Статті в журналах з теми "Australian contemporary painting"

This paper investigates a select number of examples in which largely non-literate First Nation peoples of Australia, like some First Nations peoples around the world, when faced with a judicial challenge to present evidence in court to support their land title claim, have drawn on their cultural materials as supporting evidence. Specifically, the text highlights the effective agency of indigenous visual expression as a communication tool within the Australian legal system. Further, it evaluates this history within an indigenous Australian art context, instancing where of visual art, including drawings and paintings, has been successfully used to support the main evidence in native title land claims. The focus is on three case studies, each differentiated by its distinct medium, commonly used in indigenous contemporary art—namely, ink/watercolours on paper, (Case study 1—the Mabo drawings of 1992), acrylics on canvas (Case study 2—the Ngurrara 11 canvas 1997) and ochre on bark, (Case study 3—The Saltwater Bark Collection 1997 (onwards)). The differentiation in the stylistic character of these visual presentations is evaluated within the context of being either a non-indigenous tradition (e.g., represented as European-like diagrams or sketches to detail areas and boundaries of the claim sites in question) or by an indigenous expressive context (e.g., the evidence of the claim is presented using traditionally inspired indigenous symbols relating to the claimant’s lands. These latter images are adaptations of the secret sacred symbols used in ceremonies and painting, but expressed in a form that complies with traditional protocols protecting secret, sacred knowledge). The following text details how such visual presentations in the aforementioned cases were used and accepted as legitimate legal instruments, on which Australian courts based their legal determinations of the native land title.

Aboriginal Australian contemporary artists create works that express indigenous traditions as well as the unprecedented conditions of global modernity. This is especially true for the founders of the Spinifex Arts Project, a collective established in 1997 to create so-called “government paintings”: the large-scale canvases produced as documents of land tenure used in negotiations with the government of Western Australia to reclaim expropriated desert homelands. British and Australian nuclear testing in the 1950s displaced the Anangu juta pila nguru, now known to us as the Spinifex people, from their nomadic lifeworld. Exodus and the subsequent struggle to regain lost homelands through paintings created as corroborating evidence for native title claims make Spinifex canvases not simply expressions of Tjukurpa, or “Dreamings,” but also artifacts of the atomic age and its impact on a culture seemingly far from the front lines of cold war conflict.

This article had its genesis in a family photograph of my paternal grandmother's parents, Rowland and Rebecca Walton (see Figure 1). I knew little about them apart from their English origins, but their appearance was intriguing: definitely stalwart pioneers, but what kind of pioneers? Popular cultural knowledge in Australia provides one central image of the pioneer, summed up concisely by Katharine Susannah Prichard: ‘It will be a nation of pioneers, with all the adventurous, toiling strain of the men and women who came over the sea and conquered the wilderness.’ Prichard's notion was directly inspired by a painting, The Pioneer (1904) by Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917), described by Tim Bonyhady as ‘one of the most influential paintings of the emigrant experience in Australia’. Utilising a triptych fonnat, it recounts (in the words of a contemporary reviewer) ‘its own legend of the useful toil, the homely joys, and destiny obscure of the pioneer, who does not live, as the rude cross in the third panel indicates, to see the growth or share in the prosperity of the fine city seen in the background of the panel’.

Rock-art researchers have long acknowledged the importance of discerning superimposition sequences as a means for exploring chronology. Despite their potential for reconstructing painting events and thus informing on a site's production sequences, the social significance of superimpositions and their associated meanings have been little explored. In the Kimberley Region of northwestern Australia, interpretations of superimpositions as an analytical lens have often lingered on the ‘negative’ connotations of this practice (e.g. to destroy supernatural power embedded in previous paintings and/or to show cultural dominance). As a result, it has been proposed that the overpainting of previous images was tantamount to defacing, leading to the proposition that new images constituted a form of vandalism of older art. In this paper, a sample of rock-art sites from the northwestern and northeastern Kimberley is analysed with the aim of grounding the study of superimpositions in more nuanced practices, leading researchers to contemplate the role they played among populations within the same area. It is argued here that superimpositions brought together past and present experiences that served to reinforce the links between contemporary art production and the inherited landscape.

This article explores my relations to Country through colour. It is accompanied by three art pieces I have recently painted. It has a particular focus on my changing relationship to Biripi and Ngunnawal countries in Australia and the ways this relationship was impacted by my travelling to the “Learning How to Inherit in Colonized and Ecologically Challenged Lifeworlds” symposium in Victoria, British Columbia. As depicted in the paintings, my understandings of Country are coloured by the heritage-­‐based connections to land that continue to shape my contemporary Aboriginal identity, my growing engagement with and understanding of the contemporary common worlds I inhabit, and the discussions of place and identity that took place at the symposium.

The role of artistry in transformative maintenance of law and custom is a theme widely researched and discussed in Aboriginal arts related literature. However, it is the aim of this paper to contribute to a wider discourse about learning and economic participation in remote Australia, and in particular the role of multimodality as a significant asset. The paper draws from relevant literature and two case studies; one from Keringke Arts, and one from Eastern Arrernte teacher and artist, Kathleen Kemarre Wallace. In customary form, multimodality combines and recombines various modalities — including dance, song, sand drawing, body painting and design, storytelling, stories, rhythm, petroglyph and ochre-painted rock art — enabling the intergenerational teaching and learning of rich cultural heritage in ways which connect that experience to the law and custom of the homelands. Multimodality, as it is used in this paper, draws on the concept of ‘form-relationality’; the way various modalities are combined and recombined, as elements which together describe a body of knowledge and yet separately provide myriad detail. Although beyond the scope of this paper, multimodality is also a mediating influence between contemporary and customary elements and contexts. This paper considers the complexity of multimodality as an asset in a contemporary arts market.

Between late 1979 and early 1980, Australian artist Jenny Watson painted a sequence of six works, each with the title A Painted Page. Combining gridded, painted reproductions of photographs, newspapers and department store catalogues with roughly painted fields of color, the series brought together a range of recent styles and painterly idioms: pop, photorealism, and non-objective abstraction. Watson’s evocation of styles considered dated, corrupted or redundant by contemporary critics was read as a sign of the decline of modernism and the emergence of a postmodernism inflected with irony and a cool, “new wave” sensibility. An examination of the Painted Pages in the context of Watson’s interest in autobiography and her association with the women’s art movement, however, reveals the works to be subjective, highly personal reflections on memory, self and artistic aspiration. Drawing on Bahktin’s model of the chronotope, this paper argues for a spatio-temporal reading of Watson’s Painted Pages rather than the crude model of stylistic redundancy and succession. Watson’s source images register temporal orders ranging across the daily, the seasonal and the epochal. Her paintings transpose Bahktin’s typology of quotidian, provincial and “adventuristic” time into autobiographical paintings of teenage memories, the vicissitudes of the art world and punk subcultures. Collectively, the Painted Pages established a chronotopic field; neither an aggregation of moments nor a collaged evocation of a period but a point at which Watson closed off one kind of time (an art critical time of currency and succession) and opened up another (of subjectivity and affective experience).

This edition is the first issue of Dewa Ruci’s Journal, in which all articles are in English. We deliberately changed the language of publication to English to facilitate information delivery to a wider audience. We realize that English is the official language for many countries rather than other languages in this world. The number of people who have literacy awareness and need scientific information about visual and performing arts regarding the archipelago’s cultural arts is also quite large.The decision to change the language of publication to English does not mean that we do not have nationalism or are not in love with the Indonesian language. This change is necessary to foster the intensity of scientific interaction among writers who are not limited to Indonesia’s territory alone. We desire that the scientific ideas outlined in Dewa Ruci’s Journal are read by intellectual circles of the arts internationally. We also want to express our scientific greetings to art experts from countries in New Zealand, the USA, Australia, Europe, especially Britain, and other English-speaking countries such as the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, the Caribbean, Hong Kong, South Africa, and Canada. Of course, a change in English will also benefit intellectuals from countries that have acquired English as a second language, such as Malaysia, Brunei, Israel, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. In essence, Dewa Ruci’s Journal editor wants to invite writers to greet the scientific community at large.We are grateful that six writers can greet the international community through their articles. The first is Tunjung Atmadi and Ika Yuni Purnama, who wrote an article entitled “Material Ergonomics on Application of Wooden Floors in the Interior of the Workspace Office.” This article discusses office interiors that are devoted to workspaces. The purpose of this study is to share knowledge about how to take advantage of space-forming elements in the interior design of a workspace by utilizing wooden floors like parquet. The focus is on choosing the use of wood by paying attention to the elements in its application. This research result has a significant meaning in the aesthetics, comfort, and safety of wooden floors in the workspace’s interior and its advantages and disadvantages.The second writer who had the opportunity to greet the Dewa Ruci Journal audience was intellectuals with diverse expertise, namely Taufiq Akbar, Dendi Pratama, Sarwanto, and Sunardi. Together they wrote an article entitled “Visual Adaptation: From Comics to Superhero Creation of Wayang.” This article discusses the fusion and mixing of wayang as a traditional culture with comics and films as contemporary culture products. This melting and mixing have given birth to new wayang creations with sources adapted from the superhero character “Avenger,” which they now call the Avenger Wayang Kreasi. According to them, Wayang Kreasi Avenger’s making maintains technical knowledge of the art of wayang kulit. It introduces young people who are not familiar with wayang kulit about the technique of carving sungging by displaying the attributes in the purwa skin for Wayang Kreasi Avenger. This creativity is an attempt to stimulate and show people’s love for the potential influence of traditional cultural heritage and its interaction with the potential of contemporary culture.The next authors are Sriyadi and RM Pramutomo, with an article entitled “Presentation Style of Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun Dance in Pura Mangkunegaran.” This article reveals a repertoire of Yogyakarta-style dance in Mangkunegaran, Surakarta, namely the Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun. The presence of this dance in Mangkunegaran occurred during the reign of Mangkunegara VII. However, the basic character of the Mangkunegaran style dance has a significant difference from the Yogyakarta style. This paper aims to examine the Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun dance’s presentation style in Mangkunegaran to determine the formation of its presentation technique. The shape of the Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun dance style in Mangkunegaran did not occur in an event but was a process. The presentation style’s formation is due to a problem in the inheritance system that has undergone significant changes. These problems arise from social, political, cultural, and economic conditions. The responses to these problems have shaped the Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun dance's distinctive features in Mangkunegaran, although not all of them have been positive.Hasbi wrote an article entitled “Sappo: Sulapa Eppa Walasuji as the Ideas of Creation Three Dimensional Painting.” This article reveals Hasbi’s creative process design in creating three-dimensional works of art, named Sappo. He got his inspiration from the ancient manuscripts written in Lontara, namely the manuscripts written in the traditional script of the Bugis-Makassar people on palm leaves, which they still keep until now. Sappo for the Bugis community is a fence that limits (surrounds, isolates) the land and houses. Sappo’s function is to protect herself, her family, and her people. Sulapa Eppa means four sides, is a mystical manifestation, the classical belief of the Bugis-Makassar people, which symbolizes the composition of the universe, wind-fire-water-earth. Walasuji is a kind of bamboo fence in rhombus rituals. Eppa Walasuji’s Sulapa is Hasbi’s concept in creating Sappo in the form of three-dimensional paintings. The idea is a symbolic expression borrowing the Lontara tradition's idiom to create a symbolic effect called Sappo.Mahdi Bahar and his friends wrote an article entitled “Transformation of Krinok to Bungo Krinok Music: The Innovation Certainty and Digital-Virtual Contribution for Cultural Advancement.” Together, they have made innovations to preserve Krinok music, one of Jambi’s traditional music themes, into new music that they call Bungo Krinok. He said that innovation is a necessity for the development of folk music. In innovating, they take advantage of digital technology. They realize this music’s existence as a cultural wealth that has great potential for developing and advancing art. The musical system, melodic contours, musical grammar, and distinctive interval patterns have formed krinok music’s character. This innovation has given birth to new music as a transformation from Jambi folk music called “Bungo Krinok” music.Finally, Luqman Wahyudi and Sri Hesti Heriwati. They both wrote an article entitled “Social Criticism About the 2019 Election Campaign on the Comic Strip Gump n Hell.” They explained that in 2019 there was an interesting phenomenon regarding the use of comic strips as a means of social criticism, especially in the Indonesian Presidential Election Campaign. The title of the comic is Gump n Hell by Errik Irwan Wibowo. The comic strip was published and viral on social media, describing the political events that took place. In this study, they took three samples of the comic strip Gump n Hell related to the moment of the 2019 election to analyze their meaning. From the results of this study, there is an implicit meaning in the comic strip of pop culture icons' use to represent political figures in the form of parodies.That is the essence of the issue of Volume 16 Number 1 (April Edition), 2021. Hopefully, the knowledge that has been present in this publication can spur the growth of visual and performing art science in international networks, both in the science of art creation and in scientific research of art in general. We hope that the development of visual and performing art science can reveal the various meanings behind various facts and phenomena of art life. Therefore, the growth of international networks is an indispensable need.Thank you.

IntroductionThree broad stages of Australia’s arts and culture sectors may be discerned with reference to the Northern Hemisphere. The first is in Australia’s early years where artists travelled to the metropoles of Europe to learn from acknowledged masters, to view the great works and to become part of a broader cultural scene. The second is where Australian art was promoted internationally, which to some extent began in the 1960s with exhibitions such as the 1961 ‘Survey of recent Australian painting’ at the Whitechapel gallery. The third relates to the strong promotion and push to display and sell Indigenous art, which has been a key area of focus since the 1970s.The Allure of the NorthFor a long time Australasian artists have mostly travelled to Britain (Britain) or Europe (Cooper; Frost; Inkson and Carr), be they writers, painters or musicians for example. Hecq (36) provides a useful overview of the various periods of expatriation from Australia, referring to the first significant phase at the end of the twentieth century when many painters left “to complete their atelier instruction in Paris and London”. Many writers also left for the north during this time, with a number of women travelling overseas on account of “intellectual pressures as well as intellectual isolation”(Hecq 36). Among these, Miles Franklin left Australia in “an open act of rebellion against the repressive environment of her family and colonial culture” (37). There also existed “a belief that ‘there’ is better than ‘here’” (de Groen vii) as well as a “search for the ideal” (viii). World War I led to stronger Anglo-Australian relations hence an increase in expatriation to Europe and Britain as well as longer-term sojourns. These increased further in the wake of World War II. Hecq describes how for many artists, there was significant discontent with Australian provincialism and narrow-mindedness, as well as a desire for wider audiences and international recognition. Further, Hecq describes how Europe became something of a “dreamland”, with numerous artists influenced by their childhood readings about this part of the world and a sense of the imaginary or the “other”. This sense of a dream is described beautifully by McAuliffe (56), who refers to the 1898 painting by A.J. Daplyn as a “melancholic diagram of the nineteenth-century Australian artist’s world, tempering the shimmering allure of those northern lights with the shadowy, somnolent isolation of the south”.Figure 1: The Australian Artist’s Dream of Europe; A.J. Daplyn, 1898 (oil on canvas; courtesy artnet.com)In ‘Some Other Dream’, de Groen presents a series of interviews with expatriate Australian artists and writers as an insight into what drove each to look north and to leave Australia, either temporarily or permanently. Here are a few examples:Janet Alderson: “I desperately wanted to see what was going on” (2)Robert Jacks: “the dream of something else. New York is a dream for lots of people” (21)Bruce Latimer: “I’d always been interested in America, New York in particular” (34)Jeffrey Smart: “Australia seemed to be very dull and isolated, and Italy seemed to be thrilling and modern” (50)Clement Meadmore: “I never had much to do with what was happening in Melbourne: I was never accepted there” (66)Stelarc: “I was interested in traditional Japanese art and the philosophy of Zen” (80)Robert Hughes: “I’d written everything that I’d wanted to write about Australian art and this really dread prospect was looming up of staying in Australia for the rest of one’s life” (128)Max Hutchison: “I quickly realised that Melbourne was a non-art consuming city” (158)John Stringer: “I was not getting the latitude that I wanted at the National Gallery [in Australia] … the prospects of doing other good shows seemed rather slim” (178)As the testimony here suggests, the allure of the north ranges from dissatisfaction with the south to the attraction of various parts of the world in the north.More recently, McAuliffe describes a shift in the impact of the overseas experience for many artists. Describing them as business travellers, he refers to the fact that artists today travel to meet international art dealers and to participate in exhibitions, art fairs and the like. Further, he argues that the risk today lies in “disorientation and distraction rather than provincial timidity” (McAuliffe 56). That is, given the ease and relatively cheap costs of international travel, McAuliffe argues that the challenge is in adapting to constantly changing circumstances, rather than what are now arguably dated concepts of cultural cringe or tyranny of distance. Further, given the combination of “cultural nationalism, social cosmopolitanism and information technology”, McAuliffe (58) argues that the need to expatriate is no longer a requirement for success.Australian Art Struggles InternationallyThe struggles for Australian art as a sector to succeed internationally, particularly in Britain, Europe and the US, are well documented (Frost; Robertson). This is largely due to Australia’s limited history of white settlement and established canon of great art works, the fact that power and position remain strong hence the dominance of Europe and North America in the creative arts field (Bourdieu), as well as Australia’s geographical isolation from the major art centres of the world, with Heartney (63) describing the “persistent sense of isolation of the Australian art world”. While Australia has had considerable success internationally in terms of its popular music (e.g. INXS, Kylie Minogue, The Seekers) and high-profile Hollywood actors (e.g. Geoffrey Rush, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman), the visual arts in particular have struggled (O’Sullivan), including the Indigenous visual arts subsector (Stone). One of the constant criticisms in the visual art world is that Australian art is too focussed on place (e.g. the Australian outback) and not global art movements and trends (Robertson). While on the one hand he argues that Australian visual artists have made some inroads and successes in the international market, McAuliffe (63) tempers this with the following observation:Australian artists don’t operate at the white-hot heart of the international art market: there are no astronomical prices and hotly contested bidding wars. International museums acquire Australian art only rarely, and many an international survey exhibition goes by with no Australian representation.The Push to Sell Australian Cultural Product in the NorthWriting in the mid-nineties at the time of the release of the national cultural policy Creative Nation, the then prime minister Paul Keating identified a need for Australia as a nation to become more competitive internationally in terms of cultural exports. This is a theme that continues today. Recent decades have seen several attempts to promote Australian visual art overseas and in particular Indigenous art; this has come with mixed success. However, there have been misconceptions in the past and hence numerous challenges associated with promoting and selling Aboriginal art in international markets (Wright). One of the problems is that a lot of Europeans “have often seen bad examples of Aboriginal Art” (Anonymous 69) and it is typically the art work which travels north, less so the Indigenous artists who create them and who can talk to them and engage with audiences. At the same time, the Indigenous art sector remains a major contributor to the Australian art economy (Australia Council). While there are some examples of successful Australian art managers operating galleries overseas in such places as London and in the US (Anonymous-b), these are limited and many have had to struggle to gain recognition for their artists’ works.Throsby refers to the well-established fact that the international art market predominantly resides in the US and in Europe (including Britain). Further, Throsby (64) argues that breaking into this market “is a daunting task requiring resources, perseverance, a quality product, and a good deal of luck”. Referring specifically to Indigenous Australian art, Throsby (65) reveals how leading European fairs such as those at Basel and Cologne, displaying breath-taking ignorance if not outright stupidity, have vetoed Aboriginal works on the grounds that they are folk art. This saga continues to the present day, and it still remains to be seen whether these fairs will eventually wake up to themselves.It is also presented in an issue of Artlink that the “challenge is to convince European buyers of the value of Australian art, even though the work is comparatively inexpensive” (Anonymous 69). Is the Rite of Passage Relevant in the 21st Century?Some authors challenge the notion that the rite of passage to the northern hemisphere is a requirement for success for an Australian artist (Frost). This challenge is worthy of unpacking in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and particularly so in what is being termed the Asian century (Bice and Sullivan; Wesley). Firstly, Australia is far closer to Asia than it is to Europe and North America. Secondly, the Asian population is expected to continue to experience rapid economic and population growth, for example the rise of the middle class in China, potentially representing new markets for the consumption of creative product. Lee and Lim refer to the rapid economic modernisation and growth in East Asia (Japan to Singapore). Hence, given the struggles that are often experienced by Australian artists and dealers in attempting to break into the art markets of Europe and North America, it may be more constructive to look towards Asia as an alternative north and place for Australian creative product. Fourthly, many Asian countries are investing heavily in their creative industries and creative economy (Kim and Kim; Kong), hence representing an opportune time for Australian creative practitioners to explore new connections and partnerships.In the first half of the twentieth century, Australians felt compelled to travel north to Europe, especially, if they wanted to engage with the great art teachers, galleries and art works. Today, with the impact of technology, engaging with the art world can be achieved much more readily and quickly, through “increasingly transnational forms of cultural production, distribution and consumption” (Rowe et al. 8). This recent wave of technological development has been significant (Guerra and Kagan), in relation to online communication (e.g. skype, email), social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) as well as content available on the Web for both informal and formal learning purposes. Artists anywhere in the world can now connect online while also engaging with what is an increasing field of virtual museums and galleries. For example, the Tate Gallery in London has over 70,000 artworks in its online art database which includes significant commentary on each work. While online engagement does not necessarily enable an individual to have the lived experience of a gallery walk-through or to be an audience member at a live performance in an outstanding international venue, online technologies have made it much easier for developing artists to engage from anywhere in the world. This certainly makes the ‘tyranny of distance’ factor relevant to Australia somewhat more manageable.There is also a developing field of research citing the importance of emerging artists displaying enterprising and/or entrepreneurial skills (Bridgstock), in the context of a rapidly changing global arts sector. This broadly refers to the need for artists to have business skills, to be able to seek out and identify opportunities, as well as manage multiple projects and/or various streams of income in what is a very different career type and pathway (Beckman; Bridgstock and Cunningham; Hennekam and Bennett). These opportunity seeking skills and agentic qualities have also been cited as critical in relation to the fact that there is not only a major oversupply of artistic labour globally (Menger), but there is a growing stream of entrants to the global higher education tertiary arts sector that shows no signs of subsiding (Daniel). Concluding RemarksAustralia’s history features a strong relationship with and influences from the north, and in particular from Britain, Europe and North America. This remains the case today, with much of Australian society based on inherited models from Britain, be this in the art world or in such areas as the law and education. As well as a range of cultural and sentimental links with this north, Australia is sometimes considered to be a satellite of European civilisation in the Asia-Pacific region. It is therefore explicable why artists might continue this longstanding relationship with this particular north.In our interesting and complex present of the early twenty-first century, Australia is hampered by the lack of any national cultural policy as well as recent significant cuts to arts funding at the national and state levels (Caust). Nevertheless, there are opportunities to be further explored in relation to the changing patterns of production and consumption of creative content, the impact of new and next technologies, as well as the rise of Asia in the Asian Century. The broad field of the arts and artists is a rich area for ongoing research and inquiry and ultimately, Australia’s links to the north including the concept of the rite of passage deserves ongoing consideration.ReferencesAnonymous a. "Outposts: The Case of the Unofficial Attache." Artlink 18.4 (1998): 69–71.Anonymous b. "Who’s Selling What to Whom: Australian Dealers Taking Australian Art Overseas." Artlink 18. 4 (1998): 66–68.Australia Council for the Arts. Arts Nation: An Overview of Australian Arts. 2015. <http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/arts-nation-final-27-feb-54f5f492882da.pdf>.Beckman, Gary D. "'Adventuring' Arts Entrepreneurship Curricula in Higher Education: An Examination of Present Efforts, Obstacles, and Best Practices." The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 37.2 (2007): 87–112.Bice, Sara, and Helen Sullivan. "Abbott Government May Have New Rhetoric, But It’s Still the ‘Asian Century’." The Conversation 2013. <https://theconversation.com/abbott-government-may-have-new-rhetoric-but-its-still-the-asian-century-19769>.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.Bridgstock, Ruth. "Not a Dirty Word: Arts Entrepreneurship and Higher Education." Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 12.2–3 (2013,): 122–137. doi:10.1177/1474022212465725.———, and Stuart Cunningham. "Creative Labour and Graduate Outcomes: Implications for Higher Education and Cultural Policy." International Journal of Cultural Policy 22.1 (2015): 10–26. doi:10.1080/10286632.2015.1101086.Britain, Ian. Once an Australian: Journeys with Barry Humphries, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Caust, Josephine. "Cultural Wars in an Australian Context: Challenges in Developing a National Cultural Policy." International Journal of Cultural Policy 21.2 (2015): 168–182. doi:10.1080/10286632.2014.890607.Cooper, Roslyn Pesman. "Some Australian Italies." Westerly 39.4 (1994): 95–104.Daniel, Ryan, and Robert Johnstone. "Becoming an Artist: Exploring the Motivations of Undergraduate Students at a Regional Australian University". Studies in Higher Education 42.6 (2017): 1015-1032.De Groen, Geoffrey. Some Other Dream: The Artist the Artworld & the Expatriate. Hale & Iremonger, 1984.Frost, Andrew. "Do Young Australian Artists Really Need to Go Overseas to Mature?" The Guardian, 9 Oct. 2013. <https://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2013/oct/09/1https://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2013/oct/09/1, July 20, 2016>.Guerra, Paula, and Sacha Kagan, eds. Arts and Creativity: Working on Identity and Difference. Porto: University of Porto, 2016.Heartney, Eleanor. "Identity and Locale: Four Australian Artists." Art in America 97.5 (2009): 63–68.Hecq, Dominique. "'Flying Up for Air: Australian Artists in Exile'." Commonwealth (Dijon) 22.2 (2000): 35–45.Hennekam, Sophie, and Dawn Bennett. "Involuntary Career Transition and Identity within the Artist Population." Personnel Review 45.6 (2016): 1114–1131.Inkson, Kerr, and Stuart C. Carr. "International Talent Flow and Careers: An Australasian Perspective." Australian Journal of Career Development 13.3 (2004): 23–28.Keating, P.J. "Exports from a Creative Nation." Media International Australia 76.1 (1995): 4–6.Kim, Jeong-Gon, and Eunji Kim. "Creative Industries Internationalization Strategies of Selected Countries and Their Policy Implications." KIEP Research Paper. World Economic Update-14–26 (2014). <https://ssrn.com/abstract=2488416>.Kong, Lily. "From Cultural Industries to Creative Industries and Back? Towards Clarifying Theory and Rethinking Policy." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 15.4 (2014): 593–607.Lee, H., and Lorraine Lim. Cultural Policies in East Asia: Dynamics between the State, Arts and Creative Industries. Springer, 2014.McAuliffe, Chris. "Living the Dream: The Contemporary Australian Artist Abroad." Meanjin 71.3 (2012): 56–61.Menger, Pierre-Michel. "Artistic Labor Markets and Careers." Annual Review of Sociology 25.1 (1999): 541–574.O’Sullivan, Jane. "Why Australian Artists Find It So Hard to Get International Recognition." AFR Magazine, 2016.Robertson, Kate. "Yes, Capon, Australian Artists Have Always Thought about Place." The Conversation, 2014. <https://theconversation.com/yes-capon-australian-artists-have-always-thought-about-place-31690>.Rowe, David, et al. "Transforming Cultures? From Creative Nation to Creative Australia." Media International Australia 158.1 (2016): 6–16. doi:10.1177/1329878X16629544.Stone, Deborah. "Presenters Reject Indigenous Arts." ArtsHub, 2016. <http://www.artshub.com.au/news-article/news/audience-development/deborah-stone/presenters-reject-indigenous-arts-252075?utm_source=ArtsHub+Australia&utm_campaign=7349a419f3-UA-828966-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2a8ea75e81-7349a419f3-302288158>.Throsby, David. "Get Out There and Sell: The Visual Arts Export Strategy, Past, Present and Future." Artlink 18.4 (1998): 64–65.Wesley, Michael. "In Australia's Third Century after European Settlement, We Must Rethink Our Responses to a New World." The Conversation, 2015. <https://theconversation.com/in-australias-third-century-after-european-settlement-we-must-rethink-our-responses-to-a-new-world-46671>.Wright, Felicity. "Passion, Rich Collectors and the Export Dollar: The Selling of Aboriginal Art Overseas." Artlink 18.4 (1998): 16.

At the start of the twentieth century, many young Australian artists travelled abroad to expand their art education and to gain exposure to the modern art movements of Europe. Most of these artists were active members of artist associations such as the Victorian Artists Society or the New South Wales Society of Artists. Male artists from Victoria were generally also members of the Melbourne Savage Club, a club with a strong association with the arts.This paper investigates the dual function of the club, as a space where the artists felt “at home” in the familiar environment that the club offered whilst they were abroad and, at the same time, a meeting space where they could engage in a stimulating artistic environment and gain introductions to leading figures in the art world. For those artists who chose England, London’s arts clubs played a large role, for it was in these establishments that they discussed, exhibited, shared, and met with their English counterparts. The club environment in London would have a significant impact on male Australian artists, as it offered a space where they were integrated into the English art world, which enhanced their experience whilst abroad.Artists were seldom members of Australia’s early gentlemen’s clubs, however, in the late nineteenth century Melbourne, artists formed less formal social groupings with exotic names such as the Prehistoric Order of Cannibals, the Buonarotti Club, and the Ishmael Club (Mead). Melbourne artists congregated in these clubs until the Melbourne Savage Club, modelled on the London Savage Club (1857)—a club whose membership was restricted to practitioners in the performing and visual arts—opened its doors in 1894.The Melbourne Savage Club had its origins in the Metropolitan Music Club, established in the late 1880s by a group of professional and amateur musicians and music lovers. The club initially admitted musicians and people from the dramatic professions free-of-charge, however, author Randolph Bedford (1868–1941) and artist Alf Vincent (1874–1915) were not content to be treated on a different basis to the musicians and actors, and two months after Vincent joined the club, at a Special General Meeting, the club resolved to vary Rule 6, “to admit landscape or portrait painters and sculptors without entrance fee” (Melbourne Savage Club). At another Special General Meeting, a year later, the rule was altered to admit “recognised members of the musical, dramatic and artistic professions and sculptors without payment of entrance fee” (Melbourne Savage Club).This resulted in an immediate influx of prominent Victorian male artists (Williams) and the Melbourne Savage Club became their place of choice to gather and enjoy the fellowship the club offered and to share ideas in a convivial atmosphere. When the opportunity arose for them to travel to London in the early twentieth century, they met in London’s famous art clubs. Membership of the Melbourne Savage Club not only conferred rights to visit reciprocal clubs whilst in London, but also facilitated introductions to potential patrons. The London clubs were the venue of choice for visiting artists to meet their fellow artist expatriates and to share experiences and, importantly, to meet with their British counterparts, exhibit their works, and establish valuable contacts.The London Savage Club attracted many Australian expatriates. Not only is it the grandfather of London’s bohemian clubs but also it was the model for arts clubs the world over. Founded in 1857, the qualification for admission was (and still is) to be, “a working man in literature or art, and a good fellow” (Halliday vii). If a candidate met these requirements, he would be cordially received “come whence he may.” This was embodied in the club’s first rules which required applicants for membership to be from a restricted range of pursuits relating to the arts thought to be commensurate with its bohemian ideals, namely art, literature, drama, or music.The second London arts club that attracted expatriate Australian artists was the New English Arts Club, founded in 1886 by young English artists returning from studying art in Paris. Members of The New English Arts Club were influenced by the Impressionist style as opposed to the academic art shown at the Royal Academy. As a meeting place for Australia’s expatriate artists, the New English Arts Club had a particular influence, as it exposed them to significant early Modern artist members such as John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Walter Sickert (1860–1942), William Orpen (1878–1931) and Augustus John (1878–1961) (Corbett and Perry; Thornton; Melbourne Savage Club).The third, and arguably the most popular with the expatriate Australian artists’ club, was the Chelsea Arts Club, a bohemian club formed in 1891 by local working artists looking for a place to go to “meet, talk, eat and drink” (Cross).Apart from the American-born founding member, James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), amongst the biggest Chelsea names at the time of the influx of travelling young Australian artists were modernists Sir William Orpen, Augustus John, and John Sargent. The opportunity to mix with these leading British contemporary artists was irresistible to these antipodean artists (55).When Melbourne artist, Miles Evergood (1871–1939) arrived in London from America in 1910, he had been an active exhibiting member of the Salmagundi Club, a New York artists’ club. Almost immediately he joined the New English Arts Club and the Chelsea Arts Club. Hammer tells of him associating with “writer Israel Zangwill, sculptor Jacob Epstein, and anti-academic artists including Walter Sickert, Augustus John, John Lavery, John Singer Sargent and C.R.W. Nevison, who challenged art values in Britain at the beginning of the century” (Hammer 41).Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) used the Chelsea Arts Club as his postal address, as did many expatriate artists. The Melbourne Savage Club archives contain letters and greetings, with news from abroad, written from artist members back to their “Brother Savages” (Various).In late 1902, Streeton wrote to fellow artist and Savage Club member Tom Roberts (1856–1931) from London:I belong to the Chelsea Arts Club now, & meet the artists – MacKennel says it’s about the most artistic club (speaking in the real sense) in England. … They all seem to be here – McKennal, Longstaff, Mahony, Fullwood, Norman, Minns, Fox, Plataganet Tudor St. George Tucker, Quinn, Coates, Bunny, Alston, K, Sonny Pole, other minor lights and your old friend and admirer Smike – within 100 yards of here – there must be 30 different studios. (Streeton 94)Whilst some of the artists whom Streeton mentioned were studying at either the Royal Academy or the Slade School, it was the clubs like the Chelsea Arts Club where they were most likely to encounter fellow Australian artists. Tom Roberts was obviously attentive to Streeton’s enthusiastic account and, when he returned to London the following year to work on his commission for The Big Picture of the 1901 opening of the first Commonwealth Parliament, he soon joined. Roberts, through his expansive personality, became particularly active in London’s Australian expatriate artistic community and later became Vice-President of the Chelsea Arts Club. Along with Streeton and Roberts, other visiting Melbourne Savage Club artists joined the Chelsea Arts Club. They included, John Longstaff (1861–1941), James Quinn (1869–1951), George Coates (1869–1930), and Will Dyson (1880–1938), along with Sydney artists Henry Fullwood (1863–1930), George Lambert (1873–1930), and Will Ashton (1881–1963) (Croll 95). Smith describes the exodus to London and Paris: “It was the Chelsea Arts Club that the Heidelberg School established its last and least distinguished camp” (Smith, Smith and Heathcote 152).Streeton, who retained his Chelsea Arts Club membership when he returned for a while to Australia, wrote to Roberts in 1907, “I miss Chelsea & the Club-boys” (Streeton 107). In relation to Frederick McCubbin’s pending visit he wrote: “Prof McCubbin left here a week ago by German ‘Prinz Heinrich.’ … You’ll introduce him at the Chelsea Club and I hope they make him an Hon. Member, etc” (Streeton et al. 85). McCubbin wrote, after an evening at the Chelsea Arts Club, following a visit to the Royal Academy: “Tonight, I am dining with Australian artists in Soho, and shall be there to greet my old friends. How glad I am! Longstaff will be there, and Frank Stuart, Roberts, Fullwood, Pontin, Coates, Quinn, and Tucker’s brother, and many others from all around” (MacDonald, McCubbin and McCubbin 75). Impressed by the work of Turner he wrote to his wife Annie, following avisit to the Tate Gallery:I went yesterday with Fullwood and G. Coates and Tom Roberts for a ramble … to the Tate Gallery – a beautiful freestone building facing the river through a portico into the gallery where the lately found turners are exhibited – these are not like the greater number of pictures in the National Gallery – they represent his different periods, but are mostly in his latest style, when he had realised the quality of light (McCubbin).Clearly Turner’s paintings had a profound impression on him. In the same letter he wrote:they are mostly unfinished but they are divine – such dreams of colour – a dozen of them are like pearls … mist and cloud and sea and land, drenched in light … They glow with tender brilliancy that radiates from these canvases – how he loved the dazzling brilliancy of morning or evening – these gems with their opal colour – you feel how he gloried in these tender visions of light and air. He worked from darkness into light.The Chelsea Arts Club also served as a venue for artists to entertain and host distinguished visitors from home. These guests included; Melbourne Savage Club artist member Alf Vincent (Joske 112), National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Trustee and popular patron of the arts, Professor Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929), Professor Frederick S. Delmer (1864–1931) and conductor George Marshall-Hall (1862–1915) (Mulvaney and Calaby 329; Streeton 111).Artist Miles Evergood arrived in London in 1910, and visited the Chelsea Arts Club. He mentions expatriate Australian artists gathering at the Club, including Will Dyson, Fred Leist (1873–1945), David Davies (1864–1939), Will Ashton (1881–1963), and Henry Fullwood (Hammer 41).Most of the Melbourne Savage Club artist members were active in the London Savage Club. On one occasion, in November 1908, Roberts, with fellow artist MacKennal in the Chair, attended the Australian Artists’ Dinner held there. This event attracted twenty-five expatriate Australian artists, all residing in London at the time (McQueen 532).These London arts clubs had a significant influence on the expatriate Australian artists for they became the “glue” that held them together whilst abroad. Although some artists travelled abroad specifically to take up places at the Royal Academy School or the Slade School, only a minority of artists arriving in London from Australia and other British colonies were offered positions at these prestigious schools. Many artists travelled to “try their luck.” The arts clubs of London, whilst similarly discerning in their membership criteria, generally offered a visiting “brother-of-the-brush” a warm welcome as a professional courtesy. They featured the familiar rollicking all-male “Smoke Nights” a feature of the Melbourne Savage Club. With a greater “artist” membership than the clubs in Australia, expatriate artists were not only able to catch up with their friends from Australia, but also they could associate with England’s finest and most progressive artists in a familiar congenial environment. The clubs were a “home away from home” and described by Underhill as, “an artistic Earl’s Court” (Underhill 99). Most importantly, the clubs were a centre for discourse, arguably even more so than were the teaching academies. Britain’s leading modernist artists were members of the Chelsea Arts Club and the New English Arts Club and mixed freely with the visiting Australian artists.Many Australian artists, such as Miles Evergood and George Bell (1878–1966), held anti-academic views similar to English club members and embraced the new artistic trends, which they would bring back to Australia. Streeton had no illusions about the relative worth of the famed institutions and the exhibitions held by clubs such as the New English. Writing to Roberts before he joins him in London, he describes the Royal Academy as having, “an inartistic atmosphere” and claims he “hasn’t the least desire to go again” (Streeton 77). His preference lay with a concurrent “International Exhibition”, which featured works by Rodin, Whistler, Condor, Degas, and others who were setting the pace rather than merely continuing the academic traditions.Architect Hardy Wilson (1881–1955) served as secretary of The Chelsea Arts Club. When he returned to Australia he brought back with him a number of British works by Streeton and Lambert for an exhibition at the Guild Hall Melbourne (Underhill 92). Artists and Bohemians, a history of the Chelsea Arts Club, makes special reference of its world-wide contacts and singles out many of its prominent Australian members for specific mention including; Sir John William (Will) Ashton OBE, later Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Will Dyson, whose illustrious career as an Australian war artist was described in some detail. Dyson’s popularity led to his later appointment as Chairman of the Chelsea Arts Club where he initiated an ambitious rebuilding program, improving staff accommodation, refurbishing the members’ areas, and adding five bedrooms for visiting members (Bross 87-90).Whilst the influence of travel abroad on Australian artists has been noted, the importance of the London Clubs has not been fully explored. These clubs offered artists a space where they felt “at home” and a familiar environment whilst they were abroad. The clubs functioned as a meeting space where they could engage in a stimulating artistic environment and gain introductions to leading figures in the art world. For those artists who chose England, London’s arts clubs played a large role, for it was in these establishments that they discussed, exhibited, shared, and met with their English counterparts. The club environment in London had a significant impact on male Australian artists as it offered a space where they were integrated into the English art world which enhanced their experience whilst abroad and influenced the direction of their art.ReferencesCorbett, David Peters, and Lara Perry, eds. English Art, 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.Croll, Robert Henderson. Tom Roberts: Father of Australian Landscape Painting. Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens, 1935.Cross, Tom. Artists and Bohemians: 100 Years with the Chelsea Arts Club. 1992. 1st ed. London: Quiller Press, 1992.Gray, Anne, and National Gallery of Australia. McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17. 1st ed. Parkes, A.C.T.: National Gallery of Australia, 2009.Halliday, Andrew, ed. The Savage Papers. 1867. 1st ed. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1867.Hammer, Gael. Miles Evergood: No End of Passion. Willoughby, NSW: Phillip Mathews, 2013.Joske, Prue. Debonair Jack: A Biography of Sir John Longstaff. 1st ed. Melbourne: Claremont Publishing, 1994.MacDonald, James S., Frederick McCubbin, and Alexander McCubbin. The Art of F. McCubbin. Melbourne: Lothian Book Publishing, 1916.McCaughy, Patrick. Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters. Ed. Paige Amor. The Miegunyah Press, 2014.McCubbin, Frederick. Papers, Ca. 1900–Ca. 1915. Melbourne.McQueen, Humphrey. Tom Roberts. Sydney: Macmillan, 1996.Mead, Stephen. "Bohemia in Melbourne: An Investigation of the Writer Marcus Clarke and Four Artistic Clubs during the Late 1860s – 1901.” PhD thesis. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2009.Melbourne Savage Club. Secretary. Minute Book: Melbourne Savage Club. Club Minutes (General Committee). Melbourne: Savage Archives.Mulvaney, Derek John, and J.H. Calaby. So Much That Is New: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929, a Biography. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1985.Smith, Bernard, Terry Smith, and Christopher Heathcote. Australian Painting, 1788–2000. 4th ed. South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press, 2001.Streeton, Arthur, et al. Smike to Bulldog: Letters from Sir Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1946.Streeton, Arthur, ed. Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton, 1890–1943. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989.Thornton, Alfred, and New English Art Club. Fifty Years of the New English Art Club, 1886–1935. London: New English Art Club, Curwen Press 1935.Underhill, Nancy D.H. Making Australian Art 1916–49: Sydney Ure Smith Patron and Publisher. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991.Various. Melbourne Savage Club Correspondence Book: 1902–1916. Melbourne: Melbourne Savage Club.Williams, Graeme Henry. "A Socio-Cultural Reading: The Melbourne Savage Club through Its Collections." Masters of Arts thesis. Melbourne: Deakin University, 2013.

RESUMO: Este texto pretende descortinar algumas variações e fatos que marcaram a produção artística dos artistas aborígenes. Para alcançar o meu objetivo utilizei como guia obras de arte que compõem a exposição ‘O Tempo dos Sonhos: Arte Aborígene Contemporânea da Austrália’. O projeto visita cidades brasileiras desde 2015 e oferece ao nosso público, pela primeira vez, uma coleção diversificada e vigorosa da arte dos primeiros australianos, em contexto contemporâneo. Palavras-Chave: arte aborígene, Austrália, pinturas do deserto. THE EXHIBITION ‘OUT OF DREANING’ AND THE ART BY ABORIGINAL ARTISTS FROM AUSTRALIA ABSTRACT: This text intends to reveal variations and facts that marked the artistic production by aboriginal artists. To achieve my goal I used as a guide works of art presented in the exhibition 'Out of the Dreaming: Australian Contemporary Aboriginal Art'. The project visits Brazilian cities since 2015 and offers our audience, for the first time, a diverse and vigorous collection of the art by the first Australians, in a contemporary context. Key-Words: Aboriginal art, Australia, desert paintings.

