally supported government initiatives to encourage healthier school meals; ensure cheaper fruit and vegetables; pass laws to limit salt, fat and sugar in foods; stop advertising junk foods for children and regulate for nutrition labels on food (UK public wants a “Nanny State”). The UK’s recently established National Social Marketing Centre has made recommendations for social marketing strategies to improve public health and Prime Minister Tony Blair has responded by making public health, especially the growing obesity problem, a central issue for government initiatives, offering a “helping hand” approach (Triggle). The Better Alternative Argument Wikler considered the case for more punitive government intervention in the obesity debate by weighing the pros and cons of an interesting strategy: the introduction of a “fat tax” that would require citizens to be weighed and, if found to be overweight, require them to pay a surcharge. He concluded that this level of state interference would not be justified because there are other ways to appeal to the risk-taker’s autonomy, through education and therapeutic efforts. Governments can use social marketing as one of these better alternatives to punitive sanctions. The Level Playing Field Argument Social marketers argue that many lifestyle behaviours are not entirely voluntary (O’Connell and Price). For example, it is argued that an individual’s choices about eating fast food, consuming sweetened soft drinks, and living sedentary lives have already been partially determined by commercial efforts. Thus, they argue that social marketing efforts are intended to level the playing field – educate, inform, and restore true personal autonomy to people, enabling them to make rational choices (Smith). For example, Kline’s media education program in Canada, with a component of “media risk reduction”, successfully educated young consumers (elementary school children) with strategies for “tuning out” by asking them to come up with a plan for what they would do if they “turned off TV, video games and PCs for a whole week?” (p. 249). The “tune out challenge” resulted in a reduction of media exposure (80%) displaced into active leisure pursuits. A critical aspect of this intervention was the contract drawn up in advance, with the children setting their own goals and strategies (Kline). In this view, the state is justified in trying to level the playing field, by using social marketing to offer information as well as alternative, healthier choices that can be freely accepted or rejected (Rothschild). Conclusion A real concern is that when people are treated like children, they become like children, retaining their desires and appetites but abdicating responsibility for their individual choices to the state (Knag). Some smokers, for example, declare that they will continue to smoke until the government bans smoking (Brown). Governments and social marketers have a responsibility to fund/design campaigns so that the audience views the message as informative rather than proscriptive. Joffe and Mindell (967) advocated the notion of a “canny state” with “less reliance on telling people what to do and more emphasis on making healthy choices easier”. Finally, one of the central tenets of marketing is the concept of “exchange” – the marketer must identify the benefits to be gained from buying a product. In social marketing terms, interference in an individual’s right to act freely can be effective and justified when the benefits are clearly identifiable and credible. Rothschild described marketing’s role as providing a middle point between libertarianism and paternalism, offering free choice and incentives to behave in ways that benefit the common good. Rather than shaking a finger at the individual (along the lines of earlier “Don’t Do Drugs” campaigns), the “Super Nanny” state, via social marketing, can inform and engage individuals in ways that make healthier choices more appealing and the individual feel more empowered to choose them. 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Brownwell. “Epidemiological and Economic Consequences of the Global Epidemics of Obesity and Diabetes.” Nature Medicine 12.1 (2006): 62-6. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Henley, Nadine. "Free to Be Obese in a ‘Super Nanny State’?." M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/6-henley.php>. APA Style Henley, N. (Sep. 2006) "Free to Be Obese in a ‘Super Nanny State’?," M/C Journal, 9(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/6-henley.php>.

The Gothic is not always suited to women’s emancipation, but it is very well suited to women’s anger, and all other instances of what Barbara Creed (3) would refer to as ‘abject’ femininity: excessive, uncanny and uncontained instances that disturb patriarchal norms of womanhood. This article asserts that the conventions of the Gothic genre are well suited to expressions of women’s rage; invoking Sarah Ahmed’s work on the discomforting presence of the kill-joy in order to explore how the often-alienating processes of uncensored female anger coincide with contemporary notions of the Monstrous Feminine. This should not suggest that the Gothic is a wholly feminist genre - one need only look to Jane Eyre to observe the binarised construction of Gothic women as either ‘pure’ or ‘deviant’: virginal heroine or mad woman in the attic. However, what is significant about the Gothic genre is that it often permits far more in-depth, even sympathetic explorations of ‘deviant femininity’ that are out of place elsewhere.Indeed, the normative, rationalist demand for good health and accommodating cheerfulness is symptomatic of what Queer Crip scholar Katarina Kolářová (264) describes as ‘compulsory, curative positivity’ – wherein the Monstrousness of deviant femininity, Queerness