Letteratura scientifica selezionata sul tema "Mid-century White House Conference on Children and Youth"

Introduction In September 2022, American retail giant Walmart launched two new gaming experiences onto popular multi-platform gaming experience Roblox, entitled Walmart Land and Walmart Universe of Play. First released in 2006, Roblox is an online multiplayer programme and a virtual gaming world that is part of a rise of other similar programmes, including Minecraft (2009), Pokémon GO (2016), and Fortnite (2013). Like these other games, it is also a multi-platform program, which means that “it can be played on computers, tablets, mobiles or video consoles, thus enabling its ubiquitous access” (Meier et al. 269). In that sense, these games and programmes have inherited the ubiquity that occurred through the popularity of mobile devices, smart phones, and tablets, where “games are never further than arm’s length” (Leaver & Wilson 2). It is believed that the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021 ended up intensifying user interest in Roblox as it became a site for virtual and online socialisation through its multiplayer construction and play (Cucco). Recently, Roblox has earned the reputation of being the “children’s metaverse”: as Andrew Hutchinson has noted, in the gaming worlds of Roblox “we do already have basic templates for what the metaverse may look like… where youngsters interact via digital avatars, and move from experience to experience in a 3D environment”. Roblox is essentially a host to a compendium of user-generated content games that fit into many game genres, including role player games, obbys (obstacle course games), tycoon, fantasy, adventure, strategy, simulations, and many others. In Roblox, users create personal avatars that can move and negotiate in first person through online worlds. While Roblox is aimed at players of all ages, it has been especially targeted towards younger children and teenage users, and research suggests that the programme predominantly hosts child players (Geffen). Meier et al. suggest that Roblox “is a program that offers the possibility of creating and sharing three-dimensional virtual environments easily and has an interface suitable for children” (269). Walmart’s two Roblox games demand critical attention because the virtual worlds that have been created for Roblox present knowledge about the way that a “metaverse” might be imagined for young players on the system. This is especially important due to the troubling vision of commodified and fully themed corporate shopping experiences (e.g., Ernest Cline’s dystopian novel Ready Player One (2011) of virtual worlds owned by a billionaire). An examination of these games means also examining the ways that children are exposed to commodity culture, and understanding the ways that children’s culture has been commodified through gamified experiences and technologies. As I demonstrate in this article, concern about the games‘ function as advertising for Roblox has seen action from consumer watchdog groups labelling the games as “advergames”, and recently one of the games has been removed from Roblox by Walmart. As Natalie Coulter has argued, there is a long history of consumer culture’s link with children’s media, but from the mid-twentieth century and beyond, the marketplace “has become more tightly enmeshed with children and their culture” (410). While “youth” has become a marketing category – fractured into smaller and smaller marketing niches – Coulter argues that in the twenty first century the rise of Websites and Web games have worked to “link toys and the virtual world together”, where children’s online time can now be considered “basically commercial time where there is no distinction between content and an advertisement for the toy” (419). This has been simultaneous with converged technologies that also merge storytelling with consumer products. Jason Bainbridge has noted that “merchandising is now regularly used to extend and enrich narratives, to personalise media properties, increase the cultural circulation (or shelf-life) of properties and occasionally even enable them to jump media platforms and survive in entirely new textual environments” (24). Given that Roblox is already a space of enmeshed commercial activity, play and financial transaction – especially through its internal currency of “Robux” that is used for avatar and in-game purchases – the Walmart games present yet another complex layering of these personal and corporate dimensions as an aspect of gameplay. The two Walmart games are designed to appeal to different age groups and users – Walmart Land is aimed at older children and young adults, through its creation of a live pop music virtual world, while Walmart Universe of Play is clearly marketed toward younger children through its focus on showcasing major toy brands (these included L.O.L. Surprise!, Jurassic World, Paw Patrol, Magic Mixies and Razor Scooters). In this article, I examine the two Walmart Roblox games through formal analysis of their gameplay, focussing on the ways that both games are incentivising play and how they link to in-game purchases and the Walmart brand. I argue that both games are designed to link gameplay with a highly personalised shopping experience, which blurs the boundaries between games and branded advertising. For this reason, I suggest that close attention should be given to contemporary corporate games that develop visions of a “metaverse”, as they may not have the user’s interests in mind so much as their organisation’s profit margin. Walmart’s Roblox games Walmart Land is a walk-through fantasy world that focusses on pop culture, fashion, and music: like many of the “worlds” of Roblox, it presents as a small archipelago, surrounded by sea, with the action taking place on the interconnected islands. The islands are shaped into the “spark” shape of the Walmart logo – there is one central island or “hub” (and starting point), surrounded by radiating longer islands connected by bridges. Users can walk along the series of pathways and bridges between the islands, or else shortcut via monorail to key stopovers, or finally use a portal to travel to whatever part of the “world” is most appealing (this is typical of the travel experience provided in Roblox games). There are also “obby” areas with parkour-like jumps to exciting places, and surreal locations such as a forest of broccoli and a maze of cut fruit slices. Across these islands, users are encouraged to participate, earn tokens, and explore all the areas in more detail: for example, at the “Food Truck Park”, you can find recipes for “Great Value” dishes such as “Skillet Beef Burrito”, where users are encouraged to “take a snapshot with your device” of the full recipe for making later. Tokens (visually, they are coins) are placed along the pathways of the islands, which when collected can be used as payment for in-game purchases. The tokens can be spent on Walmart fashion and accessories: for example, as I play the game there is a Free Assembly rugby polo that can be purchased for 110 tokens (Free Assembly is a Walmart fashion label). The other way to earn tokens is to participate in the various mini-games located at many of the Walmart Land’s sites. For example, there is a “Dance Off Challenge” where your avatar can try out a range of funky moves and “win” the dance-off, and a Netflix trivia challenge which grants credits to film and television knowledge. There is an “Electric Island” that according to Walmart’s marketing has been “inspired by the world’s greatest music festivals”, although the concert stage is empty as I visit. You can access the live music stage via a red carpet that is flanked by paparazzi figures clamouring to take your avatar’s photo. While the stage is typically inactive when I have accessed the game, according to Walmart’s marketing materials there have previously been musical performances from pop stars such as YUNGBLUD and Madison Beer. Then, there are singular mini-games on each island: such as a DJ booth where users can play at practicing beats; and a roller rink for blading tricks. Within Walmart Land, users can access virtual merchandise (“verch”) for the user avatar and earn tokens and games from competitions. There is a “House of Style” space with dressing rooms, which is the main location for purchase of avatar fashion with the earned tokens. As this description suggests, Walmart Land resembles in a retro way the kind of experience had in a supermarket store or a mega-mall / shopping centre, where there are “aisles/isles”, or segmented and themed areas of entertainment. The dream-like “land” aims to create a phantasmagoria, with idiosyncratic personal travel that constitutes a real-life shopping experience, hence it includes personally satisfying flânerie for distinctiveness and originality. Yet, this seems to be one of the failings of the experience: playing through this world, choices are limited, and the in-games feel simplistic, and unlikely to sustain interest across multiple visits. This game seems particularly in need of updates with novel content, such as the live concert experiences on the empty stage. The second game, Walmart Universe of Play, has a similar structure and format to Walmart Land, although the focus is squarely placed on bringing to life pre-existing toy franchises that are readily available at the retail company’s stores. For this reason, there is a much greater focus on Walmart’s brand partners in this game than in Walmart Land, except the separate themed areas seem to be fully “owned” by these brands. Again, it presents a magical wonderland full of surreal and fantastic games and events. The term “Universe of Play” is a direct reference to the name of Walmart’s real-life toy department from their bricks and mortar stores. In this game, the focus is on earning free verch that promotes either Walmart or its nominated brands (e.g. L.O.L. Surprise!, Jurassic World, Paw Patrol, Magic Mixies, and Razor Scooters). As users walk along in this world, large wrapped gift boxes appear on the pathways that can be opened through the “Interact” function. The virtual “gifts” end up being virtual images of real-life products, which arguably constitutes a pure, visual advertisement for the toy. As with Walmart Land, the game resembles the multi-world format of the retail chain itself, and the 3-D travel that is an in-built feature of Roblox’s gameplay allows users to explore “immersive worlds” connected to brand franchises, earn rewards through collection of tokens that can be redeemed for virtual merchandise and toys. There is also travel on special vehicles, such as flying hoverboards. Many of the updates in the game focus on the promotion of toy products, such as the virtual drone that can highlight the “hottest toy world of the season” (Walmart). In this way, the updates seem to emulate catalogue delivery, with the world itself a kind of virtual catalogue for purchasable products. Then, the real store’s catalogue becomes a way of learning about the game, as it offers readers codes to exclusive privileges within the Roblox game. So, there is a virtual-real crossover between the game and children’s experiences in the real-life store, inviting users to imagine that the virtual world is an extension of the real one. Through earning tokens, all of the games are designed for virtual purchases, and while these are free, they normalise the typical experience of Roblox where one’s presentation of identity (through the personal avatar) is strongly linked with in-game transactions. Discussion So, how do we make sense of these Walmart games on Roblox? Some commentators have observed that the new Walmart games do not seem to provide innovative or playful experiences, in contrast to many of the games on the Roblox platform. Writing for Forbes magazine, Paul Tassi has suggested that the Walmart logo of Walmart Land looms in the background “like a digital Eye of Sauron”, and questions the originality of the games: But who wants … Walmart Land? I’d argue nobody, and it’s just a branded, less interesting version of playspaces that already exist in Roblox a thousand times over, without a corporation attached. It is worth examining the motivation for the branded partnership from both organisations. For Roblox, the Walmart partnership was economically important: it represented one of its first major corporate partnerships with central intention to release virtual product into the Roblox game system. Typically, corporate partnerships with Roblox had led to the partnered brands creating tangible, “real life” ancillary Roblox toys and merchandise that could be purchased at toy stores (e.g., figurines, boardgames, and toy guns). (Some examples of Roblox’s recent brand toy partnerships: Hasbro created a Roblox 2022 edition of Monopoly; NERF has released NERF guns based upon particular Roblox games Adopt Me!, Arsenal, Jailbreak, Mad City, Murder Mystery 2, and Phantom Forces. Also, Roblox game studios have gone on to create their own toy lines: for example, Gamefam released a set of dolls based on their game Twilight Daycare.) In this case, the toy store (a.k.a. Walmart) has itself gone virtual, which means that Walmart is also investing into Roblox’s vision of a playable “metaverse” for its young users. This is clearly significant, as it represents what could be the beginning of a new, lucrative model for co-branded game creation for Roblox, adding to ways of diversifying revenue for the company beyond its in-game micro-transactions (Vanian). The metaverse has been a key concept in Roblox’s recent strategic vision, and they have benefitted from the wider global interest in the metaverse, popularised in the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s presentation on metaverse futures for Facebook, sensationally renamed Meta at the Connect conference of October 2021. As Evans et al. have noted, 2021 was the year that the metaverse “truly hit the mainstream”, and Meta/Facebook is “arguably the current leader in the race to build the metaverse” (1). Yet, earlier that year Roblox also mentioned their own version of a metaverse at their first Investor Day video published on YouTube in February 2021 (Roblox Investor Day). In this video, CEO and co-founder David Baszucki specifically mentions that Roblox are evolving to become the “shepherds of the metaverse”, and that their vision includes the tenets of “identity”, “friends”, “immersiveness”, “frictionless”, “variety”, “anywhere”, “a vibrant economy”, and “trust and civility”. The Walmart games, then, present a part of the rich variety of content available on the Roblox system, although Baszucki is quick to emphasise the rich user-generated content provided by non-businesses and ordinary gamers: the content created by billion-dollar companies does not receive a mention as part of this revolutionary and utopian vision. In this way, we can see how Walmart – a megacorporation that has aggressively competed for the e-commerce of major retail rival Amazon since 2016 (Del Rey) – might choose to create content and join this virtual diversity with its large network of young users. Walmart’s investment demonstrates how companies are currently choosing to test out strategies across a range of virtual online worlds: investing into many different forms of the metaverse. The investment into the virtual play of Roblox represents the company’s new strategy of engagement with virtual e-commerce, as well as investigating metaverse futures. According to a CNBC interview with Walmart’s Chief Marketing Officer William White, the two Walmart games released onto Roblox were marketing tests of new kinds of consumer engagement for online and virtual shopping experiences, helping to learn about and gauge the changing shopping habits in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Repko). Part of the rationale for production of the games was for Walmart to learn about new ways to reach consumers, with developing metaverse technologies in mind: Roblox will serve as a testing ground for Walmart as it considers moves in the metaverse and beyond, said William White, Walmart’s chief marketing officer. He said the experiences are designed with the next generation of shoppers in mind, particularly Gen Z, generally defined as around age 25 or younger. White said the company is looking to learn from the partnership. “How are we driving relevance in cultural conversation? How are we developing community and engagement? How are we moving the needle from a brand favourability [standpoint] with younger audiences?” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to accomplish here.” (Repko) Yet, as this analysis of the gameplay in the two games reveals, advertising product seems key to the experiences gained in Walmart Land and Walmart Universe of Play. After the release of the games in 2022, critical media attention quickly turned to concerns about the blurred lines between games and marketing, and in January 2023 US media watchdogs Truth in Advertising.org (TINA.org) released a complaint about the Walmart Roblox games’ lack of disclosure that they were a form of children’s advertising and therefore constituted an “advergame” (Karabus; Perez). An “advergame” is defined as a “popular marketing tool used by companies to sell products to children” (Cho & Riddle 1309). Referring to the Walmart games, TINA.org noted that the games were “blurring the distinction between advertising content and organic content, and failing to provide any clear or conspicuous disclosures that the game (or contents within the game) are ads” (Truth in Advertising). Their concern was linked to the vulnerability of young children on Roblox, especially after academic research has suggested that younger and older children have difficulty in distinguishing between advertising and computer games; for example, Waiguny and Terlutter have indicated that children have more difficulty doing this than distinguishing between television programmes and advertising. In March 2023, Walmart closed down Walmart Universe of Play, although they have officially stated that the closure was a “planned part of its strategy” (Adams). In a statement, they noted that “the intent of our presence on Roblox is to continuously innovate … . Taking down some experiences to work on new [ones] is part of that innovation” (Adams). Walmart Land is still in operation on Roblox. The closure of one of the games demonstrates the level of experimentation that is taking place as companies invest in “metaverse” games: there are still fundamental concerns to iron out about virtual branded property and its links to advertising, especially in content that is specifically created for children. Conclusion This – and other – early case studies of toy brand partnerships on Roblox should be given attention because the ways that corporations link in with the socialisation and play factors of the game may have lasting impact upon the development and construction of online identities in 3-D immersive contexts. My hope is that the issues raised in this article link to broader debates in media-focussed cultural studies about the commodification of children’s experiences, the creation of “toyetic” media texts, and the broader and extensive discourse of media effects research and impacts on children and young people. Investigating the Walmart games also has implications for emerging research on the “metaverse” and the ways by which it will be commodified. Utilising methods such as formal game analysis helps to show how users may interact with games and brands in these fledgeling metaverse experiences. It may also demonstrate how some of the utopian ideals of the concept are compromised through the company’s bottom line, which for Roblox seems particularly linked to the creation of the virtual avatar, and the production of a unique online identity troublingly linked to purchase and consumption. Acknowledgment Many thanks to Louis Joseph Jeffs for our ongoing conversations about Roblox. References Adams, Peter. “Walmart Winds Down Roblox Play as Metaverse Lands in Privacy Crosshairs.” Marketing Dive, 28 Mar. 2023. Bainbridge, Jason. “From Toyetic to Toyesis: The Cultural Value of Merchandising.” Entertainment Values. Ed. S. Harrington. London: Palgrave, 2017. 23-29. Cho, Eunji, and Karyn Riddle. “Protecting Children: Testing a Stop-and-Take-a-Break Advergame Intervention Strategy.” International Journal of Consumer Studies 45 (2021): 1309-1321. Coulter, Natalie. “From the Top Drawer to the Bottom Line: The Commodification of Children’s Cultures.” Mediascapes: New Patterns in Canadian Communication. 2013. 409-426. Cucco, Jackie. “Jump into the ‘Roblox’ Metaverse for a New Era of Play.” The Toy Book, 20 Feb. 2022. <https://toybook.com/jump-into-the-roblox-metaverse-for-a-new-era-of-play/>. Del Rey, Jason. Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets. HarperCollins, 2023. Evans, Leighton, Jordan Frith, and Michael Saker. From Microverse to Metaverse: Modelling the Future through Today’s Virtual Worlds. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2022. Geffen, Jonathan. “Improving Co-Play between Parents and Children in a Roblox Game.” KTH Royal Institute of Technology School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2021. Hutchinson, Andrew. “The Development of Roblox Provides a Framework for the Metaverse Vision.” Social Media Today, 9 Sep. 2022. Karabus, Jude. “Walmart Runs Creepy ‘Advergame’ on Roblox, Where Kids Can Make Toy Wish Lists.” The Register, 25 Jan. 2023. <https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/25/walmarts_advergame_on_roblox_pushes/>. Leaver, Tama, and Michele Willson. “Social Networks, Casual Games and Mobile Devices: The Shifting Contexts of Gamers and Gaming.” Social, Casual and Mobile Games: The Changing Gaming Landscape. Eds. T. Leaver and M. Willson. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. 1-12. Meier, Cecile, Jose Luis Saorin, Alejandro Bonnet de Leon, and Alberto Guerrero Cobos. “Using the Roblox Video Game Engine for Creating Virtual Tours and Learning about the Sculptural Heritage.” International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning 15.20 (2020): 268-280. Perez, Sarah. “Consumer Advocacy Groups Want Walmart’s Roblox Game Audited for ‘Stealth Marketing’ to Kids.” Tech Crunch, 25 Jan. 2023. <https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/24/consumer-advocacy-groups-want-walmarts-roblox-game-audited-for-stealth-marketing-to-kids/>. Repko, Melissa. “Walmart Enters the Metaverse with Roblox Experiences Aimed at Younger Shoppers.” CNBC, 26 Sep., 2022. <https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/26/walmart-enters-the-metaverse-with-roblox.html>. Roblox. “Roblox Investor Day / February 26 2021.” 26 Feb. 2021. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1joSc0mRVg>. Tassi, Paul. “Roblox’s ‘Walmart Land’ Is Horseman of the Metaverse Apocalypse.” Forbes, 27 Sep., 2022. <https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/09/27/robloxs-walmart-land-is-horseman-of-the-metaverse-apocalypse/?sh=59e12a961419>. Truth in Advertising. “Letter to CARU re. Walmart Universe of Play.” 23 Jan. 2023. <https://truthinadvertising.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/1_23_23-Letter-to-CARU-re-Walmart-Universe-of-Play.pdf>. Vanian, Jonathan. “Roblox Jumps into Online Advertising as Revenue Growth Slows.” CNBC, 9 Sep.2022. <https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/09/roblox-jumping-into-ads-in-effort-to-diversify-beyond-virtual-goods-.html>. Waiguny, Martin, and Ralf Terlutter. “Differences in Children’s Processing of Advergames and TV Commercials.” Advances in Advertising Research 2 (2011): 35-51. Walmart.“Walmart Jumps into Roblox with Launch of Walmart Land and Walmart’s Universe of Play.” 26 Sep. 2022. <https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2022/09/26/walmart-jumps-into-roblox-with-launch-of-walmart-land-and-walmarts-universe-of-play>.