In February 2021, during the third COVID-19 lockdown in the state of Victoria, Australia, artist Shaun Wilson used the teleconferencing platforms Teams and Skype to create a slow cinema feature length artwork titled Fading Light to demonstrate how innovative creative practice can overcome barriers of distance experienced by creative practitioners from the limitations sustained during the COVID-19 pandemic. While these production techniques offer free access to develop new methodologies through practice, the wider scope of pandemic lockdowns mediated artists with teleconferencing as a tool to interrogate the nature of life during our various global lockdowns. It thus afforded a pioneering ability for artists to manufacture artwork about lockdowns whilst in lockdown, made from the tools commonly used for virtual communication. The significance of such opportunities, as this article will argue, demonstrates a novel approach to making artwork about COVID-19 in ways that were limited prior to the start of 2020 in terms of commonality, that now are “turning us all into broadcasters, streamers and filmmakers” (Sullivan). However, as we are only just becoming familiar with the cultural innovation pioneered from the limitations brought about by the pandemic, new aesthetics are emerging that challenge normative traditions of manufacturing and thinking about creative artefacts. Teleconferencing platforms were used differently prior to 2020 when compared to the current pandemic era. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, there were no global gigascale movement restrictions or medical dangers to warrant a global shutdown that would ultimately determine how a person interacts with public places. In a pre-pandemic context, the daily use of teleconferencing was a luxury. Its subsequent use in the COVID-19 era became a necessity in many parts of day-to-day life. As artists have historically been able to comment through their work on global health crises, how has contemporary art responded since 2020 in using teleconferencing within critical studio practice? To explore such an idea, this article will probe examples of practice from artists making artworks with teleconferencing about pandemics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Discussion will purposely not consider a wider historical scope of teleconferencing in art and scholarship as the context in this article explicitly addresses art made in and commenting on the COVID-19 pandemic using the tools of lockdown readily available through teleconferencing platforms. It will instead concentrate on three artists addressing the pandemic during 2020 and 2021. The first example will be There Is No Such Thing as Internet from Polish artists Maria Magdalena Kozlowska and Maria Tobola, “performers who identify as one artist, Maria Małpecki” (“Pogo”). The second example is New York artist Michael Mandiberg’s Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom 3:00-4:00PM, August 16, 2020 (#24), from the series Zoom Paintings. The third example is Australian artist Shaun Wilson’s Fading Light. These works will be discussed as a means of considering teleconferencing as a contemporary art medium used in response to COVID-19 and art made as pandemic commentary through the technology that has defined its global social integration. Figure 1: Maria Małpecki, There Is No Such Thing as Internet, used with permission. There Is No Such Thing as Internet was presented as a live stream on 7 May 2020 and as an online video between 7-31 May 2020 in the “Online Cocktail Party with Maria Małpecki” at Pogo Bar, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin by Maria Małpecki and curator Tomek Pawlowski Jarmolajew (“Pogo”). The work represents a twenty-minute livestream essay created in part by a teleconferencing video call performance and appropriated video streams. This includes video chat examples from Chomsky and Žižek, compiled together through intertextual video collages which The Calvert Journal described as a work “that explore[s] identity and different modes of communication in times of isolation” (De La Torre). One of the key strengths of this work in terms of teleconferencing is how it embraces the medium as an integral part of the performative methodology. To such an extent, one might argue that if it was removed and replaced by traditional video camera shots, which do feature in the video but are not the main aesthetic driver, the Metamodernist troupe of Małpecki’s videos would not perform the same critique of the pandemic. So, for Małpecki to comment on isolation through the Internet requires video calls to be central in the artwork in order for it to hold the cultural value it embeds through the subject. The conceptual framework relies on short segments to create episodic moments reliant on philosophical laments relating to each part of the work. For example, the first act unfolds with a montage of short video clip collages reminiscent of the quick-clip YouTube browsing habit culture from the pandemic to expedite an argument that indeed, there really is no singular internet. Rather, from this, what we are experiencing is arguably something else entirely. From here we move to the second act titled “We wake up in a different room every morning. We wander in a labyrinth where most doors are already open” (Małpecki); but as Małpecki comments, “sometimes our job is to shut them”. The sequence evolves into a disorientating dual screen sequence of the artists panicking to what they are viewing on screen. What this is exactly remains unclear. It may be us as the audience or something else as Malpecki holds their webcam devices upside down to provide an unnerving menage amidst the screams and exacerbations that invites spatial disorientation as a point of engagement for the viewer. As we recognise that video call protocols during the pandemic are visually static and that normative ‘rules’ of video calls require stabilised video and clean sound, Małpecki subverts these protocols to that of an uncomfortable, anarchic performance. It's at odds with the gentility of video call aesthetics which, in the case of this artwork, is more like watching a continuous point of view shot from a participant on a roller coaster or an extreme fairground ride. As the audience moves through each of the eclectic acts, this randomness laments a continuity that, sometimes satirical and at other times sublime, infuses the silliness and obliqueness of habitual lockdown video viewing. Even the most mundane of videos we watch to pass the time have become anthems of the COVID-19 era as a mixture of boredom, stupidity, and collective grief. Małpecki’s work in this regard becomes a complex observation for a society in crisis. It eloquently uses video calls as a way to comment on what this article argues to be an important cultural artefact in contemporary art’s response to COVID-19. Just as Goya subverted the Venetian pandemic in the grim Plague Hospital, Małpecki reflects our era in the same disruptive way by using frailty as a mirror to reveal an uneasy reflection masked in satirical obscurity, layered with fragments of the Internet and its subjective “other”. Figure 2: Michael Mandiberg, Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom 3:00-4:00PM, August 16, 2020 (#24), used with permission. Conversely, the work of New York artist Michael Mandiberg uses teleconferencing in a different way by painting the background of video calls onto stretched canvases mostly over the duration of the actual call time. Yet in doing so, the removal of people from inside the frame highlights aspects of isolation and absence in lockdown. At the Denny Dinin Gallery exhibition in New York, The Zoom Paintings “presented in the digital sphere where they were born” (Defoe). Zoom provided both the frame and the exhibition space for these works, with “one painting … on view each day [on Zoom], for a total of ten paintings” (“Zoom”). Describing the works, Mandiberg states that they are “about the interchangeability of people and places. It’s not memorializing a particular event; it’s memorializing how unmemorable it is” (Mandiberg; Defoe). This defines an innovative approach to teleconferencing that engages with place in times when the same kinds of absence experienced in the images of peopleless Zoom video calls mirror the external absence of people in public places during lockdown. Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom 3:00-4:00PM, August 16, 2020 (#24) is time stamped with the diaristic nature of the Zoom Paintings series. These works are not just a set of painting subjects interlinked through a common theme of paintings ‘about Zoom backgrounds’. They, rather, operate as a complex depiction of absence located in the pandemic, evidently capturing a powerful social commentary about what the artist experienced during these times. In doing so, it immediately prompts the viewer into tensions that conceptually frame COVID-19, whether that be the isolation of waiting out the pandemic in lockdown, the removal of characters through illness from the virus, or even a sudden death from the virus itself. The camera’s point of view illustrates an empty space where we know something is missing. At the very least the artist suggests that someone nearby once inhabited these empty spaces but they are, at present, removed from the scene or have vanished altogether. On 16 August 2020, the day that the painting was made, the New York Times estimated that 514 people in the United States died from COVID-19 (“Coronavirus”). When measured against a further death rate peaking at 5,463 people in the United States who died on 11 February 2021, the catastrophic mortality data in the United States alone statistically supports Mandiberg’s lament as to the severity of the pandemic, which serves as the context of his work. Based on this data alone, the absence in Mandiberg’s paintings intensifies a sense of isolation and loss insofar as the subjectivity embedded within the video call frame speaks to a powerful way that contemporary art is providing commentary during the pandemic (“Coronavirus”). Art in this context becomes a silent observer using teleconferencing to address both what is taken away from us and what visually remains behind. This article acknowledges the absence in Mandiberg’s paintings as a timely reminder of the socio-devastation experienced in the pandemic’s wake. Therein lies a three-folded image within an image within an image, not unlike what we see in Blade Runner when Deckard’s Esper Machine investigates the reflection in a mirror of someone else, and no more vivid than in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. From a structural point of view, we witness Mandiberg’s images during its exhibition on Zoom in much the same conceptual way. In this case though, it is a mirrored online image of an image painted from a video call interpreted online from a recorded image transmitted online through teleconferencing. Through similar transactions, Shaun Wilson’s utilisation of video calls is represented in Fading Light as a way to comment on COVID-19 through the lens of Teams and Skype. The similarities of Fading Light to There Is No Such Thing as Internet stem obviously from the study of figuration used as the driver of the works but at the same time, it also draws comparison with Mandiberg’s stillness as represented in the frozen poses of each figure. At a more complex level, there is, though, a polar opposite in the mechanics that, for Mandiberg, uses video to translate into painted subjects. Fading Light does the opposite, with paintings recontextualised into video subjects. Such an analysis of both works brings about a sense of trepidation. For Mandiberg, it is the unsettling stillness through absence. In Fading Light it is the oppressive state of the motionlessness in frame that offers the same sense of awkwardness found in Mandiberg’s distorted painted laptop angles, and that makes the same kind of uncomfortableness bearable. It is only as much as an audience affords the time to allow before the loneliness of the subject renders the Zoom paintings a memorial to what is lost. Of note in Fading Light are the characteristically uncomfortable traits of what we detect should be in the frame of the subject but isn’t, which lends a tension to the viewer who has involuntarily been deprived of what is to be expected. For a modern Internet audience, a video without movement invites a combination of tension, boredom, and annoyance, drawing parallels to Hitchcock’s premise that something has just happened but we’re not entirely sure exactly what it was or is. Likewise, Małpecki’s same juxtaposition of tension with glimpses of Chomsky and Žižek videos talking over each other is joined by the artists’ breaking the fourth wall of cinema theory. Observing the artists lose concentration while watching the other videos in the video call scenario enact the mundane activities we encounter in the same kinds of situations of watching someone else on Zoom. However, in this context, we are watching them watching someone else whom we are also watching, while watching ourselves at the same time. Figure 3: Shaun Wilson, Fading Light, used with permission. The poses in Fading Light are reconfigured from characters in German medieval paintings and low relief religious iconography created during the Black Death era. Such works hang in the Gothic St. Michael’s Church in Schwäbisch Hall in Germany originally used by Martin Luther as his Southern Germany outpost during the Reformation. Wilson documented these paintings in October 2006, which then became the ongoing source images used in the 51 Paintings Suite films. The church itself has a strong connection to pandemics where a large glass floor plate behind the altar reveals an open ossuary of people who died of plague during the Black Death. This association brings an empirical linkage to the agency in Fading Light that mediates the second handed nature of the image, initially painted during a medieval pandemic, and now juxtaposed into the video frame captured in a current pandemic. From a conceptual standpoint, the critical analysis reflected in such a framework allows the artwork to reveal itself at a multi-level perspective, operating within a Metamodernist methodology. Two separate elements oscillate in tandem with one another, yet completely independent, or in this case, impervious to each other’s affect. Fading Light’s key affordance from this oscillation consolidate Wilson’s methodology in the artwork in as much detail as what Małpecki and Mandiberg construct in their respective works, yet obviously for very different motivations. If the basis of making video art in the pandemic using teleconferencing changes the way we might think about using these platforms, which otherwise may not have previously been taken serious by the academy as a valid medium in art, then the quiet meaningfulness throughout the film transcends a structured method to ascertain a pictorial presence of the image in its facsimile state. This pays respect to the source images but also embraces and overlays the narrative of the current pandemic intertwined within the subject. Given that Fading Light allows a ubiquitous dialogue to grow from the framed image, a subjective commonality in these mentioned works provide insight into how artists have engaged innovation strategies with teleconferencing to develop artwork made and commenting about the current pandemic. Whether it be Małpecki’s subversive pandemic variety show, the loneliness of Mandiberg’s Zoom call paintings or Wilson’s refilming of Black Death era paintings, all three artists use video call platforms as a contemporary art medium capable of social commentary during histo-trauma. These works also raise the possibility of interdisciplinary Metamodernist approaches to consider the implications of non-traditional mediums in offering socio-commentary during profoundly impactful times. It remains to be seen if contemporary video call platforms will become a frequented tool in contemporary art long after the COVID-19 pandemic is over. However, by these works and indeed, from the others to follow and not yet revealed, the current ossuary provides an opportunity for artists to respond to their own immediate surroundings to redefine existing boundaries in art and look to innovation in the methods they use. We are in a new era of art making, only now beginning to reveal itself. It may take years or even decades to better understand the magnitude of the significance that artists have contributed towards their own practices since the beginnings of the pandemic. This time of profound change only strengthens the need for contemporary art to preserve and enlighten humanity through the journey from crisis to hope. References Blade Runner. Dir. by Ridley Scott, Warner Brothers, 1982. “Coronavirus US Cases.” New York Times, 27 Mar. 2021. 28 Mar. 2021 <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html>. Defoe, Taylor. “‘It's Memorializing How Unmemorable It Is’: Artist Michael Mandiberg on Painting Melancholy Portraits on Zoom.” Artnet News 10 Nov. 2020. 19 Mar. 2021 <http://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/mandiberg-zoom-paintings-1922159>. De La Torre, Lucia. “Art in the Age of Zoom: Explore the Video Art Collage Unraveling the Complexities of the Digital Age.” The Culvert Journal, 5 May 2020. 19 Mar. 2021 <https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/11788/online-performance-art-polish-artist-maria-malpecki-digital-age>. Goya, Francisco. Plaga Hospital. Private Collection. 1800. Małpecki, Maria. There Is No Such Thing as Internet. Vimeo, 2020. <http://vimeo.com/415998383>. Mandiberg, Michael. Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom 3:00-4:00PM, August 16, 2020 (#24). New York: Denny Dinin Gallery, 2020. “Pogo Bar: Maria Małpecki & Tomek Pawłowski Jarmołajew.” KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 7 May 2020. 19 Mar. 2021 <http://www.kw-berlin.de/en/maria-malpecki-tomek-pawlowski-jarmolajew/>. Sullivan, Eve. “Video Art during and after the Pandemic: 2020 Limestone Coast Video Art Festival.” Artlink, 2020. 19 Mar. 2021 <http://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4885/video-art-during-and-after-the-pandemic-2020-limes/>. Van Eyck, Jan. Arnolfini Portrait. Canberra: National Gallery, 1434. Wilson, Shaun. Fading Light. Bakers Road Entertainment, 2021. “The Zoom Paintings.” Denny Dimin Gallery, 12 Nov. 2020. <http://dennydimingallery.com/news/virtual_exhibition/zoom-paintings/>.

Released in 2012 as an Android only open-beta, Ingress is an alternate-reality game for mobile devices. Developed by Niantic Labs, a subsidiary of Google, Ingress now has 7 million users worldwide (Ingress) on both Android and Apple operating systems. Players are aligned to one of two opposing factions, the Resistance (Blue) and the Enlightened (Green). Working on behalf of their faction, individual players interact with “portals” in order to establish dominance over material environments. Portals are located at places of educational or historical value, public artworks, “hyper-local” locations, public libraries, and also places of worship (Google, “Candidate Portal Criteria”). Players take on the role of portal creators, submitting potential portals to the game developers after confirming their location in the game (Google, “New Portal Submissions”).Portals become the primary point of interaction for players, bridging the digital world of the game with the players’ surrounding material environments. Players may gain inventory by hacking portals in order to destroy and (re)claim portals. Territories are claimed by forging links between fully developed portals in order to establish control fields. Portals play an important part not only of the game but in situating the practice of play within the larger sociocultural and material framework of the urban environment. Players navigate their material environment, using portals and digital representations of such spaces alongside their existing knowledge of local environments, to engage with their immediate location as efficiently as possible. While numerous public landmarks are currently used as portals, the primary interest of this paper is the role street art plays within the game, and within the larger practice of curating the city. This paper addresses the practice of playing Ingress as a form of situated play—that is, the notion that play is underscored by sociocultural and material circumstance, while simultaneously contributing to a new shared understanding of what constitutes urban play and the conditions that underscore it. In doing so, this paper firstly addresses the notion of play as a situated practice, mobilising concepts from the field of human–computer interaction as well as cultural studies analyses of games and gaming culture. This framework is applied to the practice of playing Ingress with specific focus on the role street art has in the practice of playing. The discussion of urban play as a means of exhibiting street art is extended to discuss the cultural practice of street art itself, with both occupying the liminal space struggle over the functionality of public space. Both practices occupy this liminal space between subversive use of urban environments and a form of legitimate art—a debate which has been central to forms of urban gaming. By focusing on the role of street art in urban mobile gaming, this paper addresses the cultural function of both practices, while addressing larger questions of curatorship within the urban environment. That is: how can the practice of play, as informed by the practice of street art, be thought of as a means of curating urban spaces? This paper goes on to argue that the practice of urban play may be viewed as a form of curation via the practice of re-reading, re-mixing, and re-mediating urban environments—establishing a new shared understanding of street art, urban environments, and urban play. In this paper I argue that urban mobile games such as Ingress are best thought of as a situated practice. The idea of situated practice is drawn from the fields of game studies and human–computer interaction, and the concept of situated learning. Firstly, situated practice draws from the concept of situated gaming, a term established by Yates and Littleton to understand the cultural niches in which video gaming takes place. For Yates and Littleton, these cultural niches arise from an interaction between gaming, gamers, and gaming culture—all of which are discursively constructed and culturally relative practices. Apperley (Gaming) expands on these ideas to define situated gaming as, firstly, an inclusion of the materiality of embodied gaming experiences and, secondly, an intersection of local gaming cultures and a larger global gaming ecology. Drawing from Suchman’s concept of situated actions, such interactions with technology must be understood as contextualised within specific sociocultural and material circumstances. Dourish expands on Suchman’s work and suggests thinking less about these contexts and more on the practice of technological engagement, of making meaning out of our interaction with technology. This use of “practice” is influenced by the work of Lave and Wenger, who situate learning within a social setting, what they term a “community of practice”. In short, then, the act of playing Ingress is not only an interaction with underlying sociocultural and material circumstance which constitute the urban and play but also a process of generating a shared understanding of both the urban and play within this specific context.Fig. 1: A view of Ingress’s map showing nearby portal using navigation function.Playing with Street Art Ingress functions foremost as a form of urban play; it is a mobile game with location-aware capabilities. The practice of playing games within urban environments is often compared to historically situated forms of urban exploration, such as the Situationist International practice of dérive—a form of urban drifting that is often compared to contemporary forms of mobile-mediated urban play (de Souza e Silva and Hjorth; Flanagan; Stevens). Ingress players, in their creation and constant interaction with portals, assist in the mapping of material environments—benefiting both communities of play and the game’s designers, Niantic Labs and parent company Google. Players are able to submit portals to the game’s developers if their proposed portal meets the satisfaction of the developer’s portal requirements. Portals may be erected at “a location with a cool story, a place in history or educational value … a cool piece of art or unique architecture … a hidden gem of hyper-local spot” (Google, Candidate Portal criteria). A large number of public marks form the basis of Ingress portals, alongside plaques and prominent signage. Significantly, through their submission of portals players are participating in legitimising the history of a number of locations, ensuring up-to-date mapping of locations and landmarks. While a number of other landmarks form the basis of Ingress’s dense map of material environments, this paper is primarily concerned with the role public art plays in the practice of urban play and the curatorial possibilities of urban play. Given the portal criteria put in place by the game’s developers, Ingress pays a certain amount of attention to the historical, sociocultural, and material circumstance which constitute specific locations. As a mobile game, Ingress occupies a certain place within the history of playing in urban environments. Such historical practices have been previously discussed at length, drawing comparisons between practices of urban mobility which are themselves situated in specific historical and sociocultural movements (de Souza e Silva and Hjorth; Flanagan; Stevens). Ingress, via its inclusion of street art as a potential anchor for digital portals, draws on this historical struggle over urban environments and the inherent questions of functionality and organisation which emerge from this struggle. For Stenros, Montola, and Mäyrä (262), pervasive gaming, a form of urban mobile gaming, occupies a similar cultural space to that of street art or graffiti. They argue that both practices are located within a larger struggle over public space—a struggle grounded in urbanisation, legislation, and cultural norms. Drawing comparisons between more contemporary forms of urban mobility, such as the practice/sport of parkour or skateboarding, and the historically situated flâneur or urban stroller, the authors suggest that pervasive forms of gaming and play occupy a similar liminal space and are grounded in questions of urban functionality. Similarly, the urban space may become a gallery or canvas, a space that may be subject to curatorship that is not bound to institutional bodies. The organisation and experience of urban environments then becomes deeply involved in a contested ownership and questions of functionality that are at the heart of urban play.Within the context of Australia, the struggle over the legitimacy of both street art and video games has been subject to ongoing legal discourses. The liminal relationship between gaming and street art is perhaps best illustrated by the 2006 game Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. The game was granted an MA15+ rating under the existing model of video game regulation but was later refused classification due to its depiction of antisocial behaviour. The game’s rating was appealed by the Queensland Local Government Association. Apperley (“Video”) provides further details on this issue, situating the legislative decision within the historical and political context of Australia at the time, and offering insight into the means in which Getting Up represented street art as a legitimate art form. The game’s narrative, a dystopian future where graffiti is mobilised as a form of social protest against authoritarian bodies, is similar to that of the 2002 game Jet Set Radio Future. However, unlike Jet Set, Getting Up was grounded in a detailed representation of graffiti subcultures. Getting Up’s refused classification is symbolic of the later Australian landscape in which video games and street art occupy a liminal space between art form and artistic practice. The key issue, that of antisocial behaviour, links to the notion of cultural norms and the functionality, organisation, and representations within urban spaces and, moreover, within spaces of play. This struggle for legitimacy is key to understanding the relationship between street art and urban play. Despite the struggle to overcome the functionality of urban environments, street art retains levels of value as a form of cultural heritage. Both Merrill and MacDowall discuss the cultural functions of graffiti and street art, focusing on what Merrill terms a turn towards “post-graffiti”—a shift from the historical and cultural roots of street art and the practice of tagging (373). Such a turn is exemplified by an increased public interest: a legitimisation of artistic practices. Perhaps the most notable figure of such a shift is the Bristol artist Banksy, who is most famous for stencil based art. Graffiti and street art have arguably moved beyond their function as a subversive and subcultural movement, occupying a more legitimate space within urban environments and general public discourse. Within the context of Ingress, street art holds the potential to exist as a digital node of equal value to historical plaques, public libraries, or large commissioned public artworks. This shift, argues Merrill (385) allows for street art and graffiti to be viewed as a form of alternative heritage to urban environments and cultural movements within specific locations. For MacDowell (476), graffiti may be viewed as a form of folk art, subject to new-found romanticism within the context of this “post-graffiti” turn. That is, as a form of alternative heritage, graffiti and street art signify historically situated sociocultural movements and the roots of the practice itself. Games such as Ingress, then, not only legitimate street art as a form of cultural heritage via their inclusion in a non-hierarchical network alongside longstanding institutionalised buildings and artworks but also allow players to participate in an archiving of street art through interactive cartography. The practice of playing Ingress, then, is not only a means of viewing and exploring existing street art but also a direct process in achieving and curating historically situated works of art. Fig. 2: Portal information illustrating possible actions, portal level, and resonator information. Urban Play and “the New Curatorship”Having considered the role of graffiti or street art within urban play as a form of cultural heritage, as a means of linking to the roots of the practice itself and signifying a struggle over the urban environment as a space of predetermined functions, the question then is: what role does the practice of curatorship have within this mesh of interconnected practices? For Bennett and Beudel, the work of the curator, as a caretaker of cultural heritage, is often institutionalised. Within the context of the city, such institutionalisation is itself a symptom of the city as a spectacle. The authors argue that there is the potential for art to be present on a range of surfaces within the urban environment, and call into question the role of the curator within this process.As Groys notes, since Duchamp, the ontological division between the labour of making art and displaying art has collapsed. Public urban spaces, as designed spaces regulated by institutional bodies, are subject to the changing practice of audiences. That is, those who inhabit and experience the urban environment itself now have the possibility to participate or subvert traditional curatorial structures. Drawing on the etymology of the word “curate” as related to “cure,” Groys (53) suggests that the exhibition practice is thus a cure to the powerlessness of the image—a contextualisation of the image within new institutionalised frameworks for a viewing public. Who, then, in the network of relations that is urban play, constitutes this public? Ingress players function as one faction of a public who view, inhabit, move through, and experience the urban environment and any subsequent street art within. As such, they have the potential to take on a curatorial role within the organisation of street art—recontextualising such artworks and generating a new shared understanding of the sociocultural and material conditions which contribute to a broad understanding of the urban and urban play. As such, these forms of digitally mediated urban play blur boundaries between production, consumption, and play. Players, regardless of whether they had a hand in submitting portals to the game’s developers, are articulating a collectively organised database of public art. The practice of curation, as described by Potter, is essential for contemporary digital gaming practices. Players are constantly participating in transmedia landscapes, articulating their literacies through the practice of arranging, assembling, cataloguing, collecting, distributing, and disassembling digital media (Apperley “Glitch” 240; Potter 175). Within Apperley’s example of Minecraft, play unites creativity and the curatorial as one activity. Within the context of Ingress, the practice of play brings together the practice of cartography and of the curatorial. Players, as individuals and as larger localised or global factions, participate in a global mapping of material space, expanding Google’s already extensive collection of cartographic data. Players are more concerned with exploring and territorialising within the context of local spaces, at the level of the national or regional. Such practices are an articulation of localised bodies of knowledge and often of local histories and contexts. Street art forms an integral part of this sociocultural and material fabric which underscores the practice of play. Thus, urban spaces are not subject to a transformative process, but rather to a collective curatorship whereby street art, and its embedded cultural heritage, form a key foundation of how play is performed within urban environments. Through the practice of arranging, assembling, cataloguing, collecting, distributing, and disassembling, the practices of urban play may be thought of as what Potter terms “new curatorship.” Potter’s notion of curatorship is grounded in the identity formation of young children through their use of social media and articulation of digital literacy practices. With playful urban practices such as Ingress, this practice is an articulation of urban literacies: of understanding the rich cultural heritage of specific locations, and of constituting the player’s identity as tied to these specific locations. Players no longer perform merely as an audience for existing forms of urban or street art. Alongside the technological infrastructures put in place by the game’s developers, Niantic Labs and Google, players may be viewed as actively participating in a curatorial process. Players, in their articulation of complex systems and archives of street art, through the ability to constantly update, document, and construct urban narratives with street art at their core, may be viewed as co-curating urban environments. Working together with developers, street artists, and urban planners, players are constantly re-developing and sharing a new shared understanding of urban environments and the complex network of relations which constitutes the urban environment and the practice of urban play.Fig. 3: Players may vote on and contribute new photographs to maintain accurate records of art.Conclusion To play Ingress is to participate in a situated practice of play. Here, play is grounded in material and sociocultural circumstance, with street art and graffiti representing just one of many practices which inform contemporary urban play. Within the context of Ingress, street art is played with as an object within the game (a portal), but it also occupies a similar liminal space. Both urban games and street art have been subject to ongoing debates about the functionality of urban spaces and appropriate behaviour within these spaces. Ingress also taps into street art as a form of cultural heritage; it represents shifts in power dynamics, local histories, and a range of other significant local histories. To play with street art is to acknowledge its roots, both on an international and local level. With the ability to digitally archive these histories and locations, as well as engage in the cartographic practice of urban play, Ingress players can thus be thought of as curators of the city. Through the lens of new curatorship, urban play can be thought of as a form of re-reading of urban environments, as a process of exhibiting a new-found shared understanding of specific locations and public artworks. Street art and graffiti are just one of many sociocultural and material circumstances which inform the practice of urban play. During play, there is a critical reflection on the role street art has, not only during the current context of play but also more broadly as a key component of contemporary urban landscapes. Street art functions as a form of cultural heritage, as an element of urban exploration, and as a point of reference for navigating city spaces. Ingress brings together these interrelated forms of organising and sharing experiences of urban environments, through the practice of curation. Such practices are reflexively intertwined with playing urban mobile games as such Ingress. As such, the act of playing Ingress is, in essence, a form of urban literacy, as a practice of understanding the rich and complex sociocultural conditions which contribute to our understanding of urban environments. It is a practice of collecting, assembling, and exhibiting a range of locations. The practice of playing Ingress is a collective curation of city spaces on a global scale.References Apperley, Thomas. “Glitch Sorting: Minecraft, Curation, and the Post Digital.” Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design. Ed. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 232–44.———. “Video Games in Australia.” The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to Playstation and Beyond. Ed. Mark J.P. Wolf. USA: Greenwood P, 2008. 22–29.———. Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009.Bennett, Jill, and Saskia Beudel. Curating Sydney: Imagining the City’s Future. Sydney: UNSW P, 2014.De Souza e Silva, Adriana, and Larissa Hjorth. “Playful Urban Spaces: A Historical Approach to Mobile Games.” Simulation & Gaming 40.5 (2009): 602–25. Dourish, Paul. “What We Talk about When We Talk about Context.” Personal Ubiquitous Computing 8.1 (2004): 19–30.Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009.———. “Locating Play and Politics: Real World Games & Activism.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 16.2–3 (2008). 5 June 2015 ‹http://www.leonardo.info/LEA/perthDAC/MFlanagan_LEA160203.pdf›.Groys, Boris. Going Public. Ed. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.Google. “Candidate Portal Criteria.” 2015. 5 June 2015 ‹https://support.google.com/ingress/answer/3066197?hl=en›. ———. “New Portal Submissions.” 2015. 5 June 2015 ‹https://support.google.com/ingress/answer/2808254?hl=en›. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.MacDowall, Lachlan. “In Praise of 70K: Cultural Heritage and Graffiti Style.” Continuum 20.4 (2006): 471–84.Merrill, Samuel. “Keeping It Real? Subcultural Graffiti, Street Art, Heritage and Authenticity.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21.4 (2015): 369–89.Niantic Labs. Ingress. Android Mobile Application. 2012.Potter, John. Digital Media and Learner Identity: The New Curatorship. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.Stenros, Jaakko, Markus Montola, and Frans Mäyrä. “Pervasive Games in Media Culture.” Pervasive Games: Theory and Design. Eds. Markus Montola, Jakko Stenros, and Annika Waern. Amsterdam: CRC P, 2009.Stevens, Quentin. The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces. New York: Routledge, 2007.Suchman, Lucy. Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.———. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.Yates, Simeon J., and Karen Littleton. “Understanding Computer Game Cultures: A Situated Approach.” Information, Communication & Society 2.4 (1999): 566–83.

Introduction It appears that graffiti has begun to clean up its act. Escalating numbers of mature graffiti writers feel the removal of their graffiti has robbed them of a history, and are turning to legal projects in an effort to restore it. Phibs has declared the graffiti underground “limited” and Kano claims its illegal aspect no longer inspires him (Hamilton, 73). A sign of the times was the exhibition Sake of Name: Australian Graffiti Now which opened at the Wharf 2 Theatre in January 2001. The exhibition was commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company and comprised twenty-two pieces painted by graffiti writers from around Australia. Keen to present a respectable image, writers rejected the original title of Bomb the Wharf, as they felt it focused on the negative aspects of the culture (Andrews, 2). Premier Bob Carr opened the exhibition with the declaration that there is a difference between “graffiti art” and “graffiti vandalism”. The Premier’s stance struck a discordant note with Tony Stevens, a twenty-three-year veteran graffiti cleaner. Described by the Sydney Morning Herald as an “urban art critic by default,” Stevens could see no distinction between graffiti art and vandalism (Leys, 1). Furthermore, he expressed his disappointment that the pieces had “no sense of individuality … it could be graffiti from any American city” (Stevens, 1). As far as Stevens could see, Australian graffiti expressed nothing of its Australian context; it simply mimicked that of America. Sydney Theatre Company director Benedict Andrews responded with a venomous attack on Stevens. Andrews accused the cleaner of being blinded by prejudice (1), and felt that years of cleaning texta tags from railway corridors could not have possibly qualified Stevens as an art critic (3). “The artists in this exhibition are not misfits,” Andrews wrote (2). “They are serious artists in dialogue with their culture and the landscapes in which they live” (2). He went on to hail the strength and diversity of the Australian graffiti scene: “it is a vital and agile international culture and in Australia has evolved in specific ways” (1). The altercation between Stevens and Andrews pointed to one of the debates concerning Australian graffiti: whether it is unique or simply imitative of the American form. Hinged on the assessment of graffiti as vandalism is the view that graffiti is dirty, a disease. Proponents of this view consider graffiti to be an undifferentiated global phenomenon. Others conceive of graffiti as art, and as such argue that it is expressive of local experiences. Graffiti writers maintain that graffiti is expressive of local experiences and they describe it in terms of regional styles and aesthetics. This article maps the transformation of hip hop graffiti as it has been disseminated throughout the world. It registers the distinctiveness of graffiti in Australia and argues that graffiti is not a globally homogenous form, but one which develops in a locally specific manner. Writing and Replicating: Hip Hop Graffiti and Cultural Imperialism Contemporary graffiti subcultures are strongly identified with large American cities. Originating in the black neighbourhood cultures of Philadelphia and New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, hip hop graffiti emerged as part of a larger, homegrown, alternative youth culture (“Urban Graffiti”, 77). Before the end of the 1970s, the aesthetic codes and stylised images of hip hop graffiti began to disseminate to major cities across America and throughout the globe. Its transmission was facilitated by: the production and export of films such as Style Wars (Silver and Chalfant, 1983) and Wild Style (Ahearn, 1983); the covers of rap albums; graffiti magazines; art dealers; and style manuals such as Subway Art (Cooper and Chalfant) and Spraycan Art (Chalfant and Prigroff). Graffiti migrated to Australian shores during the early 1980s, gaining influence through the appearance of these seminal works, which are credited by many as having inspired them to pick up a can of spraypaint. During its larval stages, the subcultural codes of graffiti invented by American writers were reiterated in an Australian context. Australian graffiti writers poached the vocabulary and rhetoric invented by their American counterparts. Writers spoke of “getting up”, “getting fame” and their “crew”, classifying their work as “tags”, “pieces”, or “throw ups”. They utilised the same bubble letters, and later, the incomprehensible “wildstyle” originally devised by American writers. It was not long, however, before Australian writers were making their own innovations and developing a unique style. Despite this, there is still widespread conviction in the view that Australian graffiti is a replica of an American cultural form. This view is supported at a theoretical level by the concept of cultural imperialism. It is generally understood, at a basic level, to be the diffusion of a foreign culture at the expense of a local culture. The concept has been usefully clarified by John Tomlinson. Since there are various orders of power involved in allegations of cultural imperialism, Tomlinson attempts to resist some implicit “master narrative” of the term, accounting for cultural imperialism in a multidimensional fashion (20). He outlines five possible versions, which inflect cultural imperialism to mean cultural domination; a discourse of nationality; media imperialism; global capital; and modernity (19-28). The idea that Australian graffiti replicates American graffiti draws particularly on the first two versions—that of cultural imperialism as cultural domination, and the discourse of nationality. Both these approaches focus on the processes involved in cultural imperialism—“the invasion of an indigenous culture by a foreign one” (Tomlinson, 23). Many people I spoke to about graffiti saw it as evidence of foreign, particularly American, domination and influence over Australian culture. They expressed concern that the appearance of graffiti would signal an influx of “American” problems: gang activity, escalating violence and social disorder. Cultural imperialism as a discourse of nationality hinges on the concepts of “belonging” and “indigenous culture”. In a conference organised by the Graffiti Program of the Government of Western Australia, Senator Ian Campbell argued that graffiti had no place in Australia. He felt that, “there should be little need for social comment through the vandalism of other’s property. Perhaps in nations where … freedoms are not recognised … but not in Australia” (6). Tomlinson argues that the conceptions of cultural imperialism as both cultural domination and as a discourse of nationality are popular because of their highly ambiguous (and thus accommodating) nature (19, 23). However, both notions are problematic. Tomlinson immediately dismisses the notion of cultural imperialism as cultural domination, arguing that one should aim for specificity. “Imperialism” and “domination” are rather general notions, and as such both have sufficient conceptual breadth and ambiguity to accommodate most uses to which they might be put (19). Cultural imperialism as a discourse of nationality is similarly problematic, relying on the precise definitions of a series of terms—such as belonging, and indigenous culture—which have multiple inflections (24). Cultural imperialism has often been tracked as a process of homogenisation. Conceiving of cultural imperialism as homogenisation is particularly pertinent to the argument for the global homogeneity of graffiti. Cultural homogenisation makes “everywhere seem more or less the same,” assuming a global uniformity which is inherently Western, and in extreme cases, American (6). The implications of “Americanisation” are relevant to the attitudes of Australian graffiti writers. On the Blitzkrieg Bulletin Board—an internet board for Australian graffiti writers—I found evidence of a range of responses to “Americanisation” in Australian graffiti. One of the writers had posted: “you shouldn’t even be doing graff if you are a toy little kid, buying export paint and painting legal walls during the day … f*** all y’all niggaz!” s3 replied, “I do know that modern graffiti originated in America but … token are you American? Why do you want to talk like an American gangsta rapper?” The global currency of graffiti is one in which local originality and distinctiveness are highly prized. It is a source of shame for a writer to “bite”. Many of the writers I spoke to became irate when I suggested that Australian styles “bit” those of America. It seems inconsistent that Australian graffiti writers would reproduce American graffiti, if they do not even tolerate Australian writers using the word “nigga”. Like the argument that Australian graffiti replicates that of America, the concept of cultural imperialism is problematic. By the 1970s the concept was beginning to come apart at the seams, its “artificial coherence” exposed when subjected to a range of applications (Tomlinson, 8). Although the idea of cultural imperialism has been discredited and somewhat abandoned at the level of theory, the concept nonetheless continues to guide attitudes towards graffiti. Jeff Ferrell has argued that the interplay of cultural resources involved in worldwide graffiti directly locates it inside issues of cultural imperialism (“Review of Moscow Graffiti”, paragraph 5). Stylistic and subcultural consistencies are mobilised to substantiate assertions of the operation of cultural imperialism in the global form of graffiti. This serves to render it globally homogeneous. While many graffiti writers would concede that graffiti maintains certain global elements, few would agree that this is indicative of a global homogeneity of form. As part of the hip hop component of their website, Triple J conducted an investigation into graffiti. It found that “the graffiti aesthetic developed in New York has been modified with individual characteristics … and has transformed into a unique Australian style” (“Old Skool”, paragraph 6). Veteran writers Umph, Exit, Phibs and Dmote agree. Perth writer Zenith claims, “we came up with styles from the US back in the day and it has grown into something quite unique” (personal communication). Exit declares, “every city has its own particular style. Graffiti from Australia can easily be distinguished by graffiti artists. Australia has its own particular style” (1). Umph agrees: “to us writers, the differences are obvious” (2). Although some continue to perceive Australian graffiti as replicating that of America, it appears that this is no longer the case. Evidence has emerged that Australian graffiti has evolved into a unique and localised form, which no longer imitates that of America. “Going Over” Cultural Imperialism: Hip Hop Graffiti and Processes of Globalisation The argument that graffiti has developed local inflections has lately garnered increasing support due to new theories of global cultural interaction and exchange. The modern era has been characterised by the increasing circulation of goods, capital, knowledge, information, people, images, ideologies, technologies and practices across national borders and territorial boundaries (Appadurai, 230; Scholte, 10). Academic discussion of these developments has converged in recent years around the concept of “globalisation”. While cultural imperialism describes these movements as the diffusion of a foreign culture at the expense of a local one, globalisation interprets these profound changes as evidence of “a global ecumene of persistent cultural interaction and exchange” (Hannerz, 107). In such a view, the globe is not characterised by domination and homogenisation (as with cultural imperialism), but more in terms of exchange and heterogeneity. Recent studies acknowledge that globalisation is complex and multidimensional (Giddens, 30; Kalb, 1), even a process of paradoxes (Findlay, 30). Globalisation is frequently described in terms of contradictory processes—universalisation vs. particularisation, homogenisation vs. differentiation, integration vs. fragmentation. Another of these dialectical tendencies is that of localisation. Kloos defines localisation as representing “the rise of localised, culturally defined identities … localisation stresses sociocultural specificity, in a limited space” (281). While localisation initially appears to stand in opposition to globalisation, the concepts are actually involved in a dialectical process (Giddens, 64). The relationship between localisation and globalisation has been formulated as follows: “Processes of globalisation trigger identity movements leading to the creation of localised, cultural-specific, identities” (Kloos, 282). The development of localisation is particularly pertinent to this study of graffiti. The concept allows for local diversity and has led to the understanding that global cultural phenomena are involved in a process of exchange. Work around globalisation lends credence to the argument that, as graffiti has disseminated throughout the globe, it has mutated to the specific locale within which it exists. Graffiti has always been locally specific: from the early stages which witnessed writers such as Julio 204, Fran 207 and Joe 136 (the numbers referred to their street), to the more recent practice of suffixing tag names with the name of a writers’ crew and their area code. The tendency to include area codes has been largely abandoned in Australia as the law has responded to graffiti with increasing vigilance, but evolutions in graffiti have pointed towards the development of regionally specific styles which writers have come to recognise. Thus, graffiti cannot be thought of as a globally homogenous form, nor can it be said that Australian graffiti replicates that of America. As hip hop has circulated throughout the globe it has appeared to adopt local inflections, having adapted into something quite locally distinctive. In a sense hip hop has been “translated” to particular circumstances. It is now appropriate to consider Australian hip hop and graffiti as a translation of a global cultural phenomenon. A useful reference in this regard is Yuri Lotman, who designates dialogue as the elementary mechanism of translation (143). He suggests that participants involved in a dialogue alternate between a position of “transmission” and “reception” (144). Hence cultural developments are cyclical, and relationships between units—which may range from genres to national cultures—pass through periods of “transmission” and “reception” (144). Lotman proposes that the relationship between structures follows a pattern: at first, a structure will appear in decline, static, unoriginal. He records these “intermissions” as “pauses in dialogue”, during which the structure absorbs influences from the outside (144). When saturation reaches a certain limit, the structure begins producing its own texts as its “passive state changes to a state of alertness” (145). This is a useful way of comprehending Australian hip hop culture. It appears that the Australian hip hop scene has left behind its period of “reception” and is now witnessing one of “transmission” in which it is producing uniquely Australian flavours and styles. Of the contemporary graffiti I have observed, it appears that Australian writing is truly distinctive. Australian writers may have initially poached the subcultural codes developed by their American counterparts, however Australia has evolved to be truly unique where it counts—in graffiti styles. Distinctive graffiti styles can be witnessed, not only between different continents, but also within geographic locations. American graffiti registers a variety of locally specific forms. New York remains devoted to the letter, while graffiti on the west coast of America is renowned for its gang writing. American lettering styles tend to develop existing styles. New York wildstyle is easily recognised, and differs from letters in the Bay Area and San Francisco, which feature arrows inside the letters. While American graffiti is by and large concerned with letters, Australia has gained some repute for its exploration of characters. Like American writers, Australians employ characters poached from popular culture, but for the most part Australian writers employ characters and figures that they have invented themselves, often poaching elements from a wide variety of sources and utilising a wide variety of styles. Marine imagery, not usually employed in American graffiti, recurs in Australian pieces. Kikinit in the Park, a youth festival held in Fremantle in March 2001, featured a live urban art display by Bugszy Snaps, who combined oceanic and graffiti iconography, fusing sea creatures with spraypaint cans. Phibs also “uses images from the sea a lot” (Hamilton, 73), having grown up at the beach. In spite of this focus on the development of characters and images, Australia has not neglected the letter. While initially Australian graffiti artists imitated the styles developed in America, Australian lettering has evolved into something exceptional. Some writers have continued to employ bubble letters and wildstyle, and Australia has kept up with modifications in wildstyle that has seen it move towards 3D. Australia has cultivated this form of traditional wildstyle, elevating it to new heights. Sometimes it is combined with other styles; other times it appears as controlled wildstyle—set around a framework of some sort. In other instances, Australia has charted new territory with the letter, developing styles that are completely individual. Australian writing also blends a variety of lettering and graphic styles, combining letters and figures in new and exciting ways. Australian graffiti often fuses letters with images. This is relatively rare in American graffiti, which tends to focus on lettering and, on the whole, utilises characters to less effect than Australian graffiti. Conclusion Graffiti is not a globally homogeneous form, but one which has developed in locally specific and distinctive ways. As hip hop graffiti has circulated throughout the globe it has been translated between various sites and developed local inflections. In order to visualise graffiti in this manner, it is necessary to recognise theories of cultural imperialism as guiding the widespread belief that graffiti is a globally homogeneous form. I have refuted this view and the worth of cultural imperialism in directing attitudes towards graffiti, as there is a valid foundation for considering the local distinctiveness of Australian graffiti. By engaging critically with literature around globalisation, I have established a theoretical base for the argument that graffiti is locally specific. Envisaging the global form of hip hop graffiti as translated between various sites and having developed in locally specific ways has exposed the study of graffiti outside of the United States. Current writings on cultural studies and graffiti are dominated by the American academy, taking the United States as its centre. In rectifying this imbalance, I stress the need to recognise the distinctiveness of other cultures and geographic locations, even if they appear to be similar. While writers across Australia argue that their locations produce original styles, few have been willing to expound on how their scene is “fresh”. One writer I spoke with was an exception. Zenith explained that: “the way we are original is that our style has developed for so long, fermented if you will, because of Perth being so damned isolated” (personal communication). He went on to say: “I also happen to feel that we’re losing the originality every second of every day, for a number of reasons … with web sites, videos, magazines, and all this type of graffito affiliated stuff” (personal communication). Hip hop graffiti culture is one in which communication and exchange is of central concern. The circulation of this “graffito affiliated stuff”—websites, graffiti magazines, videos, books—as well as the fact that aerosol artists frequently travel to other cities and countries to write, demonstrates that this is a culture which, although largely identified with America, is also global in reach. This global interaction and exchange is increasingly characterised by a complex relationship which involves imitation and adaptation. Glossary Bite To copy another graffiti writer’s style Crew Organised group of graffiti writers Getting up Successful graffiti endeavour; to graffiti Going over To graffiti over another’s graffiti Piece The most sophisticated kind of graffiti, which includes characters, words and phrases Tag A stylised version of a signature; the most basic form of graffiti Throw up Two-dimensional version of a tag Wildstyle Style of graffiti characterised by interlocking letters and arrows Writer Graffiti artist; one who does graffiti References Andrews, Benedict. “If a Cleaner Can Review Graffiti Art, Then …” Sydney Morning Herald 15 Jan. 2001. 15 August 2001 http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/15/features/features8.html>. Appadurai, Arjun. “Globalization and the Research Imagination.” International Social Science Journal 51.2 (1999): 229-38. Campbell, Ian. “The National Perspective.” Dealing with Graffiti. Ed. Graffiti Program, Government of Western Australia: Perth, 1997: 6-7. Chalfant, Henry, and James Prigroff. Spraycan Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1987. Cooper, Martha, and Henry Chalfant. Subway Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1984. “Exit”. n.d. [1998]. 18 Jul. 2001 http://loud.net.au/projects/digit/garry/exit.htm>. Ferrell, Jeff. “Review of Moscow Graffiti: Language and Subculture.” Social Justice 20.3-4 (1993): 188 (15). ———. “Urban Graffiti: Crime, Control, and Resistance.” Youth and Society 27 (1995-6): 73-87. Findlay, Mark. The Globalization of Crime: Understanding Transitional Relationships in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Giddens, Anthony. Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping our Lives. New York: Routledge, 2000. Hamilton, Kate. “Can in Hand.” Rolling Stone 590 (2001): 72-5. Hannerz, Ulf. “Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures.” Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Ed. Anthony D. King. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991. 107-28. Kalb, Don. “Localizing Flows: Power, Paths, Institutions, and Networks.” The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In. Ed. Don Kalb. Boston: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000. 1-29. Kloos, Peter. “The Dialectics of Globalization and Localization.” The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In. Ed. Don Kalb. Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 281-97. Leys, Nick. “Graffiti Removalist Gives Art Installation a Spray.” Sydney Morning Herald 9 January 2001. 9 Jan. 2001. http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/09/national/national15.html>. Lotman, Yuri. The Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1990. “Old Skool.” Triple J. 2001. 18 Jul. 2001 http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/arts/graff/oldskool/default.htm>. s3. “Name & Email Supplied.” Online posting. 9 May 2004. Blitzkrieg Bulletin Board. 20 July 2001 http://network54.com/Forum>. Scholte, Jan Aarte. “Globalisation: Prospects For a Paradigm Shift.” Politics and Globalisation: Knowledge, Ethics and Agency. Ed. Martin Shaw. London: Routledge, 1999. 9-22. Stevens, Tony. “It’s Vandalism, It’s Illegal and It Causes Anguish and Frustration.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Feb. 2001. 4 Mar. 2001 http://www.smh.com.au/news/0102/05/features/features10.html>. Style Wars. Dir. Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant. 1983. DVD. Passion River, 2005. Token. “F*** You Little Kids!” Online posting. 5 May 2000. Blitzkrieg Bulletin Board. 20 Jul. 2001 http://network54.com/Forum>. Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. London: Pinter Publishers, 1991. Umph. n.d. [1998]. 18 Jul. 2001. http://loud.net.au/projects/digit/garry/umph.htm>. Wild Style. Dir. Charlie Ahearn. 1983. DVD. Rhino Theatrical, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lombard, Kara-Jane. "“To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious”: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/05-lombard.php>. APA Style Lombard, K. (May 2007) "“To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious”: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/05-lombard.php>.