and disability must be ‘fixed’ in order to produce blithe, comforting feminine docility. It seems almost too obvious to point to The Yellow Wallpaper as a perfect exemplar of this: the physician husband of Gillman’s protagonist literally prescribes indolence and passivity as ‘cures’ for what may well be post-partum depression – another instance of distinctly feminine irrationality that must be promptly contained. The short story is peppered through with references to the protagonist’s ‘illness’ as a source of consternation or discomfort for her husband, who declares, “I feel easier with you now” (134) as she becomes more and more passive.The notion of men’s comfort is important within discussions of women’s anger – not only within the Gothic, but within a broader context of gendered power and privileged experience. Sara Ahmed’s Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness asserts that we “describe as happy a situation that you wish to defend. Happiness translates its wish into a politics, a wishful politics, a politics that demands that others live according to a wish” (573) For Ahmed, happiness is not solely an individual experience, but rather is relational, and as much influenced by normative systems of power as any other interpersonal process.It has historically fallen upon women to sacrifice their own happiness to ensure that men are comfortable; being quiet and unargumentative, remaining both chase and sexually alluring, being maternal and nurturing, while scrupulously censoring any evidence of pregnancy, breastfeeding or menstrual cycles (Boyer 79). If a woman has ceased to be happy within these terms, then she has failed to be a good woman, and experiences what Ahmed refers to as a ‘negative affect’ – a feeling of being out of place. To be out of place is to be an ‘affect alien’: one must either continue feeling alienated or correct one’s feelings (Ahmed 582). Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild uses the analogy of a bride feeling miserable at her wedding, obliging herself to bring her feelings in-line with what is expected of her, “Sensing a gap between the ideal feeling and the actual feeling she tolerated, the bride prompts herself to be happy” (Hochschild 61).Ahmed uses to the term ‘Kill Joy’ to refer to feminists – particularly black feminists – whose actions or presence refuse this obligation, and in turn project their discomfort outwards, instead of inwards. The stereotype of the angry black woman, or the humourless feminist persist because these women are not complicit in social orders that hold the comfort of white men as paramount (583); their presence is discomforting.Contrary to its title, Killing Joy does not advocate for an end to happiness. Rather, one might understand the act of killing joy as a tactic of subjective honesty – an acknowledgement of dis-ease, of one’s alienation and displacement within the social contract of reciprocal happiness. Here I use the word dis-ease as a deliberate double entendre – implying both the experience of a negative affect, as well as the apparent social ‘illness’ of refusing acquiescent female joy. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the protagonist’s passive femininity is ironically both the antithesis and the cause of her Monstrous transformation, demonstrating an instance of feminine liminality that is the hallmark of the Gothic heroine.Here I introduce the example of Lily Frankenstein, a modern interpretation of the Bride of the Creature, portrayed by Billie Piper in the Showtime series Penny Dreadful. In Shelley’s novel the Bride is commissioned for the Creature’s contentment, a contract that Frankenstein acknowledges she could not possibly have consented to (Shelley 206). She is never given sentience or agency; her theoretical existence and pre-natal destruction being premised entirely on the comfort of men. Upon her destruction, the Creature cries, “Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness?” (Shelley 209). Her first film portrayal by Elsa Lanchester in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1936) is iconic, but brief. She is granted no dialogue, other than a terrified scream, followed by a goose-like hiss of disgust at Boris Karloff’s lonely Creature. Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) merges the characters of Elizabeth and the Bride into the same doomed woman. After being murdered by the Creature, she is resurrected by Frankenstein – and consequently fought over by both. Her inevitable suicide is her one moment of tragic autonomy.Penny Dreadful is the first time that the Bride has been given an opportunity to speak for herself. Lily’s character arc is neither that of the idealised, innocent victim, nor is she entirely abject and wanton: she is – quite literally – two women in one. Before she is re-animated and conditioned by Victor Frankenstein to be the perfect bride, she was Brona, a predictably tragic, Irish street-walker with a taste for whisky and a consumptive cough. Diane Long Hoeveler describes the ambiguous duality of the Gothic feminine arising from the fantasies of middle-class woman writing gothic fiction during the 19th century (106). Drawing upon Harriet Guest’s examination of the development of femininity in early Gothic literature, Hoeveler asserts that women may explore the ‘deviant’ pleasures of wanton sexuality and individualistic, sadistic power while still retaining the chaste femininity demanded of them by their bourgeois upbringings. As both innocent victim of patriarchy and Monstrous Feminine, the construction of the gothic heroine simultaneously criminalises and deifies women.I assert that Penny Dreadful demonstrates the blurring of these boundaries in such a way that the fantasy of the sympathetic, yet Monstrous Gothic Feminine is launched out