“...children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents...” — Stephen Kline, The Making of Children’s Culture We live in a world saturated by design and through design artefacts, one can glean unique insights into a culture's values and norms. In fact, some academics, such as British media and film theorist Ben Highmore, see the two areas so inextricably intertwined as to suggest a wholesale “re-branding of the cultural sciences as design studies” (14). Too often, however, everyday objects are marginalised or overlooked as objects of scholarly attention. The field of material culture studies seeks to change that by focussing on the quotidian object and its ability to reveal much about the time, place, and culture in which it was designed and used. This article takes on one such object, a mid-century children's toy tea set, whose humble journey from 1968 Sears catalogue to 2014 thrift shop—and subsequently this author’s basement—reveals complex rhetorical messages communicated both visually and verbally. As material culture studies theorist Jules Prown notes, the field’s foundation is laid upon the understanding “that objects made ... by man reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased or used them, and by extension the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged” (1-2). In this case, the objects’ material and aesthetic characteristics can be shown to reflect some of the pervasive stereotypes and gender roles of the mid-century and trace some of the prevailing tastes of the American middle class of that era, or perhaps more accurately the type of design that came to represent good taste and a modern aesthetic for that audience. A wealth of research exists on the function of toys and play in learning about the world and even the role of toy selection in early sex-typing, socialisation, and personal identity of children (Teglasi). This particular research area isn’t the focus of this article; however, one aspect that is directly relevant and will be addressed is the notion of adult role-playing among children and the role of toys in communicating certain adult practices or values to the child—what sociologist David Oswell calls “the dedifferentiation of childhood and adulthood” (200). Neither is the focus of this article the practice nor indeed the ethicality of marketing to children. Relevant to this particular example I suggest, is as a product utilising messaging aimed not at children but at adults, appealing to certain parents’ interest in nurturing within their child a perceived era and class-appropriate sense of taste. This was fuelled in large part by the curatorial pursuits of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, coupled with an interest and investment in raising their children in a design-forward household and a desire for toys that reflected that priority; in essence, parents wishing to raise modern children. Following Prown’s model of material culture analysis, the tea set is examined in three stages, through description, deduction and speculation with each stage building on the previous one. Figure 1: Porcelain Toy Tea Set. Description The tea set consists of twenty-six pieces that allows service for six. Six cups, saucers, and plates; a tall carafe with spout, handle and lid; a smaller vessel with a spout and handle; a small round bowl with a lid; a larger oval bowl with a lid, and a coordinated oval platter. The cups are just under two inches tall and two inches in diameter. The largest piece, the platter is roughly six inches by four inches. The pieces are made of a ceramic material white in colour and glossy in texture and are very lightweight. The rim or edge of each piece is decorated with a motif of three straight lines in two different shades of blue and in different thicknesses, interspersed with a set of three black wiggly lines. Figure 2: Porcelain Toy Tea Set Box. The set is packaged for retail purposes and the original box appears to be fully intact. The packaging of an object carries artefactual evidence just as important as what it contains that falls into the category of a “‘para-artefact’ … paraphernalia that accompanies the product (labels, packaging, instructions etc.), all of which contribute to a product’s discourse” (Folkmann and Jensen 83). The graphics on the box are colourful, featuring similar shades of teal blue as found on the objects, with the addition of orange and a silver sticker featuring the logo of the American retailer Sears. The cover features an illustration of the objects on an orange tabletop. The most prominent text that confirms that the toy is a “Porcelain Toy Tea Set” is in an organic, almost psychedelic style that mimics both popular graphics of this era—especially album art and concert posters—as well as the organic curves of steam that emanate from the illustrated teapot’s spout. Additional messages appear on the box, in particular “Contemporary DESIGN” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. Along the edges of the box lid, a detail of the decorative motif is reproduced somewhat abstracted from what actually appears on the ceramic objects. Figure 3: Sears’s Christmas Wishbook Catalogue, page 574 (1968). Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Sears) is well-known for its over one-hundred-year history of producing printed merchandise catalogues. The catalogue is another important para-artefact to consider in analysing the objects. The tea set first appeared in the 1968 Sears Christmas Wishbook. There is no date or copyright on the box, so only its inclusion in the catalogue allows the set to be accurately dated. It also allows us to understand how the set was originally marketed. Deduction In the deduction phase, we focus on the sensory aesthetic and functional interactive qualities of the various components of the set. In terms of its function, it is critical that we situate the objects in their original use context, play. The light weight of the objects and thinness of the ceramic material lends the objects a delicate, if not fragile, feeling which indicates that this set is not for rough use. Toy historian Lorraine May Punchard differentiates between toy tea sets “meant to be used by little girls, having parties for their friends and practising the social graces of the times” and smaller sets or doll dishes “made for little girls to have parties with their dolls, or for their dolls to have parties among themselves” (7). Similar sets sold by Sears feature images of girls using the sets with both human playmates and dolls. The quantity allowing service for six invites multiple users to join the party. The packaging makes clear that these toy tea sets were intended for imaginary play only, rendering them non-functional through an all-capitals caution declaiming “IMPORTANT: Do not use near heat”. The walls and handles of the cups are so thin one can imagine that they would quickly become dangerous if filled with a hot liquid. Nevertheless, the lid of the oval bowl has a tan stain or watermark which suggests actual use. The box is broken up by pink cardboard partitions dividing it into segments sized for each item in the set. Interestingly even the small squares of unfinished corrugated cardboard used as cushioning between each stacked plate have survived. The evidence of careful re-packing indicates that great care was taken in keeping the objects safe. It may suggest that even though the set was used, the children or perhaps the parents, considered the set as something to care for and conserve for the future. Flaws in the glaze and applique of the design motif can be found on several pieces in the set and offer some insight as to the technique used in producing these items. Errors such as the design being perfectly evenly spaced but crooked in its alignment to the rim, or pieces of the design becoming detached or accidentally folded over and overlapping itself could only be the result of a print transfer technique popularised with decorative china of the Victorian era, a technique which lends itself to mass production and lower cost when compared to hand decoration. Speculation In the speculation stage, we can consider the external evidence and begin a more rigorous investigation of the messaging, iconography, and possible meanings of the material artefact. Aspects of the set allow a number of useful observations about the role of such an object in its own time and context. Sociologists observe the role of toys as embodiments of particular types of parental messages and values (Cross 292) and note how particularly in the twentieth century “children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents” (Kline 96). Throughout history children’s toys often reflected a miniaturised version of the adult world allowing children to role-play as imagined adult-selves. Kristina Ranalli explored parallels between the practice of drinking tea and the play-acting of the child’s tea party, particularly in the nineteenth century, as a gendered ritual of gentility; a method of socialisation and education, and an opportunity for exploratory and even transgressive play by “spontaneously creating mini-societies with rules of their own” (20). Such toys and objects were available through the Sears mail-order catalogue from the very beginning at the end of the nineteenth century (McGuire). Propelled by the post-war boom of suburban development and homeownership—that generation’s manifestation of the American Dream—concern with home décor and design was elevated among the American mainstream to a degree never before seen. There was a hunger for new, streamlined, efficient, modernist living. In his essay titled “Domesticating Modernity”, historian Jeffrey L. Meikle notes that many early modernist designers found that perhaps the most potent way to “‘domesticate’ modernism and make it more familiar was to miniaturise it; for example, to shrink the skyscraper and put it into the home as furniture or tableware” (143). Dr Timothy Blade, curator of the 1985 exhibition of girls’ toys at the University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Gallery—now the Goldstein Museum of Design—described in his introduction “a miniaturised world with little props which duplicate, however rudely, the larger world of adults” (5). Noting the power of such toys to reflect adult values of their time, Blade continues: “the microcosm of the child’s world, remarkably furnished by the miniaturised props of their parents’ world, holds many direct and implied messages about the society which brought it into being” (9). In large part, the mid-century Sears catalogues capture the spirit of an era when, as collector Thomas Holland observes, “little girls were still primarily being offered only the options of glamour, beauty and parenthood as the stuff of their fantasies” (175). Holland notes that “the Wishbooks of the fifties [and, I would add, the sixties] assumed most girls would follow in their mother’s footsteps to become full-time housewives and mommies” (1). Blade grouped toys into three categories: cooking, cleaning, and sewing. A tea set could arguably be considered part of the cooking category, but closer examination of the language used in marketing this object—“little hostesses”, et cetera—suggests an emphasis not on cooking but on serving or entertaining. This particular category was not prevalent in the era examined by Blade, but the cultural shifts of the mid-twentieth century, particularly the rapid popularisation of a suburban lifestyle, may have led to the use of entertaining as an additional distinct category of role play in the process of learning to become a “proper” homemaker. Sears and other retailers offered a wide variety of styles of toy tea sets during this era. Blade and numerous other sources observe that children’s toy furniture and appliances tended to reflect the style and aesthetic qualities of their contemporary parallels in the adult world, the better to associate the child’s objects to its adult equivalent. The toy tea set’s packaging trumpets messages intended to appeal to modernist values and identity including “Contemporary Design” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. The use of this coded marketing language, aimed particularly at parents, can be traced back several decades. In 1928 a group of American industrial and textile designers established the American Designers' Gallery in New York, in part to encourage American designers to innovate and adopt new styles such as those seen in the L’ Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925) in Paris, the exposition that sparked international interest in the Art Deco or Art Moderne aesthetic. One of the gallery founders, Ilonka Karasz, a Hungarian-American industrial and textile designer who had studied in Austria and was influenced by the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, publicised her new style of nursery furnishings as “designed for the very modern American child” (Brown 80). Sears itself was no stranger to the appeal of such language. The term “contemporary design” was ubiquitous in catalogue copy of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, used to describe everything from draperies (1959) and bedspreads (1961) to spice racks (1964) and the Lady Kenmore portable dishwasher (1961). An emphasis on the role of design in one’s life and surroundings can be traced back to efforts by MoMA. The museum’s interest in modern design hearkens back almost to the institution’s inception, particularly in relation to industrial design and the aestheticisation of everyday objects (Marshall). Through exhibitions and in partnership with mass-market magazines, department stores and manufacturer showrooms, MoMA curators evangelised the importance of “good design” a term that can be found in use as early as 1942. What Is Good Design? followed the pattern of prior exhibitions such as What Is Modern Painting? and situated modern design at the centre of exhibitions that toured the United States in the first half of the nineteen-fifties. To MoMA and its partners, “good design” signified the narrow identification of proper taste in furniture, home decor and accessories; effectively, the establishment of a design canon. The viewpoints enshrined in these exhibitions and partnerships were highly influential on the nation’s perception of taste for decades to come, as the trickle-down effect reached a much broader segment of consumers than those that directly experienced the museum or its exhibitions (Lawrence.) This was evident not only at high-end shops such as Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. Even mass-market retailers sought out well-known figures of modernist design to contribute to their offerings. Sears, for example, commissioned noted modernist designer and ceramicist Russel Wright to produce a variety of serving ware and decor items exclusively for the company. Notably for this study, he was also commissioned to create a toy tea set for children. The 1957 Wishbook touts the set as “especially created to delight modern little misses”. Within its Good Design series, MoMA exhibitions celebrated numerous prominent Nordic designers who were exploring simplified forms and new material technologies. In the 1968 Wishbook, the retailer describes the Porcelain Toy Tea Set as “Danish-inspired china for young moderns”. The reference to Danish design is certainly compatible with the modernist appeal; after the explosion in popularity of Danish furniture design, the term “Danish Modern” was commonly used in the nineteen-fifties and sixties as shorthand for pan-Scandinavian or Nordic design, or more broadly for any modern furniture design regardless of origin that exhibited similar characteristics. In subsequent decades the notion of a monolithic Scandinavian-Nordic design aesthetic or movement has been debunked as primarily an economically motivated marketing ploy (Olivarez et al.; Fallan). In the United States, the term “Danish Modern” became so commonly misused that the Danish Society for Arts and Crafts called upon the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to legally restrict the use of the labels “Danish” and “Danish Modern” to companies genuinely originating in Denmark. Coincidentally the FTC ruled on this in 1968, noting “that ‘Danish Modern’ carries certain meanings, and... that consumers might prefer goods that are identified with a foreign culture” (Hansen 451). In the case of the Porcelain Toy Tea Set examined here, Sears was not claiming that the design was “Danish” but rather “Danish-inspired”. One must wonder, was this another coded marketing ploy to communicate a sense of “Good Design” to potential customers? An examination of the formal qualities of the set’s components, particularly the simplified geometric forms and the handle style of the cups, confirms that it is unlike a traditional—say, Victorian-style—tea set. Punchard observes that during this era some American tea sets were actually being modelled on coffee services rather than traditional tea services (148). A visual comparison of other sets sold by Sears in the same year reveals a variety of cup and pot shapes—with some similar to the set in question—while others exhibit more traditional teapot and cup shapes. Coffee culture was historically prominent in Nordic cultures so there is at least a passing reference to that aspect of Nordic—if not specifically Danish—influence in the design. But what of the decorative motif? Simple curved lines were certainly prominent in Danish furniture and architecture of this era, and occasionally found in combination with straight lines, but no connection back to any specific Danish motif could be found even after consultation with experts in the field from the Museum of Danish America and the Vesterheim National Norwegian-American Museum (personal correspondence). However, knowing that the average American consumer of this era—even the design-savvy among them—consumed Scandinavian design without distinguishing between the various nations, a possible explanation could be contained in the promotion of Finnish textiles at the time. In the decade prior to the manufacture of the tea set a major design tendency began to emerge in the United States, triggered by the geometric design motifs of the Finnish textile and apparel company Marimekko. Marimekko products were introduced to the American market in 1959 via the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based retailer Design Research (DR) and quickly exploded in popularity particularly after would-be First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy appeared in national media wearing Marimekko dresses during the 1960 presidential campaign and on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. (Thompson and Lange). The company’s styling soon came to epitomise a new youth aesthetic of the early nineteen sixties in the United States, a softer and more casual predecessor to the London “mod” influence. During this time multiple patterns were released that brought a sense of whimsy and a more human touch to classic mechanical patterns and stripes. The patterns Piccolo (1953), Helmipitsi (1959), and Varvunraita (1959), all designed by Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi offered varying motifs of parallel straight lines. Maija Isola's Silkkikuikka (1961) pattern—said to be inspired by the plumage of the Great Crested Grebe—combined parallel serpentine lines with straight and angled lines, available in a variety of colours. These and other geometrically inspired patterns quickly inundated apparel and decor markets. DR built a vastly expanded Cambridge flagship store and opened new locations in New York in 1961 and 1964, and in San Francisco in 1965 fuelled in no small part by the fact that they remained the exclusive outlet for Marimekko in the United States. It is clear that Marimekko’s approach to pattern influenced designers and manufacturers across industries. Design historian Lesley Jackson demonstrates that Marimekko designs influenced or were emulated by numerous other companies across Scandinavia and beyond (72-78). The company’s influence grew to such an extent that some described it as a “conquest of the international market” (Hedqvist and Tarschys 150). Subsequent design-forward retailers such as IKEA and Crate and Barrel continue to look to Marimekko even today for modern design inspiration. In 2016 the mass-market retailer Target formed a design partnership with Marimekko to offer an expansive limited-edition line in their stores, numbering over two hundred items. So, despite the “Danish” misnomer, it is quite conceivable that designers working for or commissioned by Sears in 1968 may have taken their aesthetic cues from Marimekko’s booming work, demonstrating a clear understanding of the contemporary high design aesthetic of the time and coding the marketing rhetoric accordingly even if incorrectly. Conclusion The Sears catalogue plays a unique role in capturing cross-sections of American culture not only as a sales tool but also in Holland’s words as “a beautifully illustrated diary of America, it’s [sic] people and the way we thought about things” (1). Applying a rhetorical and material culture analysis to the catalogue and the objects within it provides a unique glimpse into the roles these objects played in mediating relationships, transmitting values and embodying social practices, tastes and beliefs of mid-century American consumers. Adult consumers familiar with the characteristics of the culture of “Good Design” potentially could have made a connection between the simplified geometric forms of the components of the toy tea set and say the work of modernist tableware designers such as Kaj Franck, or between the set’s graphic pattern and the modernist motifs of Marimekko and its imitators. But for a much broader segment of the population with a less direct understanding of modernist aesthetics, those connections may not have been immediately apparent. The rhetorical messaging behind the objects’ packaging and marketing used class and taste signifiers such as modern, contemporary and “Danish” to reinforce this connection to effect an emotional and aspirational appeal. These messages were coded to position the set as an effective transmitter of modernist values and to target parents with the ambition to create “appropriately modern” environments for their children. 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Folkmann, Mads Nygaard, and Hans-Christian Jensen. “Subjectivity in Self-Historicization: Design and Mediation of a ‘New Danish Modern’ Living Room Set.” Design and Culture 7.1 (2015): 65–84. Hansen, Per H. “Networks, Narratives, and New Markets: The Rise and Decline of Danish Modern Furniture Design, 1930–1970.” The Business History Review 80.3 (2006): 449–83. Hedqvist, Hedvig, and Rebecka Tarschys. “Thoughts on the International Reception of Marimekko.” Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashions, Architecture. Ed. Marianne Aav. Bard. 2003. 149–71. Highmore, Ben. The Design Culture Reader. Routledge, 2008. Holland, Thomas W. Girls’ Toys of the Fifties and Sixties: Memorable Catalog Pages from the Legendary Sears Christmas Wishbooks, 1950-1969. Windmill, 1997. Hucal, Sarah. "Scandi Crush Saga: How Scandinavian Design Took over the World." Curbed, 23 Mar. 2016. <http://www.curbed.com/2016/3/23/11286010/scandinavian-design-arne-jacobsen-alvar-aalto-muuto-artek>. Jackson, Lesley. “Textile Patterns in an International Context: Precursors, Contemporaries, and Successors.” Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashions, Architecture. Ed. Marianne Aav. Bard. 2003. 44–83. Kline, Stephen. “The Making of Children’s Culture.” The Children’s Culture Reader. Ed. Henry Jenkins. New York: NYU P, 1998. 95–109. Lawrence, Sidney. “Declaration of Function: Documents from the Museum of Modern Art’s Design Crusade, 1933-1950.” Design Issues 2.1 (1985): 65–77. Marshall, Jennifer Jane. Machine Art 1934. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. McGuire, Sheila. “Playing House: Sex-Roles and the Child’s World.” Child’s Play, Woman’s Work: An Exhibition of Miniature Toy Appliances : June 12, 1985–September 29, 1985. St. Paul: Goldstein Gallery, U Minnesota, 1985. Meikel, Jeffrey L. “Domesticating Modernity: Ambivalence and Appropriation, 1920–1940.” Designing Modernity; the Arts of Reform and Persuasion. Ed. Wendy Kaplan. Thames & Hudson, 1995. 143–68. O’Brien, Marion, and Aletha C. Huston. “Development of Sex-Typed Play Behavior in Toddlers.” Developmental Psychology, 21.5 (1985): 866–71. Olivarez, Jennifer Komar, Jukka Savolainen, and Juulia Kauste. Finland: Designed Environments. Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Nordic Heritage Museum, 2014. Oswell, David. The Agency of Children: From Family to Global Human Rights. Cambridge UP, 2013. Prown, Jules David. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio 17.1 (1982): 1–19. Punchard, Lorraine May. Child’s Play: Play Dishes, Kitchen Items, Furniture, Accessories. Punchard, 1982. Ranalli, Kristina. An Act Apart: Tea-Drinking, Play and Ritual. Master's thesis. U Delaware, 2013. Sears Corporate Archives. “What Is a Sears Modern Home?” n.d. <http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/index.htm>. "Target Announces New Design Partnership with Marimekko: It’s Finnish, Target Style." Target, 2 Mar. 2016. <http://corporate.target.com/article/2016/03/marimekko-for-target>. Teglasi, Hedwig. “Children’s Choices of and Value Judgments about Sex-Typed Toys and Occupations.” Journal of Vocational Behavior 18.2 (1981): 184–95. Thompson, Jane, and Alexandra Lange. Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes. Chronicle, 2010.