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

For centuries, artists have been inspired by place. This perception and awareness of place can also involve a spiritual connection. Artists from both Aboriginal culture and white settlement in Australia have painted works which reveal a deep spiritual connection to place. One of the geographical areas that has inspired several artists is North Queensland, which offers a rich tapestry of dry and wet tropical environments. This article considers an historical overview and deconstructs the work of four contemporary painters (Firth-Smith, Silver, Watson, and Cheshire) who have been inspired by the place that is North Queensland, in order to consider the ways in which their work reveals a spiritual connection to place.

Hidden away at the ends of streets, behind suburban parks and community assets, there remain remnants of the coastal wallum heathlands that once stretched from Caloundra to Noosa, in Queensland, Australia. From late July to September, these areas explode with colour, a springtime wonderland of white wedding bush, delicate ground orchids, the pastels and brilliance of pink boronias, purple irises, and the diverse profusion of yellow bush peas. These gifts of nature are still relatively unknown and unappreciated, with most locals, and Australians at large, having little knowledge of the remarkable nature of the wallum, the nutrient-poor sandy soil that can be almost as acidic as battery acid, but which sustains a finely tuned ecosystem that, once cleared, cannot be regrown. These heathlands and woodlands, previously commonplace beyond the beach dunes of the coastal region, are now only found in a number of national parks and reserves, and suburban remnants.Image 1: The author wildflowering and making art (Photo: Judy Barrass)I too was one of those who had no idea of the joys of the wallum and heathland wildflowers, but it was the creative works of Kathleen McArthur and Judith Wright that helped initiate my education, my own wanderings, wildflowering, and love. Learning country has been a multi-faceted experience, extended and tested as walking becomes an embodied encounter, bodies and landscapes entwined (Lund), an imaginative reimagining, creative act and source of inspiration, a form of pilgrimage (Morrison), forging an intimate relationship (Somerville).Image 2: Women wildflowering next to Rainbow Beach (Photo: Susan Davis)Wandering—the experience shares some similar characteristics to walking, but may have less of a sense of direction and destination. It may become an experience that is relational, contemplative, connected to place. Wandering may be transitory but with impact that resonates across years. Such is the case of wandering for McArthur and Wright; the experience became deeply relational but also led to a destabilisation of values, where the walking body became “entangled in monumental historical and social structures” (Heddon and Turner). They called their walking and wandering “wildflowering”. Somerville said of the term: “Wildflowering was a word they created to describe their passion for Australian wildflower and their love of the places where they found them” (Somerville 2). However, wildflowering was also very much about the experience of wandering within nature, of the “art of seeing”, of learning and communing, but also of “doing”.Image 3: Kathleen McArthur and Judith Wright “wildflowering” north of Lake Currimundi. (Photo: Alex Jelinek, courtesy Alexandra Moreno)McArthur defined and described going wildflowering as meaningdifferent things to different people. There are those who, with magnifying glass before their eyes, looking every inch the scientist, count stamens, measure hairs, pigeon-hole all the definitive features neatly in order and scoff at common names. Others bring with them an artistic inclination, noting the colours and shapes and shadows in the intimate and in the general landscape. Then there are those precious few who find poetry in a Helmut Orchid “leaning its ear to the ground”; see “the trigger-flower striking the bee”; find secrets in Sun Orchids; see Irises as “lilac butterflies” and a fox in a Yellow Doubletail…There are as many different ways to approach the “art of seeing” as there are people who think and feel and one way is as worthy as any other to make of it an enjoyably sensuous experience… (McArthur, Australian Wildflowers 52-53)Wildflowering thus extends far beyond the scientific collector and cataloguer of nature; it is about walking and wandering within nature and interacting with it; it is a richly layered experience, an “art”, “a sensuous experience”, “an artistic inclination” where perception may be framed by the poetic.Their wildflowering drove McArthur and Wright to embark on monumental struggles. They became the voice for the voiceless lifeforms within the environment—they typed letters, organised meetings, lobbied politicians, and led community groups. In fact, they often had to leave behind the environments and places that brought them joy to use the tools of culture to protest and protect—to ensure we might be able to appreciate them today. Importantly, both their creativity and the activism were fuelled by the same wellspring: walking, wandering, and wildflowering.Women Wandering and WildfloweringWhen McArthur and Wright met in the early 1950s, they shared some similarities in terms of relatively privileged social backgrounds, their year of birth (1915), and a love of nature. They both had houses named after native plants (“Calanthe” for Wright’s house at Tambourine, “Midyim” for McArthur’s house at Caloundra), and were focussed on their creative endeavours—Wright with her poetry, McArthur with her wildflower painting and writing. Wright was by then well established as a highly regarded literary figure on the Australian scene. Her book of poetry The Moving Image (1946) had been well received, and later publications further consolidated her substance and presence on the national literary landscape. McArthur had been raised as the middle daughter of a prominent Queensland family; her father was Daniel Evans, of Evans Deakin Industries, and her mother “Kit” was a daughter of one of the pastoral Durack clan. Kathleen had married and given birth to three children, but by the 1950s was exploring new futures and identities, having divorced her husband and made a home for her family at Caloundra on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. She had time and space in her life to devote to her own pursuits and some financial means provided through her inheritance to finance such endeavours.Wright and McArthur met in 1951 after McArthur sent Wright a children’s book for Judith and Jack McKinney’s daughter Meredith. The book was by McArthur’s cousins, Mary Durack (of Kings in Grass Castles fame) and Elizabeth Durack. Wright subsequently invited McArthur to visit her at Tambourine and from that visit their friendship quickly blossomed. While both women were to become known as high-profile nature lovers and conservationists, Wright acknowledges that it was McArthur who helped “train her eye” and cultivated her appreciation of the wildflowers of south-east Queensland:There are times in one’s past which remain warm and vivid, and can be taken out and looked at, so to speak, with renewed pleasure. Such, for me, were my first meetings in the early 1950s with Kathleen McArthur, and our continuing friendship. They brought me joys of discovery, new knowledge, and shared appreciation. Those “wild-flowering days” at Tamborine Mountain, Caloundra, Noosa or Lake Cootharaba, when I was able to wander with her, helped train my own eye a little to her ways of seeing and her devotion to the flowers of the coast, the mountains, and the wallum plains and swamps. (Wright quoted in McArthur, Australian Wildflowers 7)It was through this wandering and wildflowering that their friendship was forged, their knowledge of the plants and landscape grew and their passion was ignited. These acts of wandering were ones where feelings and the senses were engaged and celebrated. McArthur was to document her experiences of these environments through her wildflower paintings, cards, prints, weekly articles in the local newspapers, and books featuring Queensland and Australian Wildflowers (McArthur, Queensland Wildflowers; Living; Bush; Australian Wildflowers). Wright wrote a range of poems featuring landscapes and flora from the coastal experiences and doubtless influenced by their wildflowering experiences. These included, for example, Judith Wright’s poems “Wildflower Plain”, “Wonga Vine”, “Nameless Flower”, and “Sandy Swamp” (Collected Works).Through these acts of wildflowering, walking, and wandering, McArthur and Wright were drawn into activism and became what I call “wild/flower” women: women who cared for country, who formed a deep connection and intimate relationship with nature, with the more-than-human world; women who saw themselves not separate from nature but part of the great cycles of life, growth, death, and renewal; women whose relationship to the country, to the wildflowers and other living things was expressed through drawing, painting, poetry, stories, and performances—but that love driving them also to actions—actions to nurture and protect those wildflowers, places, and living things. This intimate relationship with nature was such that it inspired them to become “wild”, at times branded difficult, prompted to speak out, and step up to assume high profile roles on the public stage—and all because of their love of the small, humble, and often unseen.Wandering into Activism A direct link between “wildflowering” and activism can be identified in key experiences from 1953. That was the year McArthur devoted to “wildflowering”, visiting locations across the Sunshine Coast and South-East Queensland, documenting all that was flowering at different times of the year (McArthur, Living 15). She kept a monthly journal and also engaged in extensive drawing and painting. She was joined by Wright and her family for some of these trips, including one that would become a “monumental” expedition. They explored the area around Noosa and happened to climb to the top of Mt Tinbeerwah. Unlike many of the other volcanic plugs of the Sunshine Coast that would not be an easy climb for a family with young children, Tinbeerwah is a small volcanic peak, close to the road that runs between Cooroy and Tewantin, and one that is a relatively easy walk. From the car park, the trail takes you over volcanic lava flows, a pathway appearing, disappearing, winding through native grasses, modest height trees and to the edge of a dramatic cliff (one now popular with abseilers and adventurers). The final stretch brings you out above the trees to stunning 360-degree views, other volcanic peaks, a string of lakes and waterways, the patchwork greens of farmlands, distant blue oceans, and an expanse of bushland curving north for miles. Both women wrote about the experience and its subsequent significance: When Meredith was four years old, Kathleen McArthur, who was a great wildflower enthusiast and had become a good friend, invited us to join her on a wildflower expedition to the sand-plains north of Noosa. There the Noosa River spread itself out into sand-bottomed lakes between which the river meandered so slowly that everywhere the sky was serenely mirrored in it, trees hung low over it, birds haunted them.Kathleen took her little car, we took our converted van, and drove up the narrow unsealed road beyond Noosa. Once through the dunes—where the low bush-cover was white with wedding-bush and yellow with guinea-flower vines—the plains began, with many and mingled colours and scents. It was spring, and it welcomed us joyfully. (Wright, Half 279-280)McArthur also wrote about this event and its importance, as they both realised that this was territory that was worth protecting for posterity: ‘it was obvious that this was great wildflower country in addition to having a fascinating system of sand mass with related river and lakes. It would make a unique national park’ (McArthur, Living 53). After this experience, Kathleen and Judith began initial inquiries to find out about how to progress ideas for forming a national park (McArthur, Living). Brady affirms that it was Kathleen who first “broached the idea of agitating to have the area around Cooloola declared a National Park” (Brady 182), and it was Judith who then made inquiries in Brisbane on their way back to Mount Tambourine:Judith took the idea to Romeo Lahey of the National Parks Association who told her it was not threatened in any way whereas there were important areas of rainforest that were, and his association gave priority to those. If he had but known, it was threatened. The minerals sands prospectors were about to arrive, if not already in there. (McArthur, Living 53)These initial investigations were put on hold as the pair pursued their “private lives” and raised their children (McArthur, Living), but reignited throughout the 1960s. In 1962, McArthur and Wright were to become founding members of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (along with David Fleay and Brian Clouston), and Cooloola was to become one of one of their major campaigns (McArthur, Living 32). This came to the fore when they discovered there were multiple sand mining leases pending across the Cooloola region. It was at McArthur’s suggestion that a national postcard campaign was launched in 1969, with their organisation sending over 100,000 postcards across Australia to then be sent back to Joh Bjelke Peterson, the notoriously pro-development, conservative Queensland Premier. This is acknowledged as Australia’s first postcard campaign and was reported in national newspapers; The Australian called the Caloundra branch of WPSQ one of the “most militant cells” in Australia (25 May 1970). This was likely because of the extent of the WPSQ communications across media channels and persistence in taking on high profile critics, including the mining companies.It was to be another five years of campaigning before the national park was declared in 1975 (then named Cooloola National Park, now part of the Great Sandy). Wright was to then leave Queensland to live on a property near Braidwood (on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales) and in a different political climate. However, McArthur stayed in Caloundra, maintaining her deep commitment to place and country, keeping on walking and wandering, painting, and writing. She campaigned to protect beach dunes, lobbied to have Pumicestone Passage added to the national heritage register (McArthur, Pumicestone), and fought to prevent the creation of canal estates on the Pumicestone passage. Following the pattern of previous campaigns, she engaged in detailed research, drawing on expertise nationally and internationally, and writing many submissions, newspaper columns, and letters.McArthur also advocated for the plants, the places, and forms of knowing that she loved, calling for “clear thinking and deep feeling” that would enable people to see, value, and care as she did, notably saying:Because our flowers have never settled into our consciousness they are not seen. People can drive through square miles of colourful, massed display of bloom and simply not see it. It is only when the mind opens that the flowers bloom. (McArthur, Bush 2)Her belief was that once you walked the country and could “see”, become familiar with, and fall in love with the wildflowers and their environment, you could not then stand by and see what you love destroyed. Her conservation activities and activism arose and was fed through her wildflowering and the deep knowledge and connections that were formed.Wildflowering and Wanderings of My OwnSo, what we can learn from McArthur and Wright, from our wild/flower women, their wanderings, and wildflowering?Over the past few years, I have walked the wallum country that they loved, recited their poetry, shared their work with others, walked with women in the present accompanied by resonances of the past. I have shared these experiences with friends, artists, and nature lovers. While wandering with one group of women one day, we discovered that a patch of wallum behind Sunshine Beach was due to be cleared for an aged care development. It is full of casuarina food trees visited by the endangered Glossy Black Cockatoos, but it is also full of old wallum banksias, a tree I have come to love, influenced in part by writing and art by McArthur, and my experiences of “wildflowering”.Banksia aemula—the wallum banksia—stands tall, often one of the tallest trees of our coastal heathlands and after which the wallum was named. A range of sources, including McArthur herself, identify the source of the tree’s name as an Aboriginal word:It is an Aboriginal word some say applied to all species of Banksia, and others say to Banksia aemula. The wallum, being up to the present practically useless for commercial purposes provides our best wildflower shows… (McArthur, Queensland Wildflowers 2)Gnarled, textured bark—soft grey and warm red browns, in parts almost fur—the flower heads, when young, feed the small birds and honeyeaters; the bees collect nectar to make honey. And the older heads—remnants on the ground left by glorious black cockatoos, whose beaks, the perfect pliers, crack pods open to recover the hidden seeds. In summer, as the new flowers burst open, every stage of the flower stem cycle is on show. The trees often stand together like familiar friends gossiping, providing shelter; they are protective, nurturing. Banksia aemula is a tree that, according to Thomas Petrie’s reminiscence of “early” Queensland, was significant to Aboriginal women, and might be “owned” by certain women:but certain men and women owned different fruit or flower-trees and shrubs. For instance, a man could own a bon-yi (Auaurcaria Bidwilli) tree, and a woman a minti (Banksia aemula)… (Petrie, Reminiscences 148)Banksia, wallum, women… the connection has existed for millennia. Women walking country, talking, observing, collecting, communing—and this tree was special to them as it has become for me. Who knows how old those trees are in that patch of forest and who may have been their custodians.Do I care about this? Yes, I do. How did I come to care? Through walking, through “wildflowering”, through stories, art, and experience. My connections have been forged by nature and culture, seeing McArthur’s art and reading Wright’s words, through walking the country with women, learning to know, and sharing a wildflowering culture. But knowing isn’t enough: wandering and wondering, has led to something more because now I care; now we must act. Along with some of the women I walked with, we have investigated council records; written to, and called, politicians and the developer; formed a Facebook group; met with various experts; and proposed alternatives. However, our efforts have not met with success as the history of the development application and approval was old and complex. Through wandering and “wildflowering”, we have had the opportunity to both lose ourselves and find ourselves, to escape, to learn, to discover. However, such acts are not necessarily aimless or lacking direction. As connections are forged, care and concern grows, and acts can shift from the humble and mundane, into the intentional and deliberate. The art of seeing and poetic perceptions may even transform into ecological action, with ramifications that can be both significant monumental. Such may be the power of “wildflowering”.ReferencesBrady, Veronica. South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998.Heddon, Deirdre and Cathy Turner. “Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility.” Contemporary Theatre Review 22.2 (2012): 224–236.Lund, Katrín. “Landscapes and Narratives: Compositions and the Walking Body.” Landscape Research 37.2 (2012): 225–237.McArthur, Kathleen. Queensland Wildflowers: A Selection. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1959.———. The Bush in Bloom: A Wildflower Artist’s Year in Paintings and Words. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1982.———. Pumicestone Passage: A Living Waterway. Caloundra: Kathleen McArthur, 1978.———. Looking at Australian Wildflowers. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1986.———. Living on the Coast. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1989.Morrison, Susan Signe. “Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past.” M/C Journal 21.4 (2018). 12 Aug. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1437>.Petrie, Constance Campbell, and Tom Petrie. Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland. 4th ed. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Somerville, Margaret. Wildflowering: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004.Wright, Judith. Collected Poems: 1942 to 1985. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2016.———. Half a Lifetime. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999.

The integration of Australian Indigenous arts in the field of contemporary art is the fruit of a complex historical process deeply rooted in social and political relationships. The Aboriginal art market has grown exponentially since the 90s and acrylic paintings and bark paintings have become international icons of Australian national identity. Aboriginal art has been, and to a certain extent, is still endangered by cheap imitations, fakes and the transgression of Indigenous artists’ rights and community protocols. These issues have been addressed by various inquiries and reports since the 1990s. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged from the scholarship produced by researchers, such as Howard Morphy (2000), Jon Altman (2005) and others. These scholars have investigated particularly the community-controlled art centres and outlined how it could be taken as a business model. In their studies, the art centres are presented as inter-cultural institutions, as both a commercial and a cultural enterprise in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are active agents. With artists, art coordinators, curators, art dealers, bureaucrats, art critics, journalists and visitors who interact to define what Aboriginal art is and where and how it should circulate, we could easily consider the Aboriginal art industry as an art world. Drawing on Danto’s work, Howard Becker (1982) describes the art world as "the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produce(s) the kind of art works that art world is noted for". What evaluative processes do they use to construct and justify their choices? This “loose network of overlapping subcultures held together by a belief in art” (Thornton, 2008) is a challenging site to explore the process of value creation. This paper is focused on the marketing side because this field reveals significant power relations within the Australia’s Indigenous arts sector, power relations that conduct to the construction and negotiation of a complex regime of entangled values.

Special Care NoticeThis article discusses trauma and violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania through the processes of colonisation. Content within this article may be distressing to some readers. IntroductionThis article looks briefly at the collection, consultation, and digital sharing of stories essential to the histories of the First Nations peoples of Australia. Focusing on materials held in Sydney, New South Wales two case studies—the object known as the Proclamation Board and the George Augustus Robinson Papers—explore how materials can be shared with Aboriginal peoples of the region now known as Tasmania. Specifically, the authors of this article (a Palawa man and an Australian woman of European descent) ask how can the idea of the privileging of Indigenous voices, within Eurocentric cultural collections, be transformed from rhetoric to reality? Moreover, how can we navigate this complex work, that is made even more problematic by distance, through the utilisation of knowledge networks which are geographically isolated from the collections holding stories crucial to Indigenous communities? In seeking to answer these important questions, this article looks at how cultural, emotional, and intellectual ownership can be divested from the physical ownership of a collection in a way that repatriates—appropriately and sensitively—stories of Aboriginal Australia and of colonisation. Holding Stories, Not Always Our OwnCultural institutions, including libraries, have, in recent years, been drawn into discussions centred on the notion of digital disruption and “that transformative shift which has seen the ongoing realignment of business resources, relationships, knowledge, and value both facilitating the entry of previously impossible ideas and accelerating the competitive impact of those same impossible ideas” (Franks and Ensor n.p.). As Molly Brown has noted, librarians “are faced, on a daily basis, with rapidly changing technology and the ways in which our patrons access and use information. Thus, we need to look at disruptive technologies as opportunities” (n.p.). Some innovations, including the transition from card catalogues to online catalogues and the provision of a wide range of electronic resources, are now considered to be business as usual for most institutions. So, too, the digitisation of great swathes of materials to facilitate access to collections onsite and online, with digitising primary sources seen as an intermediary between the pillars of preserving these materials and facilitating access for those who cannot, for a variety of logistical and personal reasons, travel to a particular repository where a collection is held.The result has been the development of hybrid collections: that is, collections that can be accessed in both physical and digital formats. Yet, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions is often selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale digitisation projects usually only realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents that are considered high use and at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from the larger full body of records while other lesser-known components are often omitted. Digitisation projects therefore tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable or famous documents online only. Documents can be profiled as an exhibition separate from their complete collection and, critically, their wider context. Libraries of course are not neutral spaces and this practice of (re)enforcing the canon through digitisation is a challenge that cultural institutions, in partnerships, need to address (Franks and Ensor n.p.). Indeed, our digital collections are as affected by power relationships and the ongoing impacts of colonisation as our physical collections. These power relationships can be seen through an organisation’s “processes that support acquisitions, as purchases and as the acceptance of artefacts offered as donations. Throughout such processes decisions are continually made (consciously and unconsciously) that affect what is presented and actively promoted as the official history” (Thorpe et al. 8). While it is important to acknowledge what we do collect, it is equally important to look, too, at what we do not collect and to consider how we continually privilege and exclude stories. Especially when these stories are not always our own, but are held, often as accidents of collecting. For example, an item comes in as part of a larger suite of materials while older, city-based institutions often pre-date regional repositories. An essential point here is that cultural institutions can often become comfortable in what they collect, building on existing holdings. This, in turn, can lead to comfortable digitisation. If we are to be truly disruptive, we need to embrace feeling uncomfortable in what we do, and we need to view digitisation as an intervention opportunity; a chance to challenge what we ‘know’ about our collections. This is especially relevant in any attempts to decolonise collections.Case Study One: The Proclamation BoardThe first case study looks at an example of re-digitisation. One of the seven Proclamation Boards known to survive in a public collection is held by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, having been purchased from Tasmanian collector and photographer John Watt Beattie (1859–1930) in May 1919 for £30 (Morris 86). Why, with so much material to digitise—working in a program of limited funds and time—would the Library return to an object that has already been privileged? Unanswered questions and advances in digitisation technologies, created a unique opportunity. For the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania), colonisation by the British in 1803 was “an emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually confronting series of encounters” (Franks n.p.). Violent incidents became routine and were followed by a full-scale conflict, often referred to as the Black War (Clements 1), or more recently as the Tasmanian War, fought from the 1820s until 1832. Image 1: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Behind the British combatants were various support staff, including administrators and propagandists. One of the efforts by the belligerents, behind the front line, to win the war and bring about peace was the production of approximately 100 Proclamation Boards. These four-strip pictograms were the result of a scheme introduced by Lieutenant Governor George Arthur (1784–1854), on the advice of Surveyor General George Frankland (1800–38), to communicate that all are equal under the rule of law (Arthur 1). Frankland wrote to Arthur in early 1829 to suggest these Proclamation Boards could be produced and nailed to trees (Morris 84), as a Eurocentric adaptation of a traditional method of communication used by Indigenous peoples who left images on the trunks of trees. The overtly stated purpose of the Boards was, like the printed proclamations exhorting peace, to assert, all people—black and white—were equal. That “British Justice would protect” everyone (Morris 84). The first strip on each of these pictogram Boards presents Indigenous peoples and colonists living peacefully together. The second strip shows “a conciliatory handshake between the British governor and an Aboriginal ‘chief’, highly reminiscent of images found in North America on treaty medals and anti-slavery tokens” (Darian-Smith and Edmonds 4). The third and fourth strips depict the repercussions for committing murder (or, indeed, any significant crime), with an Indigenous man hanged for spearing a colonist and a European man hanged for shooting an Aboriginal man. Both men executed in the presence of the Lieutenant Governor. The Boards, oil on Huon pine, were painted by “convict artists incarcerated in the island penal colony” (Carroll 73).The Board at the State Library of New South Wales was digitised quite early on in the Library’s digitisation program, it has been routinely exhibited (including for the Library’s centenary in 2010) and is written about regularly. Yet, many questions about this small piece of timber remain unanswered. For example, some Boards were outlined with sketches and some were outlined with pouncing, “a technique [of the Italian Renaissance] of pricking the contours of a drawing with a pin. Charcoal was then dusted on to the drawing” (Carroll 75–76). Could such a sketch or example of pouncing be seen beneath the surface layers of paint on this particular Board? What might be revealed by examining the Board more closely and looking at this object in different ways?An important, but unexpected, discovery was that while most of the pigments in the painting correlate with those commonly available to artists in the early nineteenth century there is one outstanding anomaly. X-ray analysis revealed cadmium yellow present in several places across the painting, including the dresses of the little girls in strip one, uniform details in strip two, and the trousers worn by the settler men in strips three and four (Kahabka 2). This is an extraordinary discovery, as cadmium yellows were available “commercially as an artist pigment in England by 1846” and were shown by “Winsor & Newton at the 1851 Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace, London” (Fiedler and Bayard 68). The availability of this particular type of yellow in the early 1850s could set a new marker for the earliest possible date for the manufacture of this Board, long-assumed to be 1828–30. Further, the early manufacture of cadmium yellow saw the pigment in short supply and a very expensive option when compared with other pigments such as chrome yellow (the darker yellow, seen in the grid lines that separate the scenes in the painting). This presents a clearly uncomfortable truth in relation to an object so heavily researched and so significant to a well-regarded collection that aims to document much of Australia’s colonial history. Is it possible, for example, the Board has been subjected to overpainting at a later date? Or, was this premium paint used to produce a display Board that was sent, by the Tasmanian Government, to the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne? In seeking to see the finer details of the painting through re-digitisation, the results were much richer than anticipated. The sketch outlines are clearly visible in the new high-resolution files. There are, too, details unable to be seen clearly with the naked eye, including this warrior’s headdress and ceremonial scarring on his stomach, scars that tell stories “of pain, endurance, identity, status, beauty, courage, sorrow or grief” (Australian Museum n.p.). The image of this man has been duplicated and distributed since the 1830s, an anonymous figure deployed to tell a settler-centric story of the Black, or Tasmanian, War. This man can now be seen, for the first time nine decades later, to wear his own story. We do not know his name, but he is no longer completely anonymous. This image is now, in some ways, a portrait. The State Library of New South Wales acknowledges this object is part of an important chapter in the Tasmanian story and, though two Boards are in collections in Tasmania (the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston), each Board is different. The Library holds an important piece of a large and complex puzzle and has a moral obligation to make this information available beyond its metropolitan location. Digitisation, in this case re-digitisation, is allowing for the disruption of this story in sparking new questions around provenance and for the relocating of a Palawa warrior to a more prominent, perhaps even equal role, within a colonial narrative. Image 2: Detail, Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Case Study Two: The George Augustus Robinson PapersThe second case study focuses on the work being led by the Indigenous Engagement Branch at the State Library of New South Wales on the George Augustus Robinson (1791–1866) Papers. In 1829, Robinson was granted a government post in Van Diemen’s Land to ‘conciliate’ with the Palawa peoples. More accurately, Robinson’s core task was dispossession and the systematic disconnection of the Palawa peoples from their Country, community, and culture. Robinson was a habitual diarist and notetaker documenting much of his own life as well as the lives of those around him, including First Nations peoples. His extensive suite of papers represents a familiar and peculiar kind of discomfort for Aboriginal Australians, one in which they are forced to learn about themselves through the eyes and words of their oppressors. For many First Nations peoples of Tasmania, Robinson remains a violent and terrible figure, but his observations of Palawa culture and language are as vital as they are problematic. Importantly, his papers include vibrant and utterly unique descriptions of people, place, flora and fauna, and language, as well as illustrations revealing insights into the routines of daily life (even as those routines were being systematically dismantled by colonial authorities). “Robinson’s records have informed much of the revitalisation of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture in the twentieth century and continue to provide the basis for investigations of identity and deep relationships to land by Aboriginal scholars” (Lehman n.p.). These observations and snippets of lived culture are of immense value to Palawa peoples today but the act of reading between Robinson’s assumptions and beyond his entrenched colonial views is difficult work.Image 3: George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.The canonical reference for Robinson’s archive is Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834, edited by N.J.B. Plomley. The volume of over 1,000 pages was first published in 1966. This large-scale project is recognised “as a monumental work of Tasmanian history” (Crane ix). Yet, this standard text (relied upon by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers) has clearly not reproduced a significant percentage of Robinson’s Tasmanian manuscripts. Through his presumptuous truncations Plomley has not simply edited Robinson’s work but has, quite literally, written many Palawa stories out of this colonial narrative. It is this lack of agency in determining what should be left out that is most troubling, and reflects an all-too-familiar approach which libraries, including the State Library of New South Wales, are now urgently trying to rectify. Plomley’s preface and introduction does not indicate large tranches of information are missing. Indeed, Plomley specifies “that in extenso [in full] reproduction was necessary” (4) and omissions “have been kept to a minimum” (8). A 32-page supplement was published in 1971. A new edition, including the supplement, some corrections made by Plomley, and some extra material was released in 2008. But much continues to be unknown outside of academic circles, and far too few Palawa Elders and language revival workers have had access to Robinson’s original unfiltered observations. Indeed, Plomley’s text is linear and neat when compared to the often-chaotic writings of Robinson. Digitisation cannot address matters of the materiality of the archive, but such projects do offer opportunities for access to information in its original form, unedited, and unmediated.Extensive consultation with communities in Tasmania is underpinning the digitisation and re-description of a collection which has long been assumed—through partial digitisation, microfilming, and Plomley’s text—to be readily available and wholly understood. Central to this project is not just challenging the canonical status of Plomley’s work but directly challenging the idea non-Aboriginal experts can truly understand the cultural or linguistic context of the information recorded in Robinson’s journals. One of the more exciting outcomes, so far, has been working with Palawa peoples to explore the possibility of Palawa-led transcriptions and translation, and not breaking up the tasks of this work and distributing them to consultants or to non-Indigenous student groups. In this way, people are being meaningfully reunited with their own histories and, crucially, given first right to contextualise and understand these histories. Again, digitisation and disruption can be seen here as allies with the facilitation of accessibility to an archive in ways that re-distribute the traditional power relations around interpreting and telling stories held within colonial-rich collections.Image 4: Detail, George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.As has been so brilliantly illustrated by Bruce Pascoe’s recent work Dark Emu (2014), when Aboriginal peoples are given the opportunity to interpret their own culture from the colonial records without interference, they are able to see strength and sophistication rather than victimhood. For, to “understand how the Europeans’ assumptions selectively filtered the information brought to them by the early explorers is to see how we came to have the history of the country we accept today” (4). Far from decrying these early colonial records Aboriginal peoples understand their vital importance in connecting to a culture which was dismantled and destroyed, but importantly it is known that far too much is lost in translation when Aboriginal Australians are not the ones undertaking the translating. ConclusionFor Aboriginal Australians, culture and knowledge is no longer always anchored to Country. These histories, once so firmly connected to communities through their ancestral lands and languages, have been dispersed across the continent and around the world. Many important stories—of family history, language, and ways of life—are held in cultural institutions and understanding the role of responsibly disseminating these collections through digitisation is paramount. In transitioning from physical collections to hybrid collections of the physical and digital, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions can be—and due to the size of some collections is inevitably—selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale and well-resourced digitisation projects usually realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents considered high use or at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from a full body of records. Digitisation projects, as noted, tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable documents online, separate from their complete collection and, critically, their context. Our institutions carry the weight of past collecting strategies and, today, the pressure of digitisation strategies as well. Contemporary librarians should not be gatekeepers, but rather key holders. In collaborating across sectors and with communities we open doors for education, research, and the repatriation of culture and knowledge. We must, always, remember to open these doors wide: the call of Aboriginal Australians of ‘nothing about us without us’ is not an invitation to collaboration but an imperative. Libraries—as well as galleries, archives, and museums—cannot tell these stories alone. Also, these two case studies highlight what we believe to be one of the biggest mistakes that not just libraries but all cultural institutions are vulnerable to making, the assumption that just because a collection is open access it is also accessible. Digitisation projects are more valuable when communicated, contextualised and—essentially—the result of community consultation. Such work can, for some, be uncomfortable while for others it offers opportunities to embrace disruption and, by extension, opportunities to decolonise collections. For First Nations peoples this work can be more powerful than any simple measurement tool can record. Through examining our past collecting, deliberate efforts to consult, and through digital sharing projects across metropolitan and regional Australia, we can make meaningful differences to the ways in which Aboriginal Australians can, again, own their histories.Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the Palawa peoples: the traditional custodians of the lands known today as Tasmania. The authors acknowledge, too, the Gadigal people upon whose lands this article was researched and written. We are indebted to Dana Kahabka (Conservator), Joy Lai (Imaging Specialist), Richard Neville (Mitchell Librarian), and Marika Duczynski (Project Officer) at the State Library of New South Wales. Sincere thanks are also given to Jason Ensor of Western Sydney University.ReferencesArthur, George. “Proclamation.” The Hobart Town Courier 19 Apr. 1828: 1.———. Proclamation to the Aborigines. Graphic Materials. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SAFE R / 247, ca. 1828–1830.Australian Museum. “Aboriginal Scarification.” 2018. 11 Jan. 2019 <https://australianmuseum.net.au/about/history/exhibitions/body-art/aboriginal-scarification/>.Brown, Molly. “Disruptive Technology: A Good Thing for Our Libraries?” International Librarians Network (2016). 26 Aug. 2018 <https://interlibnet.org/2016/11/25/disruptive-technology-a-good-thing-for-our-libraries/>.Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg. Art in the Time of Colony: Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–2000. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2014.Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia, U of Queensland P, 2014.Crane, Ralph. “Introduction.” Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829-1834. 2nd ed. Launceston and Hobart: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and Quintus Publishing, 2008. ix.Darian-Smith, Kate, and Penelope Edmonds. “Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers.” Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim. Eds. Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds. New York: Routledge, 2015. 1–14.Edmonds, Penelope. “‘Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate’: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections.” Journal of Australian Studies 35.2 (2011): 201–18.Fiedler, Inge, and Michael A. Bayard. Artist Pigments, a Handbook of Their History and Characteristics. Ed. Robert L. Feller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 65–108. Franks, Rachel. “A True Crime Tale: Re-Imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board for the Tasmanian Aborigines.” M/C Journal 18.6 (2015). 1 Feb. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1036>.Franks, Rachel, and Jason Ensor. “Challenging the Canon: Collaboration, Digitisation and Education.” ALIA Online: A Conference of the Australian Library and Information Association, 11–15 Feb. 2019, Sydney.Kahabka, Dana. Condition Assessment [Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830, SAFE / R247]. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 2017.Lehman, Greg. “Pleading Robinson: Reviews of Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson (2008) and Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission (2008).” Australian Humanities Review 49 (2010). 1 May 2019 <http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p41961/html/review-12.xhtml?referer=1294&page=15>. Morris, John. “Notes on A Message to the Tasmanian Aborigines in 1829, popularly called ‘Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816’.” Australiana 10.3 (1988): 84–7.Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu. Broome: Magabala Books, 2014/2018.Plomley, N.J.B. Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834. Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966.Robinson, George Augustus. Papers. Textual Records. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, A 7023–A 7031, 1829–34. Thorpe, Kirsten, Monica Galassi, and Rachel Franks. “Discovering Indigenous Australian Culture: Building Trusted Engagement in Online Environments.” Journal of Web Librarianship 10.4 (2016): 343–63.

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

<p>Walking and the tropical Far North Queensland landscape of Australia have had a major influence on the author’s creative research. In this paper, immersive practice, which includes walking, is examined as a means to form connections with the natural environment and stimulate imaginative thought. These attributes have developed the author’s painting processes, which endeavour to enrich understandings of the landscapes of tropical far north Queensland. An immersive approach responds to the complexities of increasingly sedentary lifestyles and the tendency to engage with digital distractions in our high speed media-connected world. In this fast-paced realm, meaningful relationships with the natural environment can be reduced, with meandering and imaginative pursuits often becoming neglected. Living in Far North Queensland provides easy access to unique tropical landscapes to engage with. Walking receptively in such natural environments can provide a physical and mental counterpoint to contemporary fastpaced lifestyles. Furthermore, walking provides opportunities to engage in ‘mindwandering’ and embodied experience that can enrich painting practice.</p><p><br />The research presented in this paper celebrates life in tropical Far North Queensland and highlights the artist’s experience in this particular part of the world. Recently, the 29th of June was designated the International Day of the Tropics by the UN General Assembly, a day founded to raise awareness and consideration of both the challenges and opportunities faced by tropical regions of the world. (stateofthetropics.org). This designated day provides space for the author/artist to reflect upon the diverse culture and ecosystems of the region and position her artistic practice within a broader context of ideas relating to tropical environments.</p>