of the parlours of bored Victorian housewives into a contemporary feminist moment that is characterised by a split between respectable diplomacy and the visibility of female rage. Her transition from coerced docility and abject, sexualised anger manifests in the second season of the show. The Creature – having grown impatient and jealous – comes to collect his Bride and is met with a furious refusal.Lily’s rage is explosive. Her raw emotion is evidently startling to the Creature, who stands in astonishment and fear at something even more monstrous and alien than himself – a woman’s unrestrained anger. For all his wretched ‘Otherness’ and misery, he is yet a man - a bastard son of the Enlightenment, desperate to be allowed entrance into the hallowed halls of reason. In both Shelley’s original novel and the series, he tries (and fails) to establish himself as a worthy and rational citizen; settling upon the Bride as his coveted consolation prize for his Monstrous failure. If he cannot be a man as his creator was, then he shall have a companion that is ‘like’ him to soothe his pain.Consequently, Lily’s refusal of the Creature is more than a rejection – it is the manifestation of an alien affect that has been given form within the undead, angry woman: a trifecta of ‘Otherness’. “Shall we wonder the pastures and recite your fucking poetry to the fucking cows?” She mocks the Creature’s bucolic, romantic ideals, killing his joyful phantasy that she, as his companion, will love and comfort him despite his Monstrousness (“Memento Mori”).Lily’s confrontation of the Creature is an unrestrained litany of women’s pain – the humiliation of corsetry and high heels, the slavery of marriage, the brutality of sexual coercion: all which Ahmed would refer to as the “signs of labour under the sign of happiness” (573). These are the pains that women must hide in order to maintain men’s comfort, the sacrificial emotional labours which are obfuscated by the mandates of male-defined femininity. The Gothic’s nurturance of anger transforms Lily’s outburst from an act of cruelty and selfishness to a site of significant feminine abjection. Through this scene Hochschild’s comment takes on new meaning: Lily – being quite literally the Bride (or the intended Bride) of the Creature – has turned the tables and has altered the process of disaffection – and made herself happy at the expense of men.Lily forms a militia of ‘fallen’ women from whom she demands tribute: the bleeding, amputated hands of abusive men. The scene is a thrilling one, recalling the misogyny of witch trials, sexual violence and exploitation as an army of angry kill joys bang on the banquet table, baying for men’s blood (“Ebb Tide”). However, as seems almost inevitable, Lily’s campaign is short-lived. Her efforts are thwarted and her foot soldiers either murdered or fled. We last see her walking dejectedly through the London fog, her fate and future unknown.Lily’s story recalls an instance of the ‘bad feminism’ that nice, respectable, mainstream feminists seek to distance themselves from. In her discussion of the acquittal of infamous castatrix Lorena Bobbitt, poet Katha Pollitt (65-66) observes the scramble by “nice, liberal middle-class professional” feminists to distance themselves from the narratives of irrational rage that supposedly characterise ‘victim feminism’ – opting instead for the comforting ivory towers of self-control and diplomacy.Lily’s speech to her troops is seen partly through the perspective of an increasingly alarmed Dorian Gray, who has hitherto been enjoying the debauched potential of these liberated, ‘deviant’ women, recalling bell hooks’ observation that “ultimately many males revolted when we stated that our bodies were territories that they could not occupy at will. Men who were ready for female sexual liberation if it meant free pussy, no strings attached, were rarely ready for feminist female sexual agency” (41). This is no longer a coterie of wanton women that he may enjoy, but a sisterhood of angry, vengeful kill-joys that will not be respectable, or considerate of his feelings in their endeavours.Here, parallels arise between the absolutes drawn between women as agents or victims, and the positioning of women as positive, progressive ‘rational’ beings or melancholic kill-joys that Ahmed describes. We need only turn to the contemporary debate surrounding the MeToo movement (and its asinine, defensive response of ‘Not All Men’) to observe that the process of identifying oneself as a victim has – for many – become synonymous with weakness, even amongst other feminists. Notably, Germaine Greer referred to the movement as ‘whinging’, calling upon women to be more assertive, instead of wallowing in self-victimisation and misandry, as Lily supposedly does (Miller).While Greer may be a particularly easy strawman, her comments nonetheless recall Judith Halberstam’s observations of prescriptive paternalism (maternalism?) within Western feminist discourse. His chapter Shadow Feminisms uses the work of Gayatri Spivak to describe how triumphalist narratives of women’s liberation often function to restrict the terms of women’s agency and expression – particularly those of women of colour.Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? asserts that the colonial narratives inherent within white feminists’ attempts to ‘save’ non-Western women are premised upon the imagined heroicism of the individual, which in turn demands the rejection of ‘subaltern’ strategies like passiveness, anger and refusal. She asks, “does the category of resistance impose a teleology of progressive politics on the analytics of power?” (9). Put more simply, both Halberstam and Spivak beg the question of why it is necessary for women and other historically marginalised groups to adopt optimistic and respectable standards of agency? Especially when those terms are pre-emptively defined by feminists like Greer.Halberstam conceptualises Shadow Feminisms in the melancholic terms of refusal, undoing, failure and anger. Even in name, Shadow Feminism is well suited to the Gothic – it has no agenda of triumphant, linear progress, nor the saccharine coercion of individualistic optimism. Rather, it emphasises the repressed, quiet forms of subversion that skulk in the introspective, resentful gloom. This is a feminism that cannot and will not let go of its traumas or its pain, because it should not have to (Halberstam, Queer Art 128-129).Thus, the Monstrousness of female rage is given space to acknowledge, rather than downplay or dismiss the affective-alienation of patriarchy. To paraphrase scholars Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace, the Gothic allows women to explore the hidden or censured expressions of dissatisfaction and resentment within patriarchal societies, being a “coded expression of women’s fears of entrapment within the domestic and within the female body” (Smith & Wallace 2).It may be easy to dismiss the Gothic as eldritch assemblages of Opheliac madness and abject hyperbole, I argue that it is valuable precisely because it invites the opening of festering wounds and the exploration of mouldering sepulchres that are shunned by the squeamish mainstream; coaxing the skeletons from the closet so that they may finally air their musty grievances. As Halberstam states in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, the Gothic represents the return of the repressed and thus encourages rather than censors the exploration of grief, madness and irrationality (Skin Shows 19). Accordingly, we may understand Lily’s rage as what Halberstam would refer to as a Monstrous Technology (21-22) – more specifically, a technology of the Monstrous Feminine: a significant site of disruption within Gothic narratives that not only ‘shows’ the source of its abjection, but angrily airs its dirty laundry for everyone to see.Here emerges the distinction between the ‘non-whinging’, respectable feminism advocated by the likes of Greer and Lily’s Monstrous, Gothic Feminism. Observing a demonstration by a group of suffragettes, Lily describes their efforts as unambitious – “their enemies are same, but they seek equality” (“Good and Evil Braided Be”). Lily has set her sights upon mastery. By allowing her rage to manifest freely, her movement has manifested as the violent misandry that anti-suffragists and contemporary anti-feminists alike believe is characteristic of women’s liberation, provoking an uncomfortable moment for ‘good’ feminists who desperately wish to avoid such pejorative stereotypes.What Lily offers is not ethical. It does not conform to any justifiable feminist ideology. She represents that which is repressed, a distinctly female rage that has no place within any rational system of belief. Nonetheless, Lily remains a sympathetic character, her “doomed, keening women” (“Ebb Tide”) evoking a quiet, subversive thrill of solidarity that must be immediately hushed. This, I assert, is indicative of the liminal ambiguity that makes the Monstrous Feminine so unsettling, and so significant.And Monsters are always significant. Their ‘Otherness’ functions like lighthouses of meaning. Further, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (6) reminds us, Monsters signify not only the fragile boundaries of human subjectivity and discourse, but also the origins of the alterity that defines them. Like the tragic creature of Shelley’s masterpiece, Monsters eventually follow their creators home to demand an explanation – their revenant terror demands accountability (Cohen 20). What Lily exemplifies does not have to make others comfortable, and it is under no obligation to remain within any standards of ethics. To return one last time to Halberstam, I argue that the Monstrosity manifested within female rage is valuable precisely because it because it obliges us “to be unsettled by the politically problematic connections history throws our way” (Halberstam, Queer Art 162). Therefore, to be angry, to dwell on traumatic pasts, and to revel in the ‘failure’ of negativity is to ensure that these genealogies are not ignored.When finally captured, Victor Frankenstein attempts to lobotomise her, promising to permanently take away the pain that is the cause of her Monstrous rage. To this, Lily responds: “there are some wounds that can never heal. There are scars that make us who we are, but without them, we don’t exist” (“Perpetual Night and the Blessed Dark”). Lily refuses to let go of her grief and her anger, and in so doing she fails to coalesce within the placid, docile femininity demanded by Victor Frankenstein. But her refusal is not premised in an obdurate reactionism. Rather, it is a tactic of survival. By her own words, without her trauma – and that of countless women before her – she does not exist. The violence of rape, abuse and the theft of her agency have defined her as both a woman and as a Monster. “I’m the sum part of one woman’s days. No more, no less”, she tells Frankenstein. To eschew her rage is to deny its origin.So, to finish I ask readers to take a moment, and dwell on that rage. On women’s rage. On yours. On the rage that may have been directed at you. Does that make you uncomfortable?Good.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35.3 (2010): 571-593.Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 3-25.Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993.“Ebb Tide.”. Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.“Good and Evil Braided Be.” Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. USA: Duke UP, 1995.———. The Queer Art of Failure. 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