In this article I discuss a story told by the South Australian Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal elder, Aunty Hilda Wilson (nee Varcoe), about the time when, at not quite sixteen, she was sent from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Station to work in the Adelaide Hills, some 500 kilometres away, as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”. Her secondment was part of a widespread practice in early and mid-twentieth century Australia of placing young Aboriginal women “of marriageable age” from missions and government reserves into domestic service. Consciously deploying Indigenous storytelling practices as pedagogy, Hilda Wilson recounted this episode in a number of distinct ways during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Across these iterations, each building on the other, she exhibited a personal resilience in her subjectivity, embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems of relationality, kin and work, which informed her agency and determination in a challenging situation in which she was both caring for a white socially-privileged family of five, while simultaneously grappling with the injustices of a state system of segregated indentured labour. Kirmayer and colleagues propose that “notions of resilience emerging from developmental psychology and psychiatry in recent years address the distinctive cultures, geographic and social settings, and histories of adversity of indigenous peoples”. Resilience is understood here as an ability to actively engage with traumatic change, involving the capacity to absorb stress and to transform in order to cope with it (Luthar et al.). Further to this, in an Indigenous context, Marion Kickett has found the capacity for resilience to be supported by three key factors: family connections, culture and belonging as well as notions of identity and history. In exploring the layers of this autobiographical story, I employ this extended psychological notion of resilience in both a domestic ambit as well as the broader social context for Indigenous people surviving a system of external domination. Additionally I consider the resilience Aunty Hilda demonstrates at a pivotal interlude between girlhood and womanhood within the trajectory of her overall long and productive life, and within an intergenerational history of resistance and accommodation. What is especially important about her storytelling is its refusal to be contained by the imaginary of the settler nation and its generic Aboriginal-female subject. She refuses victimhood while at the same time illuminating the mechanisms of injustice, hinting also at possibilities for alternative and more equitable relationships of family and work across cultural divides. Considered through this prism, resilience is, I suggest, also a quality firmly connected to ideas of Aboriginal cultural-sovereignty and standpoint and to, what Victoria Grieves has identified as, the Aboriginal knowledge value of sharing (25, 28, 45). Storytelling as Pedagogy The story I discuss was verbally recounted in a manner that Westphalen describes as “a continuation of Dreaming Stories”, functioning to educate and connect people and country (13-14). As MacGill et al. note, “the critical and transformative aspects of decolonising pedagogies emerge from storytelling and involve the gift of narrative and the enactment of reciprocity that occurs between the listener and the storyteller.” Hilda told me that as a child she was taught not to ask questions when listening to the stories of an Elder, and her own children were raised in this manner. Hilda's oldest daughter described this as a process involving patience, intrigue and surprise (Elva Wanganeen). Narratives unfold through nuance and repetition in a complexity of layers that can generate multiple levels of meaning over time. Circularity and recursivity underlie this pedagogy through which mnemonic devices are built so that stories become re-membered and inscribed on the body of the listener. When a perceived level of knowledge-transference has occurred, a narrator may elect to elaborate further, adding another detail that will often transform the story’s social, cultural, moral or political context. Such carefully chosen additional detail, however, might re-contextualise all that has gone before. As well as being embodied, stories are also emplaced, and thus most appropriately told in the Country where events occurred. (Here I use the Aboriginal English term “Country” which encompasses home, clan estate, and the powerful complex of spiritual, animate and inanimate forces that bind people and place.) Hilda Wilson’s following account of her first job as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”, Dr Frank Swann, provides an illustration of how she expertly uses traditional narrative forms of incrementally structured knowledge transmission within a cross-cultural setting to tell a story that expresses practices of resilience as resistance and transformation at its core. A “White Doctor” Story: The First Layer Aunty Hilda first told me this story when we were winding along the South Eastern Freeway through the Adelaide hills between Murray Bridge and Mount Barker, in 1997, on our way home to Adelaide from a trip to Camp Coorong, the Ngarrindjeri cultural education centre co-founded by her granddaughter. She was then 86 years old. Ahead of us, the profile of Mt Lofty rose out of the plains and into view. The highest peak in the Mount Lofty ranges, Yurrebilla, as it is known to Kaurna Aboriginal people, or Mt Lofty, has been an affluent enclave of white settlement for Adelaide’s moneyed elite since early colonial times. Being in place, or in view of place, provided the appropriate opportunity for her to tell me the story. It belongs to a group of stories that during our initial period of working together changed little over time until one day two years later she an added contextual detail which turned it inside out. Hilda described the doctor’s spacious hill-top residence, and her responsibilities of caring for Dr Swann’s invalid wife (“an hysteric who couldn't do anything for herself”), their twin teenage boys (who attended private college in the city) along with another son and younger daughter living at home (pers. com. Hilda Wilson). Recalling the exhilaration of looking down over the sparkling lights of Adelaide at night from this position of apparent “privilege” on the summit, she related this undeniably as a success story, justifiably taking great pride in her achievements as a teenager, capable of stepping into the place of the non-Indigenous doctor's wife in running the large and demanding household. Successfully undertaking a wide range of duties employed in the care of a family, including the disabled mother, she is an active participant crucial to the lives of all in the household, including to the work of the doctor and the twin boys in private education. Hilda recalled that Mrs Swann was unable to eat without her assistance. As the oldest daughter of a large family Hilda had previously assisted in caring for her younger siblings. Told in this way, her account collapses social distinctions, delineating a shared social and physical space, drawing its analytic frame from an Indigenous ethos of subjectivity, relationality, reciprocity and care. Moreover Hilda’s narrative of domestic service demonstrates an assertion of agency that resists colonial and patriarchal hegemony and inverts the master/mistress-servant relationship, one she firmly eschews in favour of the self-affirming role of the lady of the house. (It stands in contrast to the abuse found in other accounts for example Read, Tucker, Kartinyeri. Often the key difference was a continuity of family connections and ongoing family support.) Indeed the home transformed into a largely feminised and cross-culturalised space in which she had considerable agency and responsibility when the doctor was absent. Hilda told me this story several times in much the same way during our frequent encounters over the next two years. Each telling revealed further details that fleshed a perspective gained from what Patricia Hill Collins terms an “epistemic privilege” via her “outsider-within status” of working within a white household, lending an understanding of its social mechanisms (12-15). She also stressed the extent of her duty of care in upholding the family’s well-being, despite the work at times being too burdensome. The Second Version: Coming to Terms with Intersecting Oppressions Later, as our relationship developed and deepened, when I began to record her life-narrative as part of my doctoral work, she added an unexpected detail that altered its context completely: It was all right except I slept outside in a tin shed and it was very cold at night. Mount Lofty, by far the coldest part of Adelaide, frequently experiences winter maximum temperatures of two or three degrees and often light snowfalls. This skilful reframing draws on Indigenous storytelling pedagogy and is expressly used to invite reflexivity, opening questions that move the listener from the personal to the public realm in which domestic service and the hegemony of the home are pivotal in coming to terms with the overlapping historical oppressions of class, gender, race and nation. Suddenly we witness her subjectivity starkly shift from one self-defined and allied with an equal power relationship – or even of dependency reversal cast as “de-facto doctor's wife” – to one diminished by inequity and power imbalance in the outsider-defined role of “mistreated servant”. The latter was signalled by the dramatic addition of a single signifying detail as a decoding device to a deeper layer of meaning. In this parallel stratum of the story, Hilda purposefully brings into relief the politics in which “the private domain of women's housework intersected with the public domain of governmental social engineering policies” (Haskins 4). As Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out, what for White Australia was cheap labour and a civilising mission, for Indigenous women constituted stolen children and slavery. Protection and then assimilation were government policies under which Indigenous women grew up. (96) Hilda was sent away from her family to work in 1927 by the universally-feared Sister Pearl McKenzie, a nurse who too-zealously (Katinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Calling, 23) oversaw the Chief Protector’s policies of “training” Aboriginal children from the South Australian missions in white homes once they reached fourteen (Haebich, 316—20). Indeed many prominent Adelaide hills’ families benefited from Aboriginal labour under this arrangement. Hilda explained her struggle with the immense cultural dislocation that removal into domestic service entailed, a removal her grandfather William Rankine had travelled from Raukkan to Government House to protest against less than a decade earlier (The Register December 21, 1923). This additional layer of story also illuminates Hilda’s capacity for resilience and persistence in finding a way forward through the challenge of her circumstances (Luthar et al.), drawing on her family networks and sense of personhood (Kickett). Hilda related that her father visited her at Mount Lofty twice, though briefly, on his way to shearing jobs in the south-east of the state. “He said it was no good me living like this,” she stated. Through his active intervention, reinforcement was requested and another teenager from Point Pearce, Hilda’s future husband’s cousin, Annie Sansbury, soon arrived to share the workload. But, Hilda explained, the onerous expectations coupled with the cultural segregation of retiring to the tin shed quickly became too much for Annie, who stayed only three months, leaving Hilda coping again alone, until her father applied additional pressure for a more suitable placement to be found for his daughter. In her next position, working for the family of a racehorse trainer, Hilda contentedly shared the bedroom with the small boy for whom she cared, and not long after returned to Point Pearce where she married Robert Wilson and began a family of her own. Gendered Resilience across Cultural Divides Hilda explicitly speaks into these spaces to educate me, because all but a few white women involved have remained silent about their complicity with state sanctioned practices which exploited Indigenous labour and removed children from their families through the policies of protection and assimilation. For Indigenous women, speaking out was often fraught with the danger of a deeper removal from family and Country, even of disappearance. Victoria Haskins writes extensively of two cases in New South Wales where young Aboriginal women whose protests concerning their brutal treatment at the hands of white employers, resulted in their wrongful and prolonged committal to mental health and other institutions (147-52, 228-39). In the indentured service of Indigenous women it is possible to see oppression operating through Eurocentric ideologies of race, class and gender, in which Indigenous women were assumed to take on, through displacement, the more oppressed role of white women in pre-second world war non-Aboriginal Australian society. The troubling silent shadow-figure of the “doctor’s wife” indeed provides a haunting symbol of - and also a forceful rebellion against – the docile upper middle-class white femininity of the inter-war era. Susan Bordo has argued that that “the hysteric” is archetypal of a discourse of ‘pathology as embodied protest’ in which the body may […] be viewed as a surface on which conventional constructions of femininity are exposed starkly to view in extreme or hyperliteral form. (20) Mrs Swann’s vulnerability contrasts markedly with the strength Hilda expresses in coping with a large family, emanating from a history of equitable gender relations characteristic of Ngarrindjeri society (Bell). The intersection of race and gender, as Marcia Langton contends “continues to require deconstruction to allow us to decolonise our consciousness” (54). From Hilda’s brief description one grasps a relationship resonant with that between the protagonists in Tracy Moffat's Night Cries, (a response to the overt maternalism in the film Jedda) in which the white mother finds herself utterly reliant on her “adopted” Aboriginal daughter at the end of her life (46-7). Resilience and Survival The different versions of story Hilda deploys, provide a pedagogical basis to understanding the broader socio-political framework of her overall life narrative in which an ability to draw on the cultural continuity of the past to transform the future forms an underlying dynamic. This demonstrated capacity to meet the challenging conditions thrown up by the settler-colonial state has its foundations in the connectivity and cultural strength sustained generationally in her family. Resilience moves from being individually to socially determined, as in Kickett’s model. During the onslaught of dispossession, following South Australia’s 1836 colonial invasion, Ngarrindjeri were left near-starving and decimated from introduced diseases. Pullume (c1808-1888), the rupuli (elected leader of the Ngarrindjeri Tendi, or parliament), Hilda’s third generation great-grandfather, decisively steered his people through the traumatic changes, eventually negotiating a middle-path after the Point McLeay Mission was established on Ngarrindjeri country in 1859 (Jenkin, 59). Pullume’s granddaughter, the accomplished, independent-thinking Ellen Sumner (1842—1925), played an influential educative role during Hilda’s youth. Like other Ngarrindjeri women in her lineage, Ellen Sumner was skilled in putari practice (female doctor) and midwifery culture that extended to a duty of care concerning women and children (teaching her “what to do and what not to do”), which I suggest is something Hilda herself drew from when working with the Swann family. Hilda’s mother and aunties continued aspects of the putari tradition, attending births and giving instruction to women in the community (Bell, 171, Hughes Grandmother, 52-4). As mentioned earlier, when the South Australian government moved to introduce The Training of Children Act (SA) Hilda’s maternal grandfather William Rankine campaigned vigorously against this, taking a petition to the SA Governor in December 1923 (Haebich, 315-19). As with Aunty Hilda, William Rankine used storytelling as a method to draw public attention to the inequities of his times in an interview with The Register which drew on his life-narrative (Hughes, My Grandmother, 61). Hilda’s father Wilfred Varcoe, a Barngarrla-Wirrungu man, almost a thousand kilometres away from his Poonindie birthplace, resisted assimilation by actively pursuing traditional knowledge networks using his mobility as a highly sought after shearer to link up with related Elders in the shearing camps, (and as we saw to inspect the conditions his daughter was working under at Mt Lofty). The period Hilda spent as a servant to white families to be trained in white ways was in fact only a brief interlude in a long life in which family connections, culture and belonging (Kickett) served as the backbone of her resilience and resistance. On returning to the Point Pearce Mission, Hilda successfully raised a large family and activated a range of community initiatives that fostered well-being. In the 1960s she moved to Adelaide, initially as the sole provider of her family (her husband later followed), to give her younger children better educational opportunities. Working with Aunty Gladys Elphick OBE through the Council of Aboriginal Women, she played a foundational role in assisting other Aboriginal women establish their families in the city (Mattingly et al., 154, Fisher). In Adelaide, Aunty Hilda became an influential, much loved Elder, living in good health to the age of ninety-six years. The ability to survive changing circumstances, to extend care over and over to her children and Elders along with qualities of leadership, determination, agency and resilience have passed down through her family, several of whom have become successful in public life. These include her great-grandson and former AFL football player, Michael O’Loughlin, her great-nephew Adam Goodes and her-grand-daughter, the cultural weaver Aunty Ellen Trevorrow. Arguably, resilience contributes to physical as well as cultural longevity, through caring for the self and others. Conclusion This story demonstrates how sociocultural dimensions of resilience are contextualised in practices of everyday lives. We see this in the way that Aunty Hilda Wilson’s self-narrated story resolutely defies attempts to know, subjugate and categorise, operating instead in accord with distinctively Aboriginal expressions of gender and kinship relations that constitute an Aboriginal sovereignty. Her storytelling activates a revision of collective history in ways that valorise Indigenous identity (Kirmayer et al.). Her narrative of agency and personal achievement, one that has sustained her through life, interacts with the larger narrative of state-endorsed exploitation, diffusing its power and exposing it to wider moral scrutiny. Resilience in this context is inextricably entwined with practices of cultural survival and resistance developed in response to the introduction of government policies and the encroachment of settlers and their world. We see resilience too operating across Hilda Wilson’s family history, and throughout her long life. The agency and strategies displayed suggest alternative realities and imagine other, usually more equitable, possible worlds. References Bell, Diane. Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was and Will Be. Melbourne: Spinifex, 1998. Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 90-110. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. Fisher, Elizabeth M. "Elphick, Gladys (1904–1988)." Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 29 Sep. 2013. ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/elphick-gladys-12460/text22411>. Grieves, Victoria. Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy, The Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing, Melbourne University: Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009. Haebich, Anna. Broken Circles: The Fragmenting of Indigenous Families. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Press, 2000. Haskins, Victoria. My One Bright Spot. London: Palgrave, 2005. Hughes, Karen. "My Grandmother on the Other Side of the Lake." PhD thesis, Department of Australian Studies and Department of History, Flinders University. Adelaide, 2009. ———. “Microhistories and Things That Matter.” Australian Feminist Studies 27.73 (2012): 269-278. ———. “I’d Grown Up as a Child amongst Natives.” Outskirts: Feminisms along the Edge 28 (2013). 29 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-28/karen-hughes>. Jenkin, Graham. Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri. Adelaide: Rigby, 1979. Kartinyeri, Doris. Kick the Tin. Melbourne: Spinifex, 2000. Kartinyeri, Doreen. My Ngarrindjeri Calling, Adelaide: Wakefield, 2007. Kickett, Marion. “Examination of How a Culturally Appropriate Definition of Resilience Affects the Physical and Mental Health of Aboriginal People.” PhD thesis, Curtin University, 2012. Kirmayer, L.J., S. Dandeneau, E. Marshall, M.K. Phillips, K. Jenssen Williamson. “Rethinking Resilience from Indigenous Perspectives.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 56.2 (2011): 84-91. Luthar, S., D. Cicchetti, and B. Becker. “The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work.” Child Development 71.3 (2000): 543-62. MacGill, Bindi, Julie Mathews, Ellen Trevorrow, Alice Abdulla, and Deb Rankine. “Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong,” M/C Journal 15.3 (2012). Mattingly, Christobel, and Ken Hampton. Survival in Our Own Land, Adelaide: Wakefield, 1988. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman. St Lucia: UQP, 2000. Night Cries, A Rural Tragedy. Dir. Tracy Moffatt. Chili Films, 1990. Read, Peter. A Rape of the Soul So Profound. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Tucker, Margaret. If Everyone Cared. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1977. Wanganeen, Elva. Personal Communication, 2000. Westphalen, Linda. An Anthropological and Literary Study of Two Aboriginal Women's Life Histories: The Impacts of Enforced Child Removal and Policies of Assimilation. New York: Mellen Press, 2011.