It was always based on a teenage love story between the two kids. One is a sniffer and one is not. It was designed for Central Australia because we do write these kids off there. Not only in town, where the headlines for the newspapers every second day is about ‘the problem,’ ‘the teenager problem of kids wandering the streets’ and ‘why don’t we send them back to their communities’ and that sort of stuff. Then there’s the other side of it. Elders in Aboriginal communities have been taught that kids who sniff get brain damage, so as soon as they see a kid sniffing they think ‘well they’re rubbish now, they’re brain damaged.’ So the elders are writing these kids off as well, as in ‘they are brain damaged so they’re no use now, they’ll be in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives.’ This is not true, it’s just information for elders that hasn’t been given to them. That is the world I was working with. I wanted to show two incredibly beautiful children who have fought all their lives just to breathe and how incredibly strong they are and how we should be celebrating them and backing them up. I wanted to show that to Central Australia, and if the rest of Australia or the world get involved that’s fantastic. (Thornton in interview)Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film Samson and Delilah won the hearts of Australians as well as a bag of awards — and rightly so. It is a breathtaking film that, as review after review will tell you, is about the bravery, hopelessness, optimism and struggles of two Indigenous youths. In telling this story, the film extends, inverts and challenges notions of waste: wasted youths, wasted memory, wasted history, wasted opportunities, getting wasted and wasted voices. The narrative and the film as a cultural object raise questions about being discarded and “the inescapable fact that the experience of catastrophe in the past century can only be articulated from its remains, our history sifted from among these storied deposits.” (Neville and Villeneuve 2). The purpose of this paper is to examine reaction to the film, and where this reaction has positioned the film in Australian filmmaking history. In reading the reception of the film, I want to consider the film’s contribution to dialogical cultural representations by applying Marcia Langton’s idea of intersubjectivity.In his review, Sean Gorman argues thatThe main reason for the film’s importance is it enables white Australians who cannot be bothered reading books or engaging with Indigenous Australians in any way (other than watching them play football perhaps) the smallest sliver of a world that they have no idea about. The danger however in an engagement by settler society with a film like Samson and Delilah is that the potential shock of it may be too great, as the world which it portrays is, for many, an unknown Australia. Hence, for the settler filmgoer, the issues that the film discusses may be just too hard, too unreal, and their reaction will be limited to perhaps a brief bout of anger or astonishment followed by indifference. (81.1)It is this “engagement by settler society” that I wish to consider: how the voices that we hear speaking about the film are shifting attention from the ‘Other’ to more dialogical cultural representations, that is, non-Indigenous Australia’s emerging awareness of what has previously been wasted, discarded and positioned as valueless. I find Gorman’s surmise of white Australia’s shock with a world they know nothing about, and their potential power to return to a state of indifference about it, to be an interesting notion. Colonisation has created the world that Samson and Delilah live in, and the white community is as involved as the Indigenous one in the struggles of Samson and Delilah. If “settler” society is unaware, that unawareness comes from a history of non-Indigenous power that denies, excludes, and ignores. For this reason, Samson and Delilah is a dialogical cultural representation: it forces a space where the mainstream doesn’t just critique the Aborigine, but their own identity and involvement in the construction of that critique.Wasted VoicesWaste is a subjective notion. Items that some discard and perceive as valueless can be of importance to others, and then it also becomes a waste not to acknowledge or use that item. Rather than only focusing on the concept of “waste” as items or materials that are abandoned, I wish to consider the value in what is wasted. Centring my discussion of ‘waste’ on Thornton’s film provides the opportunity to view a wasteland of dispossession from another cultural and social perspective. Reaction to the film has constructed what could be perceived as an exceptional moment of engagement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices in dialogic intercultural dialogue. By revisiting early examples of ethnographic collaboration, and re-examining contemporary reactions to Samson and Delilah, I hope to forge a space for intervention in Australian film criticism that focuses on how ‘non-Aboriginality’ depends on ‘Aboriginality’ in a vast wasteland of colonial dispossession and appropriation.Many of the reviews of Thornton’s film (Buckmaster; Collins; Davis; Gorman; Hall; Isaac; Ravier; Redwood; Rennie; Simpson) pay attention to the emotional reaction of non-Indigenous viewers. Langton states that historically non-Indigenous audiences know ‘the Aborigine’ through non-Indigenous representations and monologues about Aboriginality: “In film, as in other media, there is a dense history of racist, distorted and often offensive representation of Aboriginal people” (24). The power to define has meant that ethnographic discourses in the early days of colonisation established their need to record Indigenous peoples, knowledges and traditions before they ‘wasted away.’ At the 1966 Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area, Stanley Hawes recounts how Ian Dunlop, an Australian documentary filmmaker, commented that “someone ought to film the aborigines of the Western Desert before it was too late. They had already almost all disappeared or gone to live on Mission stations” (69). This popular belief was one of the main motivations for research on Indigenous peoples and led to the notion of “smoothing the dying pillow,” which maintained that since Aborigines were a dying race, they should be allowed to all die out peacefully (Chandra-Shekeran 120). It was only the ‘real’ Aborigine that was valued: the mission Black, the urban Black, the assimilated Black, was a waste (Cowlishaw 108). These representations of Aboriginality depended on non-Indigenous people speaking about Aboriginality to non-Indigenous people. Yet, the impetus to speak, as well as what was being spoken about, and the knowledge being discussed and used, relied on Indigenous voices and presences. When Australia made its “important contribution to ethnographic films of its Aborigines” (McCarthy 81), it could not have done so without the involvement of Indigenous peoples. In her work on intersubjectivity, Langton describes “Aboriginality” as a “social thing” that is continually remade through dialogue, imagination, representation and interpretation. She describes three broad categories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal intersubjectivity: when Aboriginal people interact with other Aboriginal people; when non-Aboriginal people stereotype, iconise, and mythologise Aboriginal people without any Aboriginal contact; and when Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people engage in dialogue (81). Since W. Baldwin Spencer’s first ethnographic film, made between 1901 and 1912, which recorded the customs of the Aranda and neighbouring Central Australian tribes (McCarthy 80), the development of Australian cinema depended on these categories of intersubjectivity. While the success of Samson and Delilah could be interpreted as opening mainstream eyes to the waste that Indigenous communities have experienced since colonisation — wasted knowledge, wasted youths, wasted communities — it could also signify that what was once perceived by dominant non-Indigenous society as trash is now viewed as treasure. Much like the dot paintings which Delilah and her nana paint in exchange for a few bucks, and which the white man then sells for thousands of dollars, Aboriginal stories come to us out of context and filtered through appropriation and misinterpretation.Beyond its undeniable worth as a piece of top-notch filmmaking, Samson and Delilah’s value also resides in its ability to share with a wide audience, and in a language we can all understand, a largely untold story steeped in the painful truth of this country’s bloody history. (Ravier)In reading the many reviews of Samson and Delilah, it is apparent there is an underlying notion of such a story being secret, and that mainstream Australia chose to engage with the film’s dialogical representation because it was sharing this secret. When Ravier states that Aboriginal stories are distorted by appropriation and misinterpretation, I would add that such stories are examples of Langton’s second category of intersubjectivity: they reveal more about the processes of non-Indigenous constructions of ‘the Aborigine’ and the need to stereotype, iconise and mythologise. These processes have usually involved judgements about what is to be retained as ‘valuable’ in Indigenous cultures and knowledges, and what can be discarded — in the same way that the film’s characters Samson and Delilah are discarded. The secret that Samson and Delilah is sharing with white Australia has never been a secret: it is that non-Indigenous Australia chooses what it wants to see or hear. Wasted SilencesIn 1976 Michael Edols directed and produced Floating about the Mowanjum communities experiences of colonisation, mission life and resistance. That same year Alessandro Cavadini directed and Carolyn Strachan produced Protected, a dramatised documentary about life on the Queensland Aboriginal reserve of Palm Island — “a dumping ground for unwanted persons or those deemed to be in need of ‘protection’” (Treole 38). Phillip Noyce’s Backroads, a story about the hardships facing a young man from a reserve in outback New South Wales, was released in 1977. In 1979, Essie Coffey produced and directed My Survival as an Aboriginal, where she documented her community’s struggles living under white domination. Two Laws, a feature film made by four of the language groups around Borroloola in 1981, examines the communities’ histories of massacre, dispossession and institutionalisation. These are just some of many films that have dealt with the ‘secrets’ about Indigenous peoples. In more recent times the work of Noyce, Rolf de Heer, Stephen Johnson, Iven Sen, Rachel Perkins and Romaine Moreton, to name only a few, have inspired mainstream engagement with films representing Indigenous experiences and knowledges. “We live in a world in which, increasingly, people learn of their own and other cultures and histories through a range of visual media — film, television, and video,” writes Faye Ginsburg (5). Changing understandings of culture and representation means that there appears to be a shift away from the “monologic, observational and privileged Western gaze” towards more dialogic, reflexive and imaginative mediation. Perhaps Samson and Delilah’s success is partly due to its contribution to social action through compelling the non-Indigenous viewer to “revise our comfortable and taken for granted narrative conventions that fetishise the text and reify ‘culture’ and ‘cultural difference.’ Instead, we — as producers, audiences, and ethnographers — are challenged to comprehend the multiple ways that media operate as a site where culture is produced, contested, mediated and continually re-imagined” (Ginsburg 14). In his review, Tom Redwood writes about the filmLike life in the desert, everything is kept to a minimum here and nothing is wasted. ... Perhaps it took an Indigenous filmmaker from Alice Springs to do this, to lead the way in reinstating meaningfulness and honesty as core values in Australian cinema. But, whatever the case, Thornton's Indigenous heritage won't make his difficult vision any easier for local audiences to swallow. Most Australians aren't used to this degree of seriousness at the movies and though many here will embrace Samson and Delilah, there will no doubt also be a minority who, unable to reject the film as a cultural curiosity, will resist its uncompromising nature with cries of 'pessimism!' or even 'reverse-racism!’ (28-29)Perhaps the film’s success has to do with the way the story is told? — “everything kept to a minimum” and “nothing is wasted.” In attempts to construct Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal intersubjectivity in previous representations perhaps language, words, English got in the way of communication? For mainstream white Australian society’s engagement in dialogic representations, for Indigenous voices to speak and be heard, for non-Indigenous monologues to be challenged, perhaps silence was called for? As the reviews for the film have emphasised, non-Indigenous reactions contribute to the dialogic nature of the film, its story, as well as its positioning as a site of cultural meaning, social relations, and power. Yet even while critiquing constructions of Aboriginality, non-Aboriginality has historically remained uncritiqued—non-Aboriginal endorsement and reaction is discussed, but what this reaction and engagement, or lack of engagement (whether because of ignorance, unawareness, or racism) reveals is not. That is, non-Aboriginality has not had to critique the power it has to continue to remain ignorant of stories about wasted Indigenous lives. Thornton’s film appears to have disrupted this form of non-engagement.With the emergence of Indigenous media and Indigenous media makers, ethnographic films have been reconceptualised in terms of aesthetics, cultural observations and epistemological processes. By re-exploring the history of ethnographic film making and shifting attention from constructions of the ‘other’ to reception by the mainstream, past films, past representations of colonisation, and past dialogues will not be wasted. With the focus on constructing Aboriginality, the cultural value of non-Aboriginality has remained unquestioned and invisible. By re-examining the reactions of mainstream Australians over the last one hundred years in light of the success of Samson and Delilah, cultural and historical questions about ‘the Aborigine’ can be reframed so that the influence Indigenous discourses have in Australian nation-building will be more apparent. The reception of Samson and Delilah signifies the transformational power in wasted voices, wasted dialogues and the wasted opportunities to listen. Wasted DialoguesFelicity Collins argues that certain “cinematic events that address Indigenous-settler relations do have the capacity to galvanise public attention, under certain conditions” (65). Collins states that after recent historical events, mainstream response to Aboriginal deprivation and otherness has evoked greater awareness of “anti-colonial politics of subjectivity” (65). The concern here is with mainstream Australia dismantling generations of colonialist representations and objectifications of the ‘other.’ What also needs to be re-examined is the paradox and polemic of how reaction to Aboriginal dispossession and deprivation is perceived. Non-Indigenous reaction remains a powerful framework for understanding, viewing and positioning Indigenous presence and representation — the power to see or not to see, to hear or to ignore. Collins argues that Samson and Delilah, along with Australia (Luhrmann, 2009) and First Australians (Perkins, 2008), are national events in Australian screen culture and that post-apology films “reframe a familiar iconography so that what is lost or ignored in the incessant flow of media temporality is precisely what invites an affective and ethical response in cinematic spaces” (75).It is the notion of reframing what is lost or ignored to evoke “ethical responses” that captures my attention; to shift the gaze from Aboriginal subjectivity, momentarily, to non-Aboriginal subjectivity and examine how choosing to discard or ignore narratives of violence and suffering needs to be critiqued as much as the film, documentary or representation of Indigenality. Perhaps then we can start to engage in dialogues of intersubjectivity rather than monologues about Aboriginality.I made [Samson and Delilah] for my mob but I made sure that it can work with a wider audience as well, and it’s just been incredible that it’s been completely embraced by a much wider audience. It’s interesting because as soon as you knock down that black wall between Aboriginals and white Australia, a film like this does become an Australian film and an Australian story. Not an Aboriginal story but a story about Australians, in a sense. It’s just as much a white story as it is a black one when you get to that position. (Thornton in interview)When we “get to that position” described by Thornton, intercultural and intersubjective dialogue allows both Aboriginality and non-Aboriginality to co-exist. When a powerful story of Indigenous experiences and representations becomes perceived as an Australian story, it provides a space for what has historically been ignored and rendered invisible to become visible. It offers a different cultural lens for all Australians to question and critique notions of value and waste, to re-assess what had been relegated to the wasteland by ethnographic editing and Westernised labels. Ever since Spencer, Melies, Abbie and Elkin decided to retain an image of Aboriginality on film, which they did with specific purposes and embedded values, it has been ‘the Aborigine’ that has been dissected and discussed. It would be a waste not to open this historiography up to include mainstream reaction, or lack of reaction, in the development of cultural and cinematic critique. A wasteland is often perceived as a dumping ground, but by re-visiting that space and unearthing, new possibilities are discovered in that wasteland, and more complex strategies for intersubjectivity are produced. At the centre of Samson and Delilah is the poverty and loss that Indigenous communities experience on a daily basis. The experiences endured by the main characters are not new or recent ones and whether cinematic reception of them produces guilt, pity, sympathy, empathy, fear or defensiveness, it is the very potential to be able to react that needs to be critiqued. As Williamson Chang points out, the “wasteland paradigm is invisible to those embedded in its structure” (852). By looking more closely at white society’s responses in order to discern more clearly if they are motivated by feelings that their wealth—whether material, cultural or social—or their sense of belonging is being challenged or reinforced then ruling values and epistemologies are challenged and dialogic negotiations engaged. If dominant non-Indigenous society has the power to classify Indigenous narratives and representation as either garbage or something of value, then colonialist structures remain intact. If they have the self-reflexive power to question their own response to Indigenous narratives and representations, then perhaps more anti-colonial discourses emerge. Notions of value and waste are tied to cultural hierarchies, and it is through questioning how a dominant culture determines value that processes of transformation and mediation take place and the intersubjective dialogue sparked by Samson and Delilah can continueIn her review of Samson and Delilah, Therese Davis suggests that the film brings people closer to truthfulness, forcing the audience to engage with that realism: “those of us ‘outside’ of the community looking in can come to know ourselves differently through the new languages of this film, both cultural and cinematic. Reformulating the space of the national from an ‘insider,’ Aboriginal community-based perspective, the film positions its spectators, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, in a shared space, a space that allows for new forms of attachment, involvement and self-knowledge, new lines of communication.” Davis goes on to caution that while the film is groundbreaking, the reviews situating the film as what Australian cinema should be need to be mindful of feeding “notions of anti-diversity, which “is an old debate in Australian Cinema Studies, but in this instance anti-diversity is doubly problematic because it also runs the risk of narrowly defining Indigenous cinema.” The danger, historically, is that anything Indigenous, has always been narrowly defined by the mainstream and yes, to continue to limit Indigenous work in any medium is colonising and problematic. However, rather than just caution against this reaction, I am suggesting that reaction itself be critiqued. While currently contemporary mainstream response to Samson and Delilah is one of adoration, is the centre from which it comes the same centre which less than fifty years ago critiqued Indigenous Australians as a savage, noble, and/or dying race wasting away? Davis writes that the film constructs a new “relation” in Australian cinema but that it should not be used as a marker against which “all new (and old) Indigenous cinema is measured.” This concern resembles, in part, my concern that until recently mainstream society has constructed their own markers of Aboriginal cultural authenticity, deciding what is to be valued and what can be discarded. I agree with Davis’s caution, yet I cannot easily untangle the notion of ‘measuring.’ As a profound Australian film, certainly cinematic criticism will use it as a signifier of ‘quality.’ But by locating it singularly in the category of Indigenous cinema, the anti-colonial and discursive Indigenous discourses the film deploys and evokes are limited to the margins of Australian film and film critique once more. After considering the idea of measuring, and asking who would be conducting this process of measuring, my fear is that the gaze returns to ‘the Aborigine’ and the power to react remains solely, and invisibly, with the mainstream. Certainly it would be a waste to position the film in such a way that limits other Indigenous filmmakers’ processes, experiences and representations. I see no problem with forcing non-Indigenous filmmakers, audiences and perceptions to have to ‘measure’ up as a result of the film. It would be yet another waste if they didn’t, and Samson and Delilah was relegated to being simply a great ‘Indigenous Australian film,’ instead of a great Australian film that challenges, inverts and re-negotiates the construction of both Aboriginality and non-Aboriginality. By examining reaction to the film, and not just reading the film itself, discussions of dialogical cultural representation can include non-Aboriginality as well as Aboriginality. Films like this are designed to create a dialogue and I’m happy if someone doesn’t like the film and they tell me why, because we’re creating dialogue. We’re talking about this stuff and taking a step forward. That’s important. (Thornton)The dialogue opened up by the success of Thornton’s beautiful film is one that also explores non-Aboriginality. If we waste the opportunity that Samson and Delilah provides, then Australia’s ongoing cinematic history will remain a wasteland, and many more Indigenous voices, stories, and experiences will continue to be wasted.ReferencesBuckmaster, Luke. “Interview with Warwick Thornton”. Cinetology 12 May 2009. 18 Aug. 2010 ‹http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2009/05/12/interview-with-warwick-thornton-writerdirector-of-samson-delilah›.———. “Samson and Delilah Review: A Seminal Indigenous Drama of Gradual and Menacing Beauty”. Cinetology 6 May 2009. 14 June 2010 ‹http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2009/05/06/samson-delilah-film-review-a-seminal-indigenous-drama-of-gradual-and-menacing-beauty›.Chang, Williamson, B. C. “The ‘Wasteland’ in the Western Exploitation of ‘Race’ and the Environment”. University of Colorado Law Review 849 (1992): 849-870.Chandra-Shekeran, Sangeetha. “Challenging the Fiction of the Nation in the ‘Reconciliation’ Texts of Mabo and Bringing Them Home”. The Australian Feminist Law Journal 11 (1998): 107-133.Collins, Felicity. “After the Apology: Reframing Violence and Suffering in First Australians, Australia and Samson and Delilah”. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24.3 (2010): 65-77.Cowlishaw, Gillian, K. “Censoring Race in ‘Post-Colonial’ Anthropology”. Critique of Anthropology 20.2 (2000): 101-123. Davis, Therese. “Love and Marginality in Samson and Delilah”. Senses of Cinema 57 (2009). 7 Jan. 2010 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/09/51/samson-and-delilah.html›. Ginsburg, Faye. “Culture/Media: A (Mild) Polemic”. Anthropology Today 10.2 (1994): 5-15.Gorman, Sean. “Review of Samson and Delilah”. History Australia 6.3 (2009): 81.1-81.2.Hall, Sandra. “Review of Samson and Delilah”. Sydney Morning Herald. 7 May 2009. Hawes, Stanley. “Official Government Production”. Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area. Canberra: Australian National Advisory Committee, 1966. 62-71.Isaac, Bruce. “Screening ‘Australia’: Samson and Delilah”. Screen Education 54 (2009): 12-17. Langton, Marcia. Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television...: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993.McCarthy, F. D “Ethnographic Research Films” Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area Australian National Advisory Committee (1966): 80-85.Neville, Brian, and Johanne Villeneuve. Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory. Albany: State U of New York P., 2002.Ravier, Matt. “Review: Samson and Delilah”. In Film Australia. 2009. 7 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.infilm.com.au/?p=802›.Redwood, Tom. “Warwick Thornton and Kath Shelper on Making Samson and Delilah”. Metro 160 (2009): 31.Rennie, Ellie. “Samson and Delilah under the Stars in Alice Springs”. Crikey 27 Apr. 2009. 18 Aug. 2010 ‹ http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/04/27/samson-and-delilah-under-the-stars-in-alice-springs/›.Samson and Delilah. Dir. Warwick Thornton. Footprint Films, 2009. Treole, Victoria. Australian Independent Film. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1982.

I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vaginal, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/clitorial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated clitoris, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. Indeed, in the intersection of my theoretical, creative, psychological, and somatic praxis, the heat (read hot and messy, insightful and insistent signage) of my body’s knowledges perhaps intensifies – with a ripe bouquet – the inevitably ongoing odour/aroma of the reproductive world. ReferencesAngel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “On Moving and Being Moved: The Corporeality of Writing in Literary Fiction and New Media Art.” Literature and Sensation, eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephan McLaren. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009: 162-172. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Brodzinsky, David. “Adjustment to Adoption: A Psychosocial Perspective.” Clinical Psychology Review 7 (1987): 25-47. doi: 10.1016/0272-7358(87)90003-1.Brodzinsky, David, Daniel Smith, and Anne Brodzinsky. Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues. California: Sage Publications, 1998.Carnochan, Peter. “Containers without Lids”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 16.3 (2006): 341-362.Cixous, Hélène. “To Live the Orange”. The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1979/1994. 81-92. ---. “Preface.” The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1994. xv-xxii.Coull, Kim. “Womb Tongues: A Collection of Poetry.” Honours Thesis. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2007. ---. “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Late Discovery Adoptee Pre-Verbal Trauma into Narrative”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Durey, Judith. Translating Hiraeth, Performing Adoption: Art as Mediation and Form of Cultural Production. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Murdoch University, 2010. 22 Sep. 2011 .Ekis Ekman, Kajsa. Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self. Trans. S. Martin Cheadle. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2013. Gardiner, Amanda. “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. NSW: Allen &. Unwin, 1994. Grotevant, Harold D., Nora Dunbar, Julie K. Kohler, and Amy. M. Lash Esau. “Adoptive Identity: How Contexts within and beyond the Family Shape Developmental Pathways.” Family Relations 49.3 (2000): 79-87.Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Harper Collins, 1992. Howard, Sethane, and Mark W. Crandall. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: What Happens in the Brain. Washington Academy of Sciences 93.3 (2007): 1-18.Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s List. London: Serpentine Publishing Company, 1982. Kenny, Pauline, Daryl Higgins, Carol Soloff, and Reem Sweid. Past Adoption Experiences: National Research Study on the Service Response to Past Adoption Practices. Research Report 21. Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Kirby, Vicky. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Klorer, P. Gussie. “Expressive Therapy with Severely Maltreated Children: Neuroscience Contributions.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 22.4 (2005): 213-220. doi:10.1080/07421656.2005.10129523.Levy-Shiff, Rachel. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees in Adulthood: Family Environment and Adoption-Related Correlates. 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IntroductionSydney’s Garden Palace was a magnificent building with a grandeur that dominated the skyline, stretching from the site of the current State Library of New South Wales to the building that now houses the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. The Palace captivated society from its opening in 1879. This article outlines the building of one of Sydney’s early structural icons and how, despite being destroyed by fire after three short years in 1882, it had an enormous impact on the burgeoning colonial community of New South Wales, thus building a physical structure, pride and a suite of memories.Design and ConstructionIn February 1878, the Colonial Secretary’s Office announced that “it is intended to hold under the supervision of the Agricultural Society of New South Wales an international Exhibition in Sydney in August 1879” (Official Record ix). By December the same year it had become clear that the Agricultural Society lacked the resources to complete the project and control passed to the state government. Colonial Architect James Barnet was directed to prepare “plans for a building suitable for an international exhibition, proposed to be built in the Inner Domain” (Official Record xx). Within three days he had submitted a set of drawings for approval. From this point on there was a great sense of urgency to complete the building in less than 10 months for the exhibition opening the following September.The successful contractor was John Young, a highly experienced building contractor who had worked on the Crystal Palace for the 1851 London International Exhibition and locally on the General Post Office and Exhibition Building at Prince Alfred Park (Kent 6). Young was confident, procuring electric lights from London so that work could be carried out 24 hours a day, to ensure that the building was delivered on time. The structure was built, as detailed in the Colonial Record (1881), using over 1 million metres of timber, 2.5 million bricks and 220 tonnes of galvanised corrugated iron. Remarkably the building was designed as a temporary structure to house the Exhibition. At the end of the Exhibition the building was not dismantled as originally planned and was instead repurposed for government office space and served to house, among other things, records and objects of historical significance. Ultimately the provisional building materials used for the Garden Palace were more suited to a temporary structure, in contrast with those used for the more permanent structures built at the same time which are still standing today.The building was an architectural and engineering wonder set in a cathedral-like cruciform design, showcasing a stained-glass skylight in the largest dome in the southern hemisphere (64 metres high and 30 metres in diameter). The total floor space of the exhibition building was three and half hectares, and the area occupied by the Garden Palace and related buildings—including the Fine Arts Gallery, Agricultural Hall, Machinery Hall and 10 restaurants and places of refreshment—was an astounding 14 hectares (Official Record xxxvi). To put the scale of the Garden Palace into contemporary perspective it was approximately twice the size of the Queen Victoria Building that stands on Sydney’s George Street today.Several innovative features set the building apart from other Sydney structures of the day. The rainwater downpipes were enclosed in hollow columns of pine along the aisles, ventilation was provided through the floors and louvered windows (Official Record xxi) while a Whittier’s Steam Elevator enabled visitors to ascend the north tower and take in the harbour views (“Among the Machinery” 70-71). The building dominated the Sydney skyline, serving as a visual anchor point that welcomed visitors arriving in the city by boat:one of the first objects that met our view as, after 12 o’clock, we proceeded up Port Jackson, was the shell of the Exhibition Building which is so rapidly rising on the Domain, and which next September, is to dazzle the eyes of the world with its splendours. (“A ‘Bohemian’s’ Holiday Notes” 2)The DomeThe dome of the Garden Palace was directly above the intersection of the nave and transept and rested on a drum, approximately 30 metres in diameter. The drum featured 36 oval windows which flooded the space below with light. The dome was made of wood covered with corrugated galvanised iron featuring 12 large lattice ribs and 24 smaller ribs bound together with purlins of wood strengthened with iron. At the top of the dome was a lantern and stained glass skylight designed by Messrs. Lyon and Cottier. It was light blue, powdered with golden stars with wooden ribs in red, buff and gold (Notes 6). The painting and decorating of the dome commenced just one month before the exhibition was due to open. The dome was the sixth largest dome in the world at the time. During construction, contractor Mr Young allowed visitors be lifted in a cage to view the building’s progress.During the construction of the Lantern which surmounts the Dome of the Exhibition, visitors have been permitted, through the courtesy of Mr. Young, to ascend in the cage conveying materials for work. This cage is lifted by a single cable, which was constructed specially of picked Manilla hemp, for hoisting into position the heavy timbers used in the construction. The sensation whilst ascending is a most novel one, and must resemble that experienced in ballooning. To see the building sinking slowly beneath you as you successively reach the levels of the galleries, and the roofs of the transept and aisles is an experience never to be forgotten, and it seems a pity that no provision can be made for visitors, on paying a small fee, going up to the dome. (“View from the Lantern of the Dome Exhibition” 8)The ExhibitionInternational Exhibitions presented the opportunity for countries to express their national identities and demonstrate their economic and technological achievements. They allowed countries to showcase the very best examples of contemporary art, handicrafts and the latest technologies particularly in manufacturing (Pont and Proudfoot 231).The Sydney International Exhibition was the ninth International Exhibition and the colony’s first, and was responsible for bringing the world to Sydney at a time when the colony was prosperous and full of potential. The Exhibition—opening on 17 September 1879 and closing on 20 April 1880—had an enormous impact on the community, it boosted the economy and was the catalyst for improving the city’s infrastructure. It was a great source of civic pride.Image 1: The International Exhibition Sydney, 1879-1880, supplement to the Illustrated Sydney News Jan. 1880. Image credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (call no.: DL X8/3)This bird’s eye view of the Garden Palace shows how impressive the main structure was and how much of the Gardens and Domain were occupied by ancillary buildings for the Exhibition. Based on an original drawing by John Thomas Richardson, chief engraver at the Illustrated Sydney News, this lithograph features a key identifying buildings including the Art Gallery, Machinery Hall, and Agricultural Hall. Pens and sheds for livestock can also be seen. The parade ground was used throughout the Exhibition for displays of animals. The first notable display was the International Show of Sheep featuring Australian, French and English sheep; not surprisingly the shearing demonstrations proved to be particularly popular with the community.Approximately 34 countries and their colonies participated in the Exhibition, displaying the very best examples of technology, industry and art laid out in densely packed courts (Barnet n.p.). There were approximately 14,000 exhibits (Official Record c) which included displays of Bohemian glass, tapestries, fine porcelain, fabrics, pyramids of gold, metals, minerals, wood carvings, watches, ethnographic specimens, and heavy machinery. Image 2: “Meet Me under the Dome.” Illustrated Sydney News 1 Nov. 1879: 4. Official records cite that between 19,853 and 24,000 visitors attended the Exhibition on the opening day of 17 September 1879, and over 1.1 million people visited during its seven months of operation. Sizeable numbers considering the population of the colony, at the time, was just over 700,000 (New South Wales Census).The Exhibition helped to create a sense of place and community and was a popular destination for visitors. On crowded days the base of the dome became a favourite meeting place for visitors, so much so that “meet me under the dome” became a common expression in Sydney during the Exhibition (Official Record lxxxiii).Attendance was steady and continuous throughout the course of the Exhibition and, despite exceeding the predicted cost by almost four times, the Exhibition was deemed a resounding success. The Executive Commissioner Mr P.A. Jennings remarked at the closing ceremony:this great undertaking […] marks perhaps the most important epoch that has occurred in our history. In holding this exhibition we have entered into a new arena and a race of progress among the nations of the earth, and have placed ourselves in kindly competition with the most ancient States of the old and new world. (Official Record ciii)Initially the cost of admission was set at 5 shillings and later dropped to 1 shilling. Season tickets for the Exhibition were also available for £3 3s which entitled the holder to unlimited entry during all hours of general admission. Throughout the Exhibition, season ticket holders accounted for 76,278 admissions. The Exhibition boosted the economy and encouraged authorities to improve the city’s services and facilities which helped to build a sense of community as well as pride in the achievement of such a fantastic structure. A steam-powered tramway was installed to transport exhibition-goers around the city, after the Exhibition, the tramway network was expanded and by 1905–1906 the trams were converted to electric traction (Freestone 32).After the exhibition closed, the imposing Garden Palace building was used as office space and storage for various government departments.An Icon DestroyedIn the early hours of 22 September 1882 tragedy struck when the Palace was engulfed by fire (“Destruction of the Garden Palace” 7). The building – and all its contents – destroyed.Image 3: Burning of the Garden Palace from Eaglesfield, Darlinghurst, sketched at 5.55am, Sep 22/82. Image credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (call no.: SSV/137) Many accounts and illustrations of the Garden Palace fire can be found in contemporary newspapers and artworks. A rudimentary drawing by an unknown artist held by the State Library of New South Wales appears to have been created as the Palace was burning. The precise time and location is recorded on the painting, suggesting it was painted from Eaglesfield, a school on Darlinghurst Road. It purveys a sense of immediacy giving some insight into the chaos and heat of the tragedy. A French artist living in Sydney, Lucien Henry, was among those who attempted to capture the fire. His assistant, G.H. Aurousseau, described the event in the Technical Gazette in 1912:Mister Henry went out onto the balcony and watched until the Great Dome toppled in; it was then early morning; he went back to his studio procured a canvas, sat down and painted the whole scene in a most realistic manner, showing the fig trees in the Domain, the flames rising through the towers, the dome falling in and the reflected light of the flames all around. (Technical Gazette 33-35)The painting Henry produced is not the watercolour held by the State Library of New South Wales, however it is interesting to see how people were moved to document the destruction of such an iconic building in the city’s history.What Was Destroyed?The NSW Legislative Assembly debate of 26 September 1882, together with newspapers of the day, documented what was lost in the fire. The Garden Palace housed the foundation collection of the Technological and Sanitary Museum (the precursor to the Powerhouse Museum, now the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences), due to open on 1 December 1882. This collection included significant ethnological specimens such as Australian Indigenous artefacts, many of which were acquired from the Sydney International Exhibition. The Art Society of New South Wales had hung 300 paintings in preparation for their annual art exhibition due to open on 2 October of that year, all of these paintings consumed by fire.The Records of the Crown Lands Occupation Office were lost along with the 1881 Census (though the summary survived). Numerous railway surveys were lost, as were: £7,000 worth of statues, between 20,000 and 30,000 plants and the holdings of the Linnean Society offices and museum housed on the ground floor. The Eastern Suburbs Brass Band performed the day before at the opening of the Eastern Suburbs Horticultural Society Flower show; all the instruments were stored in the Garden Palace and were destroyed. Several Government Departments also lost significant records, including the: Fisheries Office; Mining Department; Harbour and Rivers Department; and, as mentioned, the Census Department.The fire was so ferocious that the windows in the terraces along Macquarie Street cracked with the heat and sheets of corrugated iron were blown as far away as Elizabeth Bay. How Did The Fire Start?No one knows how the fire started on that fateful September morning, and despite an official enquiry no explanation was ever delivered. One theory blamed the wealthy residents of Macquarie Street, disgruntled at losing their harbour views. Another was that it was burnt to destroy records stored in the basement of the building that contained embarrassing details about the convict heritage of many distinguished families. Margaret Lyon, daughter of the Garden Palace decorator John Lyon, wrote in her diary:a gentleman who says a boy told him when he was putting out the domain lights, that he saw a man jump out of the window and immediately after observed smoke, they are advertising for the boy […]. Everyone seems to agree on his point that it has been done on purpose – Today a safe has been found with diamonds, sapphires and emeralds, there were also some papers in it but they were considerably charred. The statue of her majesty or at least what remains of it, for it is completely ruined – the census papers were also ruined, they were ready almost to be sent to the printers, the work of 30 men for 14 months. Valuable government documents, railway and other plans all gone. (MLMSS 1381/Box 1/Item 2) There are many eyewitness accounts of the fire that day. From nightwatchman Mr Frederick Kirchen and his replacement Mr John McKnight, to an emotional description by 14-year-old student Ethel Pockley. Although there were conflicting accounts as to where the fire may have started, it seems likely that the fire started in the basement with flames rising around the statue of Queen Victoria, situated directly under the dome. The coroner did not make a conclusive finding on the cause of the fire but was scathing of the lack of diligence by the authorities in housing such important items in a building that was not well-secured a was a potential fire hazard.Building a ReputationA number of safes were known to have been in the building storing valuables and records. One such safe, a fireproof safe manufactured by Milner and Son of Liverpool, was in the southern corner of the building near the southern tower. The contents of this safe were unscathed in contrast with the contents of other safes, the contents of which were destroyed. The Milner safe was a little discoloured and blistered on the outside but otherwise intact. “The contents included three ledgers, or journals, a few memoranda and a plan of the exhibition”—the glue was slightly melted—the plan was a little discoloured and a few loose papers were a little charred but overall the contents were “sound and unhurt”—what better advertising could one ask for! (“The Garden Palace Fire” 5).barrangal dyara (skin and bones): Rebuilding CommunityThe positive developments for Sydney and the colony that stemmed from the building and its exhibition, such as public transport and community spirit, grew and took new forms. Yet, in the years since 1882 the memory of the Garden Palace and its disaster faded from the consciousness of the Sydney community. The great loss felt by Indigenous communities went unresolved.Image 4: barrangal dyara (skin and bones). Image credit: Sarah Morley.In September 2016 artist Jonathan Jones presented barrangal dyara (skin and bones), a large scale sculptural installation on the site of the Garden Palace Building in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden. The installation was Jones’s response to the immense loss felt throughout Australia with the destruction of countless Aboriginal objects in the fire. The installation featured thousands of bleached white shields made of gypsum that were laid out to show the footprint of the Garden Palace and represent the rubble left after the fire.Based on four typical designs from Aboriginal nations of the south-east, these shields not only raise the chalky bones of the building, but speak to the thousands of shields that would have had cultural presence in this landscape over generations. (Pike 33)ConclusionSydney’s Garden Palace was a stunning addition to the skyline of colonial Sydney. A massive undertaking, the Palace opened, to great acclaim, in 1879 and its effect on the community of Sydney and indeed the colony of New South Wales was sizeable. There were brief discussions, just after the fire, about rebuilding this great structure in a more permanent fashion for the centenary Exhibition in 1888 (“[From Our Own Correspondents] New South Wales” 5). Ultimately, it was decided that this achievement of the colony of New South Wales would be recorded in history, gifting a legacy of national pride and positivity on the one hand, but on the other an example of the destructive colonial impact on Indigenous communities. For many Sydney-siders today this history is as obscured as the original foundations of the physical building. What we build—iconic structures, civic pride, a sense of community—require maintenance and remembering. References“Among the Machinery.” The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser 10 Jan. 1880: 70-71.Aurousseau, G.H. “Lucien Henry: First Lecturer in Art at the Sydney Technical College.” Technical Gazette 2.III (1912): 33-35.Barnet, James. International Exhibition, Sydney, 1880: References to the Plans Showing the Space and Position Occupied by the Various Exhibits in the Garden Palace. Sydney: Colonial Architect’s Office, 1880.“A ‘Bohemian’s’ Holiday Notes.” The Singleton Argus and Upper Hunter General Advocate 23 Apr. 1879: 2.Census Department. New South Wales Census. 1881. 3 Mar. 2017 <http://hccda.ada.edu.au/pages/NSW-1881-census-02_vi>. “Destruction of the Garden Palace.” Sydney Morning Herald 23 Sep. 1882: 7.Freestone, Robert. “Space Society and Urban Reform.” Colonial City, Global City, Sydney’s International Exhibition 1879. Eds. Peter Proudfoot, Roslyn Maguire, and Robert Freestone. Darlinghurst, NSW: Crossing P, 2000. 15-33.“[From Our Own Correspondents] New South Wales.” The Age (Melbourne, Vic.) 30 Sep. 1882: 5.“The Garden Palace Fire.” Sydney Morning Herald 25 Sep. 1882: 5.Illustrated Sydney News and New South Wales Agriculturalist and Grazier 1 Nov. 1879: 4.“International Exhibition.” Australian Town and Country Journal 15 Feb. 1879: 11.Kent, H.C. “Reminiscences of Building Methods in the Seventies under John Young. Lecture.” Architecture: An Australian Magazine of Architecture and the Arts Nov. (1924): 5-13.Lyon, Margaret. Unpublished Manuscript Diary. MLMSS 1381/Box 1/Item 2.New South Wales, Legislative Assembly. Debates 22 Sep. 1882: 542-56.Notes on the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879. Melbourne: Government Printer, 1881.Official Record of the Sydney International Exhibition 1879. Sydney: Government Printer, 1881.Pike, Emma. “barrangal dyara (skin and bones).” Jonathan Jones: barrangal dyara (skin and bones). Eds. Ross Gibson, Jonathan Jones, and Genevieve O’Callaghan. Balmain: Kaldor Public Arts Project, 2016.Pont, Graham, and Peter Proudfoot. “The Technological Movement and the Garden Palace.” Colonial City, Global City, Sydney’s International Exhibition 1879. Eds. Peter Proudfoot, Roslyn Maguire, and Robert Freestone. Darlinghurst, NSW: Crossing Press, 2000. 239-249.“View from the Lantern of the Dome of the Exhibition.” Illustrated Sydney News and New South Wales Agriculturalist and Grazier 9 Aug. 1879: 8.