In a media saturated world, doodles have recently received the kind of attention usually reserved for coverage of racy extra marital affairs, corrupt governance, and product malfunction. Former British Prime Minister Blair’s private doodling at a World Economic Forum meeting in 2005 raised suspicions that he, according to one keen graphologist, struggled “to maintain control in a confusing world," which infers he was attempting to cohere a scattershot, fragmentary series of events (Spiegel). However, placid-faced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sat nearby, actually scrawled the doodles. In this case, perhaps the scrawls mimicked the ambience in the room: Gates might have been ‘tuning’–registering the ‘white noise’ of the participants, letting his unconscious dictate doodles as a way to cope with the dissonance trekking in with the officialspeak. The doodles may have documented and registered the space between words, acting like deposits from his gestalt.Sometimes the most intriguing doodles co-exist with printed texts. This includes common vernacular graffiti that lines public and private books and magazines. Such graffiti exposes tensions in the role of readers as well as horror vacui: a fear of unused, empty space. Yet, school children fingering fresh pages and stiff book spines for the first few times often consider their book pages as sanctioned, discreet, and inviolable. The book is an object of financial and cultural investment, or imbued both with mystique and ideologies. Yet, in the e-book era, the old-fashioned, physical page is a relic of sorts, a holdover from coarse papyrus culled from wetland sage, linking us to the First Dynasty in Egypt. Some might consider the page as a vessel for typography, a mere framing device for text. The margins may reflect a perimeter of nothingness, an invisible borderland that doodles render visible by inhabiting them. Perhaps the margins are a bare landscape, like unmarred flat sand in a black and white panchromatic photo with unique tonal signature and distinct grain. Perhaps the margins are a mute locality, a space where words have evaporated, or a yet-to-be-explored environment, or an ambient field. Then comes the doodle, an icon of vernacular art.As a modern folklorist, I have studied and explored vernacular art at length, especially forms that may challenge and fissure aesthetic, cultural, and social mores, even within my own field. For instance, I contend that Grandma Prisbrey’s “Bottle Village,” featuring millions of artfully arranged pencils, bottles, and dolls culled from dumps in Southern California, is a syncretic culturescape with underlying feminist symbolism, not merely the product of trauma and hoarding (Ensminger). Recently, I flew to Oregon to deliver a paper on Mexican-American gravesite traditions. In a quest for increased multicultural tolerance, I argued that inexpensive dimestore objects left on Catholic immigrant graves do not represent a messy landscape of trinkets but unique spiritual environments with links to customs 3,000 years old. For me, doodles represent a variation on graffiti-style art with cultural antecedents stretching back throughout history, ranging from ancient scrawls on Greek ruins to contemporary park benches (with chiseled names, dates, and symbols), public bathroom latrinalia, and spray can aerosol art, including ‘bombing’ and ‘tagging’ hailed as “Spectacular Vernaculars” by Russell Potter (1995). Noted folklorist Alan Dundes mused on the meaning of latrinalia in Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia (1966), which has inspired pop culture books and web pages for the preservation and discussion of such art (see for instance, www.itsallinthehead.com/gallery1.html). Older texts such as Classic American Graffiti by Allen Walker Read (1935), originally intended for “students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology,” reveal the field’s longstanding interest in marginal, crude, and profane graffiti.Yet, to my knowledge, a monograph on doodles has yet to be published by a folklorist, perhaps because the art form is reconsidered too idiosyncratic, too private, the difference between jots and doodles too blurry for a taxonomy and not the domain of identifiable folk groups. In addition, the doodles in texts often remain hidden until single readers encounter them. No broad public interaction is likely, unless a library text circulates freely, which may not occur after doodles are discovered. In essence, the books become tainted, infected goods. Whereas latrinalia speaks openly and irreverently, doodles feature a different scale and audience.Doodles in texts may represent a kind of speaking from the ‘margin’s margins,’ revealing the reader-cum-writer’s idiosyncratic, self-meaningful, and stylised hieroglyphics from the ambient margins of one’s consciousness set forth in the ambient margins of the page. The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal spaces (both between and betwixt, in which the rules of page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned) are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank, surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak, however haphazardly and unconsciously, with and against the triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the ambient territory. If the book is borrowed, then the margins are also an intimate negotiation with shared or public space. The cryptic residue of the doodler now resides, waiting, for the city of eyes.Throughout history, both admired artists and Presidents regularly doodled. Famed Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi avoided strenuous studying by doodling in his books (Van Cleave 44). Both sides of the American political spectrum have produced plentiful inky depictions as well: roughshod Democratic President Johnson drew flags and pagodas; former Hollywood fantasy fulfiller turned politician Republican President Reagan’s specialty was western themes, recalling tropes both from his actor period and his duration acting as President; meanwhile, former law student turned current President, Barack Obama, has sketched members of Congress and the Senate for charity auctions. These doodles are rich fodder for both psychologists and cross-discipline analysts that propose theories regarding the automatic writing and self-styled miniature pictures of civic leaders. Doodles allow graphologists to navigate and determine the internal, cognitive fabric of the maker. To critics, they exist as mere trifles and offer nothing more than an iota of insight; doodles are not uncanny offerings from the recesses of memory, like bite-sized Rorschach tests, but simply sloppy scrawls of the bored.Ambient music theory may shed some light. Timothy Morton argues that Brian Eno designed to make music that evoked “space whose quality had become minimally significant” and “deconstruct the opposition … between figure and ground.” In fact, doodles may yield the same attributes as well. After a doodle is inserted into texts, the typography loses its primacy. There is a merging of the horizons. The text of the author can conflate with the text of the reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols with multiple intelligences–one manufactured and condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed end or beginning between the two no longer exists. The ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page. The blank spaces keep inviting responses. An emergent discourse is always in waiting, always threatening to overspill the text’s intended meaning. In fact, the doodles may carry more weight than the intended text: the hierarchy between authorship and readership may topple.Resistant reading may take shape during these bouts. The doodle is an invasion and signals the geography of disruption, even when innocuous. It is a leveling tool. As doodlers place it alongside official discourse, they move away from positions of passivity, being mere consumers, and claim their own autonomy and agency. The space becomes co-determinant as boundaries are blurred. The destiny of the original text’s meaning is deferred. The habitus of the reader becomes embodied in the scrawl, and the next reader must negotiate and navigate the cultural capital of this new author. As such, the doodle constitutes an alternative authority and economy of meaning within the text.Recent studies indicate doodling, often regarded as behavior that announces a person’s boredom and withdrawal, is actually a very special tool to prevent memory loss. Jackie Andrade, an expert from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, maintains that doodling actually “offsets the effects of selective memory blockade,” which yields a surprising result (quoted in “Doodling Gets”). Doodlers exhibit 29% more memory recall than those who passively listen, frozen in an unequal bond with the speaker/lecturer. Students that doodle actually retain more information and are likely more productive due to their active listening. They adeptly absorb information while students who stare patiently or daydream falter.Furthermore, in a 2006 paper, Andrew Kear argues that “doodling is a way in which students, consciously or not, stake a claim of personal agency and challenge some the values inherent in the education system” (2). As a teacher concerned with the engagement of students, he asked for three classes to submit their doodles. Letting them submit any two-dimensional graphic or text made during a class (even if made from body fluid), he soon discovered examples of “acts of resistance” in “student-initiated effort[s] to carve out a sense of place within the educational institution” (6). Not simply an ennui-prone teenager or a proto-surrealist trying to render some automatic writing from the fringes of cognition, a student doodling may represent contested space both in terms of the page itself and the ambience of the environment. The doodle indicates tension, and according to Kear, reflects students reclaiming “their own self-recognized voice” (6).In a widely referenced 1966 article (known as the “doodle” article) intended to describe the paragraph organisational styles of different cultures, Robert Kaplan used five doodles to investigate a writer’s thought patterns, which are rooted in cultural values. Now considered rather problematic by some critics after being adopted by educators for teacher-training materials, Kaplan’s doodles-as-models suggest, “English speakers develop their ideas in a linear, hierarchal fashion and ‘Orientals’ in a non-liner, spiral fashion…” (Severino 45). In turn, when used as pedagogical tools, these graphics, intentionally or not, may lead an “ethnocentric, assimilationist stance” (45). In this case, doodles likely shape the discourse of English as Second Language instruction. Doodles also represent a unique kind of “finger trace,” not unlike prints from the tips of a person’s fingers and snowflakes. Such symbol systems might be used for “a means of lightweight authentication,” according to Christopher Varenhorst of MIT (1). Doodles, he posits, can be used as “passdoodles"–a means by which a program can “quickly identify users.” They are singular expressions that are quirky and hard to duplicate; thus, doodles could serve as substitute methods of verifying people who desire devices that can safeguard their privacy without users having to rely on an ever-increasing number of passwords. Doodles may represent one such key. For many years, psychologists and psychiatrists have used doodles as therapeutic tools in their treatment of children that have endured hardship, ailments, and assault. They may indicate conditions, explain various symptoms and pathologies, and reveal patterns that otherwise may go unnoticed. For instance, doodles may “reflect a specific physical illness and point to family stress, accidents, difficult sibling relationships, and trauma” (Lowe 307). Lowe reports that children who create a doodle featuring their own caricature on the far side of the page, distant from an image of parent figures on the same page, may be experiencing detachment, while the portrayal of a father figure with “jagged teeth” may indicate a menace. What may be difficult to investigate in a doctor’s office conversation or clinical overview may, in fact, be gleaned from “the evaluation of a child’s spontaneous doodle” (307). So, if children are suffering physically or psychologically and unable to express themselves in a fully conscious and articulate way, doodles may reveal their “self-concept” and how they feel about their bodies; therefore, such creative and descriptive inroads are important diagnostic tools (307). Austrian born researcher Erich Guttman and his cohort Walter MacLay both pioneered art therapy in England during the mid-twentieth century. They posited doodles might offer some insight into the condition of schizophrenics. Guttman was intrigued by both the paintings associated with the Surrealist movement and the pioneering, much-debated work of Sigmund Freud too. Although Guttman mostly studied professionally trained artists who suffered from delusions and other conditions, he also collected a variety of art from patients, including those undergoing mescaline therapy, which alters a person’s consciousness. In a stroke of luck, they were able to convince a newspaper editor at the Evening Standard to provide them over 9,000 doodles that were provided by readers for a contest, each coded with the person’s name, age, and occupation. This invaluable data let the academicians compare the work of those hospitalised with the larger population. Their results, released in 1938, contain several key declarations and remain significant contributions to the field. Subsequently, Francis Reitman recounted them in his own book Psychotic Art: Doodles “release the censor of the conscious mind,” allowing a person to “relax, which to creative people was indispensable to production.”No appropriate descriptive terminology could be agreed upon.“Doodles are not communications,” for the meaning is only apparent when analysed individually.Doodles are “self-meaningful.” (37) Doodles, the authors also established, could be divided into this taxonomy: “stereotypy, ornamental details, movements, figures, faces and animals” or those “depicting scenes, medley, and mixtures” (37). The authors also noted that practitioners from the Jungian school of psychology often used “spontaneously produced drawings” that were quite “doodle-like in nature” in their own discussions (37). As a modern folklorist, I venture that doodles offer rich potential for our discipline as well. At this stage, I am offering a series of dictums, especially in regards to doodles that are commonly found adjacent to text in books and magazines, notebooks and journals, that may be expanded upon and investigated further. Doodles allow the reader to repopulate the text with ideogram-like expressions that are highly personalised, even inscrutable, like ambient sounds.Doodles re-purpose the text. The text no longer is unidirectional. The text becomes a point of convergence between writer and reader. The doodling allows for such a conversation, bilateral flow, or “talking back” to the text.Doodles reveal a secret language–informal codes that hearken back to the “lively, spontaneous, and charged with feeling” works of child art or naïve art that Victor Sanua discusses as being replaced in a child’s later years by art that is “stilted, formal, and conforming” (62).Doodling animates blank margins, the dead space of the text adjacent to the script, making such places ripe for spontaneous, fertile, and exploratory markings.Doodling reveals a democratic, participatory ethos. No text is too sacred, no narrative too inviolable. Anything can be reworked by the intimate graffiti of the reader. The authority of the book is not fixed; readers negotiate and form a second intelligence imprinted over the top of the original text, blurring modes of power.Doodles reveal liminal moments. Since the reader in unmonitored, he or she can express thoughts that may be considered marginal or taboo by the next reader. The original subject of the book itself does not restrict the reader. Thus, within the margins of the page, a brief suspension of boundaries and borders, authority and power, occurs. The reader hides in anonymity, free to reroute the meaning of the book. Doodling may convey a reader’s infantalism. Every book can become a picture book. This art can be the route returning a reader to the ambience of childhood.Doodling may constitute Illuminated/Painted Texts in reverse, commemorating the significance of the object in hitherto unexpected forms and revealing the reader’s codex. William Blake adorned his own poems by illuminating the skin/page that held his living verse; common readers may do so too, in naïve, nomadic, and primitive forms. Doodling demarcates tension zones, yielding social-historical insights into eras while offering psychological glimpses and displaying aesthetic values of readers-cum-writers.Doodling reveals margins as inter-zones, replete with psychogeography. While the typography is sanctioned, legitimate, normalised, and official discourse (“chartered” and “manacled,” to hijack lines from William Blake), the margins are a vernacular depository, a terminus, allowing readers a sense of agency and autonomy. The doodled page becomes a visible reminder and signifier: all pages are potentially “contested” spaces. Whereas graffiti often allows a writer to hide anonymously in the light in a city besieged by multiple conflicting texts, doodles allow a reader-cum-writer’s imprint to live in the cocoon of a formerly fossilised text, waiting for the light. Upon being opened, the book, now a chimera, truly breathes. Further exploration and analysis should likely consider several issues. What truly constitutes and shapes the role of agent and reader? Is the reader an agent all the time, or only when offering resistant readings through doodles? How is a doodler’s agency mediated by the author or the format of texts in forms that I have to map? Lastly, if, as I have argued, the ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page, what occurs in the age of digital or e-books? Will these platforms signal an age of acquiescence to manufactured products or signal era of vernacular responses, somehow hitched to html code and PDF file infiltration? Will bytes totally replace type soon in the future, shaping unforeseen actions by doodlers? Attached Figures Figure One presents the intimate graffiti of my grandfather, found in the 1907 edition of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book. The depiction is simple, even crude, revealing a figure found on the adjacent page to Lesson 248, “Of Characters Used in Punctuation,” which lists the perfunctory functions of commas, semicolons, periods, and so forth. This doodle may offset the routine, rote, and rather humdrum memorisation of such grammatical tools. The smiling figure may embody and signify joy on an otherwise machine-made bare page, a space where my grandfather illustrated his desires (to lighten a mood, to ease dissatisfaction?). Historians Joe Austin and Michael Willard examine how youth have been historically left without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. For instance, graffiti often found on walls and trains may reflect a sad reality: young people are pushed to appropriate “nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces within the landscape” (14). Indeed, book graffiti, like the graffiti found on surfaces throughout cities, may offer youth a sense of appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy: they take the page of the book, commit their writing or illustration to the page, discover some freedom, and feel temporarily independent even while they are young and disempowered. Figure Two depicts the doodles of experimental filmmaker Jim Fetterley (Animal Charm productions) during his tenure as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. His two doodles flank the text of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, regarded by most readers as an autobiographical poem that addresses her own suicide attempts. The story of Lazarus is grounded in the Biblical story of John Lazarus of Bethany, who was resurrected from the dead. The poem also alludes to the Holocaust (“Nazi Lampshades”), the folklore surrounding cats (“And like the cat I have nine times to die”), and impending omens of death (“eye pits “ … “sour breath”). The lower doodle seems to signify a motorised tank-like machine, replete with a furnace or engine compartment on top that bellows smoke. Such ominous images, saturated with potential cartoon-like violence, may link to the World War II references in the poem. Meanwhile, the upper doodle seems to be curiously insect-like, and Fetterley’s name can be found within the illustration, just like Plath’s poem is self-reflexive and addresses her own plight. Most viewers might find the image a bit more lighthearted than the poem, a caricature of something biomorphic and surreal, but not very lethal. Again, perhaps this is a counter-message to the weight of the poem, a way to balance the mood and tone, or it may well represent the larval-like apparition that haunts the very thoughts of Plath in the poem: the impending disease of her mind, as understood by the wary reader. References Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard. “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture.” Eds. Joe Austion and Michael Willard. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press, 1998. “Doodling Gets Its Due: Those Tiny Artworks May Aid Memory.” World Science 2 March 2009. 15 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090302_doodle›. Dundes, Alan. “Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia.” Papers of the Kroeber Anthropological Society 34: 91-105. Ensminger, David. “All Bottle Up: Reinterpreting the Culturescape of Grandma Prisbey.” Adironack Review 9.3 (Fall 2008). ‹http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/ensminger2.html›. Kear, Andrew. “Drawings in the Margins: Doodling in Class an Act of Reclamation.” Graduate Student Conference. University of Toronto, 2006. ‹http://gradstudentconference.oise.utoronto.ca/documents/185/Drawing%20in%20the%20Margins.doc›. Lowe, Sheila R. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis. New York: Alpha Books, 1999. Morton, Timothy. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem; a Study of Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2001). 6 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html›. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Read, Allen Walker. Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America. Waukesha, Wisconsin: Maledicta Press, 1997. Reitman, Francis. Psychotic Art. London: Routledge, 1999. Sanua, Victor. “The World of Mystery and Wonder of the Schizophrenic Patient.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8 (1961): 62-65. Severino, Carol. “The ‘Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims about Contrastive Rhetoric.” The Writing Center Journal 14.1 (Fall 1993): 44-62. Van Cleave, Claire. Master Drawings of the Italian Rennaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007. Varenhost, Christopher. Passdoodles: A Lightweight Authentication Method. Research Science Institute. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.