Introduction Fashion has long been associated with resistance movements across Asia and Australia, from the hand-spun cotton Khadi of Mahatma Gandhi’s freedom struggle to the traditional ankle length robe worn by Tibetans in the ‘White Wednesday Movement’ (Singh et al.; Yangzom). There are many reasons why fashion and activism have been interlinked. Fashion can serve as a form of nonverbal communication (Crane), which can convey activists’ grievances and concerns while symbolising solidarity (Doerr). It can provide an avenue to enact individual agency against repressive, authoritarian regimes (Yangzom; Doerr et al.). Fashion can codify a degree of uniformity within groups and thereby signal social identity (Craik), while also providing a means of building community (Barry and Drak). Fashion, therefore, offers activists the opportunity to develop the three characteristics which unite a social or environmental movement: a shared concern about an issue, a sense of social identity, and connections between individuals and groups. But while these fashion functions map onto movement characteristics, it remains unclear whether activists across the world deliberately include fashion into their protest action repertoires. This uncertainty exists partly because of a research and media focus on large scale, mass protests (Lester and Hutchins), where fashion characteristics are immediately visible and amenable to retrospective interpretation. This focus helps explain the rich volume of research examining the manifestation of fashion in past protests, such as the black, red, and yellow colours worn during the 1988 Aboriginal Long March of Freedom, Justice, and Hope (Maynard Dress; Coghlan), and the pink anti-Trump ‘pussyhats’ (Thompson). However, the protest events used to identify these fashion characteristics are a relatively small proportion of actions used by environmental activists (Dalton et al.; Gulliver et al.), which include not only rallies and marches, but also information evenings, letter writing sessions, and eco-activities such as tree plantings. This article aims to respond to Barnard’s (Looking) call for more empirical work on what contemporary cultural groups visually do with what they wear (see also Gerbaudo and Treré) via a content analysis of 36,676 events promoted on Facebook by 728 Australian environmental groups between 2010 and 2019. The article firstly reports findings from an analysis of this dataset to identify how fashion manifests in environmental activism, building on research demonstrating the role of protest-related nonverbal communications, such as protest signage (Bloomfield and Doolin), images (Kim), and icons, slogans, and logos (Goodnow). The article then considers what activists may seek to achieve through incorporating fashion into their action repertoire, and whether this suggests solidarity with activists seeking to effect environmental change across the wider Asian region. Fashion Activism Fashion is created through a particular assemblage of clothes, accessories, and hairstyles (Barry and Drak), which in turn forms a prevailing custom or style of dress (Craik). It is a cultural practice, providing ‘real estate’ (Benda 7) for an individual to express their social roles (Craik) and political identity (Behnke). Some scholars argue that fashion became overtly political during the 1960s and 70s, as social movements politicised appearance (Edwards). This has only increased in relevance with the rise of far right, populist, and authoritarian regimes, whose sub-cultures enact politicised identities through their distinct fashion characteristics (Gaugele and Titton; Gaugele). Fashion can therefore play an important role in protest movements, as “political subjectivities, political authority, political power and discipline are rendered visible, and thereby real, by the way fashion co-establishes them” (Behnke 3). Across the literature scholars have identified two primary avenues by which fashion and activism are connected. The first of these relates to activism targeting the fashion industry. This type of activism is found in both Asia and Australia, and promotes sustainable consumption choices such as buying used goods and transforming existing items (Chung and Yim), as well as highlighting garment worker exploitation within the fashion industry (Khan and Richards). The second avenue is called ‘fashion activism’: the use of fashion to intentionally signal a message seeking to evoke social and/or political change (Thompson). In this conceptualisation, clothing is used to signify a particular message (Crane). An example of this type of fashion activism is the ‘SlutWalk’, a protest where participants deliberately wore outfits described as slutty or revealing as a response to victim-blaming of women who had experienced sexual assault (Thompson). A key element of fashion activism thus appears to be its message intentionality. Clothes are specifically utilised to convey a message, such as a grievance about victim-blaming, which can then be incorporated into design features displayed on t-shirts, pins, and signs both on the runway and in protest events (Titton). However, while this ‘sender/receiver’ model of fashion communication (Barnard, Fashion as) can be compelling for activists, it is complex in practice. A message receiver can never have full knowledge of what message the sender seeks to signify through a particular clothing item, nor can the message sender predict how a receiver will interpret that message. Particular arrangements of clothing only hold communicative power when they are easily interpreted and related to the movement and its message, usually only intelligible to a specific culture or subculture (Goodnow). Even within that subculture it remains problematic to infer a message from a particular style of dress, as demonstrated in examples where dress is used to imply sexual consent; for example, in rape and assault cases (Lennon et al.). Given the challenges of interpreting fashion, do activists appear to use the ‘real estate’ (Benda 7) afforded by it as a protest tool? To investigate this question a pre-existing dataset of 36,676 events was analysed to ascertain if, and how, environmental activism engages with fashion (a detailed methodology is available on the OSF). Across this dataset, event categories, titles, and descriptions were reviewed to collate events connecting environmental activism to fashion. Three categories of events were found and are discussed in the next section: street theatre, sustainable fashion practices, and disruptive protest. Street Theatre Street theatre is a form of entertainment which uses public performance to raise awareness of injustices and build support for collective action (Houston and Pulido). It uses costumes as a vehicle for conveying messages about political issues and for making demands visible, and has been utilised by protesters across Australia and Asia (Roces). Many examples of street theatre were found in the dataset. For example, Extinction Rebellion (XR) consistently promoted street theatre events via sub-groups such as the ‘Red Rebels’ – a dedicated team of volunteers specialising in costumed street theatre – as well as by inviting supporters to participate in open street theatre events, such as in the ‘Halloween Dead Things Disco’. Dressed as spooky skeletons (doot, doot) and ghosts, we'll slide and shimmy down Sydney's streets in a supernatural style, as we bring attention to all the species claimed by the Sixth Mass Extinction. These street theatre events appeared to prioritise spectacle rather than disruption as a means to attract attention to their message. The Cairns and Far North Environment Centre ‘Climate Action Float’, for example, requested that attendees: Wear blue and gold or dress as your favourite reef animal, solar panel, maybe even the sun itself!? Reef & Solar // Blue & Gold is the guiding theme but we want your creativity take it from there. Most groups used street theatre as one of a range of different actions organised across a period of time. However, Climacts, a performance collective which uses ‘spectacle and satire to communicate the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crisis’ (Climacts), utilised this tactic exclusively. Their Climate Guardians collective used distinctive angel costumes to perform at the Climate Conference of Parties 26, and in various places around Australia (see images on their Website). Fig. 1: Costumed protest against Downer EDI's proposed work on the Adani coalmine; Image by John Englart (CC BY-SA 2.0). Sustainable Fashion Practices The second most common type of event which connected fashion with activism were those promoting sustainable fashion practices. While much research has highlighted the role of activism in raising awareness of problems related to the fashion industry (e.g. Hirscher), groups in the dataset were primarily focussed on organising activities where supporters communally created their own fashion items. The most common of these was the ‘crafternoon’, with over 260 separate crafternoon events identified in the dataset. These events brought activists together to create protest-related kit such as banners, signs, and costumes from recycled or repurposed materials, as demonstrated by Hume Climate Action Now’s ‘Crafternoon for Climate’ event: Come along on Sunday arvo for a relaxed arvo making posters and banners for upcoming Hume Climate Action Now events… Bring: Paints, textas, cardboard, fabric – whatever you’ve got lying around. Don’t have anything? That’s cool, just bring yourself. Events highlighting fashion industry problems were less frequent and tended to prioritise sharing of information about the fashion industry rather than promoting protests. For example, Transition Town Vincent held a ‘Slowing Down Fast Fashion – Transition Town Vincent Movie Night’ while the Green Embassy promoted the ‘Eco Fashion Week’. This event, held in 2017, was described as Australia’s only eco-fashion week, and included runway shows, music, and public talks. Other events also focussed on public talks, such as a Conservation Council of ACT event called ‘Green Drinks Canberra October 2017: Summer Edwards on the fashion industry’ and a panel discussion organised by a group called SEE-Change entitled ‘The Sustainable Wardrobe’. Disruptive Protest and T-Shirts Few events in the dataset mentioned elements of fashion outside of street theatre or sustainable fashion practices, with only one organisation explicitly connecting fashion with activism in its event details. This group – Australian Youth Climate Coalition – organised an event called ‘Activism in Fashion: Tote Bags, T-shirts and Poster Painting!’, which asked: How can we consistently be involved in campaigning while life can be so busy? Can we still be loud and get a message across without saying a word? The iconic 21st century activist "t-shirt and tote-bag" combination is hard to miss these days! Unlike street theatre and sustainable fashion practices, fashion appeared to be a consideration for only a small number of disruptive protests promoted by environmental groups in Australia. XR Brisbane sought to organise a fashion parade during the 2019 Rebellion Week, while XR protesters in Melbourne stripped down to underwear for a march through Melbourne city arcades (see also Turbet). Few common fashion elements appeared consistently on individual activists participating in events, and these were limited to accessories, such as ‘Stop Adani’ earrings, or t-shirts sold for fundraising and promotional purposes. Indeed, t-shirts appeared to be the most promoted clothing item in the dataset, continuing a long tradition of their use in protests (e.g. Maynard, Blankets). Easy to create, suitable for displaying both text and imagery, t-shirts sharing anti-coal messages featured predominantly in the Stop Adani campaign, while yellow t-shirts were a common item in Knitting Nanna’s anti-coal seam gas mining protests. Fig. 2: Stop Adani earrings and t-shirts; Image by John Englart (CC BY-SA 2.0). The Role of Fashion in Environmental Activism As these findings demonstrate, fashion appears to be deliberately utilised in environmental activism primarily through street theatre and the promotion of sustainable fashion practices. While fewer examples of fashion in disruptive protest were found and no consistent fashion assemblage was identified, accessories and t-shirts were utilised by many groups. What may activists be seeking to achieve through incorporating fashion via street theatre and sustainable fashion practices? Some scholars have argued that incorporating fashion into protest allows activists to signal political dissent against authoritarian control. For example, Yanzoom noted that by utilising fashion as a means of communication, Tibetan activists were able to embody their political goals despite repression of speech and movement by political powerholders. However, a consistent fashion repertoire across protests in this Australian dataset was not found. The opportunities afforded by protected protest rights in Australia and absence of violent police repression of disruptive protests may be one explanation why distinctive dress such as the masks and black attire of Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters did not manifest in the dataset. Other scholars have observed that fashion sub-cultures also developed partly to express anti-establishment politics, such as the punk movement in the 1970s. Radical clothing accessorised by symbols, bright hair colours, body piercings, and heavy-duty books signalled opposition to the dominant political ideology (Craik). However, none of these purposes appeared to play a role in Australian environmental activism either. Instead, it appears that Maynard’s contention that Australian protest fashion barely deviates from everyday dress remains true today. Fashion within the events promoted in this large empirical dataset retained the ‘prevalence of everyday clothing’ (Maynard, Dress 111). The lack of a clearly discernible single protest fashion style within the dataset may be related to the shortcomings of the sender/receiver model of fashion communication. As Barnard (Fashion Statements) argued, fashion is not always used as a vehicle for conveying messages, but also as a platform for constructing and reproducing identity. Indeed, a multiplicity of researchers have noted how fashion acts as a signal of what social groups individuals belong to (see Roach-Higgins and Eicher). Activist groups have a variety of goals, which not only include promoting environmental change but also mobilising more people to join their cause (Gulliver et al., Understanding). Stereotyping can hinder achievement of these goals. It has been demonstrated, for example, that individuals who hold negative stereotypes of ‘typical’ activists are less likely to want to associate with them, and less likely to adopt their behaviours (Bashir et al.). Accordingly, some activist groups have been shown to actively promote dress associated with other identity groups, specifically to challenge cultural constructions of environmental activist stereotypes (see also Roces). For example, Bloomfield and Doolins’s study of the NZ anti-GE group MAdGE (Mothers against Genetic Engineering in Food and the Environment) demonstrated how visual protest artifacts conveyed the protesters’ social identity as mothers and customers rather than environmental activists, claiming an alternative cultural mandate for challenging the authority of science (see also Einwohner et al.). The data suggest that Australian activists are seeking to avoid this stereotype as well. The absence of a consistent fashion promoted within the dataset may reflect awareness of problematic stereotypes that activists may be then deliberately seeking to avoid. Maynard (Dress), for example, has noted how the everyday dress of Australian protesters serves to deflect stereotypical labelling of participants. This strategy is also mirrored by the changing nature of groups within the Australian environmental movement. The event database demonstrates that an increasing number of environmental groups are emerging with names highlighting non-stereotypical environmental identities: groups such as ‘Engineers Declare’ and ‘Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action’. Beyond these identity processes, the frequent use of costumed street theatre protest suggests that activists recognise the value of using fashion as a vehicle for communicating messages, despite the challenges of interpretation described above. Much of the language used to promote street theatre in the Facebook event listings suggests that these costumes were deliberately designed to signify a particular meaning, with individuals encouraged to dress up to be ‘a vehicle for myth and symbol’ (Lavender 11). It may be that costumes are also utilised in protest due to their suitability as an image event, convenient for dissemination by mass media seeking colourful and engaging imagery (Delicath and Deluca; Doerr). Furthermore, costumes, as with text or colours presented on t-shirts, may offer activists an avenue to clearly convey a visual message which is more resistant to stereotyping. This is especially relevant given that fashion can be re-interpreted and misinterpreted by audiences, as well as reframed and reinterpreted by the media (Maynard, Dress). While the prevalence of costumed performance and infrequent mentions of fashion in the dataset may be explained by stereotype avoidance and messaging clarity, sustainable fashion practices were more straightforward in intent. Groups used multiple approaches to educate audiences about sustainable fashion, whether through fostering sustainable fashion practices or raising awareness of fashion industry problems. In this regard, fashion in protest in Australia closely resembles Asian sustainable fashion activism (see e.g. Chon et al. regarding the Singaporean context). In particular, the large number of ‘crafternoons’ suggests their importance as sites of activism and community building. Craftivism – acts such as quilting banners, yarn bombing, and cross stitching feminist slogans – are used by many groups to draw attention to social, political and environmental issues (McGovern and Barnes). This type of ‘creative activism’ (Filippello) has been used to challenge aesthetic and political norms across a variety of contested socio-political landscapes. These activities not only develop activism skills, but also foster community (Barry and Drak). For environmental groups, these community building events can play a critical role in sustaining and supporting ongoing environmental activism (Gulliver et al., Understanding) as well as demonstrating solidarity with workers across Asia experiencing labour injustices linked to the fashion industry (Chung and Yim). Conclusion Studies examining protest fashion demonstrate that clothing provides a canvas for sharing protest messages and identities in both Asia and Australia (Benda; Yangzom; Craik). However, despite the fashion’s utility as communication tool for social and environmental movements, empirical studies of how fashion is used by activists in these contexts remain rare. This analysis demonstrates that Australian environmental activists use fashion in their action repertoire primarily through costumed street theatre performances and promoting sustainable fashion practices. By doing so they may be seeking to use fashion as a means of conveying messages, while avoiding stereotypes that can demobilise supporters and reduce support for their cause. Furthermore, sustainable fashion activism offers opportunities for activists to achieve multiple goals: to subvert the fast fashion industry, to provide participation avenues for new activists, to help build activist communities, and to express solidarity with those experiencing fast fashion-related labour injustices. These findings suggest that the use of fashion in protest actions can move beyond identity messaging to also enact sustainable practices while co-opting and resisting hegemonic ideas of consumerism. By integrating fashion into the vibrant and diverse actions promoted by environmental movements across Australia and Asia, activists can construct and perform identities while fostering the community bonds and networks from which movements demanding environmental change derive their strength. Ethics Approval Statement This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Queensland (2018000963). 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Special Care Notice This article contains images of deceased people that might cause sadness or distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers. Introduction Like many cities, Perth was founded on wetlands that have been integral to its history and culture (Seddon 226–32). However, in order to promote a settlement agenda, early mapmakers sought to erase the city’s wetlands from cartographic depictions (Giblett, Cities). Since the colonial era, inner-Perth’s swamps and lakes have been drained, filled, significantly reduced in size, or otherwise reclaimed for urban expansion (Bekle). Not only have the swamps and lakes physically disappeared, the memories of their presence and influence on the city’s development over time are also largely forgotten. What was the site of Perth, specifically its wetlands, like before British settlement? In 2014, an interdisciplinary team at Edith Cowan University developed a digital visualisation process to re-imagine Perth prior to colonisation. This was based on early maps of the Swan River Colony and a range of archival information. The images depicted the city’s topography, hydrology, and vegetation and became the centerpiece of a physical exhibition entitled Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands and a virtual exhibition hosted by the Western Australian Museum. Alongside historic maps, paintings, photographs, and writings, the visual reconstruction of Perth aimed to foster appreciation of the pre-settlement environment—the homeland of the Whadjuck Nyoongar, or Bibbulmun, people (Carter and Nutter). The exhibition included the narrative of Fanny Balbuk, a Nyoongar woman who voiced her indignation over the “usurping of her beloved home ground” (Bates, The Passing 69) by flouting property lines and walking through private residences to reach places of cultural significance. Beginning with Balbuk’s story and the digital tracing of her walking route through colonial Perth, this article discusses the project in the context of contemporary pressures on the city’s extant wetlands. The re-imagining of Perth through historically, culturally, and geographically-grounded digital visualisation approaches can inspire the conservation of its wetlands heritage. Balbuk’s Walk through the City For many who grew up in Perth, Fanny Balbuk’s perambulations have achieved legendary status in the collective cultural imagination. In his memoir, David Whish-Wilson mentions Balbuk’s defiant walks and the lighting up of the city for astronaut John Glenn in 1962 as the two stories that had the most impact on his Perth childhood. From Gordon Stephenson House, Whish-Wilson visualises her journey in his mind’s eye, past Government House on St Georges Terrace (the main thoroughfare through the city centre), then north on Barrack Street towards the railway station, the site of Lake Kingsford where Balbuk once gathered bush tucker (4). He considers the footpaths “beneath the geometric frame of the modern city […] worn smooth over millennia that snake up through the sheoak and marri woodland and into the city’s heart” (Whish-Wilson 4). Balbuk’s story embodies the intertwined culture and nature of Perth—a city of wetlands. Born in 1840 on Heirisson Island, Balbuk (also known as Yooreel) (Figure 1) had ancestral bonds to the urban landscape. According to Daisy Bates, writing in the early 1900s, the Nyoongar term Matagarup, or “leg deep,” denotes the passage of shallow water near Heirisson Island where Balbuk would have forded the Swan River (“Oldest” 16). Yoonderup was recorded as the Nyoongar name for Heirisson Island (Bates, “Oldest” 16) and the birthplace of Balbuk’s mother (Bates, “Aboriginal”). In the suburb of Shenton Park near present-day Lake Jualbup, her father bequeathed to her a red ochre (or wilgi) pit that she guarded fervently throughout her life (Bates, “Aboriginal”).Figure 1. Group of Aboriginal Women at Perth, including Fanny Balbuk (far right) (c. 1900). Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: 44c). Balbuk’s grandparents were culturally linked to the site. At his favourite camp beside the freshwater spring near Kings Park on Mounts Bay Road, her grandfather witnessed the arrival of Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Irwin, cousin of James Stirling (Bates, “Fanny”). In 1879, colonial entrepreneurs established the Swan Brewery at this significant locale (Welborn). Her grandmother’s gravesite later became Government House (Bates, “Fanny”) and she protested vociferously outside “the stone gates guarded by a sentry [that] enclosed her grandmother’s burial ground” (Bates, The Passing 70). Balbuk’s other grandmother was buried beneath Bishop’s Grove, the residence of the city’s first archibishop, now Terrace Hotel (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Historian Bob Reece observes that Balbuk was “the last full-descent woman of Kar’gatta (Karrakatta), the Bibbulmun name for the Mount Eliza [Kings Park] area of Perth” (134). According to accounts drawn from Bates, her home ground traversed the area between Heirisson Island and Perth’s north-western limits. In Kings Park, one of her relatives was buried near a large, hollow tree used by Nyoongar people like a cistern to capture water and which later became the site of the Queen Victoria Statue (Bates, “Aboriginal”). On the slopes of Mount Eliza, the highest point of Kings Park, at the western end of St Georges Terrace, she harvested plant foods, including zamia fruits (Macrozamia riedlei) (Bates, “Fanny”). Fanny Balbuk’s knowledge contributed to the native title claim lodged by Nyoongar people in 2006 as Bennell v. State of Western Australia—the first of its kind to acknowledge Aboriginal land rights in a capital city and part of the larger Single Nyoongar Claim (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council et al.). Perth’s colonial administration perceived the city’s wetlands as impediments to progress and as insalubrious environments to be eradicated through reclamation practices. For Balbuk and other Nyoongar people, however, wetlands were “nourishing terrains” (Rose) that afforded sustenance seasonally and meaning perpetually (O’Connor, Quartermaine, and Bodney). Mary Graham, a Kombu-merri elder from Queensland, articulates the connection between land and culture, “because land is sacred and must be looked after, the relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations. Therefore all meaning comes from land.” Traditional, embodied reliance on Perth’s wetlands is evident in Bates’ documentation. For instance, Boojoormeup was a “big swamp full of all kinds of food, now turned into Palmerston and Lake streets” (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Considering her cultural values, Balbuk’s determination to maintain pathways through the increasingly colonial Perth environment is unsurprising (Figure 2). From Heirisson Island: a straight track had led to the place where once she had gathered jilgies [crayfish] and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms. (Bates, The Passing 70) One obstacle was Hooper’s Fence, which Balbuk broke repeatedly on her trips to areas between Kings Park and the railway station (Bates, “Hooper’s”). Her tenacious commitment to walking ancestral routes signifies the friction between settlement infrastructure and traditional Nyoongar livelihood during an era of rapid change. Figure 2. Determination of Fanny Balbuk’s Journey between Yoonderup (Heirisson Island) and Lake Kingsford, traversing what is now the central business district of Perth on the Swan River (2014). Image background prepared by Dimitri Fotev. Track interpolation by Jeff Murray. Project Background and Approach Inspired by Fanny Balbuk’s story, Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands began as an Australian response to the Mannahatta Project. Founded in 1999, that project used spatial analysis techniques and mapping software to visualise New York’s urbanised Manhattan Island—or Mannahatta as it was called by indigenous people—in the early 1600s (Sanderson). Based on research into the island’s original biogeography and the ecological practices of Native Americans, Mannahatta enabled the public to “peel back” the city’s strata, revealing the original composition of the New York site. The layers of visuals included rich details about the island’s landforms, water systems, and vegetation. Mannahatta compelled Rod Giblett, a cultural researcher at Edith Cowan University, to develop an analogous model for visualising Perth circa 1829. The idea attracted support from the City of Perth, Landgate, and the University. Using stories, artefacts, and maps, the team—comprising a cartographer, designer, three-dimensional modelling expert, and historical researchers—set out to generate visualisations of the landscape at the time of British colonisation. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup approved culturally sensitive material and contributed his perspective on Aboriginal content to include in the exhibition. The initiative’s context remains pressing. In many ways, Perth has become a template for development in the metropolitan area (Weller). While not unusual for a capital, the rate of transformation is perhaps unexpected in a city less than 200 years old (Forster). There also remains a persistent view of existing wetlands as obstructions to progress that, once removed, are soon forgotten (Urban Bushland Council). Digital visualisation can contribute to appreciating environments prior to colonisation but also to re-imagining possibilities for future human interactions with land, water, and space. Despite the rapid pace of change, many Perth area residents have memories of wetlands lost during their lifetimes (for example, Giblett, Forrestdale). However, as the clearing and drainage of the inner city occurred early in settlement, recollections of urban wetlands exist exclusively in historical records. In 1935, a local correspondent using the name “Sandgroper” reminisced about swamps, connecting them to Perth’s colonial heritage: But the Swamps were very real in fact, and in name in the [eighteen-] Nineties, and the Perth of my youth cannot be visualised without them. They were, of course, drying up apace, but they were swamps for all that, and they linked us directly with the earliest days of the Colony when our great-grandparents had founded this City of Perth on a sort of hog's-back, of which Hay-street was the ridge, and from which a succession of streamlets ran down its southern slope to the river, while land locked to the north of it lay a series of lakes which have long since been filled to and built over so that the only evidence that they have ever existed lies in the original street plans of Perth prepared by Roe and Hillman in the early eighteen-thirties. A salient consequence of the loss of ecological memory is the tendency to repeat the miscues of the past, especially the blatant disregard for natural and cultural heritage, as suburbanisation engulfs the area. While the swamps of inner Perth remain only in the names of streets, existing wetlands in the metropolitan area are still being threatened, as the Roe Highway (Roe 8) Campaign demonstrates. To re-imagine Perth’s lost landscape, we used several colonial survey maps to plot the location of the original lakes and swamps. At this time, a series of interconnecting waterbodies, known as the Perth Great Lakes, spread across the north of the city (Bekle and Gentilli). This phase required the earliest cartographic sources (Figure 3) because, by 1855, city maps no longer depicted wetlands. We synthesised contextual information, such as well depths, geological and botanical maps, settlers’ accounts, Nyoongar oral histories, and colonial-era artists’ impressions, to produce renderings of Perth. This diverse collection of primary and secondary materials served as the basis for creating new images of the city. Team member Jeff Murray interpolated Balbuk’s route using historical mappings and accounts, topographical data, court records, and cartographic common sense. He determined that Balbuk would have camped on the high ground of the southern part of Lake Kingsford rather than the more inundated northern part (Figure 2). Furthermore, she would have followed a reasonably direct course north of St Georges Terrace (contrary to David Whish-Wilson’s imaginings) because she was barred from Government House for protesting. This easier route would have also avoided the springs and gullies that appear on early maps of Perth. Figure 3. Townsite of Perth in Western Australia by Colonial Draftsman A. Hillman and John Septimus Roe (1838). This map of Perth depicts the wetlands that existed overlaid by the geomentric grid of the new city. Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: BA1961/14). Additionally, we produced an animated display based on aerial photographs to show the historical extent of change. Prompted by the build up to World War II, the earliest aerial photography of Perth dates from the late 1930s (Dixon 148–54). As “Sandgroper” noted, by this time, most of the urban wetlands had been drained or substantially modified. The animation revealed considerable alterations to the formerly swampy Swan River shoreline. Most prominent was the transformation of the Matagarup shallows across the Swan River, originally consisting of small islands. Now traversed by a causeway, this area was transformed into a single island, Heirisson—the general site of Balbuk’s birth. The animation and accompanying materials (maps, images, and writings) enabled viewers to apprehend the changes in real time and to imagine what the city was once like. Re-imagining Perth’s Urban Heart The physical environment of inner Perth includes virtually no trace of its wetland origins. Consequently, we considered whether a representation of Perth, as it existed previously, could enhance public understanding of natural heritage and thereby increase its value. For this reason, interpretive materials were exhibited centrally at Perth Town Hall. Built partly by convicts between 1867 and 1870, the venue is close to the site of the 1829 Foundation of Perth, depicted in George Pitt Morrison’s painting. Balbuk’s grandfather “camped somewhere in the city of Perth, not far from the Town Hall” (Bates, “Fanny”). The building lies one block from the site of the railway station on the site of Lake Kingsford, the subsistence grounds of Balbuk and her forebears: The old swamp which is now the Perth railway yards had been a favourite jilgi ground; a spring near the Town Hall had been a camping place of Maiago […] and others of her fathers' folk; and all around and about city and suburbs she had gathered roots and fished for crayfish in the days gone by. (Bates, “Derelicts” 55) Beginning in 1848, the draining of Lake Kingsford reached completion during the construction of the Town Hall. While the swamps of the city were not appreciated by many residents, some organisations, such as the Perth Town Trust, vigorously opposed the reclamation of the lake, alluding to its hydrological role: That, the soil being sand, it is not to be supposed that Lake Kingsford has in itself any material effect on the wells of Perth; but that, from this same reason of the sandy soil, it would be impossible to keep the lake dry without, by so doing, withdrawing the water from at least the adjacent parts of the townsite to the same depth. (Independent Journal of Politics and News 3) At the time of our exhibition, the Lake Kingsford site was again being reworked to sink the railway line and build Yagan Square, a public space named after a colonial-era Nyoongar leader. The project required specialised construction techniques due to the high water table—the remnants of the lake. People travelling to the exhibition by train in October 2014 could have seen the lake reasserting itself in partly-filled depressions, flush with winter rain (Figure 4).Figure 4. Rise of the Repressed (2014). Water Rising in the former site of Lake Kingsford/Irwin during construction, corner of Roe and Fitzgerald Streets, Northbridge, WA. Image Credit: Nandi Chinna (2014). The exhibition was situated in the Town Hall’s enclosed undercroft designed for markets and more recently for shops. While some visited after peering curiously through the glass walls of the undercroft, others hailed from local and state government organisations. Guest comments applauded the alternative view of Perth we presented. The content invited the public to re-imagine Perth as a city of wetlands that were both environmentally and culturally important. A display panel described how the city’s infrastructure presented a hindrance for Balbuk as she attempted to negotiate the once-familiar route between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford (Figure 2). Perth’s growth “restricted Balbuk’s wanderings; towns, trains, and farms came through her ‘line of march’; old landmarks were thus swept away, and year after year saw her less confident of the locality of one-time familiar spots” (Bates, “Fanny”). Conserving Wetlands: From Re-Claiming to Re-Valuing? Imagination, for philosopher Roger Scruton, involves “thinking of, and attending to, a present object (by thinking of it, or perceiving it, in terms of something absent)” (155). According to Scruton, the feelings aroused through imagination can prompt creative, transformative experiences. While environmental conservation tends to rely on data-driven empirical approaches, it appeals to imagination less commonly. We have found, however, that attending to the present object (the city) in terms of something absent (its wetlands) through evocative visual material can complement traditional conservation agendas focused on habitats and species. The actual extent of wetlands loss in the Swan Coastal Plain—the flat and sandy region extending from Jurien Bay south to Cape Naturaliste, including Perth—is contested. However, estimates suggest that 80 per cent of wetlands have been lost, with remaining habitats threatened by climate change, suburban development, agriculture, and industry (Department of Environment and Conservation). As with the swamps and lakes of the inner city, many regional wetlands were cleared, drained, or filled before they could be properly documented. Additionally, the seasonal fluctuations of swampy places have never been easily translatable to two-dimensional records. As Giblett notes, the creation of cartographic representations and the assignment of English names were attempts to fix the dynamic boundaries of wetlands, at least in the minds of settlers and administrators (Postmodern 72–73). Moreover, European colonists found the Western Australian landscape, including its wetlands, generally discomfiting. In a letter from 1833, metaphors failed George Fletcher Moore, the effusive colonial commentator, “I cannot compare these swamps to any marshes with which you are familiar” (220). The intermediate nature of wetlands—as neither land nor lake—is perhaps one reason for their cultural marginalisation (Giblett, Postmodern 39). The conviction that unsanitary, miasmic wetlands should be converted to more useful purposes largely prevailed (Giblett, Black 105–22). Felicity Morel-EdnieBrown’s research into land ownership records in colonial Perth demonstrated that town lots on swampland were often preferred. By layering records using geographic information systems (GIS), she revealed modifications to town plans to accommodate swampland frontages. The decline of wetlands in the region appears to have been driven initially by their exploitation for water and later for fertile soil. Northern market gardens supplied the needs of the early city. It is likely that the depletion of Nyoongar bush foods predated the flourishing of these gardens (Carter and Nutter). Engaging with the history of Perth’s swamps raises questions about the appreciation of wetlands today. In an era where numerous conservation strategies and alternatives have been developed (for example, Bobbink et al. 93–220), the exploitation of wetlands in service to population growth persists. On Perth’s north side, wetlands have long been subdued by controlling their water levels and landscaping their boundaries, as the suburban examples of Lake Monger and Hyde Park (formerly Third Swamp Reserve) reveal. Largely unmodified wetlands, such as Forrestdale Lake, exist south of Perth, but they too are in danger (Giblett, Black Swan). The Beeliar Wetlands near the suburb of Bibra Lake comprise an interconnected series of lakes and swamps that are vulnerable to a highway extension project first proposed in the 1950s. Just as the Perth Town Trust debated Lake Kingsford’s draining, local councils and the public are fiercely contesting the construction of the Roe Highway, which will bisect Beeliar Wetlands, destroying Roe Swamp (Chinna). The conservation value of wetlands still struggles to compete with traffic planning underpinned by a modernist ideology that associates cars and freeways with progress (Gregory). Outside of archives, the debate about Lake Kingsford is almost entirely forgotten and its physical presence has been erased. Despite the magnitude of loss, re-imagining the city’s swamplands, in the way that we have, calls attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities. We hope that the re-imagining of Perth’s wetlands stimulates public respect for ancestral tracks and songlines like Balbuk’s. Despite the accretions of settler history and colonial discourse, songlines endure as a fundamental cultural heritage. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup states, “as people, if we can get out there on our songlines, even though there may be farms or roads overlaying them, fences, whatever it is that might impede us from travelling directly upon them, if we can get close proximity, we can still keep our culture alive. That is why it is so important for us to have our songlines.” Just as Fanny Balbuk plied her songlines between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford, the traditional custodians of Beeliar and other wetlands around Perth walk the landscape as an act of resistance and solidarity, keeping the stories of place alive. Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge Rod Giblett (ECU), Nandi Chinna (ECU), Susanna Iuliano (ECU), Jeff Murray (Kareff Consulting), Dimitri Fotev (City of Perth), and Brendan McAtee (Landgate) for their contributions to this project. The authors also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon which this paper was researched and written. 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(Quoted material transcribed from 3.08–3.39 of the video.) O’Connor, Rory, Gary Quartermaine, and Corrie Bodney. Report on an Investigation into Aboriginal Significance of Wetlands and Rivers in the Perth-Bunbury Region. Perth: Western Australian Water Resources Council, 1989.Reece, Bob. “‘Killing with Kindness’: Daisy Bates and New Norcia.” Aboriginal History 32 (2008): 128–45.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Sanderson, Eric. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009.Sandgroper. “Gilgies: The Swamps of Perth.” The West Australian 4 May 1935: 7.Scruton, Roger. Art and Imagination. London: Methuen, 1974.Seddon, George. Sense of Place: A Response to an Environment, the Swan Coastal Plain, Western Australia. Melbourne: Bloomings Books, 2004.South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council and John Host with Chris Owen. “It’s Still in My Heart, This is My Country:” The Single Noongar Claim History. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009.Urban Bushland Council. “Bushland Issues.” 2015. 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.bushlandperth.org.au/bushland-issues›.Welborn, Suzanne. Swan: The History of a Brewery. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 1987.Weller, Richard. Boomtown 2050: Scenarios for a Rapidly Growing City. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009. Whish-Wilson, David. Perth. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013.

The contemporary supermarket is a work of classification and cataloguing as marvellous as any museum. Barcodes are hallmarks by which its computer systems could know, in their own electronic language, every possible product of a certain kind afoot in the nation. It is a rather special institution in this respect -- a huge fund of contemporary synchronic cultural memory, a database and storehouse of collected human tastes to which individuals turn to seek out their own. However, this means that just as Wittgenstein demonstrated the impossibility of a purely private language, there can be no such thing as a purely private taste. Taste is demonstrated by choosing from a range of public items, that is, products. Therefore let's bracket the liberal concept of sovereign personal taste for now and beat a different track: the supermarket is the site of aggregation of multiple discourses by which the individual is sewn into and sews the fabric of collective life. Techniques used to sell food today, such as freebies (like plastic toys), free offers, forms of gambling, and images of healthiness, convenience, celebrity and enhanced relationships, appeal to -- must appeal to for commercial reasons -- shared values. It is inviting to view the supermarket as an emblem of a postmodern condition. The gaggle of images and words that line its aisles defy unity, play fast and loose with reality, create a simulacral space of copied quotes and sight bites that is coterminous with radically decentred selves. It conforms to the Jamesonian topography of a culture that has lost it -- that sense of real placed history that identity used to be tied up with. But my aim in this essay is to critique such a rhetoric of loss. Discourse remains the province of the self-imaginings of social groups in spite of the diversity of images in circulation. And although the media through which group solidarity is transmitted change with technological developments, the fact of such transmission does not. Hence, by looking at the imagery used on food packets, I will analyse the way that one rhetorical strategy used to sell the food we find on supermarket shelves -- nationalism -- is part of a longstanding cultural trajectory by which citizens of a nation imagine their relationship with their land. This, however, involves the equation of 'the nation' with the ethnic imagery of the group that dominates its political apparatus and territory, a process of circumscription that I shall ultimately suggest has political ramifications, especially in the context of nations like Australia which were formed by largely European settler colonisation of the land. Nationalism, then, is a strand of marketing rhetoric used most often, but not exclusively, for the promotion of products in the country of their origin. As such it grafts a tradition of art commemorating place and ethnic identity into the seemingly unlikely genre of the product label. Indeed, for Benedict Anderson the sociopolitical sentiment of nationalism requires forums and images through which to articulate itself, or more accurately, to imaginatively create its auratic object of adoration -- as nationalism is itself innovative (Anderson 15). It also depends upon technologies that can produce a sense of simultaneity between dispersed people who will never meet each other. The distribution of the packaged 'gifts' of a land to 'its people' provides one such opportunity for the transmission of sacralised images of land and the solidarity of its inhabitants. So the genre of the label that comes with a specific distribution and selling system provides the technical medium, and the land, its produce, its people and their relationships in ecosocial community, form the imagery. A limit case example of pride in the gifts of the land can be found on the label of New Zealand's Steinlager: "New Zealand's Finest ... World's Best Lager ... Brewed with the finest New Zealand Hops, Yeast, Barley and Pure Water ... Since 1854". It embodies a series of associations found in other examples: the products of the land are associated with firstly, high quality, and secondly, natural purity. New Zealand seems to be repeated with two slightly different senses. In its juxtaposition with "the world", the two places centre on the finished product of lager, which is presented as a literally world-beating national product. The last line of the label reads "Brewed and Bottled by New Zealand Breweries Limited", the company name both emphasising the agency of New Zealand people in processing ingredients taken from their land's soil, and the legally New Zealandian status of their enterprise. The second sense implies the physical basis for all this: the giftedness of the land which subtends an economy and a culture. "Since 1854" brings these components together on the axis of continuity, making the origination of national production temporal as well as spatial. In other words this benign relationship of production becomes part of national heritage. A certain double sense is in play. Land is both a nation comprising citizens and physical resource; the word that perfectly fuses the sense of the former's political proprietary relationship with the latter into a working unity. Accordingly many packets transfigure the legal requirement to mention the place of production into an attention-grabbing declaration of country of origin whilst also referring to the physical land. The latter may be parsed into two general categories: imagery of animals, plants, landscapes, the elements, etc, and rustic images of human management of the land. So Bulla ice cream advertises its Australianness to a pastoral backdrop; Saxa salt, which has been "Australia's own ... Since 1911", is being hauled by a hat-wearing Aussie man and loyal horse; Bundaberg caster sugar is both "pure Australian" and "Australian made" thanks to the blessing of the (Australian) sun. And other products, such as Australian Natural Foods Non Dairy Soy Mango Smoothie and Pureland Organic Tofu make links between nation and nature through 'land-based' company names similarly buttressed by images of Australian agricultural landscape and the Australian made hallmark respectively. The three conceptual categories often found in correlation with the concrete particulars of 'the land' -- healthiness, purity and naturalness -- are well represented in the packets analysed here. A series of metonymic implications is set up between the terms. They are all potential qualities of the land that are realised in the products it yields. Pureland and Australian Natural Foods juxtapose nation and healthiness closely and the pastoral visions of Bürgen and Dairy Vale have the approval of the National Heart Foundation. Bundaberg and Pureland make the most direct appeals to purity, but concepts such as Bulla's "Australian made real dairy" and Devondale's "choice grade" and "premium Australian" also convey a certain sense of uncorrupted pedigree in their products' provenance. Most products seem to evoke naturalness pictorially, with green rolling landscapes and cows feeding on the verdure featuring particularly highly. Thus at this point a critique of capitalist industrial culture is possible. The missing links are the contemporary factory and office: the places of the processing and assembly of the product physically and discursively; the places where the fruits of the land meet their packaging and are primed for the marketplace. The gifts of nature become commodities but are inscribed as the gifts of nature still, such that the point of sale obfuscates the point of production: profit. The whole enterprise seems to be based on a principle of distantiation. Because of urbanisation, the vast majority of people live away from farm land, and because most food is not consumed by the local communities that produce it, but is produced for larger markets, it is packed and written upon for transport to strangers who will buy it and perhaps also an idealisation of the land. Yet they aren't strangers. This mediation of group solidarity by food-as-commodity does not tear social bonds apart, it forms them. It forms ecosocial community just as it provides a projection of one. And the very invocation of group loyalty as the reason for buying means we should question, as John Frow has done, whether the commodity is always simply a token of abstraction in conceptual opposition to 'the gift' (Frow, "Gift and Commodity"). It is not simply the case that capitalists dupe consumers into thinking of commodities in gift-like terms. Indeed, the discourses of the land we find on supermarket shelves go back a long way in Western culture. As Raymond Williams says: "in English, 'country' is both a nation and a part of a 'land'; 'the country' can be the whole society or its rural area. In the long history of human settlements, this connection between the land from which directly or indirectly we all get our living and the achievements of human society has been deeply known" (1). The majority of the packets analysed extend the pastoral tradition of European art, a tradition which determines the "innate bounty" (33) of the land as the province of benign, 'total' social relations as reflected in the "timeless rhythm" of the authentic agrarian life (10). But the pastoral tradition is itself a media technical one. Williams points out that "a working country is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation" (120). The same is true of pastoral in its nationalistic guise. It is transmitted by books, paintings and packets, is predicated on such a 'separation and observation'. The idealisation of the common land that subtends 'us' may be an attempt to bridge that distance, yet it is, ironically, transmitted through inscribed objects that create bonds between spatially and temporally dispersed people. It achieves what Anderson calls "unisonance", "a special kind of contemporaneous community which language alone suggests -- above all in the form of poetry and songs" (132). So, if the supermarket turns inner desire outward to the realm of public items that provides its possibilities, nationalistic desire moves in the same way, both inside and outside the supermarket context. There is no purely internal or purely external nation, just as there is no private language. Rather cultural memory, whether transmitted by a food packet or a poem is a thread transmitted through selves, language, technological milieux, and groups of people. Thus as Thongchai Winichakul succinctly states, "a nation is not a given reality. Rather it is the effect of imagining about it" (14). "We can know about it as long as we employ certain technologies to inscribe the possible sphere. In turn, such technologies create the knowledge of it, create a fact of it, and the entity comes into existence." (15). The contemporary food packet is one such media technology as certainly as a book or a song, and all media inscriptions of the possible sphere of 'the land' are lived ecosocial experience of the land. They make the land a unity by fusing its first physical sense with its second sociopolitical one. Invocation of the land as a prior given that subtends and provides the continuity of a sociopolitical group that has power over its resources, nests the historical contingency of that power relationship into a secure vision of the provenance of nation with the self-origination of 'its' land. That natural element, free, pure and healthy, is the one in which the group's ownership rights are rooted and legitimated. However, in fact, any nation is itself an historical innovation, an inherently unstable ideological product of strategy, technique, rhetorical and material. Nation-states are not naturally correlative with the land, nor are the ethnic groups that politically dominate the nation. They arise where other socio-economic political organisations existed before; they emerge. In The City and the Country Williams's main concern was to point out an alternative class-based history of the real and largely exploitative management of the land, a history that is actively occluded by idealised renderings of the countryside. Here in a parallel way but without room for explication, I want to suggest an alternative history of the management of the land that is indissociable from the emergence of the modern Australian nation -- a race-based history. Thus, here's the rub: the totems of pastoral that are equated with Australianness in the packets I have referred to, are European. The 'food packet' pastoral idealises group totems such as to transform historically contingent relationships of certain ethnic groups with the land into naturalised ones. The cows of Bulla and Devondale, the pastures of Dairy Vale, Bürgen's wheat, the agricultural infrastructure, the men imaged and their modes of management of the land, are European in lineage, and so is most of the food they sacralise as 'Australian'. These things are not natural to the land but were introduced, as was a related political and economic infrastructure that created 'Australia'. And there is a whole history to this appropriation of the land that is not active in the rhetorical force field of the European Australian pastoral, just as the living cultural memories of Aboriginal peoples disposed by the creation of the Australian nation-state are not. ... In "Australia Day at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy", Felicia Fletcher and John Leonard mention how representatives of Aboriginal countries in Australia assembled at Parliament House eat food to sustain themselves in their bid to right this dispossession: "vegetables are cooked in the coals, bread is toasted over the fire, endless cups of tea are poured, pots of three dozen eggs are boiled again and again to keep up the strengths and spirits of the people" (16). However, they add, quoting the group rather than a specific individual: "'It's nice, but at home we'd have a nice bit of kangaroo tail in the fire -- you've got to know how to do it properly -- and damper'": a different memory of and relationship with 'the land' (in both its senses). To conclude, the memories of the land create it at the time of commemoration. How we commemorate it is a present-day matter of great communal and political significance. Plates 1 Ducks Nuts 7 Bürgen High-Bake Heritage White bread 2 Steinlager Beer 8 Devondale Extra Soft margarine 3 Bulla Real Dairy Ice Cream 9 Bundaberg Caster Sugar 4 Saxa Table Salt 10 Dairy Vale Skim Milk 5 Pureland Organic Tofu 11 Devondale Cheese 6 So Natural Mango Smoothie 12 Edgell References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Fletcher, Felicia, and John Leonard. "Australia Day at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy." Meanjin 58.1 (1999): 10-17. Frow, John. "Gift and Commodity." Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. ---. "Toute la Mémoire du Monde: Repetition and Forgetting." Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973. Winichakul, Thongchai. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Guy Redden. "Packaging the Gifts of Nation." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php>. Chicago style: Guy Redden, "Packaging the Gifts of Nation," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Guy Redden. (1999) Packaging the gifts of nation. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php> ([your date of access]).

As the distinction between disclosure-fuelled celebrity and lasting fame becomes difficult to discern, the “based on a true story” label has gained a particular traction among readers and viewers. This is despite much public approbation and private angst sometimes resulting from such disclosure as “little in the law or in society protects people from the consequences of others’ revelations about them” (Smith 537). Even fiction writers can stray into difficult ethical and artistic territory when they disclose the private facts of real lives—that is, recognisably biographical information—in their work, with autoethnographic fiction where authors base their fiction on their own lives (Davis and Ellis) not immune as this often discloses others’ stories (Ellis) as well. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously counselled writers to take their subjects from life and, moreover, to look to the singular, specific life, although this then had to be abstracted: “Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing” (139). One of the problems when assessing fiction through this lens, however, is that, although many writers are inspired in their work by an actual life, event or historical period, the resulting work is usually ultimately guided by literary concerns—what writers often term the quest for aesthetic truth—rather than historical accuracy (Owen et al. 2008). In contrast, a biography is, and continues to be, by definition, an accurate account of a real persons’ life. Despite postmodern assertions regarding the relativity of truth and decades of investigation into the incorporation of fiction into biography, other non-fiction texts and research narratives (see, for instance: Wyatt), many biographers attest to still feeling irrevocably tied to the factual evidence in a way that novelists and the scriptors of biographically-based fictional television drama, movies and theatrical pieces do not (Wolpert; Murphy; Inglis). To cite a recent example, Louis Nowra’s Ice takes the life of nineteenth-century self-made entrepreneur and politician Malcolm McEacharn as its base, but never aspires to be classified as creative nonfiction, history or biography. The history in a historical novel is thus often, and legitimately, skewed or sidelined in order to achieve the most satisfying work of art, although some have argued that fiction may uniquely represent the real, as it is able to “play […] in the gap between the narratives of history and the actualities of the past” (Nelson n.p.). Fiction and non-fictional forms are, moreover, increasingly intermingling and intertwining in content and intent. The ugly word “faction” was an attempt to suggest that the two could simply be elided but, acknowledging wide-ranging debates about whether literature can represent the complexities of life with any accuracy and post-structuralist assertions that the idea of any absolute truth is outmoded, contemporary authors play with, and across, these boundaries, creating hybrid texts that consciously slide between invention and disclosure, but which publishers, critics and readers continue to define firmly as either fiction or biography. This dancing between forms is not particularly new. A striking example was Marion Halligan’s 2001 novel The Fog Garden which opens with a personal essay about the then recent death of her own much-loved husband. This had been previously published as an autobiographical memoir, “Cathedral of Love,” and again in an essay collection as “Lapping.” The protagonist of the novel is a recently widowed writer named Clare, but the inclusion of Halligan’s essay, together with the book’s marketing campaign which made much of the author’s own sadness, encourages readers to read the novel as a disclosure of the author’s own personal experience. This is despite Halligan’s attempt to keep the two separate: “Clare isn’t me. She’s like me. Some of her experience, terrors, have been mine. Some haven’t” (Fog Garden 9). In such acts of disclosure and denial, fiction and non-fiction can interrogate, test and even create each other, however quite vicious criticism can result when readers feel the boundaries demarking the two are breached. This is most common when authors admit to some dishonesty in terms of self-disclosure as can be seen, for instance, in the furore surrounding highly inflated and even wholly fabricated memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences and Misha Defonseca’s A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Related problems and anxieties arise when authors move beyond incorporating and disclosing the facts of their own lives in memoir or (autobiographical) fiction, to using the lives of others in this way. Daphne Patai sums up the difference: “A person telling her life story is, in a sense, offering up her self for her own and her listener’s scrutiny […] Whether we should appropriate another’s life in this way becomes a legitimate question” (24–5). While this is difficult but seemingly manageable for non-fiction writers because of their foundational reliance on evidence, this anxiety escalates for fiction writers. This seems particularly extreme in relation to how audience expectations and prior knowledge of actual events can shape perceptions and interpretations of the resulting work, even when those events are changed and the work is declared to be one of fiction. I have discussed elsewhere, for instance, the difficult terrain of crafting fiction from well-known criminal cases (Brien, “Based on a True Story”). The reception of such work shows how difficult it is to dissociate creative product from its source material once the public and media has made this connection, no matter how distant that finished product may be from the original facts.As the field of biography continues to evolve for writers, critics and theorists, a study of one key text at a moment in that evolution—Jill Shearer’s play Georgia and its reliance on disclosing the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe for its content and dramatic power—reveals not only some of the challenges and opportunities this close relationship offers to the writers and readers of life stories, but also the pitfalls of attempting to dissemble regarding artistic intention. This award-winning play has been staged a number of times in the past decade but has attracted little critical attention. Yet, when I attended a performance of Georgia at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane in 1999, I was moved by the production and admiring of Shearer’s writing which was, I told anyone who would listen, a powerfully dramatic interpretation of O’Keeffe’s life, one of my favourite artists. A full decade on, aspects of the work and its performance still resonate through my thinking. Author of more than twenty plays performed throughout Australia and New Zealand as well as on Broadway, Shearer was then (and is) one of Australia’s leading playwrights, and I judged Georgia to be a major, mature work: clear, challenging and confident. Reading the Currency Press script a year or so after seeing the play reinforced for me how distinctive and successful a piece of theatre Shearer had created utilising a literary technique which has been described elsewhere as fictionalised biography—biography which utilises fictional forms in its presentation but stays as close to the historical record as conventional biography (Brien, The Case of Mary Dean).The published version of the script indeed acknowledges on its title page that Georgia is “inspired by the later life of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe” (Shearer). The back cover blurb begins with a quote attributed to O’Keeffe and then describes the content of the play entirely in terms of biographical detail: The great American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is physically, emotionally and artistically debilitated by her failing eyesight. Living amidst the Navajo spiritual landscape in her desert home in New Mexico, she becomes prey to the ghosts of her past. Her solitude is broken by Juan, a young potter, whose curious influence on her life remains until her death at 98 (Georgia back cover). This short text ends by unequivocally reinforcing the relation between the play and the artist’s life: “Georgia is a passionate play that explores with sensitivity and wry humour the contradictions and the paradoxes of the life of Georgia O’Keeffe” (Georgia back cover). These few lines of plot synopsis actually contain a surprisingly large number of facts regarding O’Keeffe’s later life. After the death of her husband (the photographer and modern art impresario Alfred Steiglitz whose ghost is a central character in the play), O’Keeffe did indeed relocate permanently to Abiquiú in New Mexico. In 1971, aged 84, she was suffering from an irreversible degenerative disease, had lost her central vision and stopped painting. One autumn day in 1973, Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her adobe house looking for work. She hired him and he became her lover, closest confidante and business manager until her death at 98. These facts form not only the background story but also much of the riveting content for Georgia which, as the published script’s introduction states, takes as its central themes: “the dilemma of the artist as a an older woman; her yearning to create against the fear of failing artistic powers; her mental strength and vulnerability; her sexuality in the face of physical deterioration; her need for companionship and the paradoxical love of solitude” (Rider vii). These issues are not only those which art historians identify as animating the O’Keeffe’s later life and painting, but ones which are discussed at length in many of the biographies of the artist published from 1980 to 2007 (see, for instance: Arrowsmith and West; Berry; Calloway and Bry; Castro; Drohojowska-Philp; Eisler; Eldredge; Harris; Hogrefe; Lisle; Peters; Reily; Robinson).Despite this clear focus on disclosing aspects of O’Keeffe’s life, both the director’s and playwright’s notes prefacing the published script declare firmly that Georgia is fiction, not biography. While accepting that these statements may be related to copyright and privacy concerns, the stridency of the denials of the biography label with its implied intention of disclosing the facts of a life, are worthy of analysis. Although noting that Georgia is “about the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe”, director of the La Boite production Sue Rider asserts that not only that the play moves “beyond the biographical” (vii) but, a few pages later, that it is “thankfully not biography” (xii). This is despite Rider’s own underscoring of the connection to O’Keeffe by setting up an exhibition of the artist’s work adjacent to the theatre. Shearer, whose research acknowledgments include a number of works about O’Keeffe, is even more overtly strident in her denial of any biographical links stating that her characters, “this Juan, Anna Marie and Dorothy Norman are a work of dramatic fiction, as is the play, and should be taken as such” (xiii).Yet, set against a reading of the biographies of the artist, including those written in the intervening decade, Georgia clearly and remarkably accurately discloses the tensions and contradictions of O’Keeffe’s life. It also draws on a significant amount of documented biographical data to enhance the dramatic power of what is disclosed by the play for audiences with this knowledge. The play does work as a coherent narrative for a viewer without any prior knowledge of O’Keeffe’s life, but the meaning of the dramatic action is enhanced by any biographical knowledge the audience possesses. In this way, the play’s act of disclosure is reinforced by this externally held knowledge. Although O’Keeffe’s oeuvre is less well known and much anecdotal detail about her life is not as familiar for Australian viewers as for those in the artist’s homeland, Shearer writes for an international as well as an Australian audience, and the program and adjacent exhibition for the Brisbane performance included biographical information. It is also worth noting that large slabs of biographical detail are also omitted from the play. These omissions to disclosure include O’Keeffe’s early life from her birth in 1887 in Wisconsin to her studies in Chicago and New York from 1904 to 1908, as well as her work as a commercial artist and art teacher in Texas and other Southern American states from 1912 to 1916. It is from this moment in 1916, however, that the play (although opening in 1946) constructs O’Keeffe’s life right through to her death in 1986 by utilising such literary devices as flashbacks, dream sequences and verbal and visual references.An indication of the level of accuracy of the play as biographical disclosure can be ascertained by unpacking the few lines of opening stage directions, “The Steiglitz’s suite in the old mid-range Shelton Hotel, New York, 1946 ... Georgia, 59, in black, enters, dragging a coffin” (1). In 1946, when O’Keeffe was indeed aged 59, Steiglitz died. The couple had lived part of every year at the Shelton Towers Hotel at 525 Lexington Avenue (now the New York Marriott East Side), a moderately priced hotel made famous by its depiction in O’Keeffe’s paintings and Steiglitz’s photographs. When Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis, O’Keeffe was spending the summer in New Mexico, but she returned to New York where her husband died on 13 July. This level of biographical accuracy continues throughout Georgia. Halfway through the first page “Anita, 52” enters. This character represents Anita Pollitzer, artist, critic and O’Keeffe’s lifelong friend. The publication of her biography of O’Keeffe, A Woman on Paper, and Georgia’s disapproval of this, is discussed in the play, as are their letters, which were collected and published in 1990 as Lovingly, Georgia (Gibiore). Anita’s first lines in the play after greeting her friend refer to this substantial correspondence: “You write beautifully. I always tell people: “I have a friend who writes the most beautiful letters” (1). In the play, as in life, it is Anita who introduces O’Keeffe’s work to Stieglitz who is, in turn, accurately described as: “Gallery owner. Two Nine One, Fifth Avenue. Leader of the New York avant-garde, the first to bring in the European moderns” (6). The play also chronicles how (unknown to O’Keeffe) Steiglitz exhibited the drawings Pollitzer gave him under the incorrect name, a scene which continues with Steiglitz persuading Georgia to allow her drawings to remain in his gallery (as he did in life) and ends with a reference to his famous photographs of her hands and nude form. Although the action of a substantial amount of real time is collapsed into a few dramatic minutes and, without doubt, the dialogue is invented, this invention achieves the level of aesthetic truth aimed for by many contemporary biographers (Jones)—as can be assessed when referring back to the accepted biographical account. What actually appears to have happened was that, in the autumn 1915, while teaching art in South Carolina, O’Keeffe was working on a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognised as among the most innovative in American art of that time. She mailed some of these drawings to Pollitzer, who showed them Steiglitz, who exhibited ten of them in April 1916, O’Keeffe only learning of this through an acquaintance. O’Keeffe, who had first visited 291 in 1908 but never spoken to Stieglitz, held his critical opinion in high regard, and although confronting him over not seeking her permission and citing her name incorrectly, eventually agreed to let her drawings hang (Harris). Despite Shearer’s denial, the other characters in Georgia are also largely biographical sketches. Her “Anna Marie”, who never appears in the play but is spoken of, is Juan’s wife (in real life Anna Marie Hamilton), and “Dorothy Norman” is the character who has an affair with Steiglitz—the discovery of which leads to Georgia’s nervous breakdown in the play. In life, while O’Keeffe was in New Mexico, Stieglitz became involved with the much younger Norman who was, he claimed, only his gallery assistant. When O’Keeffe discovered Norman posing nude for her husband (this is vividly imagined in Georgia), O’Keeffe moved out of the Shelton and suffered from the depression that led to her nervous breakdown. “ Juan,” who ages from 26 to 39 in the play, represents the potter Juan Hamilton who encouraged the nearly blind O’Keeffe to paint again. In the biographical record there is much conjecture about Hamilton’s motives, and Shearer sensitively portrays her interpretation of this liaison and the difficult territory of sexual desire between a man and a much older woman, as she also too discloses the complex relationship between O’Keeffe and the much older Steiglitz.This complexity is described through the action of the play, but its disclosure is best appreciated if the biographical data is known. There are also a number of moments of biographical disclosure in the play that can only be fully understood with biographical knowledge in hand. For instance, Juan refers to Georgia’s paintings as “Beautiful, sexy flowers [... especially] the calla lilies” (24). All attending the play are aware (from the exhibition, program and technical aspects of the production) that, in life, O’Keeffe was famous for her flower paintings. However, knowing that these had brought her fame and fortune early in her career with, in 1928, a work titled Calla Lily selling for U.S. $25,000, then an enormous sum for any living American artist, adds to the meaning of this line in the play. Conversely, the significant level of biographical disclosure throughout Georgia does not diminish, in any way, the power or integrity of Shearer’s play as a literary work. Universal literary (and biographical) themes—love, desire and betrayal—animate Georgia; Steiglitz’s spirit haunts Georgia years after his death and much of the play’s dramatic energy is generated by her passion for both her dead husband and her younger lover, with some of her hopeless desire sublimated through her relationship with Juan. Nadia Wheatley reads such a relationship between invention and disclosure in terms of myth—relating how, in the process of writing her biography of Charmain Clift, she came to see Clift and her husband George Johnson take on a larger significance than their individual lives: “They were archetypes; ourselves writ large; experimenters who could test and try things for us; legendary figures through whom we could live vicariously” (5). In this, Wheatley finds that “while myth has no real beginning or end, it also does not bother itself with cause and effect. Nor does it worry about contradictions. Parallel tellings are vital to the fabric” (5). In contrast with both Rider and Shearer’s insistence that Georgia was “not biography”, it could be posited that (at least part of) Georgia’s power arises from the creation of such mythic value, and expressly through its nuanced disclosure of the relevant factual (biographical) elements in parallel to the development of its dramatic (invented) elements. Alongside this, accepting Georgia as such a form of biographical disclosure would mean that as well as a superbly inventive creative work, the highly original insights Shearer offers to the mass of O’Keeffe biography—something of an American industry—could be celebrated, rather than excused or denied. ReferencesArrowsmith, Alexandra, and Thomas West, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives—A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs. Washington DC: HarperCollins and Calloway Editions, and The Phillips Collection, 1992.Berry, Michael. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.Brien, Donna Lee. The Case of Mary Dean: Sex, Poisoning and Gender Relations in Australia. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Queensland University of Technology, 2004. –––. “‘Based on a True Story’: The Problem of the Perception of Biographical Truth in Narratives Based on Real Lives”. TEXT: Journal of Writers and Writing Programs 13.2 (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au >.Calloway, Nicholas, and Doris Bry, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe in the West. New York: Knopf, 1989.Castro, Jan G. The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Crown Publishing, Random House, 1985.Davis, Christine S., and Carolyn Ellis. “Autoethnographic Introspection in Ethnographic Fiction: A Method of Inquiry.” In Pranee Liamputtong and Jean Rumbold, eds. Knowing Differently: Arts-Based and Collaborative Research. New York: Nova Science, 2008. 99–117.Defonseca, Misha. Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Bluebell, PA: Mt. Ivy Press, 1997.Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: WW Norton, 2004.Ellis, Carolyn. “Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives: Relational Ethics in Research with Intimate Others.” Qualitative Inquiry 13.1 (2007): 3–29. Eisler, Benita. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance. New York: Doubleday, 1991.Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962.Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: N.A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.Gibiore, Clive, ed. Lovingly, Georgia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.Halligan, Marion. “Lapping.” In Peter Craven, ed. Best Australian Essays. Melbourne: Bookman P, 1999. 208–13.Halligan, Marion. The Fog Garden. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001.Halligan, Marion. “The Cathedral of Love.” The Age 27 Nov. 1999: Saturday Extra 1.Harris, J. C. “Georgia O’Keeffe at 291”. Archives of General Psychiatry 64.2 (Feb. 2007): 135–37.Hogrefe, Jeffrey. O’Keeffe: The Life of an American Legend. New York: Bantam, 1994.Inglis, Ian. “Popular Music History on Screen: The Pop/Rock Biopic.” Popular Music History 2.1 (2007): 77–93.Jones, Kip. “A Biographic Researcher in Pursuit of an Aesthetic: The Use of Arts-Based (Re)presentations in “Performative” Dissemination of Life Stories”. Qualitative Sociology Review 2.1 (Apr. 2006): 66–85. Jones, Margaret B. Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Seaview Books, 1980.Murphy, Mary. “Limited Lives: The Problem of the Literary Biopic”. Kinema 17 (Spr. 2002): 67–74. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (Oct. 2007). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct07/nelson.htm >.Nowra, Louis. Ice. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2008.Owen, Jillian A. Tullis, Chris McRae, Tony E. Adams, and Alisha Vitale. “Truth Troubles.” Qualitative Inquiry 15.1 (2008): 178–200.Patai, Daphne. “Ethical Problems of Personal Narratives, or, Who Should Eat the Last Piece of Cake.” International Journal of Oral History 8 (1987): 5–27.Peters, Sarah W. Becoming O’Keeffe. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.Pollitzer, Anita. A Woman on Paper. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.Reily, Nancy Hopkins. Georgia O’Keeffe. A Private Friendship, Part II. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2009.Rider, Sue. “Director’s Note.” Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000. vii–xii.Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990. Shearer, Jill. Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000.Smith, Thomas R. “How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves [review]”. Biography 23.3 (2000): 534–38.Wheatley, Nadia. The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Sydney: Flamingo, 2001.Wolpert, Stanley. “Biography as History: A Personal Reflection”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.3 (2010): 399–412. Pub. online (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/jinh/40/3 >.Wyatt, Jonathan. “Research, Narrative and Fiction: Conference Story”. The Qualitative Report 12.2 (Jun. 2007): 318–31.

Previously limited and somewhat neglected as a focus of academic scrutiny, interest in home and domesticity is now growing apace across the humanities and social sciences (Mallett; Blunt, “Cultural Geographies of Home”; Blunt and Dowling). This is evidenced in the recent publication of a range of books on home from various disciplines (Chapman and Hockey; Cieraad; Miller; Chapman; Pink; Blunt and Dowling), the advent in 2004 of a new journal, Home Cultures, focused specifically on the subject of home and domesticity, as well as similar recent special issues in several other journals, including Antipode, Cultural Geographies, Signs and Housing, Theory and Society. This increased interest in the home as a site of social and cultural inquiry reflects a renewed fascination with home and domesticity in the media, popular culture and everyday life. Domestic life is explicitly central to the plot and setting of many popular and/or critically-acclaimed television programs, especially suburban dramas like Neighbours [Australia], Coronation Street [UK], Desperate Housewives [US] and The Secret Life of Us [Australia]. The deeply-held value of home – as a place that must be saved or found – is also keenly represented in films such as The Castle [Australia], Floating Life [Australia], Rabbit-Proof Fence [Australia], House of Sand and Fog [US], My Life as a House [US] and Under the Tuscan Sun [US]. But the prominence of home in popular media imaginaries of Australia and other Western societies runs deeper than as a mere backdrop for entertainment. Perhaps most telling of all is the rise and ratings success of a range of reality and/or lifestyle television programs which provide their audiences with key information on buying, building, renovating, designing and decorating home. In Australia, these include Backyard Blitz , Renovation Rescue, The Block, Changing Rooms, DIY Rescue, Location, Location and Our House. Likewise, popular magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and Australian Vogue Living tell us how to make our homes more beautiful and functional. Other reality programs, meanwhile, focus on how we might secure the borders of our suburban homes (Crimewatch [UK]) and our homeland (Border Security [Australia]). Home is also a strong theme in other media forms and debates, including life writing, novels, art and public dialogue about immigration and national values (see Blunt and Dowling). Indeed, notions of home increasingly frame ‘real world’ experiences, “especially for the historically unprecedented number of people migrating across countries”, where movement and resettlement are often configured through processes of leaving and establishing home (Blunt and Dowling 2). In this issue of M/C Journal we contribute to these critical voices and popular debates, seeking to further untangle the intricate and multi-layered connections between home and everyday life in the contemporary world. Before introducing the articles comprising this issue, we want to extend some of the key themes that weave through academic and popular discussions of home and domesticity, and which are taken up and extended here by the subsequent articles. Home is powerful, emotive and multi-faceted. As a basic desire for many, home is saturated with the meanings, memories, emotions, experiences and relationships of everyday life. The idea and place of home is perhaps typically configured through a positive sense of attachment, as a place of belonging, intimacy, security, relationship and selfhood. Indeed, many reinforce their sense of self, their identity, through an investment in their home, whether as house, hometown or homeland. But at the same time, home is not always a well-spring of succour and goodness; others experience alienation, rejection, hostility, danger and fear ‘at home’. Home can be a site of domestic violence or ‘house arrest’; young gay men and lesbians may feel alienated in the family home; asylum seekers are banished from their homelands; indigenous peoples are often dispossessed of their homelands; refugees might be isolated from a sense of belonging in their new home(land)s. But while this may seriously mitigate the affirmative experience of home, many still yearn for places, both figurative and material, to call ‘home’ – places of support, nourishment and belonging. The experience of violence, loss, marginalisation or dispossession can trigger, in Michael Brown’s words, “the search for a new place to call home”: “it means having to relocate oneself, to leave home and reconfigure it elsewhere” (50). Home, in this sense, understood as an ambiguous site of both belonging and alienation, is not a fixed and static location which ‘grounds’ an essential and unchanging sense of self. Rather, home is a process. If home enfolds and carries some sense of desire for positive feelings of attachment – and the papers in this special issue certainly suggest so, most quite explicitly – then equally this is a relationship that requires ongoing maintenance. Blunt and Dowling call these processes ‘homemaking practices’, and point to how home must be understood as a lived space which is “continually created and recreated through everyday practices” (23). In this way, home is posited as relational – the ever-changing outcome of the ongoing and mediated interaction between self, others and place. What stands out in much of the above discussion is the deep inter-connection between home, identity and self. Across the humanities and social sciences, home has been keenly explored as a crucial site “for the construction and reconstruction of one’s self” (Young 153). Indeed, Blunt and Dowling contend that “home as a place and an imaginary constitutes identities – people’s sense of themselves are related to and produced through lived and imaginative experiences of home” (24). Thus, through various homemaking practices, individuals generate a sense of self (and social groups produce a sense of collective identity) while they create a place called home. Moreover, as a relational entity, neither home nor identity are fixed, but mutually and ongoingly co-constituted. Homemaking enables changing and cumulative identities to be materialised in and supported by the home (Blunt and Dowling). Unfolding identities are progressively embedded and reflected in the home through both everyday practices and routines (Wise; Young), and accumulating and arranging personally meaningful objects (Marcoux; Noble, “Accumulating Being”). Consequently, as one ‘makes home’, one accumulates a sense of self. Given these intimate material and affective links between home, self and identity, it is perhaps not surprising that writing about a place called home has often been approached autobiographically (Blunt and Dowling). Emphasising the importance of autobiographical accounts for understanding home, Blunt argues that “through their accounts of personal memories and everyday experiences, life stories provide a particularly rich source for studying home and identity” (“Home and Identity”, 73). We draw attention to the importance of autobiographical accounts of home because this approach is prominent across the papers comprising this issue of M/C Journal. The authors have used autobiographical reflections to consider the meanings of home and processes of homemaking operating at various scales. Three papers – by Brett Mills, Lisa Slater and Nahid Kabir – are explicitly autobiographical, weaving scholarly arguments through deeply personal experiences, and thus providing evocative first-hand accounts of the power of home in the contemporary world. At the same time, several other authors – including Melissa Gregg, Gilbert Caluya and Jennifer Gamble – use personal experiences about home, belonging and exclusion to introduce or illustrate their scholarly contentions about home, self and identity. As this discussion suggests, home is relational in another way, too: it is the outcome of a relationship between material and imaginative qualities. Home is somewhere – it is situated, located, emplaced. But it is also much more than a location – as suggested by the saying, ‘A house is not a home’. Rather, a house becomes a home when it is imbued with a range of meanings, feelings and experiences by its occupants. Home, thus, is a fusion of the imaginative and affective – what we envision and desire home to be – intertwined with the material and physical – an actual location which can embody and realise our need for belonging, affirmation and sustenance. Blunt and Dowling capture this relationship between emplacement and emotion – the material and the imaginative – with their powerful assertion of home as a spatial imaginary, where “home is neither the dwelling nor the feeling, but the relation between the two” (22). Moreover, they demonstrate that this conceptualisation also detaches ‘home’ from ‘dwelling’ per se, and invokes the creation of home – as a space and feeling of belonging – at sites and scales beyond the domestic house. Instead, as a spatial imaginary, home takes form as “a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connects places” (Blunt and Dowling 2). The concept of home, then, entails complex scalarity: indeed, it is a multi-scalar spatial imaginary. Put quite simply, scale is a geographical concept which draws attention to the layered arenas of everyday life – body, house, neighbourhood, city, region, nation and globe, for instance – and this terminology can help extend our understanding of home. Certainly, for many, house and home are conflated, so that a sense of home is coterminous with a physical dwelling structure (e.g. Dupuis and Thorns). For others, however, home is signified by intimate familial or community relationships which extend beyond the residence and stretch across a neighbourhood (e.g. Moss). And moreover, without contradiction, we can speak of hometowns and homelands, so that home can be felt at the scale of the town, city, region or nation (e.g. Blunt, Domicile and Diaspora). For others – international migrants and refugees, global workers, communities of mixed descent – home can be stretched into transnational belongings (e.g. Blunt, “Cultural Geographies of Home”). But this notion of home as a multi-scalar spatial imaginary is yet more complicated. While the above arenas (house, neighbourhood, nation, globe, etc.) are often simply posited as discrete territories, they also intersect and interact in complex ways (Massey; Marston). Extending this perspective, we can grasp the possibility of personal and collective homemaking processes operating across multiple scales simultaneously. For instance, making a house into a home invariably involves generating a sense of home and familiarity in a wider neighbourhood or nation-state. Indeed, Greg Noble points out that homemaking at the scale of the dwelling can be inflected by broader social and national values which are reflected materially in the house, in “the furniture of everyday life” (“Comfortable and Relaxed”, 55) – landscape paintings and national flags and ornaments, for example. He demonstrates that “homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience” (54). For others – those moving internationally between nation-states – domestic practices in dwelling structures are informed by cultural values and social ideals which extend well beyond the nation of settlement. Everyday domestic practices from one’s ‘land of origin’ are integral for ‘making home’ in a new house, neighbourhood and country at the same time (Hage). Many of the papers in this issue reflect upon the multi-scalarity of homemaking processes, showing how home must be generated across the multiple intersecting arenas of everyday life simultaneously. Indeed, given this prominence across the papers, we have chosen to use the scale of home as our organising principle for this issue. We begin with the links between the body – the geography closest to our skin (McDowell) – the home, and other scales, and then wind our way out through evocations of home at the intersecting scales of the house, the neighbourhood, the city, the nation and the diasporic. The rhetoric of home and belonging not only suggests which types of places can be posited as home (e.g. houses, neighbourhoods, nations), but also valorises some social relations and embodied identities as homely and others as unhomely (Blunt and Dowling; Gorman-Murray). The dominant ideology of home in the Anglophonic West revolves around the imaginary ‘ideal’ of white, middle-class, heterosexual nuclear family households in suburban dwellings (Blunt and Dowling). In our lead paper, Melissa Gregg explores how the ongoing normalisation of this particular conception of home in Australian politico-cultural discourse affects two marginalised social groups – sexual minorities and indigenous Australians. Her analysis is timely, responding to recent political attention to the domestic lives of both groups. Scrutinising the disciplinary power of ‘normal homes’, Gregg explores how unhomely (queer and indigenous) subjects and relationships unsettle the links between homely bodies, ideal household forms and national belonging in politico-cultural rhetoric. Importantly, she draws attention to the common experiences of these marginalised groups, urging “queer and black activists to join forces against wider tendencies that affect both communities”. Our first few papers then continue to investigate intersections between bodies, houses and neighbourhoods. Moving to the American context – but quite recognisable in Australia – Lisa Roney examines the connection between bodies and houses on the US lifestyle program, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, in which families with disabled members are over-represented as subjects in need of home renovations. Like Gregg, Roney demonstrates that the rhetoric of home is haunted by the issue of ‘normalisation’ – in this case, EMHE ‘corrects’ and normalises disabled bodies through providing ‘ideal’ houses. In doing so, there is often a disjuncture between the homely ideal and what would be most helpful for the everyday domestic lives of these subjects. From an architectural perspective, Marian Macken also considers the disjuncture between bodily practices, inhabitation and ideal houses. While traditional documentation of house designs in working drawings capture “the house at an ideal moment in time”, Macken argues for post factum documentation of the house, a more dynamic form of architectural recording produced ‘after-the-event’ which interprets ‘the existing’ rather than the ideal. This type of documentation responds to the needs of the body in the inhabited space of domestic architecture, representing the flurry of occupancy, “the changes and traces the inhabitants make upon” the space of the house. Gilbert Caluya also explores the links between bodies and ideal houses, but from a different viewpoint – that of the perceived need for heightened home security in contemporary suburban Australia. With the rise of electronic home security systems, our houses have become extensions of our bodies – ‘architectural nervous systems’ which extend our eyes, ears and senses through modern security technologies. The desire for home security is predicated on controlling the interplay between the house and wider scales – the need to create a private and secure defensible space in hostile suburbia. But at the same time, heightened home security measures ironically connect the mediated home into a global network of electronic grids and military technologies. Thus, new forms of electronic home security stretch home from the body to the globe. Irmi Karl also considers the connections between technologies and subjectivities in domestic space. Her UK-based ethnographic analysis of lesbians’ techo-practices at home also considers, like Gregg, tactics of resistance to the normalisation of the heterosexual nuclear family home. Karl focuses on the TV set as a ‘straightening device’ – both through its presence as a key marker of ‘family homes’ and through the heteronormative content of programming – while at the same time investigating how her lesbian respondents renegotiated the domestic through practices which resisted the hetero-regulation of the TV – through watching certain videos, for instance, or even hiding the TV set away. Susan Thompson employs a similar ethnographic approach to understanding domestic practices which challenge normative meanings of home, but her subject is quite different. In an Australian-based study, Thompson explores meanings of home in the wake of relationship breakdown of heterosexual couples. For her respondents, their houses embodied their relationships in profoundly symbolic and physical ways. The deterioration and end of their relationships was mirrored in the material state of the house. The end of a relationship also affected homely, familiar connections to the wider neighbourhood. But there was also hope: new houses became sources of empowerment for former partners, and new meanings of home were created in the transition to a new life. Brett Mills also explores meanings of home at different scales – the house, neighbourhood and city – but returns to the focus on television and media technologies. His is a personal, but scholarly, response to seeing his own home on the television program Torchwood, filmed in Cardiff, UK. Mills thus puts a new twist on autobiographical narratives of home and identity: he uses this approach to examine the link between home and media portrayals, and how personal reactions to “seeing your home on television” change everyday perceptions of home at the scales of the house, neighbourhood and city. His reflection on “what happens when your home is on television” is solidly but unobtrusively interwoven with scholarly work on home and media, and speaks to the productive tension of home as material and imaginative. As the above suggests, especially with Mills’s paper, we have begun to move from the homely connections between bodies and houses to focus on those between houses, neighbourhoods and beyond. The next few papers extend these wider connections. Peter Pugsley provides a critical analysis of the meaning of domestic settings in three highly-successful Singaporean sitcoms. He argues that the domestic setting in these sitcoms has a crucial function in the Singaporean nation-state, linking the domestic home and national homeland: it is “a valuable site for national identities to be played out” in terms of the dominant modes of culture and language. Thus, in these domestic spaces, national values are normalised and disseminated – including the valorisation of multiculturalism, the dominance of Chinese cultural norms, benign patriarchy, and ‘proper’ educated English. Donna Lee Brien, Leonie Rutherford and Rosemary Williamson also demonstrate the interplay between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces and values in their case studies of the domestic sphere in cyberspace, examining three online communities which revolve around normatively domestic activities – pet-keeping, crafting and cooking. Their compelling case studies provide new ways to understand the space of the home. Home can be ‘stretched’ across public and private, virtual and physical spaces, so that “online communities can be seen to be domesticated, but, equally … the activities and relationships that have traditionally defined the home are not limited to the physical space of the house”. Furthermore, as they contend in their conclusion, these extra-domestic networks “can significantly modify practices and routines in the physical home”. Jennifer Gamble also considers the interplay of the virtual and the physical, and how home is not confined to the physical house. Indeed, the domestic is almost completely absent from the new configurations of home she offers: she conceptualises home as a ‘holding environment’ which services our needs and provides care, support and ontological security. Gamble speculates on the possibility of a holding environment which spans the real and virtual worlds, encompassing email, chatrooms and digital social networks. Importantly, she also considers what happens when there are ruptures and breaks in the holding environment, and how physical or virtual dimensions can compensate for these instances. Also rescaling home beyond the domestic, Alexandra Ludewig investigates concepts of home at the scale of the nation-state or ‘homeland’. She focuses on the example of Germany since World War II, and especially since re-unification, and provides an engaging discussion of the articulation between home and the German concept of ‘Heimat’. She shows how Heimat is ambivalent – it is hard to grasp the sense of longing for homeland until it is gone. Thus, Heimat is something that must be constantly reconfigured and maintained. Taken up in a critical manner, it also attains positive values, and Ludewig suggests how Heimat can be employed to address the Australian context of homeland (in)security and questions of indigenous belonging in the contemporary nation-state. Indeed, the next couple of papers focus on the vexed issue of building a sense home and belonging at the scale of the nation-state for non-indigenous Australians. Lisa Slater’s powerful autobiographical reflection considers how non-indigenous Australians might find a sense of home and belonging while recognising prior indigenous ownership of the land. She critically reflects upon “how non-indigenous subjects are positioned in relation to the original owners not through migrancy but through possession”. Slater urges us to “know our place” – we need not despair, but use such remorse in a productive manner to remake our sense of home in Australia – a sense of home sensitive to and respectful of indigenous rights. Nahid Kabir also provides an evocative and powerful autobiographical narrative about finding a sense of home and belonging in Australia for another group ‘beyond the pale’ – Muslim Australians. Hers is a first-hand account of learning to ‘feel at home’ in Australia. She asks some tough questions of both Muslim and non-Muslim Australians about how to accommodate difference in this country. Moreover, her account shows the homing processes of diasporic subjects – transnational homemaking practices which span several countries, and which enable individuals and social groups to generate senses of belonging which cross multiple borders simultaneously. Our final paper also contemplates the homing desires of diasporic subjects and the call of homelands – at the same time bringing our attention back to home at the scales of the house, neighbourhood, city and nation. As such, Wendy Varney’s paper brings us full circle, lucidly invoking home as a multi-scalar spatial imaginary by exploring the diverse and complex themes of home in popular music. Given the prevalence of yearnings about home in music, it is surprising so little work has explored the powerful conceptions of home disseminated in and through this widespread and highly mobile media form. Varney’s analysis thus makes an important contribution to our understandings of home presented in media discourses in the contemporary world, and its multi-scalar range is a fitting way to bring this issue to a close. Finally, we want to draw attention to the cover art by Rohan Tate that opens our issue. A Sydney-based photographer, Tate is interested in the design of house, home and the domestic form, both in terms of exteriors and interiors. This image from suburban Sydney captures the shifting styles of home in suburban Australia, giving us a crisp juxtaposition between modern and (re-valued) traditional housing forms. Bringing this issue together has been quite a task. We received 60 high quality submissions, and selecting the final 14 papers was a difficult process. Due to limits on the size of the issue, several good papers were left out. We thank the reviewers for taking the time to provide such thorough and useful reports, and encourage those authors who did not make it into this issue to keep seeking outlets for their work. The number of excellent submissions shows that home continues to be a growing and engaging theme in social and cultural inquiry. As editors, we hope that this issue of M/C Journal will make a vital contribution to this important range of scholarship, bringing together 14 new and innovative perspectives on the experience, location, creation and meaning of home in the contemporary world. References Blunt, Alison. “Home and Identity: Life Stories in Text and in Person.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Eds. Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder. London: Arnold, 2003. 71-87. ———. Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. ———. “Cultural Geographies of Home.” Progress in Human Geography 29.4 (2005): 505-515. ———, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Brown, Michael. Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe. London: Routledge, 2000. Chapman, Tony. Gender and Domestic Life: Changing Practices in Families and Households. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ———, and Jenny Hockey, eds. Ideal Homes? Social Change and Domestic Life. London: Routledge, 1999. Cieraad, Irene, ed. At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Dupuis, Ann, and David Thorns. “Home, Home Ownership and the Search for Ontological Security.” The Sociological Review 46.1 (1998): 24-47. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Homeboys: Uses of Home by Gay Australian Men.” Social and Cultural Geography 7.1 (2006): 53-69. Hage, Ghassan. “At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-Building.” Home/world: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West. Eds. Helen Grace, Ghassan Hage, Lesley Johnson, Julie Langsworth and Michael Symonds. Annandale: Pluto, 1997. 99-153. Mallett, Shelley. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review 52.1 (2004): 62-88. Marcoux, Jean-Sébastien. “The Refurbishment of Memory.” Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Ed. Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg, 2001. 69-86. Marston, Sally. “A Long Way From Home: Domesticating the Social Production of Scale.” Scale and Geographic Inquiry: Nature, Society and Method. Eds. Eric Sheppard and Robert McMaster. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 170-191. Massey, Doreen. “A Place Called Home.” New Formations 17 (1992): 3-15. McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Cambridge: Polity, 1999. Miller, Daniel, ed. Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Moss, Pamela. “Negotiating Space in Home Environments: Older Women Living with Arthritis.” Social Science and Medicine 45.1 (1997): 23-33. Noble, Greg. “Comfortable and Relaxed: Furnishing the Home and Nation.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.1 (2002): 53-66. ———. “Accumulating Being.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.2 (2004): 233-256. Pink, Sarah. Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Wise, J. Macgregor. “Home: Territory and Identity.” Cultural Studies 14.2 (2000): 295-310. Young, Iris Marion. “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme.” On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 123-154. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gorman-Murray, Andrew, and Robyn Dowling. "Home." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Gorman-Murray, A., and R. Dowling. (Aug. 2007) "Home," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/01-editorial.php>.

Introduction The proliferation of non-fungible tokens has transformed cryptocurrency artefacts into a legitimised art form now considered in mainstream art collecting as an emerging high-yield commodity based on scarcity. As photography was debated “of being art” in the late 19th century, video art in the 1960s, virtual reality in the 1990s, and augmented reality in the 2010s, NFT art is the next medium of artwork tied to emergent cultural forms. From the concept of “introducing scarcity from born-digital assets for the first time ever, NFTs or crypto or digital collectibles, as they are also referred to, have already shown glimpses of their potential'” (Valeonti et al. 1). Yet for NFT art, “numerous misconceptions still exist that are partly caused by the complexity of the technology and partly by the existence of many blockchain variants” (Treiblmaier 2). As the discussion of NFT art is still centred on questions of justifying the legitimacy of the medium and its financial trading, critical analysis outside of these key points is still limited to blogs and online articles as the mainstay of debate. To distance NFTs from a common assumption that they are in some form or another a populous digital fad, cryptocurrencies are intended primarily as currencies, even if they maintain some asset-like properties (Baur et al.). In a broader sense, NFTs have positioned digital art as a collectable staple as “the most common types are collectibles and artworks, objects in virtual worlds, and digitalised characters from sports and other games” (Dowling). As a point of origin "NFTs were originally developed using the Ethereum blockchain, [while] many other blockchain networks now facilitate trade and exchange of NFTs” (Wilson et al.). “Given NFTs link to underlying assets that are unique in some way and cannot be exchanged like for like” (Bowden and Jones), this article will consider how artists respond to this uniqueness, which separates the art as simply trading an artefact on a crypto platform, to instead consider a different approach that attests to legitimising the medium as a conceptual space. The concept of NFTs was first introduced in 2012 with Bitcoin’s “Colored Coins”, which referred to tokens that represent any type of physical asset “such as real estate properties, cars and bonds” (Rosenfeld). To that end, the origins of NFTs, as we know, attach themselves to rarities, much the same as any other luxury trading artefact. But where NFTs differ is, as a system, in the non-fungibility of their agency and, as an artefact, the singularity of their rarity and uniqueness. As an example in art, consider a Van Gogh painting where its rarity sustains its value, as there are only a certain number of Van Gogh paintings in circulation. Thus, the value of a Van Gogh painting in the domain of rarity is determined by its metadata with attention to the verification of the authenticity of the artefact and, among others, its subsequent details of the year it was painted. NFTs work along with the same premise: both the Van Gogh painting’s data and an NFT are non-fungible because they cannot be forged, but the painting is fungible because it can be forged. From here, there are two components to associate with NFT art. The first is the NFT, which is the data of a digital token registered on a blockchain. The second is the artefact associated with the NFT, which we know as NFT art. But the system by which NFTs exists as a blockchain is different from, say, buying shares listed in a stock market. Therefore, to find a conceptuality in NFT art, the idea of an NFT artwork as a singular tradable commodity needs to be rethought as not the artefact per se, but the effect of the condition brought about by a combination of the artefact, the currency, and nature of its transaction system. To think of these key points as an independent singularity dismantles any sense of a conceptual framework by which NFT art can exist beyond its form. As McLoughlin argues, “unlike the commercial gallery business model, NFTs are designed to cut out the need for art dealers, enabling artists to trade directly online, typically via specialist auction sites” (McLoughlin). With regards to the GLAM sector, the conceptuality of this disruption positions both the born-digital artefact and the system of trading of the artefact as inextricably linked together. Yet the way this link is considered, even by galleries and curators alike, invites further attention to see NFT art not as a fad, but as a beginning of an entirely new system of the digital genre. Background From an aesthetics perspective, recent hostility surrounding the acceptance of NFT art within the establishment has predictably taken issue with the low-brow nature of mainstream avatar-oriented NFT art; for example, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cryptopunks not surprisingly have been at odds with “proper” art. More so, other artists who have used blockchain in their practice, including Kevin McCoy, Mitchel F. Chan, and Rhea Myers, contributed to early crypto art especially in the 2010s to be inclusive of the proliferation of NFT art as a fine arts medium. Yet despite these contributions, the polarising of NFT art within the art world, as Widdington asserts, has accounted for assumptions that NFT art is identified as being of populous kitsch, lowbrow images, where contemporary art is in opposition to the critique it subjectifies itself against. The art establishment’s disdain towards the aesthetics of NFTs is historically predictable. Early NFT art focussed on pop culture references that have significance within the crypto community (Pepe memes, collectible CryptoKitties), and similarly, in the 1980s, Jeff Koons forced the world of “high art” to confront and accept his works rejoicing in pop culture (Michael Jackson, Pink Panther; Widdington). A key point from Widdington’s claim can be attested for other art that came before Postmodernism, linked firmly to artists using identifiers as part of their studio practice. Moreover, the tying of artwork to a non-fungible identifier is not new. Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #793B Certificate (LeWitt) compounded his manifesto that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art” (LeWitt). By adopting the practice that each of his artworks was accompanied by an authenticity certificate, where the identification code forced a fungible asset to be associated with a unique non-fungible asset, it is the ownership of a certificate of authenticity, or a smart contract on the blockchain in the case of an NFT, that makes the artist’s work unique and therein valuable (Widdington). The scarcity of born-digital assets drives demand for collecting NFT art and joins a financial aspect tied to the process of buying and selling crypto assets. This is obviously different from a crypto conceptuality which exists outside the process and thereby manifests in the idea of what intersects the process, and, in the case of NFT artworks, the subject of the image being traded. Just as LeWitt’s certificate of ownership was thought to raise questions about authenticity and uniqueness through abstract thinking, the concept of art derived from NFT art is fundamentally no different. Both use non-fungibility as a condition of their agency to first address what can be copied and what remains as unique. Second, the mechanism of a ledger that, for NFTs, is blockchain and, for a certificate of authenticity, is the assigned number of the unique identifier, regulates scarcity by using a system to define uniqueness. Adopting this manifesto invites a different way to consider NFT art when the main conversation about NFT art in popular journalism or blogging is a narrow discussion either about the legitimacy of NFTs as an authentic financial stock or about the amount of money they transact in collecting the artefacts. One such conceptuality is in the recent NFT artwork of Damien Hirst. NFT Art Damien Hirst’s The Currency “is composed of 10,000 NFTs linked to 10,000 individual spot paintings on paper” (Hawkins) which are inclusive of added security devices within the paper itself to make the physical asset unique. The purchaser can decide if they would like to own the NFT “or ... keep the physical work and relinquish rights to the blockchain-based artwork” (Goldstein). Perspectives of the project, despite the fact that “Hirst has become a renewed critical target in the left and left-liberal media” (White 197) for his NFT project, not to mention being lamented as “Thatcher’s Warhol” (Lemmey), range from indicating “greater fool theory” (Hawkins) to the questioning of a “responsibility to other NFT artists in the market” (Meyohas). However, discussion on the conceptuality created by The Currency, especially its ontology, is muted if not ignored altogether, which this article considers a fundamental oversight in any credible critical assessment of NFT art. Given that Hirst’s artwork has consistently been moulded around conceptual art, whereby the idea of art becomes the artwork not necessarily found in the hand-made aspect of the artefact itself, the idea of The Currency is to question the role and relationship of art and money through an allegory. One might argue that its conceptuality then affords the idea of the artwork being a currency in itself. It speaks to divisibility, just as the cryptocurrency used to purchase the artworks is divisible of its own tender. The disjuncture in this accord is that “NFTs are not currencies themselves, but rather more like records of ownership” (Cornelius 2). The dot paintings on paper are created as unique artefacts where their uniqueness makes them rare, and this uniqueness makes the rarity an increase in financial value. However, subverting this are Hirst’s physical creations, where the legal tender’s conceptuality is manufactured with watermarks, security embeds, and financial markings the same as traded bills. If this perspective is considered a concept, not a digital selling point, then The Currency prompts further debate on how NFT art can, on the one hand, disrupt the way we might think about the financial systems within cryptocurrencies, and on the other hand, fuel debate on how collecting art within traditional markets has been transformed through the emergence of cryptocurrencies. These once excluded forms of money, often thought of as scams, vapourware, and Ponzi schemes from collectable trade, now dwarf digital art auction sales at an exponential margin; see, for example, the recent Christie's sale of Beeple’s NFT art. When dissecting The Currency through a conceptuality, it is important to state that this is not the first time that artists have used currency to conceptualise social questions about money. At a system level, Marcel Duchamp created his work Monte Carlo Bond (Duchamp), which “advertised a series of bonds by which he claimed he would exploit a system he had developed to make money while at the roulette wheel in Monaco” (Russeth). At an artefact level, artist Mark Wagner “deconstructed dollar bills to make portraits of presidents, recreations of famous paintings and other collages” (Ryssdal and Hollenhorst). Most notoriously, “Jens Haaning was loaned 534,000 kroner ($116,106) in cash to recreate his old artworks using the banknotes [but] pocketed the money and sent back blank canvases with a new title: "Take the Money and Run" (ABC News). If anything, The Currency is merely one of many artists' responses in a long history of exploring art and money. Yet the conceptuality of Hirst’s tender lends itself to deploying a conceptual currency system that says more about the money transactions of the art world than it does about the art sold as a financial transaction. More so, a clever subversion by Hirst, whose ongoing thematic produces artworks about mortality, life, and death, places this thematic back on the purchasers of The Currency to decide if they will “kill” the tethered artwork; that is, if they accept the NFT and not the assigned NFT art, the artwork will be destroyed by an act of burning. Hirst’s conceptuality from The Currency forces the consumer to “play God” by deciding which component is destroyed or not, posing the moral question of how we value the immorality of destroying an artwork for the sake of profitability from a born-digital token. The twist at the end is that Hirst melds such a moral choice with “an experiment in the highly irrational economics of collectibles and blockchain technology” (Hawkins). While this article acknowledges that the extreme wealth of Hirst plays a determining factor in how The Currency has been received by the public, one might argue that such polarising opinions are of no value to the critical assessment of The Currency nor the conceptualities of NFT art when determining the mechanical aspects of the artworks. The same invalidation emerged in December 2021, when “a group of Wikipedia editors ... voted not to categorize NFTs as art—at least for now” (Artnews). This standpoint contradicts the New York Times, which referred to Beeple as the “third-highest-selling artist alive” after his Christie’s sale (Artnews). Bowden and Jones provide insight into this kind of hesitation in legitimising NFT art, saying that “the tension between innovation and incumbency also contributes to the scepticism that always surrounds such new technologies” (Bowden and Jones). Another example, Beautiful Thought Coins from Australian artist Shaun Wilson, is made up of 200 digital hand-drawn colour field NFT artworks that are an allegorical investigation into bureaucracy, emotion, and currency. “The project is complete with a virtual exhibition, digital art prints, art book, and a soundtrack of AI hosted podcasts exploring everything from NFTs to chihuahuas” (Lei). As with The Currency, Beautiful Thought Coins approaches a conceptuality about NFT art through its subject, but also in the embodiment of the currency embedded within the NFT digital ecosystem. Not surprisingly, the artwork depicts coins sharing a direct relationship to the roundel paintings of Jasper John and Peter Blake, but instead with the design proportions of the iconic Type C.1 roundels adopted by the Royal Air Force between 1942 and 1947. Merging these similarities between its pop-art heritage and historical references, the allegorical discussion in Beautiful Thought Coins centres around the pretext of bureaucracy that extends to the individual artwork’s metadata. As featured on its OpenSea sales window, each of the coins has substantial metadata that, when expanded to view, reveal a secondary narrative found in the qualities each NFT has linked to its identifier. Once compared with other tokens, these metadata expand into a separate story with the NFT artworks, using fictitious qualities that link directly to the titles of each artwork in the digital collection to describe how each of the coins is feeling. One might argue that in this instance, the linking of metadata narratives to the artworks functions as an ontological framework. Wilson’s coins draw similarly to philosophical questions raised by Cross, who asks “what, exactly, is the ontological status of an NFT in relation to the work linked to it?” (Cross). Likewise, in the exhibition catalogue of Beautiful Thoughts Coins, Church states that the ontology of this series appears to be linked to a conceptuality with more questions than answers about the ‘lifestyle’ bureaucracy attached to NFT art, where the branding of the artwork by a digital token will make you feel better with the promise to also make you potentially wealthy. (Church) When considering the nature of the artwork's divisibility, ontology plays a part in finding a link between its allegory and aesthetic. Given that each image of the roundels is identical, except for the colours that fill each of its four rings, the divisibility of the hue in the subject is likened to the divisibility of the cryptocurrency that purchases NFTs. Conclusion This article has discussed NFT art in the context of its emergent conceptuality. Through assessment of the crypto artwork of Hirst and Wilson, it has proposed a way of thinking about how this conceptuality can remove NFT art from a primary attachment to financial exchange, to instead give rise to considerations of the allegory surmounting both fungible and non-fungible artefacts linked to digital tokens. Both series of works draw allegorical commentary about the nature of currency. Hirst takes a literal approach to manufacture physical artworks as a mock currency linked to minted NFTs to discuss the transactions of money in art. Wilson manufactures digital artworks by creating images of coins linked to minted NFTs to discuss the transactions of AI-generated lifestyle bureaucracy controlling money. The assessment of both series has considered that each artist uses NFT art as modularity to represent their contexts, rather than a singularity lacking in conversation about the ontological implications of the medium. While NFT art is still in its infancy, this article invites a wider conversation about how artists can deploy crypto art in a conceptual space. It is by this factor that the plausibility of meaningful dialogue is active in determining the medium as a legitimised art form. At the same time, it explores the possibilities now and yet to come, to attest to defining a new dynamic art form, already changing the way artists think about their work as both a currency and a conceptual effect. References ABC News. “Danish Artist Takes Payment for Art, Sends Museum Blank Canvasses Titled Take the Money and Run.” 30 Sep. 2021. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-30/danish-artist-jens-haaning-take-the-money-and-run/100502338>. ———. “What’s behind the NFT Digital Craze?” 19 Mar. 2021. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=_e7TOBV43y8>. 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Samarbakhsh, Laleh. “What Are NFTs and Why Are People Paying Millions for Them?” The Conversation 24 Mar. 2021. <https://theconversation.com/what-are-nfts-and-why-are-people- paying-millions-for-them-157035>. Treiblmaier, Horst. “Beyond Blockchain: How Tokens Trigger the Internet of Value and What Marketing Researchers Need to Know about Them.” Journal of Marketing Communications 22 Nov. 2021. <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13527266.2021.2011375>. Valeonti, Foteini, Antonis Bikakis, Melissa Terras, Chris Speed, Andrew Hudson-Smith, and Konstantinos Chalkias. “Crypto Collectibles, Museum Funding and OpenGLAM: Challenges, Opportunities and the Potential of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).” Applied Sciences 21.11 (2021). <https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/21/9931>. White, Luke. “Flogging a Dead Hirst?” Events, Journal of Visual Culture 12.1 (2013): 195-199. Widdington, Richard. “NFTs as Conceptual Art? 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1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.

Globalisation is often identified as the pre-eminent push towards a global social order. Some see globalisation as an all encompassing and inevitable process towards an emerging “hyperglobal” world order (Held et al.); an “inexorable integration of markets, nation states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before” (Friedman); a world that has become a “single place” (Robertson). Some contend that this emergent global order signals the end of the nation state (Ohmae), while others argue it is a deliberate project of capitalism, imposing intense market forces on states and individuals (McMichael, Hirst and Thompson). Some, like Wallerstein, question the ‘newness’ of this global order, pointing to continuities with earlier capitalist and imperialist movements. Across these diverse views, there is a central shared notion that globalisation moves us towards a global social order (past, present, or future), an order that is in need of interrogation and critique. In an era of global power monopolies, intense social upheaval and inequality, how can order be anything but suspect? Order is at the crux of power; we associate it with domination and control, a system imposed. Social and cultural critics, influenced by liberation movements of the past 50 years, are vigilant in questioning the existing order, and work to expose the inequalities inscribed within it. Order serves the interests of the powerful, at the expense of the weak. We see it as a social construct, negotiated as much through our very ways of knowing (‘the order of things’) and systems of representation and belief as it is through institutions of regulation and enforcement. Social inquiry is the critique of order, seeing order as an effect of power and domination. Yet our own inquiry is fraught with order. Order, more than progress, is the end point of Modernity, the promise of knowledge and technology; a new order of global economic and social prosperity. Implicit in critique is a call for reform, for a different social order. The idea of a new order underpins social critique. The drive to understand is a drive towards order. Or is such ordered sense-making just a particular kind of inquiry, the totalising project of modernity, resisted by poststructuralist, postmodernist, and postcolonial social critics? Following this tradition of resistance, many contemporary social debates are characterised by a scepticism towards order, whether of the past, present, or identified as emerging, to be struggled towards or resisted. In a ‘post’ mode of inquiry, cultural critics such as those included in this issue of M/C Journal deconstruct order, reluctant to impose or propose another order. Some identify alternative formations that emerge, tentatively, in spite of order, or out of disorder. These diverse social and cultural formations can be thought of as examples of ‘spontaneous order’, following mathematician Steven Strogatz’s work (revising chaos and complexity theory) on synchrony in complex natural phenomena. Many critics look to the spaces of new media to explore questions of social order, imposed or spontaneous, hegemonic or liberatory. Just as the city is emblematic of modernity’s order, the Internet and converged media are emblematic of the ‘hyperglobal’ order, and the various dispersed formations of ‘spontaneous order’. The articles in this issue of M/C Journal engage with this topic of ‘order’ from a variety of perspectives. Our feature article by Mark Nunes deals with what is perhaps the most important struggle for ‘order’ of the present time – the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ and its implications for the networked environment. Far from the quagmire of the Iraqi conflict, Nunes finds a new kind of order being imposed through new policies in the ‘homeland’ itself. Another, far less life-threatening but nonetheless important, ideological conflict is currently playing out closer to M/C’s home in Australia, following the recent changes to the tertiary education system imposed by the Federal government. Tara Brabazon’s article “Freedom from Choice” questions the implications of the new policies, and asks how they will re-order the educational value system in this country. Derek Wallace adds a wider perspective to this line of thought, examining the implications of continuing moves towards a knowledge society or knowledge economy in many leading nations of the Western hemisphere: whose order is being pursued here, and is it a beneficial one? In turn, Teodor Mitew examines sites of resistance to these and other attempted re-orderings. In his view, autonomous activist movements such as the Critical Art Ensemble desire a ‘beta-utopian order’, an unfinished order existing in ‘eternal pre-release form’ and constantly requiring debugging. The computer metaphor is carried through to Jussi Parikka’s article, describing the continuing virus threat as a form of digital disorder. He suggests that viruses uncover ideological and political aspects of digital order which would otherwise remain unseen. We remain in the digital realm with our subsequent articles. In his contribution to this issue, Mark McGuire analyses Habbo Hotel, a highly ordered community space for teenagers which appears not unlike an online version of some of the privatised townships now run by Disney and other corporations. Providing further insight into how such ordering of commercial online spaces is performed, Kylie Jarrett offers an examination of the correlations between the rhetorical, hypertext, and database structures of ninemsn, Microsoft’s Australian partnership with the Nine TV network. The rhetoric of social and communal order is also the topic of Rob Garbutt’s article “Local Order”, which investigates the power of that simple term ‘local’ as it is applied to or withheld from residents in the town of Lismore, New South Wales. Being a local is an honour not awarded lightly, as Garbutt shows. And such local order exists even in anarchist communities, as Jeff Shantz shows: while resisting dominant paradigms, ‘DIY’ anarchists “occupy their own ground” in autonomous zones (‘A-zones’), and offer alternative orderings of their environment. The last three articles in this issue all deal with the ordering power of the media. Stephen Stockwell discusses the response of Hollywood to the 11 September attacks and subsequent wars, showing the mainstream film industry’s support for the Bush administration’s campaign at home and abroad while painting a different picture for television drama. Ben Isakhan offers a crucial counterpoint to the all-too-common myths and omissions dominating news coverage from the Iraqi conflict, and Solrun Hoass finally turns our gaze towards another member of the infamous ‘axis of evil’, pleading for a more considered engagement with North Korea which could be informed by a look at the movies and television series produced there. Order is multifaceted and omnipresent. The articles in this issue offer glimpses of some of the flashpoints of the many struggles between order and disorder, and between various ordering paradigms. In doing so, they provide a snapshot of current world conflicts. References Albrow, M. The Global Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Friedman, T. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. London: Harper Collins, 2000. Globalization. 3 Feb. 2005 http://www.sociology.emory.edu/globalization/>. Held, D., et al. Global Transformations. Oxford: Polity, 1999. Hirst, P., and G. Thompson. Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance. Cambridge, UK.: Polity Press, 1999. McMichael, P. Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2000. Ohmae, K. The End of the Nation-State. New York: Free Press, 1995. Robertson, R. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Strogatz, Steven. Synch: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. New York: Theia, 2003. Wallerstein, I., and T. Hopkins. The Age of Transition: The World System 1945-2025. Atlantic Highlands, NJ.: Zed Books, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ferrier, Liz, and Axel Bruns. "Editorial: Fraught with Order." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Ferrier, L., and A. Bruns. (Jan. 2005) "Editorial: Fraught with Order," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/00-editorial.php>.