One of the greatest joys in watching Foxtel is to see all the crazy people who run talk shows. Judgement, ridicule and generalisations slip from their tongues like overcooked lamb off a bone. From Oprah to Rikki, from Jerry to Mother Love, the posterior of pop culture claims a world-wide audience. Recently, a new talk diva was added to the pay television stable. Dr Laura Schlessinger, the Mother of Morals, prowls the soundstage. attacking 'selfish acts' such as divorce, de facto relationships and voting Democrat. On April 11, 2001, a show aired in Australia that added a new demon to the decadence of the age. Dr Laura had been told that a disgusting video clip, called 'Rock DJ', had been televised at 2:30pm on MTV. Children could have been watching. The footage that so troubled our doyenne of daytime featured the British performer Robbie Williams not only stripping in front of disinterested women, but then removing skin, muscle and tissue in a desperate attempt to claim their gaze. This was too much for Dr Laura. She was horrified: her strident tone became piercing. She screeched, "this is si-ee-ck." . My paper is drawn to this sick masculinity, not to judge - but to laugh and theorise. Robbie Williams, the deity of levity, holds a pivotal role in theorising the contemporary 'crisis' of manhood. To paraphrase Austin Powers, Williams returned the ger to singer. But Williams also triumphed in a captivatingly original way. He is one of the few members of a boy band who created a successful solo career without regurgitating the middle of the road mantras of boys, girls, love, loss and whining about it. Williams' journey through post-war popular music, encompassing influences from both Sinatra and Sonique, forms a functional collage, rather than patchwork, of masculinity. He has been prepared to not only age in public, but to discuss the crevices and cracks in the facade. He strips, smokes, plays football, wears interesting underwear and drinks too much. My short paper trails behind this combustible masculinity, focussing on his sorties with both masculine modalities and the rock discourse. My words attack the gap between text and readership, beat and ear, music and men. The aim is to reveal how this 'sick masculinity' problematises the conservative rendering of men's crisis. Come follow me I'm an honorary Sean Connery, born '74 There's only one of me … Press be asking do I care for sodomy I don't know, yeah, probably I've been looking for serial monogamy Not some bird that looks like Billy Connolly But for now I'm down for ornithology Grab your binoculars, come follow me. 'Kids,' Robbie Williams Robbie Williams is a man for our age. Between dating supermodels and Geri 'Lost Spice' Halliwell [1], he has time to "love … his mum and a pint," (Ansen 85) but also subvert the Oasis cock(rock)tail by frocking up for a television appearance. Williams is important to theories of masculine representation. As a masculinity to think with, he creates popular culture with a history. In an era where Madonna practices yoga and wears cowboy boots, it is no surprise that by June 2000, Robbie Williams was voted the world's sexist man [2]. A few months later, in the October edition of Vogue, he posed in a British flag bikini. It is reassuring in an era where a 12 year old boy states that "You aren't a man until you shoot at something," (Issac in Mendel 19) that positive male role models exist who are prepared to both wear a frock and strip on national television. Reading Robbie Williams is like dipping into the most convincing but draining of intellectual texts. He is masculinity in motion, conveying foreignness, transgression and corruption, bartering in the polymorphous economies of sex, colonialism, race, gender and nation. His career has spanned the boy bands, try-hard rock, video star and hybrid pop performer. There are obvious resonances between the changes to Williams and alterations in masculinity. In 1988, Suzanne Moore described (the artist still known as) Prince as "the pimp of postmodernism." (165-166) Over a decade later, the simulacra has a new tour guide. Williams revels in the potency of representation. He rarely sings about love or romance, as was his sonic fodder in Take That. Instead, his performance is fixated on becoming a better man, glancing an analytical eye over other modes of masculinity. Notions of masculine crisis and sickness have punctuated this era. Men's studies is a boom area of cultural studies, dislodging the assumed structures of popular culture [3]. William Pollack's Real Boys has created a culture of changing expectations for men. The greater question arising from his concerns is why these problems, traumas and difficulties are emerging in our present. Pollack's argument is that boys and young men invest energy and time "disguising their deepest and most vulnerable feelings." (15) This masking is difficult to discern within dance and popular music. Through lyrics and dancing, videos and choreography, masculinity is revealed as convoluted, complex and fragmented. While rock music is legitimised by dominant ideologies, marginalised groups frequently use disempowered genres - like country, dance and rap genres - to present oppositional messages. These competing representations expose seamless interpretations of competent masculinity. Particular skills are necessary to rip the metaphoric pacifier out of the masculine mouth of popular culture. Patriarchal pop revels in the paradoxes of everyday life. Frequently these are nostalgic visions, which Kimmel described as a "retreat to a bygone era." (87) It is the recognition of a shared, simpler past that provides reinforcement to heteronormativity. Williams, as a gaffer tape masculinity, pulls apart the gaps and crevices in representation. Theorists must open the interpretative space encircling popular culture, disrupting normalising criteria. Multiple nodes of assessment allow a ranking of competent masculinity. From sport to business, drinking to sex, masculinity is transformed into a wired site of ranking, judgement and determination. Popular music swims in the spectacle of maleness. From David Lee Roth's skied splits to Eminem's beanie, young men are interpellated as subjects in patriarchy. Robbie Williams is a history lesson in post war masculinity. This nostalgia is conservative in nature. The ironic pastiche within his music videos features motor racing, heavy metal and Bond films. 'Rock DJ', the 'sick text' that vexed Doctor Laura, is Williams' most elaborate video. Set in a rollerdrome with female skaters encircling a central podium, the object of fascination and fetish is a male stripper. This strip is different though, as it disrupts the power held by men in phallocentralism. After being confronted by Williams' naked body, the observing women are both bored and disappointed at the lack-lustre deployment of masculine genitalia. After this display, Williams appears embarrassed, confused and humiliated. As Buchbinder realised, "No actual penis could every really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus." (49) To render this banal experience of male nudity ridiculous, Williams then proceeds to remove skin and muscle. He finally becomes an object of attraction for the female DJ only in skeletal form. By 'going all the way,' the strip confirms the predictability of masculinity and the ordinariness of the male body. For literate listeners though, a higher level of connotation is revealed. The song itself is based on Barry White's melody for 'It's ecstasy (when you lay down next to me).' Such intertextuality accesses the meta-racist excesses of a licentious black male sexuality. A white boy dancer must deliver an impotent, but ironic, rendering of White's (love unlimited) orchestration of potent sexuality. Williams' iconography and soundtrack is refreshing, emerging from an era of "men who cling … tightly to their illusions." (Faludi 14) When the ideological drapery is cut away, the male body is a major disappointment. Masculinity is an anxious performance. Fascinatingly, this deconstructive video has been demeaned through its labelling as pornography [4]. Oddly, a man who is prepared to - literally - shave the skin of masculinity is rendered offensive. Men's studies, like feminism, has been defrocking masculinity for some time. Robinson for example, expressed little sympathy for "whiny men jumping on the victimisation bandwagon or playing cowboys and Indians at warrior weekends and beating drums in sweat lodges." (6) By grating men's identity back to the body, the link between surface and depth - or identity and self - is forged. 'Rock DJ' attacks the new subjectivities of the male body by not only generating self-surveillance, but humour through the removal of clothes, skin and muscle. He continues this play with the symbols of masculine performance throughout the album Sing when you're winning. Featuring soccer photographs of players, coaches and fans, closer inspection of the images reveal that Robbie Williams is actually every character, in every role. His live show also enfolds diverse performances. Singing a version of 'My Way,' with cigarette in tow, he remixes Frank Sinatra into a replaying and recutting of masculine fabric. He follows one dominating masculinity with another: the Bond-inspired 'Millennium.' Some say that we are players Some say that we are pawns But we've been making money Since the day we were born Robbie Williams is comfortably located in a long history of post-Sinatra popular music. He mocks the rock ethos by combining guitars and drums with a gleaming brass section, hailing the lounge act of Dean Martin, while also using rap and dance samples. Although carrying fifty year's of crooner baggage, the spicy scent of homosexuality has also danced around Robbie Williams' career. Much of this ideology can be traced back to the Take That years. As Gary Barlow and Jason Orange commented at the time, Jason: So the rumour is we're all gay now are we? Gary: Am I gay? I am? Why? Oh good. Just as long as we know. Howard: Does anyone think I'm gay? Jason: No, you're the only one people think is straight. Howard: Why aren't I gay? What's wrong with me? Jason: It's because you're such a fine figure of macho manhood.(Kadis 17) For those not literate in the Take That discourse, it should come as no surprise that Howard was the TT equivalent of The Beatle's Ringo Starr or Duran Duran's Andy Taylor. Every boy band requires the ugly, shy member to make the others appear taller and more attractive. The inference of this dialogue is that the other members of the group are simply too handsome to be heterosexual. This ambiguous sexuality has followed Williams into his solo career, becoming fodder for those lads too unappealing to be homosexual: Oasis. Born to be mild I seem to spend my life Just waiting for the chorus 'Cause the verse is never nearly Good enough Robbie Williams "Singing for the lonely." Robbie Williams accesses a bigger, brighter and bolder future than Britpop. While the Gallagher brothers emulate and worship the icons of 1960s British music - from the Beatles' haircuts to the Stones' psychedelia - Williams' songs, videos and persona are chattering in a broader cultural field. From Noel Cowardesque allusions to the ordinariness of pub culture, Williams is much more than a pretty-boy singer. He has become an icon of English masculinity, enclosing all the complexity that these two terms convey. Williams' solo success from 1999-2001 occurred at the time of much parochial concern that British acts were not performing well in the American charts. It is bemusing to read Billboard over this period. The obvious quality of Britney Spears is seen to dwarf the mediocrity of British performers. The calibre of Fatboy Slim, carrying a smiley backpack stuffed with reflexive dance culture, is neither admitted nor discussed. It is becoming increasing strange to monitor the excessive fame of Williams in Britain, Europe, Asia and the Pacific when compared to his patchy career in the United States. Even some American magazines are trying to grasp the disparity. The swaggering king of Britpop sold a relatively measly 600,000 copies of his U.S. debut album, The ego has landed … Maybe Americans didn't appreciate his songs about being famous. (Ask Dr. Hip 72) In the first few years of the 2000s, it has been difficult to discuss a unified Anglo-American musical formation. Divergent discursive frameworks have emerged through this British evasion. There is no longer an agreed centre to the musical model. Throughout 1990s Britain, blackness jutted out of dance floor mixes, from reggae to dub, jazz and jungle. Plied with the coldness of techno was an almost too hot hip hop. Yet both were alternate trajectories to Cool Britannia. London once more became swinging, or as Vanity Fair declared, "the nerve centre of pop's most cohesive scene since the Pacific Northwest grunge explosion of 1991." (Kamp 102) Through Britpop, the clock turned back to the 1960s, a simpler time before race became 'a problem' for the nation. An affiliation was made between a New Labour, formed by the 1997 British election, and the rebirth of a Swinging London [5]. This style-driven empire supposedly - again - made London the centre of the world. Britpop was itself a misnaming. It was a strong sense of Englishness that permeated the lyrics, iconography and accent. Englishness requires a Britishness to invoke a sense of bigness and greatness. The contradictions and excesses of Blur, Oasis and Pulp resonate in the gap between centre and periphery, imperial core and colonised other. Slicing through the arrogance and anger of the Gallaghers is a yearning for colonial simplicity, when the pink portions of the map were the stable subjects of geography lessons, rather than the volatile embodiment of postcolonial theory. Simon Gikandi argues that "the central moments of English cultural identity were driven by doubts and disputes about the perimeters of the values that defined Englishness." (x) The reason that Britpop could not 'make it big' in the United States is because it was recycling an exhausted colonial dreaming. Two old Englands were duelling for ascendancy: the Oasis-inflected Manchester working class fought Blur-inspired London art school chic. This insular understanding of difference had serious social and cultural consequences. The only possible representation of white, British youth was a tabloidisation of Oasis's behaviour through swearing, drug excess and violence. Simon Reynolds realised that by returning to the three minute pop tune that the milkman can whistle, reinvoking parochial England with no black people, Britpop has turned its back defiantly on the future. (members.aol.com/blissout/Britpop.html) Fortunately, another future had already happened. The beats per minute were pulsating with an urgent affirmation of change, hybridity and difference. Hip hop and techno mapped a careful cartography of race. While rock was colonialisation by other means, hip hop enacted a decolonial imperative. Electronic dance music provided a unique rendering of identity throughout the 1990s. It was a mode of musical communication that moved across national and linguistic boundaries, far beyond Britpop or Stateside rock music. While the Anglo American military alliance was matched and shadowed by postwar popular culture, Brit-pop signalled the end of this hegemonic formation. From this point, English pop and American rock would not sail as smoothly over the Atlantic. While 1995 was the year of Wonderwall, by 1996 the Britpop bubble corroded the faces of the Gallagher brothers. Oasis was unable to complete the American tour. Yet other cultural forces were already active. 1996 was also the year of Trainspotting, with "Born Slippy" being the soundtrack for a blissful journey under the radar. This was a cultural force that no longer required America as a reference point [6]. Robbie Williams was able to integrate the histories of Britpop and dance culture, instigating a complex dialogue between the two. Still, concern peppered music and entertainment journals that British performers were not accessing 'America.' As Sharon Swart stated Britpop acts, on the other hand, are finding it less easy to crack the U.S. market. The Spice Girls may have made some early headway, but fellow purveyors of pop, such as Robbie Williams, can't seem to get satisfaction from American fans. (35 British performers had numerous cultural forces working against them. Flat global sales, the strength of the sterling and the slow response to the new technological opportunities of DVD, all caused problems. While Britpop "cleaned house," (Boehm 89) it was uncertain which cultural formation would replace this colonising force. Because of the complex dialogues between the rock discourse and dance culture, time and space were unable to align into a unified market. American critics simply could not grasp Robbie Williams' history, motives or iconography. It's Robbie's world, we just buy tickets for it. Unless, of course you're American and you don't know jack about soccer. That's the first mistake Williams makes - if indeed one of his goals is to break big in the U.S. (and I can't believe someone so ambitious would settle for less.) … Americans, it seems, are most fascinated by British pop when it presents a mirror image of American pop. (Woods 98 There is little sense that an entirely different musical economy now circulates, where making it big in the United States is not the singular marker of credibility. Williams' demonstrates commitment to the international market, focussing on MTV Asia, MTV online, New Zealand and Australian audiences [7]. The Gallagher brothers spent much of the 1990s trying to be John Lennon. While Noel, at times, knocked at the door of rock legends through "Wonderwall," he snubbed Williams' penchant for pop glory, describing him as a "fat dancer." (Gallagher in Orecklin 101) Dancing should not be decried so summarily. It conveys subtle nodes of bodily knowledge about men, women, sex and desire. While men are validated for bodily movement through sport, women's dancing remains a performance of voyeuristic attention. Such a divide is highly repressive of men who dance, with gayness infiltrating the metaphoric masculine dancefloor [8]. Too often the binary of male and female is enmeshed into the divide of rock and dance. Actually, these categories slide elegantly over each other. The male pop singers are located in a significant semiotic space. Robbie Williams carries these contradictions and controversy. NO! Robbie didn't go on NME's cover in a 'desperate' attempt to seduce nine-year old knickerwetters … YES! He used to be teenybopper fodder. SO WHAT?! So did the Beatles the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, etc blah blah pseudohistoricalrockbollocks. NO! Making music that gurlz like is NOT a crime! (Wells 62) There remains an uncertainty in his performance of masculinity and at times, a deliberate ambivalence. He grafts subversiveness into a specific lineage of English pop music. The aim for critics of popular music is to find a way to create a rhythm of resistance, rather than melody of credible meanings. In summoning an archaeology of the archive, we begin to write a popular music history. Suzanne Moore asked why men should "be interested in a sexual politics based on the frightfully old-fashioned ideas of truth, identity and history?" (175) The reason is now obvious. Femininity is no longer alone on the simulacra. It is impossible to separate real men from the representations of masculinity that dress the corporeal form. Popular music is pivotal, not for collapsing the representation into the real, but for making the space between these states livable, and pleasurable. Like all semiotic sicknesses, the damaged, beaten and bandaged masculinity of contemporary music swaddles a healing pedagogic formation. Robbie Williams enables the writing of a critical history of post Anglo-American music [9]. Popular music captures such stories of place and identity. Significantly though, it also opens out spaces of knowing. There is an investment in rhythm that transgresses national histories of music. While Williams has produced albums, singles, video and endless newspaper copy, his most important revelations are volatile and ephemeral in their impact. He increases the popular cultural vocabulary of masculinity. [1] The fame of both Williams and Halliwell was at such a level that it was reported in the generally conservative, pages of Marketing. The piece was titled "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing, August 2000: 17. [2] For poll results, please refer to "Winners and Losers," Time International, Vol. 155, Issue 23, June 12, 2000, 9 [3] For a discussion of this growth in academic discourse on masculinity, please refer to Paul Smith's "Introduction," in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. [4] Steve Futterman described Rock DJ as the "least alluring porn video on MTV," in "The best and worst: honour roll," Entertainment Weekly 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. [5] Michael Bracewell stated that "pop provides an unofficial cartography of its host culture, charting the national mood, marking the crossroads between the major social trends and the tunnels of the zeitgeist," in "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman .(February 21 1997): 36. [6] It is important to make my point clear. The 'America' that I am summoning here is a popular cultural formation, which possesses little connection with the territory, institution or defence initiatives of the United States. Simon Frith made this distinction clear, when he stated that "the question becomes whether 'America' can continue to be the mythical locale of popular culture as it has been through most of this century. As I've suggested, there are reasons now to suppose that 'America' itself, as a pop cultural myth, no longer bears much resemblance to the USA as a real place even in the myth." This statement was made in "Anglo-America and its discontents," Cultural Studies 5 1991: 268. [7] To observe the scale of attention paid to the Asian and Pacific markets, please refer to http://robbiewilliams.com/july13scroll.html, http://robbiewilliams.com/july19scroll.html and http://robbiewilliams.com/july24scroll.html, accessed on March 3, 2001 [8] At its most naïve, J. Michael Bailey and Michael Oberschneider asked, "Why are gay men so motivated to dance? One hypothesis is that gay men dance in order to be feminine. In other words, gay men dance because women do. An alternative hypothesis is that gay men and women share a common factor in their emotional make-up that makes dancing especially enjoyable," from "Sexual orientation in professional dance," Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997). Such an interpretation is particularly ludicrous when considering the pre-rock and roll masculine dancing rituals in the jive, Charleston and jitterbug. Once more, the history of rock music is obscuring the history of dance both before the mid 1950s and after acid house. [9] Women, gay men and black communities through much of the twentieth century have used these popular spaces. For example, Lynne Segal, in Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990, stated that "through dancing, athletic and erotic performance, but most powerfully through music, Black men could express something about the body and its physicality, about emotions and their cosmic reach, rarely found in white culture - least of all in white male culture,": 191 References Ansen, D., Giles, J., Kroll, J., Gates, D. and Schoemer, K. "What's a handsome lad to do?" Newsweek 133.19 (May 10, 1999): 85. "Ask Dr. Hip." U.S. News and World Report 129.16 (October 23, 2000): 72. Bailey, J. Michael., and Oberschneider, Michael. "Sexual orientation in professional dance." Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997):expanded academic database [fulltext]. Boehm, E. "Pop will beat itself up." Variety 373.5 (December 14, 1998): 89. Bracewell, Michael. "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman.(February 21 1997): 36. Buchbinder, David. Performance Anxieties .Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Frith, Simon. "Anglo-America and its discontents." Cultural Studies. 5 1991. Futterman, Steve. "The best and worst: honour roll." Entertainment Weekly, 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Kadis, Alex. Take That: In private. London: Virgin Books, 1994. Kamp, D. "London Swings! Again!" Vanity Fair ( March 1997): 102. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Mendell, Adrienne. How men think. New York: Fawcett, 1996. Moore, Susan. "Getting a bit of the other - the pimps of postmodernism." In Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (ed.) Male Order .London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988. 165-175. Orecklin, Michele. "People." Time. 155.10 (March 13, 2000): 101. Pollack, William. Real boys. Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 1999. Reynolds, Simon. members.aol.com/blissout/britpop.html. Accessed on April 15, 2001. Robinson, David. No less a man. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1994. Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990. Smith, Paul. "Introduction" in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. Swart, S. "U.K. Showbiz" Variety.(December 11-17, 2000): 35. Sexton, Paul and Masson, Gordon. "Tips for Brits who want U.S. success" Billboard .(September 9 2000): 1. Wells, Steven. "Angst." NME.(November 21 1998): 62. "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing.(August 2000): 17. Woods, S. "Robbie Williams Sing when you're winning" The Village Voice. 45.52. (January 2, 2001): 98.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)We need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination … so we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts … each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest (Hulme 347). Acclaimed climate scientist, the late Stephen Schneider, made this comment in 1988. Later he regretted it and said that there are ways of using metaphors that can “convey both urgency and uncertainty” (Hulme 347). What Schneider encapsulates here is the great conundrum for those attempting to communicate climate change to the everyday public. How do scientists capture the public’s imagination and convey the desperation they feel about climate change, but do it ethically? If scientific findings are presented carefully, in boring technical jargon that few can understand, then they are unlikely to attract audiences or provide an impetus for behavioural change. “What can move someone to act?” asks communication theorists Susan Moser and Lisa Dilling (37). “If a red light blinks on in a cockpit” asks Donella Meadows, “should the pilot ignore it until in speaks in an unexcited tone? … Is there any way to say [it] sweetly? Patiently? If one did, would anyone pay attention?” (Moser and Dilling 37). In 2010 Tim Flannery was appointed Panasonic Chair in Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University. His main teaching role remains within the new science communication programme. One of the first things Flannery was emphatic about was acquainting students with Karl Popper and the origin of the scientific method. “There is no truth in science”, he proclaimed in his first lecture to students “only theories, hypotheses and falsifiabilities”. In other words, science’s epistemological limits are framed such that, as Michael Lemonick argues, “a statement that cannot be proven false is generally not considered to be scientific” (n.p., my emphasis). The impetus for the following paper emanates precisely from this issue of scientific uncertainty — more specifically from teaching a course with Tim Flannery called Communicating climate change to a highly motivated group of undergraduate science communication students. I attempt to illuminate how uncertainty is constructed differently by different groups and that the “public” does not necessarily interpret uncertainty in the same way the sciences do. This paper also analyses how doubt has been politicised and operates polemically in media coverage of climate change. As Andrew Gorman-Murray and Gordon Waitt highlight in an earlier issue of M/C Journal that focused on the climate-culture nexus, an understanding of the science alone is not adequate to deal with the cultural change necessary to address the challenges climate change brings (n.p). Far from being redundant in debates around climate change, the humanities have much to offer. Erosion of Trust in Science The objectives of Macquarie’s science communication program are far more ambitious than it can ever hope to achieve. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. The initiative is a response to declining student numbers in maths and science programmes around the country and is designed to address the perceived lack of communication skills in science graduates that the Australian Council of Deans of Science identified in their 2001 report. According to Macquarie Vice Chancellor Steven Schwartz’s blog, a broader, and much more ambitious aim of the program is to “restore public trust in science and scientists in the face of widespread cynicism” (n.p.). In recent times the erosion of public trust in science was exacerbated through the theft of e-mails from East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit and the so-called “climategate scandal” which ensued. With the illegal publication of the e-mails came claims against the Research Unit that climate experts had been manipulating scientific data to suit a pro-global warming agenda. Three inquiries later, all the scientists involved were cleared of any wrongdoing, however the damage had already been done. To the public, what this scandal revealed was a certain level of scientific hubris around the uncertainties of the science and an unwillingness to explain the nature of these uncertainties. The prevailing notion remained that the experts were keeping information from public scrutiny and not being totally honest with them, which at least in the short term, damaged the scientists’s credibility. Many argued that this signalled a shift in public opinion and media portrayal on the issue of climate change in late 2009. University of Sydney academic, Rod Tiffen, claimed in the Sydney Morning Herald that the climategate scandal was “one of the pivotal moments in changing the politics of climate change” (n.p). In Australia this had profound implications and meant that the bipartisan agreement on an emissions trading scheme (ETS) that had almost been reached, subsequently collapsed with (climate sceptic) Tony Abbott's defeat of (ETS advocate) Malcolm Turnbull to become opposition leader (Tiffen). Not long after the reputation of science received this almighty blow, albeit unfairly, the federal government released a report in February 2010, Inspiring Australia – A national strategy for engagement with the sciences as part of the country’s innovation agenda. The report outlines a commitment from the Australian government and universities around the country to address the challenges of not only communicating science to the broader community but, in the process, renewing public trust and engagement in science. The report states that: in order to achieve a scientifically engaged Australia, it will be necessary to develop a culture where the sciences are recognized as relevant to everyday life … Our science institutions will be expected to share their knowledge and to help realize full social, economic, health and environmental benefits of scientific research and in return win ongoing public support. (xiv-xv) After launching the report, Innovation Minister Kim Carr went so far as to conflate “hope” with “science” and in the process elevate a discourse of technological determinism: “it’s time for all true friends of science to step up and defend its values and achievements” adding that, "when you denigrate science, you destroy hope” (n.p.). Forever gone is our naïve post-war world when scientists were held in such high esteem that they could virtually use humans as guinea pigs to test out new wonder chemicals; such as organochlorines, of which DDT is the most widely known (Carson). Thanks to government-sponsored nuclear testing programs, if you were born in the 1950s, 1960s or early 1970s, your brain carries a permanent nuclear legacy (Flannery, Here On Earth 158). So surely, for the most part, questioning the authority and hubristic tendencies of science is a good thing. And I might add, it’s not just scientists who bear this critical burden, the same scepticism is directed towards journalists, politicians and academics alike – something that many cultural theorists have noted is characteristic of our contemporary postmodern world (Lyotard). So far from destroying hope, as the former Innovation Minister Kim Carr (now Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) suggests, surely we need to use the criticisms of science as a vehicle upon which to initiate hope and humility. Different Ways of Knowing: Bayesian Beliefs and Matters of Concern At best, [science] produces a robust consensus based on a process of inquiry that allows for continued scrutiny, re-examination, and revision. (Oreskes 370) In an attempt to capitalise on the Macquarie Science Faculty’s expertise in climate science, I convened a course in second semester 2010 called SCOM201 Science, Media, Community: Communicating Climate Change, with invaluable assistance from Penny Wilson, Elaine Kelly and Liz Morgan. Mike Hulme’s provocative text, Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity provided an invaluable framework for the course. Hulme’s book brings other types of knowledge, beyond the scientific, to bear on our attitudes towards climate change. Climate change, he claims, has moved from being just a physical, scientific, and measurable phenomenon to becoming a social and cultural phenomenon. In order to understand the contested nature of climate change we need to acknowledge the dynamic and varied meanings climate has played in different cultures throughout history as well as the role that our own subjective attitudes and judgements play. Climate change has become a battleground between different ways of knowing, alternative visions of the future, competing ideas about what’s ethical and what’s not. Hulme makes the point that one of the reasons that we disagree about climate change is because we disagree about the role of science in today’s society. He encourages readers to use climate change as a tool to rigorously question the basis of our beliefs, assumptions and prejudices. Since uncertainty was the course’s raison d’etre, I was fortunate to have an extraordinary cohort of students who readily engaged with a course that forced them to confront their own epistemological limits — both personally and in a disciplinary sense. (See their blog: https://scom201.wordpress.com/). Science is often associated with objective realities. It thus tends to distinguish itself from the post-structuralist vein of critique that dominates much of the contemporary humanities. At the core of post-structuralism is scepticism about everyday, commonly accepted “truths” or what some call “meta-narratives” as well as an acknowledgement of the role that subjectivity plays in the pursuit of knowledge (Lyotard). However if we can’t rely on objective truths or impartial facts then where does this leave us when it comes to generating policy or encouraging behavioural change around the issue of climate change? Controversial philosophy of science scholar Bruno Latour sits squarely in the post-structuralist camp. In his 2004 article, “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern”, he laments the way the right wing has managed to gain ground in the climate change debate through arguing that uncertainty and lack of proof is reason enough to deny demands for action. Or to use his turn-of-phrase, “dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives” (Latour n.p). Through co-opting (the Left’s dearly held notion of) scepticism and even calling themselves “climate sceptics”, they exploited doubt as a rationale for why we should do nothing about climate change. Uncertainty is not only an important part of science, but also of the human condition. However, as sociologist Sheila Jasanoff explains in her Nature article, “Technologies of Humility”, uncertainty has become like a disease: Uncertainty has become a threat to collective action, the disease that knowledge must cure. It is the condition that poses cruel dilemmas for decision makers; that must be reduced at all costs; that is tamed with scenarios and assessments; and that feeds the frenzy for new knowledge, much of it scientific. (Jasanoff 33) If we move from talking about climate change as “a matter of fact” to “a matter of concern”, argues Bruno Latour, then we can start talking about useful ways to combat it, rather than talking about whether the science is “in” or not. Facts certainly matter, claims Latour, but they can’t give us the whole story, rather “they assemble with other ingredients to produce a matter of concern” (Potter and Oster 123). Emily Potter and Candice Oster suggest that climate change can’t be understood through either natural or cultural frames alone and, “unlike a matter of fact, matters of concern cannot be explained through a single point of view or discursive frame” (123). This makes a lot of what Hulme argues far more useful because it enables the debate to be taken to another level. Those of us with non-scientific expertise can centre debates around the kinds of societies we want, rather than being caught up in the scientific (un)certainties. If we translate Latour’s concept of climate change being “a matter of concern” into the discourse of environmental management then what we come up with, I think, is the “precautionary principle”. In the YouTube clip, “Stephen Schneider vs Skeptics”, Schneider argues that when in doubt about the potential environmental impacts of climate change, we should always apply the precautionary principle. This principle emerged from the UN conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and concerns the management of scientific risk. However its origins are evident much earlier in documents such as the “Use of Pesticides” from US President’s Science Advisory Committee in 1962. Unlike in criminal and other types of law where the burden of proof is on the prosecutor to show that the person charged is guilty of a particular offence, in environmental law the onus of proof is on the manufacturers to demonstrate the safety of their product. For instance, a pesticide should be restricted or disproved for use if there is “reasonable doubt” about its safety (Oreskes 374). Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992 has its foundations in the precautionary principle: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation” (n.p). According to Environmental Law Online, the Rio declaration suggests that, “The precautionary principle applies where there is a ‘lack of full scientific certainty’ – that is, when science cannot say what consequences to expect, how grave they are, or how likely they are to occur” (n.p.). In order to make predictions about the likelihood of an event occurring, scientists employ a level of subjectivity, or need to “reveal their degree of belief that a prediction will turn out to be correct … [S]omething has to substitute for this lack of certainty” otherwise “the only alternative is to admit that absolutely nothing is known” (Hulme 85). These statements of “subjective probabilities or beliefs” are called Bayesian, after eighteenth century English mathematician Sir Thomas Bayes who developed the theory of evidential probability. These “probabilities” are estimates, or in other words, subjective, informed judgements that draw upon evidence and experience about the likelihood of event occurring. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses Bayesian beliefs to determine the risk or likelihood of an event occurring. The IPCC provides the largest international scientific assessment of climate change and often adopts a consensus model where viewpoint reached by the majority of scientists is used to establish knowledge amongst an interdisciplinary community of scientists and then communicate it to the public (Hulme 88). According to the IPCC, this consensus is reached amongst more than more than 450 lead authors, more than 800 contributing authors, and 2500 scientific reviewers. While it is an advisory body and is not policy-prescriptive, the IPCC adopts particular linguistic conventions to indicate the probability of a statement being correct. Stephen Schneider convinced the IPCC to use this approach to systemise uncertainty (Lemonick). So for instance, in the IPCC reports, the term “likely” denotes a chance of 66%-90% of the statement being correct, while “very likely” denotes more than a 90% chance. Note the change from the Third Assessment Report (2001), indicating that “most of the observed warming in over the last fifty years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions” to the Fourth Assessment (February 2007) which more strongly states: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (Hulme 51, my italics). A fiery attack on Tim Flannery by Andrew Bolt on Steve Price’s talkback radio show in June 2010 illustrates just how misunderstood scientific uncertainty is in the broader community. When Price introduces Flannery as former Australian of the Year, Bolt intercedes, claiming Flannery is “Alarmist of the Year”, then goes on to chastise Flannery for making various forecasts which didn’t eventuate, such as that Perth and Brisbane might run out of water by 2009. “How much are you to blame for the swing in sentiment, the retreat from global warming policy and rise of scepticism?” demands Bolt. In the context of the events of late 2009 and early 2010, the fact that these events didn’t materialise made Flannery, and others, seem unreliable. And what Bolt had to say on talkback radio, I suspect, resonated with a good proportion of its audience. What Bolt was trying to do was discredit Flannery’s scientific credentials and in the process erode trust in the expert. Flannery’s response was to claim that, what he said was that these events might eventuate. In much the same way that the climate sceptics have managed to co-opt scepticism and use it as a rationale for inaction on climate change, Andrew Bolt here either misunderstands basic scientific method or quite consciously misleads and manipulates the public. As Naomi Oreskes argues, “proof does not play the role in science that most people think it does (or should), and therefore it cannot play the role in policy that skeptics demand it should” (Oreskes 370). Doubt and ‘Situated’ Hope Uncertainty and ambiguity then emerge here as resources because they force us to confront those things we really want–not safety in some distant, contested future but justice and self-understanding now. (Sheila Jasanoff, cited in Hulme, back cover) In his last published book before his death in mid-2010, Science as a contact sport, Stephen Schneider’s advice to aspiring science communicators is that they should engage with the media “not at all, or a lot”. Climate scientist Ann Henderson-Sellers adds that there are very few scientists “who have the natural ability, and learn or cultivate the talents, of effective communication with and through the media” (430). In order to attract the public’s attention, it was once commonplace for scientists to write editorials and exploit fear-provoking measures by including a “useful catastrophe or two” (Moser and Dilling 37). But are these tactics effective? Susanne Moser thinks not. She argues that “numerous studies show that … fear may change attitudes … but not necessarily increase active engagement or behaviour change” (Moser 70). Furthermore, risk psychologists argue that danger is always context specific (Hulme 196). If the risk or danger is “situated” and “tangible” (such as lead toxicity levels in children in Mt Isa from the Xstrata mine) then the public will engage with it. However if it is “un-situated” (distant, intangible and diffuse) like climate change, the audience is less likely to. In my SCOM201 class we examined the impact of two climate change-related campaigns. The first one was a short film used to promote the 2010 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit (“Scary”) and the second was the State Government of Victoria’s “You have the power: Save Energy” public awareness campaign (“You”). Using Moser’s article to guide them, students evaluated each campaign’s effectiveness. Their conclusions were that the “You have the power” campaign had far more impact because it a) had very clear objectives (to cut domestic power consumption) b) provided a very clear visualisation of carbon dioxide through the metaphor of black balloons wafting up into the atmosphere, c) gave viewers a sense of empowerment and hope through describing simple measures to cut power consumption and, d) used simple but effective metaphors to convey a world progressed beyond human control, such as household appliances robotically operating themselves in the absence of humans. Despite its high production values, in comparison, the Copenhagen Summit promotion was more than ineffective and bordered on propaganda. It actually turned viewers off with its whining, righteous appeal of, “please help the world”. Its message and objectives were ambiguous, it conveyed environmental catastrophe through hackneyed images, exploited children through a narrative based on fear and gave no real sense of hope or empowerment. In contrast the Victorian Government’s campaign focused on just one aspect of climate change that was made both tangible and situated. Doubt and uncertainty are productive tools in the pursuit of knowledge. Whether it is scientific or otherwise, uncertainty will always be the motivation that “feeds the frenzy for new knowledge” (Jasanoff 33). Articulating the importance of Hulme’s book, Sheila Jasanoff indicates we should make doubt our friend, “Without downplaying its seriousness, Hulme demotes climate change from ultimate threat to constant companion, whose murmurs unlock in us the instinct for justice and equality” (Hulme back cover). The “murmurs” that Jasanoff gestures to here, I think, can also be articulated as hope. And it is in this discussion of climate change that doubt and hope sit side-by-side as bedfellows, mutually entangled. Since the “failed” Copenhagen Summit, there has been a distinct shift in climate change discourse from “experts”. We have moved away from doom and gloom discourses and into the realm of what I shall call “situated” hope. “Situated” hope is not based on blind faith alone, but rather hope grounded in evidence, informed judgements and experience. For instance, in distinct contrast to his cautionary tale The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change, Tim Flannery’s latest book, Here on Earth is a biography of our Earth; a planet that throughout its history has oscillated between Gaian and Medean impulses. However Flannery’s wonder about the natural world and our potential to mitigate the impacts of climate change is not founded on empty rhetoric but rather tempered by evidence; he presents a series of case studies where humanity has managed to come together for a global good. Whether it’s the 1987 Montreal ban on CFCs (chlorinated fluorocarbons) or the lesser-known 2001 Stockholm Convention on POP (Persistent Organic Pollutants), what Flannery envisions is an emerging global civilisation, a giant, intelligent super-organism glued together through social bonds. He says: If that is ever achieved, the greatest transformation in the history of our planet would have occurred, for Earth would then be able to act as if it were as Francis Bacon put it all those centuries ago, ‘one entire, perfect living creature’. (Here on Earth, 279) While science might give us “our most reliable understanding of the natural world” (Oreskes 370), “situated” hope is the only productive and ethical currency we have. ReferencesAustralian Council of Deans of Science. What Did You Do with Your Science Degree? A National Study of Employment Outcomes for Science Degree Holders 1990-2000. Melbourne: Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, 2001. Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Inspiring Australia – A National Strategy for Engagement with the Sciences. Executive summary. Canberra: DIISR, 2010. 24 May 2010 ‹http://www.innovation.gov.au/SCIENCE/INSPIRINGAUSTRALIA/Documents/InspiringAustraliaSummary.pdf›. “Andrew Bolt with Tim Flannery.” Steve Price. Hosted by Steve Price. Melbourne: Melbourne Talkback Radio, 2010. 9 June 2010 ‹http://www.mtr1377.com.au/index2.php?option=com_newsmanager&task=view&id=6209›. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. London: Penguin, 1962 (2000). Carr, Kim. “Celebrating Nobel Laureate Professor Elizabeth Blackburn.” Canberra: DIISR, 2010. 19 Feb. 2010 ‹http://minister.innovation.gov.au/Carr/Pages/CELEBRATINGNOBELLAUREATEPROFESSORELIZABETHBLACKBURN.aspx›. Environmental Law Online. “The Precautionary Principle.” N.d. 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.envirolaw.org.au/articles/precautionary_principle›. Flannery, Tim. The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2005. ———. Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, and Gordon Waitt. “Climate and Culture.” M/C Journal 12.4 (2009). 9 Mar 2011 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/184/0›. Harrison, Karey. “How ‘Inconvenient’ Is Al Gore’s Climate Change Message?” M/C Journal 12.4 (2009). 9 Mar 2011 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/175›. Henderson-Sellers, Ann. “Climate Whispers: Media Communication about Climate Change.” Climatic Change 40 (1998): 421–456. Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding, Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A Picture of Climate Change: The Current State of Understanding. 2007. 11 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/press-ar4/ipcc-flyer-low.pdf›. Jasanoff, Sheila. “Technologies of Humility.” Nature 450 (2007): 33. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004). 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Latour.html›. Lemonick, Michael D. “Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues.” Nature News 1 Nov. 2010. 9 Mar 2011 ‹http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101101/full/news.2010.577.html›. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Moser, Susanne, and Lisa Dilling. “Making Climate Hot: Communicating the Urgency and Challenge of Global Climate Change.” Environment 46.10 (2004): 32-46. Moser, Susie. “More Bad News: The Risk of Neglecting Emotional Responses to Climate Change Information.” In Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling (eds.), Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 64-81. Oreskes, Naomi. “Science and Public Policy: What’s Proof Got to Do with It?” Environmental Science and Policy 7 (2004): 369-383. Potter, Emily, and Candice Oster. “Communicating Climate Change: Public Responsiveness and Matters of Concern.” Media International Australia 127 (2008): 116-126. President’s Science Advisory Committee. “Use of Pesticides”. Washington, D.C.: The White House, 1963. United Nations Declaration on Environment and Development. Rio de Janeiro, 1992. 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163›. “Scary Global Warming Propaganda Video Shown at the Copenhagen Climate Meeting – 7 Dec. 2009.” YouTube. 21 Mar. 2011‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzSuP_TMFtk&feature=related›. Schneider, Stephen. Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate. National Geographic Society, 2010. ———. “Stephen Schneider vs. the Sceptics”. YouTube. 21 Mar. 2011 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rj1QcdEqU0›. Schwartz, Steven. “Science in Search of a New Formula.” 2010. 20 May 2010 ‹http://www.vc.mq.edu.au/blog/2010/03/11/science-in-search-of-a-new-formula/›. Tiffen, Rodney. "You Wouldn't Read about It: Climate Scientists Right." Sydney Morning Herald 26 July 2010. 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/you-wouldnt-read-about-it-climate-scientists-right-20100727-10t5i.html›. “You Have the Power: Save Energy.” YouTube. 21 Mar. 2011 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCiS5k_uPbQ›.