IntroductionWhen a baby girl born in Britain was endowed with the topical name ‘Hashtag’, a social media post decried the naming, and a media storm followed. Before she was even home from hospital, headlines were at the ready: “Did a mother really just name her child Hashtag?” (Nye) and “Baby Hashtag: has the search for original names gone too far?” (Barkham). Trollers were also poised to react, offering: “The first name is REALLY dumb. And you're even dumber,” prompting a rejection of the baby’s name as well as her ostensibly ill-equipped parents (Facebook). Dubbed a “Public Figure” on her Facebook page, Hashtag Jameson accrued a particularly premature type of celebrity, where, with a handful of baby selfies, she declared via Twitter, and only hours after birth, that she was “already trending”.In this article, I consider the relationship between the infant child and the visual-digital economies in which it – as in the Hashtag hoax, above – performs. The infant child is brought into view with the very first sentence that frames John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. “Seeing comes before words”, he writes. “The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” (1). Berger’s reference to the seeing child positions it as an active agent in cultures and practices of visuality, but also uses an idea of the child to position vision as the primary communicative means by which we “establish our place in the surrounding world” and in which we are enveloped “before” speech (7). Here, I explore the intensified relationship between the visual culture of infancy and the economised digital movement of vision that it produces in one highly specific image-genre: the baby selfie. In doing so I aim to characterise the depictive nature of this format in terms of how it compositionally documents – to further borrow the language of Berger, who was then discussing oil paintings – “a way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange” (87).The new sociology of childhood has been concerned with the construction of the child figure as it has interfaced with new cultural and political realities since the early 1980s (Prout). These include “phenomena such as the flexibilization of production … expanding networks of knowledge … and shifts in labour market participation, work and the global economy” (Prout 5). I suggest here that the baby selfie can be seen as an unprecedented social marker of these transformations, signalling a heightened degree of priceless sentiment within which the child – as an animator of amateur affects, viral tendencies and algorithmic logics – is given to operate. I focus on the compositional propensities of the baby selfie in order to characterise how it visually construes a particular kind of self that is intrinsically entangled with the conception of the image as a form of capital exchange. That is, I suggest that in its intense and yet paradoxical self-performativity the baby selfie depicts a way of seeing that is predicated on, but also troubles, the conceit of a commodified social relation. What Does the Baby Selfie Say?“Should babies really be taking selfies?” yells a headline warning against the perceived dangers of youth digital cultures (Cox). The 2014 story references a phone app built by father Matthew Pegula that uses front-facing cameras to “unintentionally teac[h] your baby to take selfies of themselves” by generating “rattling sounds, pictures of cute animals, and more to get the baby’s attention.” The article explains that “[w]hen the baby reaches out to touch the screen, the camera snaps their selfie and saves it to the device”. While Pegula’s Baby Selfie App is available for purchase on Google Play’s app store for $1.09, a similar device named New Born Fame, featuring “Facebook and Twitter symbols that are activated when the youngster reaches for them” and inclusions such as “a pair of shoes with an internal pedometer that tracks kicks and posts the activity online, a squeezable GPS tracker and a ‘selfie-ball’ that photographs the baby and uploads the shot whenever the ball rotates” (Peppers), artistically interrogated this relatively new category of “insta-infa-fame”.In their article “What Does the Selfie Say?”, Theresa M. Senft and Nancy K. Baym argue that the selfie exists as the hallmark genre of a new kind of self-reflexive image-making, one that is formally characterised by the “self-generated” nature of the photographic portraiture it depicts, which is in turn conceived for its transmissibility, occurring “primarily via social media” (1589). Popularised in part by new technologies (the camera phone, the smart phone, and then the front-facing phone camera) and in part by new digital platforms (“Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Tumblr, WeChat, and Tinder”) (1589), Senft and Baym further explain that the selfie is simultaneously a photographic object which transmits human feeling, a practice of sending (as well as of depicting), and third, a monetized assemblage curated by nonhuman agents. It is this last factor which renders the objecthood of the selfie as it relates to the vernacular that it enacts as well as the practice of its making, political.Notions around the simultaneously constituting and yet virally distributed “self” of social media are not new. A now prominent literature around how the selfie graphically manifests and performs: intimate publics (Walsh and Baker), a normative or resistive image repertoire (Murray), and emotionalised, communicable affect (Bayer et al.), gives rise to a range of viewpoints that aim to characterise how the hyper self-reflexivity of the selfie depicts – visually as well as ontologically – the self as an agent of their own transmissibility (Holiday et al.). From these we understand that the selfie is distinct for its (i) self-representational image-format (it is an image made by the self, of the self, and thereby is identifiable for its capturing of the self in this very process of self-composition); ii) its methods of distribution (selfies are taken and distributed often instantaneously, and thereby are not only objects of, but active agents of, the reshaping of digitally communicative economies); iii) its idiomatic performance of a sociality and aesthetic of the amateur or vernacular (Abidin).The doubled glance both inwards and outwards that the selfie casts is further characterised for how it traces as well as points to a gestural self-awareness held within its compositional characteristics (Frosh). This moves us from a semiotic reading of the selfie to a reading of its “kineasthetic sociability” – that is, its embodied inception of new forms of autobiographical inscription which say “not only ‘see this, here, now,’ but also ‘see me showing you me’” (Frosh 1609-10). Here, the selfie is less a static object and more a gestural imprint of the communicative action in process: it is “simultaneously mediating (the outstretched arm executes the taking of the selfie) and mediated (the outstretched arm becomes a legible and iterable sign within selfies of, among other things, the selfieness of the image)” (Frosh 1611). In this sense, its compositional logic offers a tracing of this very enactive, embodied tendency, which bears more than an indexical relationship to the field that it marks – it depicts itself as a constituting part of that field.While these characteristics are broadly accepted as being true of selfies, the “selfieness” of a baby selfie might be seen to offer a paradoxical reframing of these depictive qualities. That is, if a selfie is a self-depiction of a process of self-depiction, the baby selfie most usually performs this self-reflexivity with recourse to an external agent who is either present in the image frame or who is occluded from it but nonetheless implied by the very nature of the image (a parent or the image-facilitator, or indeed, a baby app). The baby selfie’s scene of self-depiction, then, might be thought of as a kind of self-depiction-by-proxy. At the same time, the baby selfie asks us to invest in the belief that the picture was knowingly self-taken, and in doing so, models a kind of aspirational autonomy for the child/baby figure who is depicted. In this sense, the baby selfie, by its very nature, disrupts the accepted distinguishing format of the selfie: that the picture is both self-depicting and is self-composed. Instead, the baby selfie can be seen to gesturally reincorporate into its visual scene the very question of this structural im/possibility.Depicting the Viral ChildThe figure of the child has been considered by a range of theorists as the organising principle of modernity. Philippe Aries’ foundational work has argued that the modern discovery of childhood is reflected in the rise of the nuclear family and consequential shifts from sociability to privacy. Viviana Zelizer similarly positions the emergence of the economically “useless” but sentimentally “priceless” child against comprehensive social and industrial transformations taking place across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that excluded the child as a labourer and instead situated it with the disciplinary regime of education. The hetero-normatively white child has since been shown to emblematise concepts of social futurity (Edelman) and myths of morality, humanity and the “ordering of time” (Pelligrini 98).Following Zelizer, the more recently ‘digitally’ visual cultures of childhood can be seen to spin the figure of the child around new socio-economic and discursive imperatives. Lisa Cartwright writes about photographs of waiting adoptee children, in which “children of poor countries become commodities and their images become advertisements in a global market” (83). Deborah Lupton similarly considers the coding of infant bodies in popular media for their “represent[ation] as helpless, vulnerable, uncontrolled, dirty and leaky in opposition to the idealised adult body that is powerful, self-regulated, autonomous, clean, its bodily boundaries sealed from the outside world” (349). More recently, children have been considered for how they either accidentally or volitionally interact with mediated technologies (Nansen) as well as for how they are increasingly digitally surveilled as the objects of a necessary – and increasingly normalised – parental “culture of care” (Leaver 2). These studies make clear that while children are increasingly positioned as the ‘viral’ agents of new kinds of visual markets, they are also infantilised as victims in need of unprecedented cyber-protection.In 1994 Douglas Rushkoff coined the term “media virus” to account for the rapid and uncontrollable ways that popular media texts performed to either coerce or awaken viewing publics. While Rushkoff’s medium of reference was television, Henry Jenkins et al. later reframed virality to instead encompass ideas of user-led agency by linking it with a logic of “stickiness” – evoking what he termed a “peanut butter” analogy to describe the “spreadable” (3) movement of ideas in more recent social media practices. Indeed, Liam French finds a strong parallel between the “phenomenal rise in user generated content” and the turn towards newer visual cultures within social media practices more broadly, noting that it is “ordinary people” (French’s term) who actively generate the very forms of visual cultural production that become key to communicatory circulation. The selfie, in this regard, becomes both a format and an icon of the new ways of seeing brought into perspective by social media practices.Given the political, social and industrial ecologies that constitute such image cultures, it is only recently that the “viral” child, as the next delineation of the sentimentally “priceless” child, has arrived into view. Here, the baby Hashtag hoax can be seen to critically narrate a specific cultural moment: one that is concerned with stabilising the figure of the child even as it constitutes the ground through which that figure also becomes undone. I refer to the way that Hashtag, as a figural baby, presents a tautological identity, where the digital grammar of # names the mechanism by which she would also search for herself. If Hashtag is emblematic of the algorithmic and affective assemblage of contemporary image-cultures of childhood – whose image-work shapes the new temporal dimensions of our watching and viewing practices – she also illustrates how the child has been become not only an object, but a medium of the economic logics of communicative capitalism. That is, the image-work of the baby selfie can be seen to point to the very question of autonomous agency that frames the figure of the child and in doing so, provides a disruptive counterpoint to the “peanut butter” logic of spreadable visual cultures of so-called “ordinary people” more broadly.It is this light that I ask (drawing on Senft and Baym): what does the baby selfie say about how we understand or construe the figure of the child? More specifically, I ask (via Berger) what culture of vision is brought into view by the rise of such visual cultures of the viral child? The “Gestural Gaze” of Digital Infant Agency Ellentv.com recently advertised a call for viewers to send in their favourite baby selfies: “If you've got a baby and a camera, it's time to take some selfies! Take a photo of you and your baby making the same face, and send it to us!” The legal disclaimer accompanying the callout additionally advised that “[b]y submitting Materials, … you … do not violate the right of privacy or publicity of, or constitute a defamation against, any person or entity; that the Materials will not infringe upon or violate the copyright or common law rights or any other rights of any person or entity” (Ellentv.com). From the outset, there appears within baby selfie culture a curious calibration of the agency of the child, who is at once a selfie-self-taker but who is also excluded from a legal right to privacy that concerns “any person or entity”. In this respect we might further ask – following Jacqueline Bhabha’s question “what sort of human is a child?” (1526) – what sort of human is a viral child, and how does the baby selfie depict this paradoxical configuration of infantile agency?While the formality of the baby selfie still demonstrates a range of configurations which often incorporate the figure of a parent and hence contradict the discreet self-composing parameters of the selfie, here I focus in closing on one specific baby selfie that I suggest is emblematic of an increasing prevalence of apparently “true” baby selfies which operate on a range of image-sharing platforms and meme sites. These baby selfies are distinguished by seeming to be (i) an image that is made by the self, of the self, and thereby is identified for its capturing of the self in this very process of self-composition; ii) an image that is construed for methods of often instantaneous distribution; iii) an image that puts forward an idiomatic performance of an amateur vernacular – or what Abidin has called “calibrated amateurism”.One compilation, “12 of the Cutest Baby Selfies You Will Ever See”, foregrounds the autonomy of the figure of the viral child as depicted by baby selfie culture, explaining that “These babies might be small, but they can do a lot more than just laugh, crawl, and play. It turns out they can also work their way around a camera and snap some amazing selfies. Talk about impressive!” (Campbell). While all the images in the selection depict the embodied gestural sociality of the selfie that Frosh characterises – that which is “simultaneously mediating (the outstretched arm executes the taking of the selfie) and mediated (the outstretched arm becomes a legible and iterable sign within selfies of … the selfieness of the image)” (1611) – one in particular is arresting for its striking interpellation of the “innocent” figure of the child with what I will extend via Frosh to call the inherent mediality of her gestural gaze. In this iconic baby selfie, the gestural gaze is witnessed in the way that the baby’s outstretched hand seems to be extending towards us, the viewer, but is rather (we think we know) extended towards the phone camera, in order to better see herself.The infant in the image is coded female, wearing a pink bonnet, dummy clip and dummy. The dummy is centred defiantly in the baby’s mouth and doubly defiantly in the centre of the image frame as an infantile ‘technology’ that seems to undercut the technology of the phone camera apparatus. The dummy imbues the image with an iconic sense of the baby’s innate “baby-ness” which seems to directly contradict the strength of her gaze, which also appears, in following the outwards arc of her selfie-taking arm, to reach beyond the image frame and address her viewer directly. It seems to say – to paraphrase Frosh – see me here, now, showing you me. The ambivalent origins of the image are also key to how it is read and distributed here. The image in question can be found on the media site Woman’s World, which offers an untraceable credit to Instagram for its original source. The image has also, since, spread itself, appearing across a range of other multilingual sites and feeds, depicting the child at the centre of its frame as somewhat entangled in a further labour of self-duplication. The baby selfie in circulation says not only “‘see this, here, now,’” and “‘see me showing you me’,” but ‘see all of this here, and again, here and again, here.’John Berger writes of two related image genres that connect histories of vernacular depiction to histories of the evolution of the publicity image as a medium and sign of capital exchange. Writing on oil painting, he notes how the materiality of the medium signified the “thingness” of its depiction: “if you buy a painting you also buy a look of the thing that it represents” (83). He finds, therein, an “analogy between possessing and a way of seeing which is incorporated in oil painting” (83) and which, as he later explains, becomes tied to “the tangibility, the texture, the lustre, the solidity of what it depicts” (88). The textural qualities of oil painting, which for Berger construe the “real” as that which can be materially conveyed or indexed as commodity, might be compared to the gestural residue that is contained within the selfie. While oil painting construed the materiality of things – and hence, the commodifiable nature of any particular relation – the selfie might be seen to depict the self in the process of its own self-labour: the material gesture of taking the image necessitates that the self becomes an agent who then becomes the immaterial self of transmission. The selfie is in this way a depiction of the self in a form of capital relation to itself.While the selfie – as a digital composition – is not materially “real” in the same way that oil painting is, the indexical nature of the arm that reaches out beyond the image frame to point to the inherent transmissibility – and hence capital value – of the image, might be. While the baby selfie imitates these capacities, I suggest here that it also traces a compositional logic that further complicates that which Frosh charts. This is because in the very moment that the spectator of the image is confronted with the baby selfie’s call to “see me showing you me” (1609-10), the spectator is also confronted with the figure of the infant as an autonomous agent capable of their own image-constitution. In essence, the baby selfie posits a question around the baby’s innate ability to knowingly generate its image-frame, even as that very image-frame is what casts the infant into the spreadable contexts within which it will then operate – or, indeed, become ‘knowable’.In its heightened self-referentiality but tenuously depicted sense of rhetorical agency, the baby selfie then faces us with what we think we know, or do not know, about the figure of the child. This central ambivalence inherent to the compositional makeup of the baby selfie in this way both depicts and disrupts the economics of circulation that are intrinsic to selfies more broadly, pointing to a decomposing of the parameters by which a selfie is interpreted and understood. Further, it enables us to question relationships between ways of seeing and ways of being – how does the baby selfie envision the figure of the chid? What sort of human does it become? While there are valid discussions to be had around the absence of “direct self-representational agency” (Leaver) and moral rights or wrongs of the parental management of children’s image-work in online spaces, the baby selfie also opens up questions around how we understand the very contours of infantile agency, how we perceive rhetorical knowingness, and what we mean to mean by the relentless circulation of this imagery of the viral child. Indeed, as Wendy S. Hesford writes, it can be helpful to shift an understanding of agency from being an “individual enterprise” to being understood as that which is “enabled and constrained by cultural discourses and material forces” that compel it into material circulation (156).Here, I am not aiming to foreclose debates about the role of infants (or children more broadly) living with and in digital cultures. Neither do I aim to cast judgement upon on those image practices which enfold child subjects within them. I rather aim to circumvent those important debates to find – following Berger – a trace of how the image cultures that co-constitute digital infancies operate to formulate as well as depict a new field of vision that is predicated upon a seemingly impossible but nonetheless compelling logic of the contradictory impulses of the viral child. That is, it challenges us to think more carefully about what we think we know about children as well as about how we come to know them.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor.” Social Media + Society (Apr.-June 2017): 1–15.Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Trans. Robert Baldick. 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The Leichhardt Highway is a six hundred-kilometre stretch of sealed inland road that joins the Australian Queensland border town of Goondiwindi with the Capricorn Highway, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Named after the young Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, part of this roadway follows the route his party took as they crossed northern Australia from Morton Bay (Brisbane) to Port Essington (near Darwin). Ignoring the usual colonial practice of honouring the powerful and aristocratic, Leichhardt named the noteworthy features along this route after his supporters and fellow expeditioners. Many of these names are still in use and a series of public monuments have also been erected in the intervening century and a half to commemorate this journey. Unlike Leichhardt, who survived his epic trip, some contemporary travellers who navigate the remote roadway named in his honour do not arrive at their final destinations. Memorials to these violently interrupted lives line the highway, many enigmatically located in places where there is no obvious explanation for the lethal violence that occurred there. This examination profiles the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. All humans know that death awaits them (Morell). Yet, despite this, and the unprecedented torrent of images of death and dying saturating news, television, and social media (Duwe; Sumiala; Bisceglio), Gorer’s mid-century ideas about the denial of death and Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning description of the purpose of human civilization as a defence against this knowledge remains current in the contemporary trope that individuals (at least in the West) deny their mortality. Contributing to this enigmatic situation is how many deny the realities of aging and bodily decay—the promise of the “life extension” industries (Hall)—and are shielded from death by hospitals, palliative care providers, and the multimillion dollar funeral industry (Kiernan). Drawing on Piatti-Farnell’s concept of popular culture artefacts as “haunted/haunting” texts, the below describes how memorials to the dead can powerfully reconnect those who experience them with death’s reality, by providing an “encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience” (Piatti-Farnell). While certainly very different to the “sublime” iconic Gothic structure, the Gothic ruin that Summers argued could be seen as “a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret” (407), these memorials do function in both this way as melancholy/regret-inducing relics as well as in Piatti-Farnell’s sense of bringing the dead into everyday consciousness. Such memorialising activity also evokes one of Spooner’s features of the Gothic, by acknowledging “the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present” (8).Ludwig Leichhardt and His HighwayWhen Leichhardt returned to Sydney in 1846 from his 18-month journey across northern Australia, he was greeted with surprise and then acclaim. Having mounted his expedition without any backing from influential figures in the colony, his party was presumed lost only weeks after its departure. Yet, once Leichhardt and almost all his expedition returned, he was hailed “Prince of Explorers” (Erdos). When awarding him a significant purse raised by public subscription, then Speaker of the Legislative Council voiced what he believed would be the explorer’s lasting memorial —the public memory of his achievement: “the undying glory of having your name enrolled amongst those of the great men whose genius and enterprise have impelled them to seek for fame in the prosecution of geographical science” (ctd. Leichhardt 539). Despite this acclaim, Leichhardt was a controversial figure in his day; his future prestige not enhanced by his Prussian/Germanic background or his disappearance two years later attempting to cross the continent. What troubled the colonial political class, however, was his transgressive act of naming features along his route after commoners rather than the colony’s aristocrats. Today, the Leichhardt Highway closely follows Leichhardt’s 1844-45 route for some 130 kilometres from Miles, north through Wandoan to Taroom. In the first weeks of his journey, Leichhardt named 16 features in this area: 6 of the more major of these after the men in his party—including the Aboriginal man ‘Charley’ and boy John Murphy—4 more after the tradesmen and other non-aristocratic sponsors of his venture, and the remainder either in memory of the journey’s quotidian events or natural features there found. What we now accept as traditional memorialising practice could in this case be termed as Gothic, in that it upset the rational, normal order of its day, and by honouring humble shopkeepers, blacksmiths and Indigenous individuals, revealed the “disturbance and ambivalence” (Botting 4) that underlay colonial class relations (Macintyre). On 1 December 1844, Leichhardt also memorialised his own past, referencing the Gothic in naming a watercourse The Creek of the Ruined Castles due to the “high sandstone rocks, fissured and broken like pillars and walls and the high gates of the ruined castles of Germany” (57). Leichhardt also disturbed and disfigured the nature he so admired, famously carving his initials deep into trees along his route—a number of which still exist, including the so-called Leichhardt Tree, a large coolibah in Taroom’s main street. Leichhardt also wrote his own memorial, keeping detailed records of his experiences—both good and more regretful—in the form of field books, notebooks and letters, with his major volume about this expedition published in London in 1847. Leichhardt’s journey has since been memorialised in various ways along the route. The Leichhardt Tree has been further defaced with numerous plaques nailed into its ancient bark, and the town’s federal government-funded Bicentennial project raised a formal memorial—a large sandstone slab laid with three bronze plaques—in the newly-named Ludwig Leichhardt Park. Leichhardt’s name also adorns many sites both along, and outside, the routes of his expeditions. While these fittingly include natural features such as the Leichhardt River in north-west Queensland (named in 1856 by Augustus Gregory who crossed it by searching for traces of the explorer’s ill-fated 1848 expedition), there are also many businesses across Queensland and the Northern Territory less appropriately carrying his name. More somber monuments to Leichhardt’s legacy also resulted from this journey. The first of these was the white settlement that followed his declaration that the countryside he moved through was well endowed with fertile soils. With squatters and settlers moving in and land taken up before Leichhardt had even arrived back in Sydney, the local Yeeman people were displaced, mistreated and completely eradicated within a decade (Elder). Mid-twentieth century, Patrick White’s literary reincarnation, Voss of the eponymous novel, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker have enshrined in popular memory not only the difficult (and often described as Gothic) nature of the landscape through which Leichhardt travelled (Adams; Mollinson, and Bonham), but also the distinctive and contrary blend of intelligence, spiritual mysticism, recklessness, and stoicism Leichhardt brought to his task. Roadside Memorials Today, the Leichhardt Highway is also lined with a series of roadside shrines to those who have died much more recently. While, like centotaphs, tombstones, and cemeteries, these memorialise the dead, they differ in usually marking the exact location that death occurred. In 43 BC, Cicero articulated the idea of the dead living in memory, “The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living” (93), yet Nelson is one of very few contemporary writers to link roadside memorials to elements of Gothic sensibility. Such constructions can, however, be described as Gothic, in that they make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering. These are also enigmatic sites. Traffic levels are generally low along the flat or gently undulating terrain and many of these memorials are located in locations where there is no obvious explanation for the violence that occurred there. They are loci of contradictions, in that they are both more private than other memorials, in being designed, and often made and erected, by family and friends of the deceased, and yet more public, visible to all who pass by (Campbell). Cemeteries are set apart from their surroundings; the roadside memorial is, in contrast, usually in open view along a thoroughfare. In further contrast to cemeteries, which contain many relatively standardised gravesites, individual roadside memorials encapsulate and express not only the vivid grief of family and friends but also—when they include vehicle wreckage or personal artefacts from the fatal incident—provide concrete evidence of the trauma that occurred. While the majority of individuals interned in cemeteries are long dead, roadside memorials mark relatively contemporary deaths, some so recent that there may still be tyre marks, debris and bloodstains marking the scene. In 2008, when I was regularly travelling this roadway, I documented, and researched, the six then extant memorial sites that marked the locations of ten fatalities from 1999 to 2006. (These were all still in place in mid-2014.) The fatal incidents are very diverse. While half involved trucks and/or road trains, at least three were single vehicle incidents, and the deceased ranged from 13 to 84 years of age. Excell argues that scholarship on roadside memorials should focus on “addressing the diversity of the material culture” (‘Contemporary Deathscapes’) and, in these terms, the Leichhardt Highway memorials vary from simple crosses to complex installations. All include crosses (mostly, but not exclusively, white), and almost all are inscribed with the name and birth/death dates of the deceased. Most include flowers or other plants (sometimes fresh but more often plastic), but sometimes also a range of relics from the crash and/or personal artefacts. These are, thus, unsettling sights, not least in the striking contrast they provide with the highway and surrounding road reserve. The specific location is a key component of their ability to re-sensitise viewers to the dangers of the route they are travelling. The first memorial travelling northwards, for instance, is situated at the very point at which the highway begins, some 18 kilometres from Goondiwindi. Two small white crosses decorated with plastic flowers are set poignantly close together. The inscriptions can also function as a means of mobilising connection with these dead strangers—a way of building Secomb’s “haunted community”, whereby community in the post-colonial age can only be built once past “murderous death” (131) is acknowledged. This memorial is inscribed with “Cec Hann 06 / A Good Bloke / A Good hoarseman [sic]” and “Pat Hann / A Good Woman” to tragically commemorate the deaths of an 84-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife from South Australia who died in the early afternoon of 5 June 2006 when their Ford Falcon, towing a caravan, pulled onto the highway and was hit by a prime mover pulling two trailers (Queensland Police, ‘Double Fatality’; Jones, and McColl). Further north along the highway are two memorials marking the most inexplicable of road deaths: the single vehicle fatality (Connolly, Cullen, and McTigue). Darren Ammenhauser, aged 29, is remembered with a single white cross with flowers and plaque attached to a post, inscribed hopefully, “Darren Ammenhauser 1971-2000 At Rest.” Further again, at Billa Billa Creek, a beautifully crafted metal cross attached to a fence is inscribed with the text, “Kenneth J. Forrester / RIP Jack / 21.10.25 – 27.4.05” marking the death of the 79-year-old driver whose vehicle veered off the highway to collide with a culvert on the creek. It was reported that the vehicle rolled over several times before coming to rest on its wheels and that Forrester was dead when the police arrived (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Traffic Incident’). More complex memorials recollect both single and multiple deaths. One, set on both sides of the road, maps the physical trajectory of the fatal smash. This memorial comprises white crosses on both sides of road, attached to a tree on one side, and a number of ancillary sites including damaged tyres with crosses placed inside them on both sides of the road. Simple inscriptions relay the inability of such words to express real grief: “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed” and “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed / Forever in our hearts.” The oldest and most complex memorial on the route, commemorating the death of four individuals on 18 June 1999, is also situated on both sides of the road, marking the collision of two vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One memorial to a 62-year-old man comprises a cross with flowers, personal and automotive relics, and a plaque set inside a wooden fence and simply inscribed “John Henry Keenan / 23-11-1936–18-06-1999”. The second memorial contains three white crosses set side-by-side, together with flowers and relics, and reveals that members of three generations of the same family died at this location: “Raymond Campbell ‘Butch’ / 26-3-67–18-6-99” (32 years of age), “Lorraine Margaret Campbell ‘Lloydie’ / 29-11-46–18-6-99” (53 years), and “Raymond Jon Campbell RJ / 28-1-86–18-6-99” (13 years). The final memorial on this stretch of highway is dedicated to Jason John Zupp of Toowoomba who died two weeks before Christmas 2005. This consists of a white cross, decorated with flowers and inscribed: “Jason John Zupp / Loved & missed by all”—a phrase echoed in his newspaper obituary. The police media statement noted that, “at 11.24pm a prime mover carrying four empty trailers [stacked two high] has rolled on the Leichhardt Highway 17km north of Taroom” (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Truck Accident’). The roadside memorial was placed alongside a ditch on a straight stretch of road where the body was found. The coroner’s report adds the following chilling information: “Mr Zupp was thrown out of the cabin and his body was found near the cabin. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had applied the brakes or in any way tried to prevent the crash … Jason was not wearing his seatbelt” (Cornack 5, 6). Cornack also remarked the truck was over length, the brakes had not been properly adjusted, and the trip that Zupp had undertaken could not been lawfully completed according to fatigue management regulations then in place (8). Although poignant and highly visible due to these memorials, these deaths form a small part of Australia’s road toll, and underscore our ambivalent relationship with the automobile, where road death is accepted as a necessary side-effect of the freedom of movement the technology offers (Ladd). These memorials thus animate highways as Gothic landscapes due to the “multifaceted” (Haider 56) nature of the fear, terror and horror their acknowledgement can bring. Since 1981, there have been, for instance, between some 1,600 and 3,300 road deaths each year in Australia and, while there is evidence of a long term downward trend, the number of deaths per annum has not changed markedly since 1991 (DITRDLG 1, 2), and has risen in some years since then. The U.S.A. marked its millionth road death in 1951 (Ladd) along the way to over 3,000,000 during the 20th century (Advocates). These deaths are far reaching, with U.K. research suggesting that each death there leaves an average of 6 people significantly affected, and that there are some 10 to 20 per cent of mourners who experience more complicated grief and longer term negative affects during this difficult time (‘Pathways Through Grief’). As the placing of roadside memorials has become a common occurrence the world over (Klaassens, Groote, and Vanclay; Grider; Cohen), these are now considered, in MacConville’s opinion, not only “an appropriate, but also an expected response to tragedy”. Hockey and Draper have explored the therapeutic value of the maintenance of “‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead” (3). This is, however, only one explanation for the reasons that individuals erect roadside memorials with research suggesting roadside memorials perform two main purposes in their linking of the past with the present—as not only sites of grieving and remembrance, but also of warning (Hartig, and Dunn; Everett; Excell, Roadside Memorials; MacConville). Clark adds that by “localis[ing] and personalis[ing] the road dead,” roadside memorials raise the profile of road trauma by connecting the emotionless statistics of road death directly to individual tragedy. They, thus, transform the highway into not only into a site of past horror, but one in which pain and terror could still happen, and happen at any moment. Despite their increasing commonality and their recognition as cultural artefacts, these memorials thus occupy “an uncomfortable place” both in terms of public policy and for some individuals (Lowe). While in some states of the U.S.A. and in Ireland the erection of such memorials is facilitated by local authorities as components of road safety campaigns, in the U.K. there appears to be “a growing official opposition to the erection of memorials” (MacConville). Criticism has focused on the dangers (of distraction and obstruction) these structures pose to passing traffic and pedestrians, while others protest their erection on aesthetic grounds and even claim memorials can lower property values (Everett). While many ascertain a sense of hope and purpose in the physical act of creating such shrines (see, for instance, Grider; Davies), they form an uncanny presence along the highway and can provide dangerous psychological territory for the viewer (Brien). Alongside the townships, tourist sites, motels, and petrol stations vying to attract customers, they stain the roadway with the unmistakable sign that a violent death has happened—bringing death, and the dead, to the fore as a component of these journeys, and destabilising prominent cultural narratives of technological progress and safety (Richter, Barach, Ben-Michael, and Berman).Conclusion This investigation has followed Goddu who proposes that a Gothic text “registers its culture’s contradictions” (3) and, in profiling these memorials as “intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (Goddu 3) has proposed memorials as Gothic artefacts that can both disturb and reveal. Roadside memorials are, indeed, so loaded with emotional content that their close contemplation can be traumatising (Brien), yet they are inescapable while navigating the roadway. Part of their power resides in their ability to re-animate those persons killed in these violent in the minds of those viewing these memorials. In this way, these individuals are reincarnated as ghostly presences along the highway, forming channels via which the traveller can not only make human contact with the dead, but also come to recognise and ponder their own sense of mortality. While roadside memorials are thus like civic war memorials in bringing untimely death to the forefront of public view, roadside memorials provide a much more raw expression of the chaotic, anarchic and traumatic moment that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. While traditional memorials—such as those dedicated by, and to, Leichhardt—moreover, pay homage to the vitality of the lives of those they commemorate, roadside memorials not only acknowledge the alarming circumstances of unexpected death but also stand testament to the power of the paradox of the incontrovertibility of sudden death versus our lack of ability to postpone it. In this way, further research into these and other examples of Gothic memorialising practice has much to offer various areas of cultural study in Australia.ReferencesAdams, Brian. Sidney Nolan: Such Is Life. Hawthorn, Vic.: Hutchinson, 1987. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities & Fatality Rate: 1899-2003.” 2004. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Bisceglio, Paul. “How Social Media Is Changing the Way We Approach Death.” The Atlantic 20 Aug. 2013. Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. 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The National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper—drafted to assist the Australian Government in developing the first national Cultural Policy since Creative Nation nearly two decades ago—envisages a future in which arts, cultural and creative activities directly support the development of an inclusive, innovative and productive Australia. "The policy," it says, "will be based on an understanding that a creative nation produces a more inclusive society and a more expressive and confident citizenry by encouraging our ability to express, describe and share our diverse experiences—with each other and with the world" (Australian Government 3). Even a cursory reading of this Discussion Paper makes it clear that the question of impact—in aesthetic, cultural and economic terms—is central to the Government's agenda in developing a new Cultural Policy. Hand-in-hand with the notion of impact comes the process of measurement of progress. The Discussion Paper notes that progress "must be measurable, and the Government will invest in ways to assess the impact that the National Cultural Policy has on society and the economy" (11). If progress must be measurable, this raises questions about what arts, cultural and creative workers do, whether it is worth it, and whether they could be doing it better. In effect, the Discussion Paper pushes artsworkers ever closer to a climate in which they have to be skilled not just at making work, but at making the impact of this work clear to stakeholders. The Government in its plans for Australia's cultural future, is clearly most supportive of artsworkers who can do this, and the scholars, educators and employers who can best train the artsworkers of the future to do this. Teaching Artsworkers to Measure the Impact of Their Work: The Challenges How do we train artsworkers to assess, measure and articulate the impact of what they do? How do we prepare them to be ready to work in a climate that will—as the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper makes clear—emphasise measuring impact, communicating impact, and communicating impact across aesthetic, cultural and economic categories? As educators delivering training in this area, the Discussion Paper has made this already compelling question even more pressing as we work to develop the career-ready graduates the Government seeks. Our program, the Master of Creative Industries (Creative Production & Arts Management) offered in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, is, like most programs in arts and cultural management in the US, UK, Europe and Australia, offering a three-Semester postgraduate program that allows students to develop the career-ready skills required to work as managers of arts, cultural or creative organisations. That we need to train our graduates to work not just as producers of plays, paintings or recordings, but as entrepreneurial arts advocates who can measure and articulate the value of their programs to others, is not news (Hadley "Creating" 647-48; cf. Brkic; Ebewo and Sirayi; Beckerman; Sikes). Our program—which offers training in arts policy, management, marketing and budgeting followed by training in entrepreneurship and a practical project—is already structured around this necessity. The question of how to teach students this diverse skill set is, however, still a subject of debate; and the question of how to teach students to measure the impact of this work is even more difficult. There is, of course, a body of literature on the impact of arts, cultural and creative activities, value and evaluation that has been developed over the past decade, particularly through landmark reports like Matarasso's Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts (1997) and the RAND Corporation's Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts (2004). There are also emergent studies in an Australian context: Madden's "Cautionary Note" on using economic impact studies in the arts (2001); case studies on arts and wellbeing by consultancy firm Effective Change (2003); case studies by DCITA (2003); the Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management (2009) issue on "value"; and Australia Council publications on arts, culture and economy. As Richards has explained, "evaluation is basically a straightforward concept. E-value-ation = a process of enquiry that allows a judgment of amount, value or worth to be made" (99). What makes arts evaluation difficult is not the concept, but the measurement of intangible values—aesthetic quality, expression, engagement or experience. In the literature, discussion has been plagued by debate about what is measured, what method is used, and whether subjective values can in fact be measured. Commentators note that in current practice, questions of value are still deferred because they are too difficult to measure (Bilton and Leary 52), discussed only in terms of economic measures such as market share or satisfaction which are statistically quantifiable (Belfiore and Bennett "Rethinking" 137), or done through un-rigorous surveys that draw only ambiguous, subjective, or selective responses (Merli 110). According to Belfiore and Bennett, Public debate about the value of the arts thus comes to be dominated by what might best be termed the cult of the measurable; and, of course, it is those disciplines primarily concerned with measurement, namely, economics and statistics, which are looked upon to find the evidence that will finally prove why the arts are so important to individuals and societies. A corollary of this is that the humanities are of little use in this investigation. ("Rethinking" 137) Accordingly, Ragsdale states, Arts organizations [still] need to find a way to assess their progress in …making great art that matters to people—as evidenced, perhaps, by increased enthusiasm, frequency of attendance, the capacity and desire to talk or write about one's experience, or in some other way respond to the experience, the curiosity to learn about the art form and the ideas encountered, the depth of emotional response, the quality of the social connections made, and the expansion of one's aesthetics over time. Commentators are still looking for a balanced approach (cf. Geursen and Rentschler; Falk and Dierkling), which evaluates aesthetic practices, business practices, audience response, and results for all parties, in tandem. An approach which evaluates intrinsic impacts, instrumental impacts, and the way each enables the other, in tandem—with an emphasis not on the numbers but on whether we are getting better at what we are doing. And, of course, allows evaluators of arts, cultural and creative activities to use creative arts methods—sketches, stories, bodily movements and relationships and so forth—to provide data to inform the assessment, so they can draw not just on statistical research methods but on arts, culture and humanities research methods. Teaching Artsworkers to Measure the Impact of Their Work: Our Approach As a result of this contested terrain, our method for training artsworkers to measure the impact of their programs has emerged not just from these debates—which tend to conclude by declaring the needs for better methods without providing them—but from a research-teaching nexus in which our own trial-and-error work as consultants to arts, cultural and educational organisations looking to measure the impact of or improve their programs has taught us what is effective. Each of us has worked as managers of professional associations such as Drama Australia and Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA), members of boards or committees for arts organisations such as Youth Arts Queensland and Young People and the Arts Australia (YPAA), as well as consultants to major cultural organisations like the Queensland Performing Arts Centre and the Brisbane Festival. The methods for measuring impact we have developed via this work are based not just on surveys and statistics, but on our own practice as scholars and producers of culture—and are therefore based in arts, culture and humanities approaches. As scholars, we investigate the way marginalised groups tell stories—particularly groups marked by age, gender, race or ability, using community, contemporary and public space performance practices (cf. Hadley, "Bree"; Gattenhof). What we have learned by bringing this sort of scholarly analysis into dialogue with a more systematised approach to articulating impact to government, stakeholders and sponsors is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. What is needed, instead, is a toolkit, which incorporates central principles and stages, together with qualitative, quantitative and performative tools to track aesthetics, accessibility, inclusivity, capacity-building, creativity etc., as appropriate on a case-by-case basis. Whatever the approach, it is critical that the data track the relationship between the experience the artists, audience or stakeholders anticipated the activity should have, the aspects of the activity that enabled that experience to emerge (or not), and the effect of that (or not) for the arts organisation, their artists, their partners, or their audiences. The combination of methods needs to be selected in consultation with the arts organisation, and the negotiations typically need to include detailed discussion of what should be evaluated (aesthetics, access, inclusivity, or capacity), when it should be evaluated (before, during or after), and how the results should be communicated (including the difference between evaluation for reporting purposes and evaluation for program improvement purposes, and the difference between evaluation and related processes like reflection, documentary-making, or market research). Translating what we have learned through our cultural research and consultancy into a study package for students relies on an understanding of what they want from their study. This, typically, is practical career-ready skills. Students want to produce their own arts, or produce other people's arts, and most have not imagined themselves participating in meta-level processes in which they argue the value of arts, cultural and creative activities (Hadley, "Creating" 652). Accordingly, most have not thought of themselves as researchers, using cultural research methods to create reports that inform how the Australian government values, supports, and services the arts. The first step in teaching students to operate effectively as evaluators of arts, cultural and creative activities is, then, to re-orient their expectations to include this in their understanding of what artsworkers do, what skills artsworkers need, and where they deploy these skills. Simply handing over our own methods, as "the" methods, would not enable graduates to work effectively in a climate were one size will not fit all, and methods for evaluating impact need to be negotiated again for each new context. 1. Understanding the Need for Evaluation: Cause and Effect The first step in encouraging students to become effective evaluators is asking them to map their sector, the major stakeholders, the agendas, alignments and misalignments in what the various players are trying to achieve, and the programs, projects and products through which the players are trying to achieve it. This starting point is drawn from Program Theory—which, as Joon-Yee Kwok argues in her evaluation of the SPARK National Mentoring Program for Young and Emerging Artists (2010) is useful in evaluating cultural activities. The Program Theory approach starts with a flow chart that represents relationships between activities in a program, allowing evaluators to unpack some of the assumptions the program's producers have about what activities have what sort of effect, then test whether they are in fact having that sort of effect (cf. Hall and Hall). It could, for example, start with a flow chart representing the relationship between a community arts policy, a community arts organisation, a community-devised show it is producing, and a blog it has created because it assumes it will allow the public to become more interested in the show the participants are creating, to unpack the assumptions about the sort of effect this is supposed to have, and test whether this is in fact having this sort of effect. Masterclasses, conversations and debate with peers and industry professionals about the agendas, activities and assumptions underpinning programs in their sector allows students to look for elements that may be critical in their programs' ability to achieve (or not) an anticipated impact. In effect to start asking about, "the way things are done now, […] what things are done well, and […] what could be done better" (Australian Government 12).2. Understanding the Nature of Evaluation: PurposeOnce students have been alerted to the need to look for cause-effect assumptions that can determine whether or not their program, project or product is effective, they are asked to consider what data they should be developing about this, why, and for whom. Are they evaluating a program to account to government, stakeholders and sponsors for the money they have spent? To improve the way it works? To use that information to develop innovative new programs in future? In other words, who is the audience? Being aware of the many possible purposes and audiences for evaluation information can allow students to be clear not just about what needs to be evaluated, but the nature of the evaluation they will do—a largely statistical report, versus a narrative summary of experiences, emotions and effects—which may differ depending on the audience.3. Making Decisions about What to Evaluate: Priorities When setting out to measure the impact of arts, cultural or creative activities, many people try to measure everything, measure for the purposes of reporting, improvement and development using the same methods, or gather a range of different sorts of data in the hope that something in it will answer questions about whether an activity is having the anticipated effect, and, if so, how. We ask students to be more selective, making strategic decisions about which anticipated effects of a program, project or product need to be evaluated, whether the evaluation is for reporting, improvement or innovation purposes, and what information stakeholders most require. In addition to the concept of collecting data about critical points where programs succeed or fail in achieving a desired effect, and different approaches for reporting, improvement or development, we ask students to think about the different categories of effect that may be more or less interesting to different stakeholders. This is not an exhaustive list, or a list of things every evaluation should measure. It is a tool to demonstrate to would-be evaluators points of focus that could be developed, depending on the stakeholders' priorities, the purpose of the evaluation, and the critical points at which desired effects need to occur to ensure success. Without such framing, evaluators are likely to end up with unusable data, which become a difficulty to deal with rather than a benefit for the artsworkers, arts organisations or stakeholders. 4. Methods for Evaluation: Process To be effective, methods for collecting data about how arts, cultural or creative activities have (or fail to have) anticipated impact need to include conventional survey, interview and focus group style tools, and creative or performative tools such as discussion, documentation or observation. We encourage students to use creative practice to draw out people's experience of arts events—for example, observation, documentation still images, video or audio documentation, or facilitated development of sketches, stories or scenes about an experience, can be used to register and record people's feelings. These sorts of methods can capture what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow" of experience (cf. Belfiore and Bennett, "Determinants" 232)—for example, photos of a festival space at hourly intervals or the colours a child uses to convey memory of a performance can capture to flow of movement, engagement, and experience for spectators more clearly than statistics. These, together with conventional surveys or interviews that comment on the feelings expressed, allow for a combination of quantitative, qualitative and performative data to demonstrate impact. The approach becomes arts- and humanities- based, using arts methods to encourage people to talk, write or otherwise respond to their experience in terms of emotion, connection, community, or expansion of aesthetics. The evaluator still needs to draw out the meaning of the responses through content, text or discourse analysis, and teaching students how to do a content analysis of quantitative, qualitative and performative data is critical at this stage. When teaching students how to evaluate their data, our method encourages students not just to focus on the experience, or the effect of the experience, but the relationship between the two—the things that act as "enablers" "determinants" (White and Hede; Belfiore and Bennett, "Determinants" passim) of effect. This approach allows the evaluator to use a combination of conventional and creative methods to describe not just what effect an activity had, but, more critically, what enabled it to have that effect, providing a firmer platform for discussing the impact, and how it could be replicated, developed or deepened next time, than a list of effects and numbers of people who felt those effects alone. 5. Communicating Results: Politics Often arts, cultural or creative organisations can be concerned about the image of their work an evaluation will create. The final step in our approach is to alert students to the professional, political and ethical implications of evaluation. Students learn to share their knowledge with organisations, encouraging them to see the value of reporting both correct and incorrect assumptions about the impact of their activities, as part of a continuous improvement process. Then we assist them in drawing the results of this sort of cultural research into planning, development and training documents which may assist the organisation in improving in the future. In effect, it is about encouraging organisations to take the Australian government at its word when, in the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper, it says it that measuring impact is about measuring progress—what we do well, what we could do better, and how, not just success statistics about who is most successful—as it is this that will ultimately be most useful in creating an inclusive, innovative, productive Australia. Teaching Artsworkers to Measure the Impact of Their Work: The Impact of Our Approach What, then, is the impact of our training on graduates' ability to measure the impact of work? Have we made measurable progress in our efforts to teach artsworkers to assess and articulate the impact of their work? The MCI (CP&AM) has been offered for three years. Our approach is still emergent and experimental. We have, though, identified a number of impacts of our work. First, our students are less fearful of becoming involved in measuring the value or impact of arts, cultural and creative programs. This is evidenced by the number who chooses to do some sort of evaluation for their Major Project, a 15,000 word individual project or internship which concludes their degree. Of the 50 or so students who have reached the Major Project in three years—35 completed and 15 in planning for 2012—about a third have incorporated evaluation into their Major Project. This includes evaluation of sector, business or producing models (5), youth arts and youth arts mentorship programs (4), audience development programs (2), touring programs (4), and even other arts management training programs (1). Indeed, after internships in programming or producing roles, this work—aligned with the Government's interest in improving training of young artists, touring, audience development, and economic development—has become a most popular Major Project option. This has enabled students to work with a range of arts, cultural and creative organisations, share their training—their methods, their understanding of what their methods can measure, when, and how—with Industry. Second, this Industry-engaged training has helped graduates in securing employment. This is evidenced by the fact that graduates have gone on to be employed with organisations they have interned with as part of their Major Project, or other organisations, including some of Brisbane's biggest cultural organisations—local and state government departments, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane Festival, Metro Arts, Backbone Youth Arts, and Youth Arts Queensland, amongst others. Thirdly, graduates' contribution to local organisations and industry has increased the profile of a relatively new program. This is evidenced by the fact that it enrols 40 to 50 new students a year across Graduate Certificate / MCI (CP&AM) programs, typically two thirds domestic students and one third international students from Canada, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway and, of course, China. Indeed, some students are now disseminating this work globally, undertaking their Major Project as an internship or industry project with an organisation overseas. In effect, our training's impact emerges not just from our research, or our training, but from the fact that our graduates disseminate our approach to a range of arts, cultural and creative organisations in a practical way. We have, as a result, expanded the audience for this approach, and the number of people and contexts via which it is being adapted and made useful. Whilst few of students come into our program with a desire to do this sort of work, or even a working knowledge of the policy that informs it, on completion many consider it a viable part of their practice and career pathway. When they realise what they can achieve, and what it can mean to the organisations they work with, they do incorporate research, research consultant and government roles as part of their career portfolio, and thus make a contribution to the strong cultural sector the Government envisages in the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper. Our work as scholars, practitioners and educators has thus enabled us to take a long-term, processual and grassroots approach to reshaping agendas for approaches to this form of cultural research, as our practices are adopted and adapted by students and industry stakeholders. Given the challenges commentators have identified in creating and disseminating effective evaluation methods in arts over the past decade, this, for us—though by no means work that is complete—does count as measurable progress. References Beckerman, Gary. "Adventuring Arts Entrepreneurship Curricula in Higher Education: An Examination of Present Efforts, Obstacles, and Best pPractices." The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 37.2 (2007): 87-112. Belfiore, Eleaonora, and Oliver Bennett. "Determinants of Impact: Towards a Better Understanding of Encounters with the Arts." Cultural Trends 16.3 (2007): 225-75. ———. "Rethinking the Social Impacts of the Arts." International Journal of Cultural Policy 13.2 (2007): 135-51. Bilton, Chris, and Ruth Leary. "What Can Managers Do for Creativity? Brokering Creativity in the Creative Industries." International Journal of Cultural Policy 8.1 (2002): 49-64. Brkic, Aleksandar. "Teaching Arts Management: Where Did We Lose the Core Ideas?" Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 38.4 (2009): 270-80. Czikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. "A Systems Perspective on Creativity." Creative Management. Ed. Jane Henry. Sage: London, 2001. 11-26. Australian Government. "National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper." Department of Prime Minster and Cabinet – Office for the Arts 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://culture.arts.gov.au/discussion-paper›. Ebewo, Patrick, and Mzo Sirayi. "The Concept of Arts/Cultural Management: A Critical Reflection." Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 38.4 (2009): 281-95. Effective Change and VicHealth. Creative Connections: Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing through Community Arts Participation 2003. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/en/Publications/Social-connection/Creative-Connections.aspx›. Effective Change. Evaluating Community Arts and Community Well Being 2003. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.arts.vic.gov.au/Research_and_Resources/Resources/Evaluating_Community_Arts_and_Wellbeing›. Falk, John H., and Lynn. D Dierking. "Re-Envisioning Success in the Cultural Sector." Cultural Trends 17.4 (2008): 233-46. Gattenhof, Sandra. "Sandra Gattenhof." QUT ePrints Article Repository. Queensland University of Technology, 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Gattenhof,_Sandra.html›. Geursen, Gus and Ruth Rentschler. "Unravelling Cultural Value." The Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 33.3 (2003): 196-210. Hall, Irene and David Hall. Evaluation and Social Research: Introducing Small Scale Practice. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2004. Hadley, Bree. "Bree Hadley." QUT ePrints Article Repository. Queensland University of Technology, 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Hadley,_Bree.html›. ———. "Creating Successful Cultural Brokers: The Pros and Cons of a Community of Practice Approach in Arts Management Education." Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management 8.1 (2011): 645-59. Kwok, Joon. When Sparks Fly: Developing Formal Mentoring Programs for the Career Development of Young and Emerging Artists. Masters Thesis. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2010. Madden, Christopher. "Using 'Economic' Impact Studies in Arts and Cultural Advocacy: A Cautionary Note." Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 98 (2001): 161-78. Matarasso, Francis. Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts. Bournes Greens, Stroud: Comedia, 1997. McCarthy, Kevin. F., Elizabeth H. Ondaatje, Laura Zakaras, and Arthur Brooks. Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2004. Merli, Paola. "Evaluating the Social Impact of Participation in Arts Activities." International Journal of Cultural Policy 8.1 (2002): 107-18. Muir, Jan. The Regional Impact of Cultural Programs: Some Case Study Findings. Communications Research Unit - DCITA, 2003. Ragsdale, Diana. "Keynote - Surviving the Culture Change." Australia Council Arts Marketing Summit. Australia Council for the Arts: 2008. Richards, Alison. "Evaluation Approaches." Creative Collaboration: Artists and Communities. Melbourne: Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2006. Sikes, Michael. "Higher Education Training in Arts Administration: A Millennial and Metaphoric Reappraisal. Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 30.2 (2000): 91-101.White, Tabitha, and Anne-Marie Hede. "Using Narrative Inquiry to Explore the Impact of Art on Individuals." Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 38.1 (2008): 19-35.