Introduction The academic area known as food studies—incorporating elements from disciplines including anthropology, folklore, history, sociology, gastronomy, and cultural studies as well as a range of multi-disciplinary approaches—asserts that cooking and eating practices are less a matter of nutrition (maintaining life by absorbing nutrients from food) and more a personal or group expression of various social and/or cultural actions, values or positions. The French philosopher, Michel de Certeau agrees, arguing, moreover, that there is an urgency to name and unpick (what he identifies as) the “minor” practices, the “multifarious and silent reserve of procedures” of everyday life. Such practices are of crucial importance to all of us, as although seemingly ordinary, and even banal, they have the ability to “organise” our lives (48). Within such a context, the following aims to consider the influence and significance of an important (although largely unstudied) professional figure in rural and regional economic life: the country food preparer variously known as the local chef or cook. Such an approach is obviously framed by the concept of “cultural economy”. This term recognises the convergence, and interdependence, of the spheres of the cultural and the economic (see Scott 335, for an influential discussion on how “the cultural geography of space and the economic geography of production are intertwined”). Utilising this concept in relation to chefs and cooks seeks to highlight how the ways these figures organise (to use de Certeau’s term) the social and cultural lives of those in their communities are embedded in economic practices and also how, in turn, their economic contributions are dependent upon social and cultural practices. This initial mapping of the influence and significance of the rural and regional chef in one rural and regional area, therefore, although necessarily different in approach and content, continues the application of such converged conceptualisations of the cultural and economic as Teema Tairu’s discussion of the social, recreational and spiritual importance of food preparation and consumption by the unemployed in Finland, Guy Redden’s exploration of how supermarket products reflect shared values, and a series of analyses of the cultural significance of individual food products, such as Richard White’s study of vegemite. While Australians, both urban and rural, currently enjoy access to an internationally renowned food culture, it is remarkable to consider that it has only been during the years following the Second World War that these sophisticated and now much emulated ways of eating and cooking have developed. It is, indeed, only during the last half century that Australian eating habits have shifted from largely Anglo-Saxon influenced foods and meals that were prepared and eaten in the home, to the consumption of a wider range of more international and sophisticated foods and meals that are, increasingly, prepared by others and eaten outside the consumer’s residence. While a range of commonly cited influences has prompted this relatively recent revolution in culinary practice—including post-war migration, increasing levels of prosperity, widespread international travel, and the forces of globalisation—some of this change owes a debt to a series of influential individual figures. These tastemakers have included food writers and celebrity chefs; with early exponents including Margaret Fulton, Graham Kerr and Charmaine Solomon (see Brien). The findings of this study suggests that many restaurant chefs, and other cooks, have similarly played, and continue to take, a key role in the lives of not only the, necessarily, limited numbers of individuals who dine in a particular eatery or the other chefs and/or cooks trained in that establishment (Ruhlman, Reach), but also the communities in which they work on a much broader scale. Considering Chefs In his groundbreaking study, A History of Cooks and Cooking, Australian food historian Michael Symons proposes that those who prepare food are worthy of serious consideration because “if ‘we are what we eat’, cooks have not just made our meals, but have also made us. They have shaped our social networks, our technologies, arts and religions” (xi). Writing that cooks “deserve to have their stories told often and well,” and that, moreover, there is a “need to invent ways to think about them, and to revise our views about ourselves in their light” (xi), Symons’s is a clarion call to investigate the role and influence of cooks. Charles-Allen Baker-Clark has explicitly begun to address this lacunae in his Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks Have Taught Us About Ourselves and Our Food (2006), positing not only how these figures have shaped our relationships with food and eating, but also how these relationships impact on identities, culture and a range of social issues including those of social justice, spirituality and environmental sustainability. With the growing public interest in celebrities, it is perhaps not surprising that, while such research on chefs and/or cooks is still in its infancy, most of the existing detailed studies on individuals focus on famed international figures such as Marie-Antoine Carême (Bernier; Kelly), Escoffier (James; Rachleff; Sanger), and Alexis Soyer (Brandon; Morris; Ray). Despite an increasing number of tabloid “tell-all” surveys of contemporary celebrity chefs, which are largely based on mass media sources and which display little concern for historical or biographical accuracy (Bowyer; Hildred and Ewbank; Simpson; Smith), there have been to date only a handful of “serious” researched biographies of contemporary international chefs such as Julia Child, Alice Waters (Reardon; Riley), and Bernard Loiseux (Chelminski)—the last perhaps precipitated by an increased interest in this chef following his suicide after his restaurant lost one of its Michelin stars. Despite a handful of collective biographical studies of Australian chefs from the later-1980s on (Jenkins; O’Donnell and Knox; Brien), there are even fewer sustained biographical studies of Australian chefs or cooks (Clifford-Smith’s 2004 study of “the supermarket chef,” Bernard King, is a notable exception). Throughout such investigations, as well as in other popular food writing in magazines and cookbooks, there is some recognition that influential chefs and cooks have worked, and continue to work, outside such renowned urban culinary centres as Paris, London, New York, and Sydney. The Michelin starred restaurants of rural France, the so-called “gastropubs” of rural Britain and the advent of the “star-chef”-led country bed and breakfast establishment in Australia and New Zealand, together with the proliferation of farmer’s markets and a public desire to consume locally sourced, and ecologically sustainable, produce (Nabhan), has focused fresh attention on what could be called “the rural/regional chef”. However, despite the above, little attention has focused on the Australian non-urban chef/cook outside of the pages of a small number of key food writing magazines such as Australian Gourmet Traveller and Vogue Entertaining + Travel. Setting the Scene with an Australian Country Example: Armidale and Guyra In 2004, the Armidale-Dumaresq Council (of the New England region, New South Wales, Australia) adopted the slogan “Foodies thrive in Armidale” to market its main city for the next three years. With a population of some 20,000, Armidale’s main industry (in economic terms) is actually education and related services, but the latest Tourist Information Centre’s Dining Out in Armidale (c. 2006) brochure lists some 25 restaurants, 9 bistros and brasseries, 19 cafés and 5 fast food outlets featuring Australian, French, Italian, Mediterranean, Chinese, Thai, Indian and “international” cuisines. The local Yellow Pages telephone listings swell the estimation of the total number of food-providing businesses in the city to 60. Alongside the range of cuisines cited above, a large number of these eateries foreground the use of fresh, local foods with such phrases as “local and regional produce,” “fresh locally grown produce,” “the finest New England ingredients” and locally sourced “New England steaks, lamb and fresh seafood” repeatedly utilised in advertising and other promotional material. Some thirty kilometres to the north along the New England highway, the country town of Guyra, proclaimed a town in 1885, is the administrative and retail centre for a shire of some 2,200 people. Situated at 1,325 metres above sea level, the town is one of the highest in Australia with its main industries those of fine wool and lamb, beef cattle, potatoes and tomatoes. Until 1996, Guyra had been home to a large regional abattoir that employed some 400 staff at the height of its productivity, but rationalisation of the meat processing industry closed the facility, together with its associated pet food processor, causing a downturn in employment, local retail business, and real estate values. Since 2004, Guyra’s economy has, however, begun to recover after the town was identified by the Costa Group as the perfect site for glasshouse grown tomatoes. Perfect, due to its rare combination of cool summers (with an average of less than two days per year with temperatures over 30 degrees celsius), high winter light levels and proximity to transport routes. The result: 3.3 million kilograms of truss, vine harvested, hydroponic “Top of the Range” tomatoes currently produced per annum, all year round, in Guyra’s 5-hectare glasshouse: Australia’s largest, opened in December 2005. What residents (of whom I am one) call the “tomato-led recovery” has generated some 60 new local jobs directly related to the business, and significant flow on effects in terms of the demand for local services and retail business. This has led to substantial rates of renovation and building of new residential and retail properties, and a noticeably higher level of trade flowing into the town. Guyra’s main street retail sector is currently burgeoning and stories of its renewal have appeared in the national press. Unlike many similar sized inland towns, there are only a handful of empty shops (and most of these are in the process of being renovated), and new commercial premises have recently been constructed and opened for business. Although a small town, even in Australian country town terms, Guyra now has 10 restaurants, hotel bistros and cafés. A number of these feature local foods, with one pub’s bistro regularly featuring the trout that is farmed just kilometres away. Assessing the Contribution of Local Chefs and Cooks In mid-2007, a pilot survey to begin to explore the contribution of the regional chef in these two close, but quite distinct, rural and regional areas was sent to the chefs/cooks of the 70 food-serving businesses in Armidale and Guyra that I could identify. Taking into account the 6 returns that revealed a business had closed, moved or changed its name, the 42 replies received represented a response rate of 65.5per cent (or two thirds), representatively spread across the two towns. Answers indicated that the businesses comprised 18 restaurants, 13 cafés, 6 bistro/brasseries, 1 roadhouse, 1 takeaway/fast food and 3 bed and breakfast establishments. These businesses employed 394 staff, of whom 102 were chefs and/cooks, or 25.9 per cent of the total number of staff then employed by these establishments. In answer to a series of questions designed to ascertain the roles played by these chefs/cooks in their local communities, as well as more widely, I found a wide range of inputs. These chefs had, for instance, made a considerable contribution to their local economies in the area of fostering local jobs and a work culture: 40 (95 per cent) had worked with/for another local business including but not exclusively food businesses; 30 (71.4 per cent) had provided work experience opportunities for those aspiring to work in the culinary field; and 22 (more than half) had provided at least one apprenticeship position. A large number had brought outside expertise and knowledge with them to these local areas, with 29 (69 per cent) having worked in another food business outside Armidale or Guyra. In terms of community building and sustainability, 10 (or almost a quarter) had assisted or advised the local Council; 20 (or almost half) had worked with local school children in a food-related way; 28 (two thirds) had helped at least one charity or other local fundraising group. An extra 7 (bringing the cumulative total to 83.3 per cent) specifically mentioned that they had worked with/for the local gallery, museum and/or local history group. 23 (more than half) had been involved with and/or contributed to a local festival. The question of whether they had “contributed anything else important, helpful or interesting to the community” elicited the following responses: writing a food or wine column for the local paper (3 respondents), delivering TAFE teacher workshops (2 respondents), holding food demonstrations for Rotary and Lions Clubs and school fetes (5 respondents), informing the public about healthy food (3 respondents), educating the public about environmental issues (2 respondents) and working regularly with Meals on Wheels or a similar organisation (6 respondents, or 14.3 per cent). One respondent added his/her work as a volunteer driver for the local ambulance transport service, the only non-food related response to this question. Interestingly, in line with the activity of well-known celebrity chefs, in addition to the 3 chefs/cooks who had written a food or wine column for the local newspaper, 11 respondents (more than a quarter of the sample) had written or contributed to a cookbook or recipe collection. One of these chefs/cooks, moreover, reported that he/she produced a weblog that was “widely read”, and also contributed to international food-related weblogs and websites. In turn, the responses indicated that the (local) communities—including their governing bodies—also offer some support of these chefs and cooks. Many respondents reported they had been featured in, or interviewed and/or photographed for, a range of media. This media comprised the following: the local newspapers (22 respondents, 52.4 per cent), local radio stations (19 respondents, 45.2 per cent), regional television stations (11 respondents, 26.2 per cent) and local websites (8 respondents, 19 per cent). A number had also attracted other media exposure. This was in the local, regional area, especially through local Council publications (31 respondents, 75 per cent), as well as state-wide (2 respondents, 4.8 per cent) and nationally (6 respondents, 14.3 per cent). Two of these local chefs/cooks (or 4.8 per cent) had attracted international media coverage of their activities. It is clear from the above that, in the small area surveyed, rural and regional chefs/cooks make a considerable contribution to their local communities, with all the chefs/cooks who replied making some, and a number a major, contribution to those communities, well beyond the requirements of their paid positions in the field of food preparation and service. The responses tendered indicate that these chefs and cooks contributed regularly to local public events, institutions and charities (with a high rate of contribution to local festivals, school programs and local charitable activities), and were also making an input into public education programs, local cultural institutions, political and social debates of local importance, as well as the profitability of other local businesses. They were also actively supporting not only the future of the food industry as a whole, but also the viability of their local communities, by providing work experience opportunities and taking on local apprentices for training and mentorship. Much more than merely food providers, as a group, these chefs and cooks were, it appears, also operating as food historians, public intellectuals, teachers, activists and environmentalists. They were, moreover, operating as content producers for local media while, at the same time, acting as media producers and publishers. Conclusion The terms “chef” and “cook” can be diversely defined. All definitions, however, commonly involve a sense of professionalism in food preparation reflecting some specialist knowledge and skill in the culinary arts, as well as various levels of creativity, experience and responsibility. In terms of the specific duties that chefs and professional cooks undertake every day, almost all publications on the subject deal specifically with workplace related activities such as food and other supply ordering, staff management, menu planning and food preparation and serving. This is constant across culinary textbooks (see, for instance, Culinary Institute of America 2002) and more discursive narratives about the professional chef such as the bestselling autobiographical musings of Anthony Bourdain, and Michael Ruhlman’s journalistic/biographical investigations of US chefs (Soul; Reach). An alternative preliminary examination, and categorisation, of the roles these professionals play outside their kitchens reveals, however, a much wider range of community based activities and inputs than such texts suggest. It is without doubt that the chefs and cooks who responded to the survey discussed above have made, and are making, a considerable contribution to their local New England communities. It is also without doubt that these contributions are of considerable value, and valued by, those country communities. Further research will have to consider to what extent these contributions, and the significance and influence of these chefs and cooks in those communities are mirrored, or not, by other country (as well as urban) chefs and cooks, and their communities. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Engaging Histories: Australian Historical Association Regional Conference, at the University of New England, September 2007. I would like to thank the session’s participants for their insightful comments on that presentation. A sincere thank you, too, to the reviewers of this article, whose suggestions assisted my thinking on this piece. Research to complete this article was carried out whilst a Visiting Fellow with the Research School of Humanities, the Australian National University. References Armidale Tourist Information Centre. Dining Out in Armidale [brochure]. Armidale: Armidale-Dumaresq Council, c. 2006. Baker-Clark, C. A. 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Redden, G. “Packaging the Gifts of Nation.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php. Riley, N. Appetite For Life: The Biography of Julia Child. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Ruhlman, M. The Soul of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2001. Ruhlman, M. The Reach of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2006. Sanger, M. B. Escoffier: Master Chef. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1976. Scott, A. J. “The Cultural Economy of Cities.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 212 (1997) 323–39. Simpson, N. Gordon Ramsay: The Biography. London: John Blake, 2006. Smith, G. Nigella Lawson: A Biography. London: Andre Deutsch, 2005. Symons, M. A History of Cooks and Cooking. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2004. Tairu, T. “Material Food, Spiritual Quest: When Pleasure Does Not Follow Purchase.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/pleasure.php. White, R. 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I first came across etoy in Linz, Austria in 1995. They turned up at Ars Electronica with their shaved heads, in their matching orange bomber jackets. They were not invited. The next year they would not have to crash the party. In 1996 they were awarded Arts Electronica’s prestigious Golden Nica for web art, and were on their way to fame and bitterness – the just rewards for their art of self-regard. As founding member Agent.ZAI says: “All of us were extremely greedy – for excitement, for drugs, for success.” (Wishart & Boschler: 16) The etoy story starts on the fringes of the squatters’ movement in Zurich. Disenchanted with the hard left rhetorics that permeate the movement in the 1980s, a small group look for another way of existing within a commodified world, without the fantasy of an ‘outside’ from which to critique it. What Antonio Negri and friends call the ‘real subsumption’ of life under the rule of commodification is something etoy grasps intuitively. The group would draw on a number of sources: David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, the Manchester rave scene, European Amiga art, rumors of the historic avant gardes from Dada to Fluxus. They came together in 1994, at a meeting in the Swiss resort town of Weggis on Lake Lucerne. While the staging of the founding meeting looks like a rerun of the origins of the Situationist International, the wording of the invitation might suggest the founding of a pop music boy band: “fun, money and the new world?” One of the – many – stories about the origins of the name Dada has it being chosen at random from a bilingual dictionary. The name etoy, in an update on that procedure, was spat out by a computer program designed to make four letter words at random. Ironically, both Dada and etoy, so casually chosen, would inspire furious struggles over the ownership of these chancey 4-bit words. The group decided to make money by servicing the growing rave scene. Being based in Vienna and Zurich, the group needed a way to communicate, and chose to use the internet. This was a far from obvious thing to do in 1994. Connections were slow and unreliable. Sometimes it was easier to tape a hard drive full of clubland graphics to the underside of a seat on the express train from Zurich to Vienna and simply email instructions to meet the train and retrieve it. The web was a primitive instrument in 1995 when etoy built its first website. They launched it with a party called etoy.FASTLANE, an optimistic title when the web was anything but. Coco, a transsexual model and tabloid sensation, sang a Japanese song while suspended in the air. She brought media interest, and was anointed etoy’s lifestyle angel. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “it was as if the Seven Dwarfs had discovered their Snow White.” (Wishart & Boschler: 33) The launch didn’t lead to much in the way of a music deal or television exposure. The old media were not so keen to validate the etoy dream of lifting themselves into fame and fortune by their bootstraps. And so etoy decided to be stars of the new media. The slogan was suitably revised: “etoy: the pop star is the pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager is the system is etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 34) The etoy boys were more than net.artists, they were artists of the brand. The brand was achieving a new prominence in the mid-90s. (Klein: 35) This was a time when capitalism was hollowing itself out in the overdeveloped world, shedding parts of its manufacturing base. Control of the circuits of commodification would rest less on the ownership of the means of production and more on maintaining a monopoly on the flows of information. The leading edge of the ruling class was becoming self-consciously vectoral. It controlled the flow of information about what to produce – the details of design, the underlying patents. It controlled the flows of information about what is produced – the brands and logos, the slogans and images. The capitalist class is supplanted by a vectoral class, controlling the commodity circuit through the vectors of information. (Wark) The genius of etoy was to grasp the aesthetic dimension of this new stage of commodification. The etoy boys styled themselves not so much as a parody of corporate branding and management groupthink, but as logical extension of it. They adopted matching uniforms and called themselves agents. In the dada-punk-hiphop tradition, they launched themselves on the world as brand new, self-created, self-named subjects: Agents Zai, Brainhard, Gramazio, Kubli, Esposto, Udatny and Goldstein. The etoy.com website was registered in 1995 with Network Solutions for a $100 fee. The homepage for this etoy.TANKSYSTEM was designed like a flow chart. As Gramazio says: “We wanted to create an environment with surreal content, to build a parallel world and put the content of this world into tanks.” (Wishart & Boschler: 51) One tank was a cybermotel, with Coco the first guest. Another tank showed you your IP number, with a big-brother eye looking on. A supermarket tank offered sunglasses and laughing gas for sale, but which may or may not be delivered. The underground tank included hardcore photos of a sensationalist kind. A picture of the Federal Building in Oklamoma City after the bombing was captioned in deadpan post-situ style “such work needs a lot of training.” (Wishart & Boschler: 52) The etoy agents were by now thoroughly invested in the etoy brand and the constellation of images they had built around it, on their website. Their slogan became “etoy: leaving reality behind.” (Wishart & Boschler: 53) They were not the first artists fascinated by commodification. It was Warhol who said “good art is good business.”(Warhol ) But etoy reversed the equation: good business is good art. And good business, in this vectoral age, is in its most desirable form an essentially conceptual matter of creating a brand at the center of a constellation of signifiers. Late in 1995, etoy held another group meeting, at the Zurich youth center Dynamo. The problem was that while they had build a hardcore website, nobody was visiting it. Agents Gooldstein and Udatny thought that there might be a way of using the new search engines to steer visitors to the site. Zai and Brainhard helped secure a place at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts where Udatny could use the computer lab to implement this idea. Udatny’s first step was to create a program that would go out and gather email addresses from the web. These addresses would form the lists for the early examples of art-spam that etoy would perpetrate. Udatny’s second idea was a bit more interesting. He worked out how to get the etoy.TANKSYSTEM page listed in search engines. Most search engines ranked pages by the frequency of the search term in the pages it had indexed, so etoy.TANKSYSTEM would contain pages of selected keywords. Porn sites were also discovering this method of creating free publicity. The difference was that etoy chose a very carefully curated list of 350 search terms, including: art, bondage, cyberspace, Doom, Elvis, Fidel, genx, heroin, internet, jungle and Kant. Users of search engines who searched for these terms would find dummy pages listed prominently in their search results that directed them, unsuspectingly, to etoy.com. They called this project Digital Hijack. To give the project a slightly political aura, the pages the user was directed to contained an appeal for the release of convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick. This was the project that won them a Golden Nica statuette at Ars Electronica in 1996, which Gramazio allegedly lost the same night playing roulette. It would also, briefly, require that they explain themselves to the police. Digital Hijack also led to the first splits in the group, under the intense pressure of organizing it on a notionally collective basis, but with the zealous Agent Zai acting as de facto leader. When Udatny was expelled, Zai and Brainhard even repossessed his Toshiba laptop, bought with etoy funds. As Udatny recalls, “It was the lowest point in my life ever. There was nothing left; I could not rely on etoy any more. I did not even have clothes, apart from the etoy uniform.” (Wishart & Boschler: 104) Here the etoy story repeats a common theme from the history of the avant gardes as forms of collective subjectivity. After Digital Hijack, etoy went into a bit of a slump. It’s something of a problem for a group so dependent on recognition from the other of the media, that without a buzz around them, etoy would tend to collapse in on itself like a fading supernova. Zai spend the early part of 1997 working up a series of management documents, in which he appeared as the group’s managing director. Zai employed the current management theory rhetoric of employee ‘empowerment’ while centralizing control. Like any other corporate-Trotskyite, his line was that “We have to get used to reworking the company structure constantly.” (Wishart & Boschler: 132) The plan was for each member of etoy to register the etoy trademark in a different territory, linking identity to information via ownership. As Zai wrote “If another company uses our name in a grand way, I’ll probably shoot myself. And that would not be cool.” (Wishart & Boschler:: 132) As it turned out, another company was interested – the company that would become eToys.com. Zai received an email offering “a reasonable sum” for the etoy.com domain name. Zai was not amused. “Damned Americans, they think they can take our hunting grounds for a handful of glass pearls….”. (Wishart & Boschler: 133) On an invitation from Suzy Meszoly of C3, the etoy boys traveled to Budapest to work on “protected by etoy”, a work exploring internet security. They spent most of their time – and C3’s grant money – producing a glossy corporate brochure. The folder sported a blurb from Bjork: “etoy: immature priests from another world” – which was of course completely fabricated. When Artothek, the official art collection of the Austrian Chancellor, approached etoy wanting to buy work, the group had to confront the problem of how to actually turn their brand into a product. The idea was always that the brand was the product, but this doesn’t quite resolve the question of how to produce the kind of unique artifacts that the art world requires. Certainly the old Conceptual Art strategy of selling ‘documentation’ would not do. The solution was as brilliant as it was simple – to sell etoy shares. The ‘works’ would be ‘share certificates’ – unique objects, whose only value, on the face of it, would be that they referred back to the value of the brand. The inspiration, according to Wishart & Boschsler, was David Bowie, ‘the man who sold the world’, who had announced the first rock and roll bond on the London financial markets, backed by future earnings of his back catalogue and publishing rights. Gramazio would end up presenting Chancellor Viktor Klima with the first ‘shares’ at a press conference. “It was a great start for the project”, he said, “A real hack.” (Wishart & Boschler: 142) For this vectoral age, etoy would create the perfect vectoral art. Zai and Brainhard took off next for Pasadena, where they got the idea of reverse-engineering the online etoy.TANKSYSTEM by building an actual tank in an orange shipping container, which would become etoy.TANK 17. This premiered at the San Francisco gallery Blasthaus in June 1998. Instant stars in the small world of San Francisco art, the group began once again to disintegrate. Brainhard and Esposito resigned. Back in Europe in late 1998, Zai was preparing to graduate from the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. His final project would recapitulate the life and death of etoy. It would exist from here on only as an online archive, a digital mausoleum. As Kubli says “there was no possibility to earn our living with etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 192) Zai emailed eToys.com and asked them if them if they would like to place a banner ad on etoy.com, to redirect any errant web traffic. Lawyers for eToys.com offered etoy $30,000 for the etoy.com domain name, which the remaining members of etoy – Zai, Gramazio, Kubli – refused. The offer went up to $100,000, which they also refused. Through their lawyer Peter Wild they demanded $750,000. In September 1999, while etoy were making a business presentation as their contribution to Ars Electronica, eToys.com lodged a complaint against etoy in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The company hired Bruce Wessel, of the heavyweight LA law firm Irell & Manella, who specialized in trademark, copyright and other intellectual property litigation. The complaint Wessel drafted alleged that etoy had infringed and diluted the eToys trademark, were practicing unfair competition and had committed “intentional interference with prospective economic damage.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) Wessel demanded an injunction that would oblige etoy to cease using its trademark and take down its etoy.com website. The complaint also sought to prevent etoy from selling shares, and demanded punitive damages. Displaying the aggressive lawyering for which he was so handsomely paid, Wessel invoked the California Unfair Competition Act, which was meant to protect citizens from fraudulent business scams. Meant as a piece of consumer protection legislation, its sweeping scope made it available for inventive suits such as Wessel’s against etoy. Wessel was able to use pretty much everything from the archive etoy built against it. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “The court papers were like a delicately curated catalogue of its practices.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) And indeed, legal documents in copyright and trademark cases may be the most perfect literature of the vectoral age. The Unfair Competition claim was probably aimed at getting the suit heard in a Californian rather than a Federal court in which intellectual property issues were less frequently litigated. The central aim of the eToys suit was the trademark infringement, but on that head their claims were not all that strong. According to the 1946 Lanham Act, similar trademarks do not infringe upon each other if there they are for different kinds of business or in different geographical areas. The Act also says that the right to own a trademark depends on its use. So while etoy had not registered their trademark and eToys had, etoy were actually up and running before eToys, and could base their trademark claim on this fact. The eToys case rested on a somewhat selective reading of the facts. Wessel claimed that etoy was not using its trademark in the US when eToys was registered in 1997. Wessel did not dispute the fact that etoy existed in Europe prior to that time. He asserted that owning the etoy.com domain name was not sufficient to establish a right to the trademark. If the intention of the suit was to bully etoy into giving in, it had quite the opposite effect. It pissed them off. “They felt again like the teenage punks they had once been”, as Wishart & Bochsler put it. Their art imploded in on itself for lack of attention, but called upon by another, it flourished. Wessel and eToys.com unintentionally triggered a dialectic that worked in quite the opposite way to what they intended. The more pressure they put on etoy, the more valued – and valuable – they felt etoy to be. Conceptual business, like conceptual art, is about nothing but the management of signs within the constraints of given institutional forms of market. That this conflict was about nothing made it a conflict about everything. It was a perfectly vectoral struggle. Zai and Gramazio flew to the US to fire up enthusiasm for their cause. They asked Wolfgang Staehle of The Thing to register the domain toywar.com, as a space for anti-eToys activities at some remove from etoy.com, and as a safe haven should eToys prevail with their injunction in having etoy.com taken down. The etoy defense was handled by Marcia Ballard in New York and Robert Freimuth in Los Angeles. In their defense, they argued that etoy had existed since 1994, had registered its globally accessible domain in 1995, and won an international art prize in 1996. To counter a claim by eToys that they had a prior trademark claim because they had bought a trademark from another company that went back to 1990, Ballard and Freimuth argued that this particular trademark only applied to the importation of toys from the previous owner’s New York base and thus had no relevance. They capped their argument by charging that eToys had not shown that its customers were really confused by the existence of etoy. With Christmas looming, eToys wanted a quick settlement, so they offered Zurich-based etoy lawyer Peter Wild $160,000 in shares and cash for the etoy domain. Kubli was prepared to negotiate, but Zai and Gramazio wanted to gamble – and raise the stakes. As Zai recalls: “We did not want to be just the victims; that would have been cheap. We wanted to be giants too.” (Wishart & Boschler: 207) They refused the offer. The case was heard in November 1999 before Judge Rafeedie in the Federal Court. Freimuth, for etoy, argued that federal Court was the right place for what was essentially a trademark matter. Robert Kleiger, for eToys, countered that it should stay where it was because of the claims under the California Unfair Competition act. Judge Rafeedie took little time in agreeing with the eToys lawyer. Wessel’s strategy paid off and eToys won the first skirmish. The first round of a quite different kind of conflict opened when etoy sent out their first ‘toywar’ mass mailing, drawing the attention of the net.art, activism and theory crowd to these events. This drew a report from Felix Stalder in Telepolis: “Fences are going up everywhere, molding what once seemed infinite space into an overcrowded and tightly controlled strip mall.” (Stalder ) The positive feedback from the net only emboldened etoy. For the Los Angeles court, lawyers for etoy filed papers arguing that the sale of ‘shares’ in etoy was not really a stock offering. “The etoy.com website is not about commerce per se, it is about artist and social protest”, they argued. (Wishart & Boschler: 209) They were obliged, in other words, to assert a difference that the art itself had intended to blur in order to escape eToy’s claims under the Unfair Competition Act. Moreover, etoy argued that there was no evidence of a victim. Nobody was claiming to have been fooled by etoy into buying something under false pretences. Ironically enough, art would turn out in hindsight to be a more straightforward transaction here, involving less simulation or dissimulation, than investing in a dot.com. Perhaps we have reached the age when art makes more, not less, claim than business to the rhetorical figure of ‘reality’. Having defended what appeared to be the vulnerable point under the Unfair Competition law, etoy went on the attack. It was the failure of eToys to do a proper search for other trademarks that created the problem in the first place. Meanwhile, in Federal Court, lawyers for etoy launched a counter-suit that reversed the claims against them made by eToys on the trademark question. While the suits and counter suits flew, eToys.com upped their offer to settle to a package of cash and shares worth $400,000. This rather puzzled the etoy lawyers. Those choosing to sue don’t usually try at the same time to settle. Lawyer Peter Wild advised his clients to take the money, but the parallel tactics of eToys.com only encouraged them to dig in their heels. “We felt that this was a tremendous final project for etoy”, says Gramazio. As Zai says, “eToys was our ideal enemy – we were its worst enemy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 210) Zai reported the offer to the net in another mass mail. Most people advised them to take the money, including Doug Rushkoff and Heath Bunting. Paul Garrin counseled fighting on. The etoy agents offered to settle for $750,000. The case came to court in late November 1999 before Judge Shook. The Judge accepted the plausibility of the eToys version of the facts on the trademark issue, which included the purchase of a registered trademark from another company that went back to 1990. He issued an injunction on their behalf, and added in his statement that he was worried about “the great danger of children being exposed to profane and hardcore pornographic issues on the computer.” (Wishart & Boschler: 222) The injunction was all eToys needed to get Network Solutions to shut down the etoy.com domain. Zai sent out a press release in early December, which percolated through Slashdot, rhizome, nettime (Staehle) and many other networks, and catalyzed the net community into action. A debate of sorts started on investor websites such as fool.com. The eToys stock price started to slide, and etoy ‘warriors’ felt free to take the credit for it. The story made the New York Times on 9th December, Washington Post on the 10th, Wired News on the 11th. Network Solutions finally removed the etoy.com domain on the 10th December. Zai responded with a press release: “this is robbery of digital territory, American imperialism, corporate destruction and bulldozing in the way of the 19th century.” (Wishart & Boschler: 237) RTMark set up a campaign fund for toywar, managed by Survival Research Laboratories’ Mark Pauline. The RTMark press release promised a “new internet ‘game’ designed to destroy eToys.com.” (Wishart & Boschler: 239) The RTMark press release grabbed the attention of the Associated Press newswire. The eToys.com share price actually rose on December 13th. Goldman Sachs’ e-commerce analyst Anthony Noto argued that the previous declines in the Etoys share price made it a good buy. Goldman Sachs was the lead underwriter of the eToys IPO. Noto’s writings may have been nothing more than the usual ‘IPOetry’ of the time, but the crash of the internet bubble was some months away yet. The RTMark campaign was called ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. It used the Floodnet technique that Ricardo Dominguez used in support of the Zapatistas. As Dominguez said, “this hysterical power-play perfectly demonstrates the intensions of the new net elite; to turn the World Wide Web into their own private home-shopping network.” (Wishart & Boschler: 242) The Floodnet attack may have slowed the eToys.com server down a bit, but it was robust and didn’t crash. Ironically, it ran on open source software. Dominguez claims that the ‘Twelve Days’ campaign, which relied on individuals manually launching Floodnet from their own computers, was not designed to destroy the eToys site, but to make a protest felt. “We had a single-bullet script that could have taken down eToys – a tactical nuke, if you will. But we felt this script did not represent the presence of a global group of people gathered to bear witness to a wrong.” (Wishart & Boschler: 245) While the eToys engineers did what they could to keep the site going, eToys also approached universities and businesses whose systems were being used to host Floodnet attacks. The Thing, which hosted Dominguez’s eToys Floodnet site was taken offline by The Thing’s ISP, Verio. After taking down the Floodnet scripts, The Thing was back up, restoring service to the 200 odd websites that The Thing hosted besides the offending Floodnet site. About 200 people gathered on December 20th at a demonstration against eToys outside the Museum of Modern Art. Among the crowd were Santas bearing signs that said ‘Coal for eToys’. The rally, inside the Museum, was led by the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping: “We are drowning in a sea of identical details”, he said. (Wishart & Boschler: 249-250) Meanwhile etoy worked on the Toywar Platform, an online agitpop theater spectacle, in which participants could act as soldiers in the toywar. This would take some time to complete – ironically the dispute threatened to end before this last etoy artwork was ready, giving etoy further incentives to keep the dispute alive. The etoy agents had a new lawyer, Chris Truax, who was attracted to the case by the publicity it was generating. Through Truax, etoy offered to sell the etoy domain and trademark for $3.7 million. This may sound like an insane sum, but to put it in perspective, the business.com site changed hands for $7.5 million around this time. On December 29th, Wessel signaled that eToys was prepared to compromise. The problem was, the Toywar Platform was not quite ready, so etoy did what it could to drag out the negotiations. The site went live just before the scheduled court hearings, January 10th 2000. “TOYWAR.com is a place where all servers and all involved people melt and build a living system. In our eyes it is the best way to express and document what’s going on at the moment: people start to about new ways to fight for their ideas, their lifestyle, contemporary culture and power relations.” (Wishart & Boschler: 263) Meanwhile, in a California courtroom, Truax demanded that Network Solutions restore the etoy domain, that eToys pay the etoy legal expenses, and that the case be dropped without prejudice. No settlement was reached. Negotiations dragged on for another two weeks, with the etoy agents’ attention somewhat divided between two horizons – art and law. The dispute was settled on 25th January. Both parties dismissed their complaints without prejudice. The eToys company would pay the etoy artists $40,000 for legal costs, and contact Network Solutions to reinstate the etoy domain. “It was a pleasure doing business with one of the biggest e-commerce giants in the world” ran the etoy press release. (Wishart & Boschler: 265) That would make a charming end to the story. But what goes around comes around. Brainhard, still pissed off with Zai after leaving the group in San Francisco, filed for the etoy trademark in Austria. After that the internal etoy wranglings just gets boring. But it was fun while it lasted. What etoy grasped intuitively was the nexus between the internet as a cultural space and the transformation of the commodity economy in a yet-more abstract direction – its becoming-vectoral. They zeroed in on the heart of the new era of conceptual business – the brand. As Wittgenstein says of language, what gives words meaning is other words, so too for brands. What gives brands meaning is other brands. There is a syntax for brands as there is for words. What etoy discovered is how to insert a new brand into that syntax. The place of eToys as a brand depended on their business competition with other brands – with Toys ‘R’ Us, for example. For etoy, the syntax they discovered for relating their brand to another one was a legal opposition. What made etoy interesting was their lack of moral posturing. Their abandonment of leftist rhetorics opened them up to exploring the territory where media and business meet, but it also made them vulnerable to being consumed by the very dialectic that created the possibility of staging etoy in the first place. By abandoning obsolete political strategies, they discovered a media tactic, which collapsed for want of a new strategy, for the new vectoral terrain on which we find ourselves. Works Cited Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. Continuum, London, 2003. Warhol, Andy. From A to B and Back Again. Picador, New York, 1984. Stalder, Felix. ‘Fences in Cyberspace: Recent events in the battle over domain names’. 19 Jun 2003. <http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.php>. Wark, McKenzie. ‘A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]’ 19 Jun 2003. http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. Harper Collins, London, 2000. Wishart, Adam & Regula Bochsler. Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com & Other Battles to Control Cyberspace Ecco Books, 2003. Staehle, Wolfgang. ‘<nettime> etoy.com shut down by US court.’ 19 Jun 2003. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.html Links http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.htm http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.html http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Wark, McKenzie. "Toywars" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>. APA Style Wark, M. (2003, Jun 19). Toywars. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>