The phenomenological experience of art is one of embodied awareness. Now more than ever, as contemporary art becomes more interactive and immersive, our perceptions of embodiment are useful tools to gauge the efficacy of visual art as a stimulus for knowledge, new experience and expression. Art has a mimetic and interactive relationship with the world. As Schopenhauer said, “The world is my representation” (3). So which takes effect first: the lungful of excited breath or the synapses, is it the miasmic smell of dust on whirring video projectors or the emotion? When we see great art (in this instance, new media work), do we shudder, then see and understand it? Or do we see, tremble and, only then, know? “Art unleashes and intensifies...Art is of the animal” (Grosz, Chaos 62-3). Are our bodies reacting in response to the physical information at hand in the world? “Why do you like Amy?” I asked my six year old son, who was in love at the time. “I like her face,” he said. Was this a crude description of infantile love or an intuitive understanding of how all kinds of passion begin with the surface of the face? Peter Sloterdijk writes about the immersion and mimicry, the life and death mutualism of faces, of gazing on another’s face. He says, “Both of these, self-knowledge as well as self-completion, are operations in a sphere of illusory bipolarity that, like an ellipse, only formally possess two focal points” (205). It seems to me that this desire for the love, beauty and knowledge of another is mutual; a reciprocal narrative thrust, the same existential motivation. Elizabeth Grosz writes about the first emotions of the newborn child and the immediate expressiveness of the face, with those of the parents. She refers to Alphonso Lingis to develop this connection between emotion and bodily expression as: “the pleasure and pains the body comes to articulate: human infants laugh and weep before they can speak.” (Grosz, Chaos 51) To be acknowledged, to see a reflection of one’s own face in that of another’s face as an expression of love, is a craving common to all humans.Art, like new love, has the ability to set our hearts aflutter, lips aquiver, our palms turned upwards in awe, our eyes widened in surprise. “The reverie of love defies all attempts to record it” (Stendhal 63). We are physically drawn to great works, to their immediacy, to their sudden emerging determination and tangibility (Menke). Our perceptions are entangled, our attitudes are affected, our imaginations are piqued and our knowledge and memory are probed.So what happens next? Once our hearts are pounding and our legs are wobbling, then what? As our unconscious experience becomes conscious (as the result of our brain letting our body know and then identifying and analysing the data), we start to draw associations and allow the mind and the body to engage with the world. The significance of what we see, an art object worthy of love for instance, is interpreted or distinguished by our memory and our personal accumulation of information over our lives. When we are away from the object, we perceive the art work to be dispassionate, inanimate and impassive. Yet standing before the object, our perception shifts and we consider the art work to be alive and dynamic. I believe the ability to ‘fall’ for an art work reflects the viewer’s heart-breaking longing to ensnare the beauty (or ugliness) that has so captured his or her soul. Like the doppelganger who doesn’t recognise its own double, its own shadow, the viewer falls in love (Poe 1365). This perverse perception of love (perverse because we usually associate love as existing between humans) is real. Philosopher Paul Crowther writes about the phenomenology of visual art. Where I am talking about a romantic longing, a love of the love itself, the face falling for the face, the body falling for the body, bodily, Crowther breaks down the physical patterns of perceiving art. Though he does not deny the corporeal reality of the experience, he talks of the body operations discriminating at the level of perception, drawing on memories and future expectations and desire (Crowther, Phenomenology 62). Crowther says, “Through the painting, the virtual and the physical, the world and the body, are shown to inhabit one another simultaneously and inseparably” (Phenomenology 75). I am not sure that these experiences occur simultaneously or even in tandem. While we perceive the experience as full and complex and potentially revelatory, one element more likely informs the next and so on, but in a nanosecond of time. The bodily senses warn the heart which warns the mind. The mind activates the memories and experiences before alerting us to the world and the context and finally, the aesthetic judgement.Crowther’s perception of transcendence operates when reality is suspended in the mode of possibility. This informs my view that love of art functions as an impossibility of desire’s end, gratification must be pushed back every time. What of Crowther’s corporeal imagination? This is curious: how can we imagine with our bodies (as opposed to our mind and spirit)? This idea is virtual, in time and space outside those we are used to. This is an imagination that engages instantly, in a self-conscious way. Crowther refers to the virtually immobilised subject matter and the stationary observer and calls it a “suspension of tense” (Phenomenology 69). However I am interested in the movement of the spectator around the art work or in synchronicity with the artwork too. This continues the face to face, body to body, encounter of art.Crowther also writes of phenomenological depth as a condition of embodiment which is of significance to judgement; phenomenological depth is “shown through ways in which the creation of visual artworks embodies complex relations between the human subject and its objects of perception, knowledge, and action” (Phenomenology 9). Although Crowther is leaning on the making of the artwork more heavily than the viewers’ perception of it in this account, it relates well to the Australian artists and twins Silvana and Gabriella Mangano, whose action performances, presented in three-screened, large-scale video were represented in the 2012 Sydney Biennale. The Mangano twins collaborate on video performance works which focus on their embodied interpretations of the act of drawing. In the Mangano sisters’ 2001 Drawing 1, the twins stand beside a wall of paper, facing each other. While maintaining eye contact, they draw the same image on the wall, without seeing what mark they are making or what mark the other is making. This intuitive, physical, corporeal manifestation of their close connection becomes articulated on paper. Its uncanny nature, the shared creativity and the performative act of collaborative drawing is riveting. The spectator is both excluded and incorporated in this work. Such intimacy between siblings is exclusive and yet the participation of the spectator is necessary, as witnesses to this inexplicable ability to know where the other’s drawing will move next. The sisters are face to face but the spectator and the artwork also function in a face to face encounter; the rhythmic fluidity of movement on the video screen surface is the face of the artwork.When experiencing the Mangano works, we become aware of our own subjective physical experiences. Also, we are aware of the artists’ consciousness of their heightened physical relations with each other, while making the work. I am writing in an era of digital video and performance art, where sound, movement, space and shifts of temporality must be added to more traditional formalist criteria such as form, surface, line and colour. As such, our criteria for judgement of this new surge of highly technical (though often intuitively derived) work and the immersive, sometimes interactive, experiences of the audience have to change at the same pace. One of the best methods of aesthetic critique to use is the concept of embodiment, the perceptual forces at work when we are conscious of the experience of art. As I sit at my desk, I am vaguely aware of my fingers rattling across the keyboard and of my legs crossed beneath me. I am conscious of their function, as an occupied space within which my consciousness resides. “I know where each of my limbs is through a body image in which all are included. But the notion of body image is ambiguous,” (102) says Merleau-Ponty, and this is a “Continual translation into visual language of the kinaesthetic and articular impressions of the moment” (102). Mark Johnson reiterates this dilemma: “We are aware of what we see, but not of our seeing.” (5) This doesn’t only relate to the movement of the Mangano twins’ muscles, postures and joint positions in their videos. It also relates to the spectator’s posture and straining, our recoiling and absorption. If I lurch forward (Lingis 174) to see the video image of the twins as they walk across a plain in El Bruc, Spain, using Thonet wooden chairs as stilts in their 2009 work The Surround, and if my eyes widen, if my hands unclench and open, and if I touch my cheek in wonder, then, is this embodied reaction a legitimate normative response? Is this perception of the work, as a beautiful and desirable experience, an admissible form of judgement? If I feel moved, if my heart races, my skin prickles, does that mean the effect is as important as other technical, conceptual or formalist categories of success? Does this feeling refer to the possibility of new intelligence? An active body in a bodily space (Merleau-Ponty 104) as opposed to external space can be perceived because of darkness needed for the ‘theatre’ of the performance. Darkness is often the cue for audiences that there is performative information at work. In the Manganos’ videos in Spain (they completed several videos during a residency in El Bruc Spain), the darkness was the isolated and alienating landscape of a remote plain. In their 2010 work Neon, which was inspired by Atsuko Tanaka’s 1957 Electric Dress, the movement and flourish of coloured neon paper was filmed against a darkened background, which is the kind of theatre space Merleau-Ponty describes: the performative cue. In Neon the checkered and brightly coloured paper appeared waxy as the sisters moved it around their half-hidden bodies, as though blown by an imaginary wind. This is an example of how the black or darkened setting works as a stimulant for understanding the importance of the body at work within the dramatic space. This also escalates the performative nature of the experience, which in turn informs the spectator’s active reaction. Merleau-Ponty says, “the laying down of the first co-ordinates, the anchoring of the active body in an object, the situation of the body in the face of its tasks. Bodily space can be distinguished from external space and envelop its parts instead of spreading them out” (115) The viewer, however, is not disembodied, despite the occasional sensation of hallucination in the face of an artwork. The body is present, it is in, near, around and sometimes below the stimulus. Many art experiences are immersive, such as Mexican, Rafael Lorenzo Hemmer, and Dane, Olafur Eliasson, whose installations explore time, light and sound and require audience participation. The participant’s interaction causes an effect upon the artwork. We are more conscious of ourselves in these museum environments: we move slowly, we revolve and pause, with hands on hip, head cocked to the side. We smile, frown, sense, squint, laugh, listen and touch. Traditional art (such as painting) may not invite such extremes of sensory multiplicity, such extremes of mimicking movement and intimate immersion. “The fact that the self exists in such an horizon of past and possible experiences means that it can never know itself sufficiently as just this immediately given physical body. It inhabits that body in the sense of being able, as it were, to wander introspectively through memory and imagination to places, times and situations other than those of its present embodiment” (Crowther, Phenomenology 178). Crowther’s point is important in application to the discussion of embodiment as a normative criteria of aesthetic judgement. It is not just our embodied experience that we bring to the magistrate’s court room, for judgement, but our memory and knowledge and the context or environment of both our experience and the experience that is enacted in relation to the art work. So an argument for embodiment as a criteria for normative judgements would not function alone, but as an adjunct, an add-on, an addition to the list of already applied criteria. This approach of open honesty and sincerity to art is similar to the hopefulness of new love. This is not the sexualised perception, the tensions of eroticism, which Alphonso Lingis speaks of in his Beauty and Lust essay. I am not talking about how “the pattern of holes and orifices we sense in the other pulls at the layout of lips, fingers, breasts, thighs and genitals” nor “the violent emotions that sense the obscenity in anguish” (175-76), I am instead referring to a G-rated sense of attachment, a more romantic attitude of compassion, desire, empathy and affection. Those movements made by the Mangano twins in their videos, in slow motion, sometimes in reverse, in black and white, the actions and postures that flow and dance, peak and drop, swirl and fall: the play of beauty within space, remind me of other languorous mimetic accents taken from nature. I recall the rhythms of poetry I have read, the repetitions of rituals and patterns of behaviour in nature I have witnessed. This knowledge, experience, memory and awareness all contribute to the map of love which is directing me to different points in the performance. These contributors to my embodied experience are creating a new whole and also a new format for judgement. Elizabeth Grosz talks about body maps when she says, “the body is thus also a site of resistance...for it is capable of being self-marked, self-represented in alternative ways” (Inscriptions and Body Maps 64). I’m interested less in the marking and more in the idea of the power of bodily participation. This is power in terms of the personal and the social as transformative qualities. “Art reminds us of states of animal vigour,” Nietsche says (Grosz, Chaos 63). Elizabeth Grosz continues this idea by saying that sensations are composites (75) and that art is connected to sexual energies and impulses, to a common impulse for more (63). However I think there is a mistake in attributing sexuality, as prescribed by Lingis and Grosz, despite my awe and admiration for them both, to the impulses of art. They might seem or appear to be erotic or sexual urges but are they not something a little more fleeting, more abstract, more insouciant? These are the desires at close hand but it is what those desires really represent that count. Philosopher John Armstrong refers to a Vuillard painting in the Courtauld Institute: “This beautiful image reminds us that sexuality isn’t just about sex; it conveys a sense of trust and comfort which are connected to tender touch” (Armstrong 135). In other words, if we assume there is a transference of Freudian sexual intensity or libido to the art work, perhaps it is not the act of sex we crave but a more elaborate desire, a desire for old-fashioned love, respect and honour.Sue Best refers to the word communion to describe the rapturous transport of being close to the artwork but always kept at a certain distance (512). This relates to the condition of love, of desiring an object but never attaining it. This is arrested pleasure, otherwise known as torture. But the word communion also gives rise, for me, to an idea of religious communion, of drinking the wine and bread as metaphor for Christ’s blood and body. This concept of embodied virtue or pious love, of becoming one with the Lord has repetitions or parallels with the experience of art. The urge to consume, intermingle or become physically entangled with the object of our desire is more than a philosophical urge but a spiritual urge. It seems to me that embodiment is not just the physical realities and percepts of experience but that they stand, mnemonically and mimetically, for more abstract urges and desires, hopes and ambitions, outside the realm of the gallery space, the video space or the bodily space. Crowther says, “Art answers this psychological/ontological need. ...through the complex and ubiquitous ways in which it engages the imagination” (Defining Art 238). While our embodied or perceptual experiences might seem slight or of less importance at first, they gather weight when added to knowledge and desire. Bergson said, “But there is, in this necessary poverty of our conscious perception, something that is positive, that foretells spirit: it is in the etymological sense of the word, discernment” (31). This art love is an aspiration for more, for hopes and expectation that the art work I fall for will enlighten me, will enrich my experience. This art work reminds me of all the qualities and principles I crave, but know in my heart are just beyond my fingertips. Perhaps we can consider the acknowledgement of art love as, not only a means of discernment but also as a legitimate purpose, that is, to be bodily, emotionally and intellectually changed and to gain further knowledge.ReferencesArmstrong, John. Conditions of Love. London: Penguin, 2002.Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2004.Best, Sue. “Rethinking Visual Pleasure: Aesthetics and Affect.” Theory and Psychology 17 (2007): 4.Crowther, Paul. The Phenomenology of Visual Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.---. Defining Art: Creating the Canon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007.Menke, Christoph, Daniel Birnbaum, Isabell Graw and Daniel Loick. The Power of Judgement: A Debate on Aesthetic Critique. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.---. “Inscriptions and Body-Maps: Representations and the Corporeal.” Feminine/Masculine and Representation. Eds. Terry Threadgold and Anne Granny-France. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990. 62-74. Johnson, Mark. The Meaning of the Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.Lingis, Alphonso. “Beauty and Lust.” Journal of Phenomenological Pyschology 27 (1996): 174-192.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge Classics, 2002.Poe, Edgar Allen. “William Wilson: A Tale.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: Nortin, 1985.Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. New York: Dover, 1969.Sloterdijk, Peter. Bubbles, Spheres 1. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011.Stendhal. Love. London: Penguin, 2004.

If iconophobia is defined as the suspicion and anxiety towards the power exerted by images, its history is an ancient one in all of its Platonic, Christian, and Judaic forms. At its most radical, iconophobia results in an act of iconoclasm, or the total destruction of the image. At the other end of the spectrum, contemporary iconophobia may be more subtle. Images are simply withdrawn from circulation with the aim of eliminating their visibility. In his book Images in Spite of All, French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman questions the tradition of suspicion and denigration governing visual representations of the Holocaust, arguing we have abdicated our ethical obligation to try to imagine. This essay will argue that disruptions to traditional modes of spectatorship shift the terms of viewing from suspicion to ethical participation. By building on Didi-Huberman’s discussion of images and the spectatorial gaze, this essay will consider Laura Waddington’s 2002 documentary film Border. Waddington spent six months hiding with asylum seekers in the area surrounding the Red Cross refugee camp at Sangatte in northern France. I will argue that Waddington proposes a model of spectatorship that implicates the viewer into the ethical content of the film. By seeking to restore the dignity and humanity of the asylum seekers rather than viewing them with suspicion, Border is an acute reminder of our moral responsibility to bear witness to that which lies beyond the boundaries of conventional representations of asylum seekers.The economy managing the circulation of mainstream media images is a highly suspicious mechanism. After the initial process of image selection and distribution, what we are left with is an already homogenised collection of predictable and recyclable media images. The result is an increasingly iconophobic media gaze as the actual content of the image is depleted. In her essay “Precarious Life,” Judith Butler describes this economy in terms of the “normative processes” of control exercised by the mainstream media, arguing that the structurally unbalanced media representations of the ‘other’ result in creating a progressively dehumanised effect (Butler 146). This process of disidentification completes the iconophobic circle as the spectator, unable to develop empathy, views the dehumanised subject with increasing suspicion. Written in the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror, Butler’s insights are important as they alert us to the possibility of a breach or rupture in the image economy. It is against Butler’s normative processes that Didi-Huberman’s critique of Holocaust iconoclasm and Waddington’s Border propose a slippage in representation and spectatorship capable of disrupting the homogeneity of the mass circulation of images.Most images that have come to represent the Holocaust in our collective memory were either recorded by the Nazis for propaganda or by the Allies on liberation in 1945. Virtually no photographs exist from inside the concentration camps. This is distinct from the endlessly recycled images of gaunt, emaciated survivors and bulldozers pushing aside corpses which have become critical in defining Holocaust iconography (Saxton 14). Familiar and recognisable, this visual record constitutes a “visual memory bank” that we readily draw upon when conjuring up images of the Holocaust. What occurs, however, when an image falls outside the familiar corpus of Holocaust representation? This was the question raised in a now infamous exhibition held in Paris in 2001 (Chéroux). The exhibition included four small photographs secretly taken by members of the Sonderkommando inside the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944. The Sonderkommando were the group of prisoners who were delegated the task of the day-to-day running of the crematoria. The photographs were smuggled out of the camps in a tube of toothpaste, and eventually reached the Polish Resistance.By evading the surveillance of the SS the photographs present a breach in the economy of Holocaust iconography. They exist as an exception to the rule, mere fragments stolen from beneath the all-seeing eye of the SS Guards and their watch towers. Despite operating in an impossible situation, the inmate maintained the belief that these images could provide visual proof of the existence of the gas chambers. The images are testimony produced inside the camp itself, a direct challenge to the discourse emphasising the prohibition of representation of the Holocaust and in particular the gas chambers. Figure 1 The Auschwitz crematorium in operation, photograph by Sonderkommando prisoners August 1944 © www.auschwitz.org.plDidi-Huberman’s essay marks a point of departure from the iconophobia which has stressed the unimaginable (Lanzmann), unknowable (Lyotard), and ultimately unrepresentable (Levinas) nature of the Holocaust since the 1980s. Denigrated and derided, images have been treated suspiciously by this philosophical line of thought, emphasising the irretrievable gap between representation and the Holocaust. In a direct assault on the tradition of framing the Holocaust as unrepresentable, Didi-Huberman’s essay becomes a plea to the moral and ethical responsibility to bear witness. He writes of the obligation to these images, arguing that “it is a response we must offer, as a debt to the words and images that certain prisoners snatched, for us, from the harrowing Real of their experience” (3). The photographs are not simply archival documents, but a testament to the humanity of the members of the Sonderkommando the Nazis sought to erase.Suspicion towards the potential power exerted by images has been neutralised by models of spectatorship privileging the viewer’s mastery and control. In traditional theories of film spectatorship, the spectator is rendered in terms of a general omnipotence described by Christian Metz as “an all-powerful position which is of God himself...” (49). It is a model of spectatorship that promotes mastery over the image by privileging the unilateral gaze of the spectator. Alternatively, Didi-Huberman evokes a long counter tradition within French literature and philosophy of the “seer seen,” where the object of the spectator’s gaze is endowed with the ability to return the gaze resulting in various degrees of anxiety and paranoia. The image of the “seer seen” recurs throughout the writing of Baudelaire, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Barthes, negating the unilateral gaze of an omnipotent spectator (Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons).Didi-Huberman explicitly draws upon Jacques Lacan’s thinking about the gaze in light of this tradition of the image looking back. In his 1964 seminars on vision in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan dedicates several chapters to demonstrate how the visual field is structured by the symbolic order, the real, symbolic and the imaginary. Following Lacan, Didi-Huberman introduces two terms, the veil-image and the tear-image, which are analogous with Lacan’s imaginary and the real. The imaginary, with its connotations of illusion and fantasy, provides the sense of wholeness in both ourselves and what we perceive. For Didi-Huberman, the imaginary corresponds with the veil-image. Within the canon of Holocaust photography, the veil-image is the image “where nobody really looks,” the screen or veil maintaining the spectator’s illusion of mastery (81). We might say that in the circulation of Holocaust atrocity images, the veil serves to anaesthetise and normalise the content of the image.Lacan’s writing on the gaze, however, undermines the spectator’s mastery over the image by placing the spectator not at the all-seeing apex of the visual field, but located firmly within the visual field of the image. Lacan writes, “in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am the picture...I am photo-graphed” (Lacan 106). The spectator is ensnared in the gaze of the image as the gaze is reciprocated. For Didi-Huberman, the veil-image seeks to disarm the threat to the spectator being caught in the image-gaze. Lacan describes this neutralisation in terms of “the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting. Something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the gaze” (101). Further on, Lacan expresses this in terms of the dompte-regarde, or a taming of the gaze (109). The veil-image maintains the fiction of the spectator’s ascendency by subduing the threat of the image-gaze. In opposition to the veil-image is the tear-image, in which for Didi-Huberman “a fragment of the real escapes” (81). This represents a rupture in the visual field. The real is presented here in terms of the tuché, or missed encounter, resulting in the spectator’s anxiety and trauma. As the real cannot be represented, it is the point where representation collapses, rupturing the illusion of coherency maintained by the veil-image. Operating as an exception or disruption to the rule, the tear-image disrupts the image economy. No longer neutralised, the image returns the gaze, shattering the illusion of the all-seeing mastery of the spectator. Didi-Huberman describes this tearing exception to the rule, “where everyone suddenly feels looked at” (81).To treat the Sonderkommando photographs as tear-images, not veil-images, we are offered a departure from classic models of spectatorship. We are forced to align ourselves and identify with the “inhuman” gaze of the Sonderkommando. The obvious response is to recoil. The gaze here is not the paranoid Sartrean gaze, evoking shame in the spectator-as-voyeur. Nor are these photographs reassuring narcissistic veil-images, but will always remain the inimical gaze of the Other—tearing, ripping images, which nonetheless demand that we do not turn away. It is an ethical response we must offer. If the power of the tear-image resides in its ability to disrupt traditional modes of representation and spectatorship, I would like to discuss this in relation to Laura Waddington’s 2004 film Border. Waddington is a Brussels based filmmaker with a particular interest in documenting the movement of displaced peoples. Just as the Sonderkommando photographs were taken clandestinely from beneath the gaze of the SS, Waddington evaded the surveillance of the French police and helicopter patrols as she bore witness to the plight of asylum seekers trying to reach England. Border presents her stolen testimony, operating outside the familiar iconography of mainstream media’s representation of asylum seekers. If we were to consider the portrayal of asylum seekers by the Australian media in terms of the veil-image, we are left with a predictable body of homogenised and neutralised stock media images. The myth of Australia being overrun by boat people is reinforced by the visual iconography of the news media. Much like the iconography of the Holocaust, these types of images have come to define the representations of asylum seekers. Traceable back to the 2001 Tampa affair images tend to be highly militarised, frequently with Australian Navy patrol boats in the background. The images reinforce the ‘stop the boats’ rhetoric exhibited on both sides of politics, paradoxically often working against the grain of the article’s editorial content. Figure 2 Thursday 16 Apr 2009 there was an explosion on board a suspected illegal entry vessel (SIEV) 36 in the vicinity of Ashmore Reef. © Commonwealth of Australia 2011Figure 3 The crew of HMAS Albany, Attack One, board suspected illegal entry vessel (SIEV) 38 © Commonwealth of Australia 2011 The media gaze is structurally unbalanced against the suffering of asylum seekers. In Australia asylum seekers are detained in mandatory detention, in remote sites such as Christmas Island and Woomera. Worryingly, the Department of Immigration maintains strict control over media representations of the conditions inside the camps, resulting in a further abstraction of representation. Geographical isolation coupled with a lack of transparent media access contributes to the ongoing process of dehumanisation of the asylum seekers. Judith Butler describes this as “The erasure of that suffering through the prohibition of images and representations” (146). In the endless recycling of images of leaky fishing boats and the perimeters of detention centres, our critical capacity to engage becomes progressively eroded. These images fulfil the function of the veil-image, where nobody really looks as there is nothing left to see. Figure 4 Asylum seekers arrive by boat on Christmas Island, Friday, July 8, 2011. AAP Image/JOSH JERGA Figure 5 Woomera Detention Centre. AAP Image/ROB HUTCHISON By reading Laura Waddington’s Border against an iconophobic media gaze, we are afforded the opportunity to reconsider this image economy and the suspicious gaze of the spectator it seeks to solicit. Border reminds us of the paradoxical function of the news image—it shows us everything, but nothing at all. In a subtle interrogation of our indifference to the existence of asylum seekers and their suffering, Border is a record of the six months Waddington spent hidden in the fields surrounding the French Red Cross camp at Sangatte in 2002. Sangatte is a small town in northern France, just south of Calais and only one and a half hours’ drive from Paris. The asylum seekers are predominantly Afghan and Iraqi. Border is a record of the last stop in their long desperate journey to reach England, which then had comparatively humane asylum seeking policies. The men are attempting to cross the channel tunnel, hidden in trucks and on freight trains. Many are killed or violently injured in their attempts to evade capture by the French police. Nevertheless they are sustained by the hope that England will offer them “a better life.” Figure 6 Still from Border showing asylum seekers in the fields of Sangatte ©Laura Waddington 2002Waddington dedicates the film, “for those I met.” It is an attempt to restore the humanity and dignity of the people who are denied individual identities. Waddington refuses to let “those who I met” remain nameless. She names them—Omar, Muhammad, Abdulla—and narrates their individual stories. Border is Waddington’s attempt to return a voice to those who have been systematically dehumanised, by-products of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his classic account of documentary, Bill Nichols describes six modes of documentary representation (99–138). In Border, Waddington is working in the participatory mode, going into the field and participating in the lives of others (115). It is via this mode of representation that Waddington is able to heighten the ethical encounter with the asylum seekers. Waddington was afforded no special status as a filmmaker, but lived as a refugee among the asylum seekers during the six months of filming. At no point are we granted visible access to Waddington, yet we are acutely aware of her presence. She is physically participating in the drama unfolding before her. At times, we become alert to her immediate physical danger, as she too runs through the fields away from the police and their dogs.The suspicious gaze is predicated on maintaining a controlled distance between the spectator and the subject. Michele Aaron (82–123) has recently argued for a model of spectatorship as an intrinsically ethical encounter. Aaron demonstrates that spectatorship is not neutral but always complicit—it is a contract between the spectator and the film. Particularly relevant to the purposes of this essay is her argument concerning the “merging gaze,” where the gaze of the filmmaker and spectator are collapsed. This has the effect of folding the spectator into the film’s narrative (93). Waddington exploits the documentary medium to implicate the spectator into the structure of the film. It is in Waddington’s full participatory immersion into the documentary itself that undermines the conventional distance maintained by the spectator. The spectator can no longer remain neutral as the lines of demarcation between filmmaker and spectator collapse.Waddington was shooting alone with a small video camera at night in extremely low-light conditions. The opening scene is dark and grainy, refusing immediate entry into the film. As our eyes gradually adjust to the light, we realise we are looking at a young man, concealed in the bushes from the menacing glare of the lights of oncoming traffic. Waddington does not afford us the all-perceiving spectatorial mastery over the image. Rather, we are crouching with her as she records the furtive movements of the man. The background sound, a subtle and persistent hum, adds to a growing disquiet, a looming sense of apprehension concerning the fate of these asylum seekers. Figure 7 Grainy still showing the Red Cross camp in Border ©Laura Waddington 2002Waddington’s commentary has been deliberately pared back and her voice over is minimal with extended periods of silence. The camera alternates from meditative, lingering shots taken from the safety offered by the Red Cross camp, to the fields where the shots are truncated and chaotically framed. The actions of the asylum seekers jerk and shudder, producing an image akin to the flicker effect of early silent cinema because the film is not running at the full rate of 24 frames per second. Here the images become blurred to the point of unintelligibility. Like the Sonderkommando photographs, the asylum seekers exist as image-fragments, shards stolen by Waddington’s camera as she too works hard to evade capture. Tension gradually increases throughout the film, cumulating in a riot scene after a decision to close the camp down. The sweeping search lights of the police helicopter remind us of the increased surveillance undertaken by the border patrols. Without the safety of the Red Cross camp, the asylum seekers are offered no protection from the increasing police brutality. With nowhere else to go, the asylum seekers are forced into the town of Sangatte itself, to sleep in the streets. They are huddled together, and there is a faintly discernible chant repeating in the background, calling to the UN for help. At points during the riot scene, Waddington completely cuts the sound, enveloping the film in a haunting silence. We are left with a mute montage of distressing still images recording the clash between the asylum seekers and police. Again, we are reminded of Waddington’s lack of immunity to the violence, as the camera is deliberately knocked from her hand by a police officer. Figure 8 Clash between asylum seekers and police in Border ©Laura Waddington 2002It is via the merged gaze of the camera and the asylum seekers that Waddington exposes the fictional mastery of the spectator’s gaze. The fury of the tear-image is unleashed as the image-gaze absorbs the spectator into its visual field. No longer pacified by the veil, the spectator is unable to retreat to familiar modes of spectatorship to neutralise and disarm the image. With no possible recourse to desire and fantasy, the encounter becomes intrinsically ethical. Refusing to be neutralised by the Lacanian veil, the tear-image resists the anaesthetising effects of recycled and predictable images of asylum seekers.This essay has argued that a suspicious spectator is the product of an iconophobic media gaze. In the endless process of recycling, the critical capacity of the image to engage the viewer becomes progressively disarmed. Didi-Huberman’s reworking of the Lacanian gaze proposes a model of spectatorship designed to disrupt this iconophobic image economy. The veil-image asks little from us as spectators beyond our complicity. Protected by the gaze of the image, the fiction of the all—perceiving spectator is maintained. By abandoning this model of spectatorship as Didi-Huberman and Waddington are asking us to do, the unidirectional relationship between the viewer and the image is undermined. The terms of spectatorship may be relocated from suspicion to an ethical, participatory mode of engagement. We are laying down our weapons to receive the gaze of the Other. ReferencesAaron, Michele. Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On. London: Wallflower, 2007.Border. Waddington, Laura. Love Stream Productions, 2004.Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.London: Verso, 2004.Chéroux, Clément, ed. Mémoires des Camps. Photographies des Camps de Concentration et d'Extermination Nazis, 1933-1999. Paris: Marval, 2001.Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Trans. Lillis, Shane B. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.Didi-Huberman, Georges. Ce Que Nous Voyons, Ce Qui Nous regarde.Critique. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1992.Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis.Trans. Sheridan, Alan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.Levinas, Emmanuel. "Reality and its Shadow." The Levinas Reader. Ed. Hand, Seán. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 130–43.Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1982.Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2001.Saxton, Libby. Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust. London: Wallflower, 2008.

Fig 1: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. Introduction NOTE: Rangoon, Burma has been known as Yangon, Myanmar, since 2006. I use Rangoon and Burma for the period prior to 2006 and Yangon and Myanmar for the period thereafter. In addition, I have removed the name of any activist currently in Myanmar due to the recent policy of executing political prisoners. On 1 February 2021, Myanmar was again plunged into political turmoil when the military illegally overthrew the country’s democratically elected government. This is the third time Myanmar, formally known as Burma, has been subject to a coup d’état; violent seizures of power took place in 1962 and in 1988-90. While those two earlier military governments met with opposition spearheaded by students and student organisations, in 2021 the military faced organised resistance through a mass Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) initiated by government healthcare workers who refused to come to work. They were joined by private sector “strikes” and, perhaps most visible of all to western viewers, mass street demonstrations “led” by “Gen Z” activists—young people who had come of age during Myanmar’s brief decade of democracy. There is little doubt that the success of the CDM and associated protests is due to the widespread coverage and reach of social media as well as the creative communications skills of the country’s first “generation of digital natives”, who are sufficiently familiar and comfortable with social platforms to “participate and shape their identities in communication and dialogue with global digital media content” (Jordt et al. 12 ). The leveraging of global culture, including the use of English in protest signs, was notable in garnering international media coverage and so keeping Myanmar’s political plight front-of-mind with governments around the world. Yet this is not the whole story behind the effectiveness of these campaigns. As Lisa Brooten argues, contemporary networks are built on “decades of behind-the-scenes activism to build a multi-ethnic civil society” (East Asia Forum). The leading democracy activist, Min Ko Naing, aligned “veteran activists from previous generations with novice Gen Z activists”, declaring “this revolution represents a combination of Generations X, Y and Z in fighting against the military dictatorship’” (Jordt et al. 18). Similarly, the creative strategies used by 2021’s digital campaigners also build on protests by earlier generations of young, creative people. This paper looks at two creative protest across the generations. The first is “secret” fashion photography of the late 1970s collected in Lukas Birk’s Yangon Fashion 1979 – Fashion=Resistance. The second is the contemporary #100projectors campaign, a “projection project for Myanmar democracy movement against the military dictatorship” (in the interest of full disclosure, I took part in the #100projectors project). Drawing from the contemporary advertising principle of “segmentation”, the communications practice where potential consumers are divided into “subgroups … based on specific characteristics and needs” (WARC 1), as well as contemporary thinking on the “aesthetics” of “cosmopolitanism”, (Papastergiadis, Featherstone, and Christensen), I argue that contemporary creative strategies can be traced back to the creative tactics of resistance employed by earlier generations of protesters and their re-imagining of “national space and its politics” (Christensen 556) in the interstices of cosmopolitan Rangoon, Burma, and Yangon, Myanmar. #100projectors Myanmar experienced two distinct periods of military rule, the Socialist era between 1962 and 1988 under General Ne Win and the era under the State Law and Order Restoration Council – State Peace and Development Council between 1988 and 2011. These were followed by a semi-civilian era from 2011 to 2021 (Carlson 117). The coup in 2021 marks a return to extreme forms of control, censorship, and surveillance. Ne Win’s era of military rule saw a push for Burmanisation enforced through “significant cultural restrictions”, ostensibly to protect national culture and unity, but more likely to “limit opportunities for internal dissent” (Carlson 117). Cultural restrictions applied to art, literature, film, television, as well as dress. Despite these prohibitions, in the 1970s Rangoon's young people smuggled in illegal western fashion magazines, such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue, and commissioned local tailors to make up the clothes they saw there. Bell-bottoms, mini-skirts, western-style suits were worn in “secret” fashion shoots, with the models posing for portraits at Rangoon photographic studios such as the Sino-Burmese owned Har Si Yone in Chinatown. Some of the wealthier fashionistas even came for weekly shoots. Demand was so high, a second branch devoted to these photographic sessions was opened with its own stock of costumes and accessories. Copies of these head to toe fashion portraits, printed on 12 x 4 cm paper, were shared with friends and family; keeping portrait albums was a popular practice in Burma and had been since the 1920s and 30s (Birk, Burmese Photographers 113). The photos that survive this era are collected in Lukas Birk’s Yangon Fashion 1979 – Fashion=Resistance. #100projectors was launched in February 2021 by a group of young visual and video artists with the aim of resisting the coup and demanding the return of democracy. Initially a small group of projectionists or “projector fighters”, as the title suggests they plan to amplify their voices by growing their national and international network to 100. #100projectors is one of many campaigns, movements, and fundraisers devised by artists and creatives to protest the coup and advocate for revolution in Myanmar. Other notable examples, all run by Gen Z activists, include the Easter Egg, Watermelon, Flash, and Marching Shoes strikes. The Marching Shoe Strike, which featured images of flowers in shoes, representing those who had died in protests, achieved a reach of 65.2 million in country with 1.4 million interactions across digital channels (VERO, 64) and all of these campaigns were covered by the international press, including The Guardian, Reuters, The Straits Times, and VOA East Asia Pacific Session, as well as arts magazines around the world (for example Hyperallergic, published in Brooklyn). #100projectors material has been projected in Finland, Scotland, and Australia. The campaign was written about in various art magazines and their Video #7 was screened at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in February 2022 as part of Defiant Art: A Year of Resistance to the Myanmar Coup. At first glance, these two examples seem distant in both their aims and achievements. Fashion photos, taken in secret and shared privately, could be more accurately described as a grassroots social practice rather than a political movement. While Birk describes the act of taking these images as “a rebellion” and “an escape” in a political climate when “a pair of flowers and a pair of sunglasses might just start a revolution”, the fashionistas’ photographs seem “ephemeral” at best, or what Mina Roces describes as the subtlest form of resistance or ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott in Roces 7). By contrast, #100projectors has all the hallmarks of a polished communications campaign. They have a logo and slogans: “We fight for light” and “The revolution must win”. There is a media plan, which includes the use of digital channels, encrypted messaging, live broadcasts, as well as in-situ projections. Finally, there is a carefully “targeted” audience of potential projectionists. It is this process of defining a target audience, based on segmentation, that is particularly astute and sophisticated. Traditionally, segmentation defined audiences based on demographics, geodemographics, and self-identification. However, in the online era segments are more likely to be based on behaviour and activities revealed in search data as well as shares, depending on preferences for privacy and permission. Put another way, as a digital subject, “you are what you choose to share” (WARC 1). The audience for #100projectors includes artists and creative people around the world who choose to share political video art. They are connected through digital platforms including Facebook as well as encrypted messaging. Yet this contemporary description of digital subjectivity, “you are what you choose to share”, also neatly describes the Yangon fashionistas and the ways in which they resist the political status quo. Photographic portraits have always been popular in Burma and so this collection does not look especially radical. Initially, the portraits seem to speak only about status, taste, and modernity. Several subjects within the collection are shown in national or ethnic dress, in keeping with the governments edict that Burma consisted of 135 ethnicities and 8 official races. In addition, there is a portrait of a soldier in full uniform. But the majority of the images are of men and women in “modern” western gear typical of the 1970s. With their wide smiles and careful poses, these men and women look like they’re performing sophisticated worldliness as well as showing off their wealth. They are cosmopolitan adepts taking part in international culture. Status is implicit in the accessories, from sunglasses to jewellery. One portrait is shot at mid-range so that it clearly features a landline phone. In 1970s Burma, this was an object out of reach for most. Landlines were both prohibitively expensive and reserved for the true elites. To make a phone call, most people had to line up at special market stalls. To be photographed with a phone, in western clothes (to be photographed at all), seems more about aspiration than anarchy. In the context of Ne Win’s Burma, however, the portraits clearly capture a form of political agency. Burma had strict edicts for dress and comportment: kissing in public was banned and Burmese citizens were obliged to wear Burmese dress, with western styles considered degenerate. Long hair, despite being what Burmese men traditionally wore prior to colonisation, was also deemed too western and consequently “outlawed” (Edwards 133). Dress was not only proscribed but hierarchised and heavily gendered; only military men had “the right to wear trousers” (Edwards 133). Public disrespect of the all-powerful, paranoid, and vindictive military (known as “sit tat” for military or army versus “Tatmadaw” for the good Myanmar army) was dangerous bordering on the suicidal. Consequently, wearing shoulder-length hair, wide bell bottoms, western-style suits, and “risqué” mini-skirts could all be considered acts of at least daring and definitely defiance. Not only are these photographs a challenge to gender constructions in a country ruled by a hyper-masculine army, but these images also question the nature of what it meant to be Burmese at a time when Burmeseness itself was rigidly codified. Recording such acts on film and then sharing the images entailed further risk. Thus, these models are, as Mina Roces puts it, “express[ing] their agency through sartorial change” (Roces 5). Fig. 2: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot – illicit dress and hair. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. Fig. 3: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. Roces also notes the “challenge” of making protest visible in spaces “severely limited” under authoritarian regimes (Roces 10). Burma under the Socialist government was a particularly difficult place in which to mount any form of resistance. Consequences included imprisonment or even execution, as in the case of the student leader Tin Maung Oo. Ma Thida, a writer and human rights advocate herself jailed for her work, explains the use of creative tools such as metaphor in a famous story about a crab by the writer and journalist Hanthawaddy U Win Tin: The crab, being hard-shelled, was well protected and could not be harmed. However, the mosquito, despite being a far smaller animal, could bite the eyes of the crab, leading to the crab’s eventual death. ... Readers drew the conclusion that the socialist government of Ne Win was the crab that could be destabilized if a weakness could be found. (Thida 317) If the metaphor of a crab defeated by a mosquito held political meaning, then being photographed in prohibited fashions was a more overt way of making defiance and resistant “visible”. While that visibility seems ephemeral, the fashionistas also found a way not only to be seen by the camera in their rebellious clothing, but also by a “public” or audience of those with whom they shared their images. The act of exchanging portraits, what Birk describes as “old-school Instagram”, anticipates not only the shared selfie, but also the basis of successful contemporary social campaigns, which relied in part on networks sharing posts to amplify their message (Birk, Yangon Fashion 17). What the fashionistas also demonstrate is that an act of rebellion can also be a means of testing the limits of conformity, of the need for beauty, of the human desire to look beautiful. Acts of rebellion are also acts of celebration and so, solidarity. Fig. 4: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot – illicit dress length. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. Fig. 5: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot – illicit trousers. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. As the art critic and cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis writes, “the cosmopolitan imagination in contemporary art could be defined as an aesthetic of openness that engenders a global sense of inter-connectedness” (207). Inter-connectedness and its possibilities and limits shape the aesthetic imaginary of both the secret fashion shoots of 1970s Rangoon and the artists and videographers of 2021. In the videos of the #100projectors project and the fashion portraits of stylish Rangoonites, interconnection comes as a form of aesthetic blending, a conversation that transcends the border. The sitter posing in illicit western clothes in a photo studio in the heart of Rangoon, then Burma’s capital and seat of power, cannot help but point out that borders are permeable, and that national identity is temporally-based, transitory, and full of slippages. In this spot, 40-odd years earlier, Burmese nationalists used dress as a means of publicly supporting the nationalist cause (Edwards, Roces). Like the portraits, the #100projector videos blend global and local perspectives on Myanmar. Combining paintings, drawings, graphics, performance art recordings, as well as photography, the work shares the ‘instagrammable’ quality of the Easter Egg, Watermelon, and Marching Shoes strikes with their bright colours and focus on people—or the conspicuous lack of people and the example of the Silent Strike. Graphics are in Burmese as well as English. Video #6 was linked to International Women’s Day. Other graphics reference American artists such as Shepherd Fairey and his Hope poster, which was adapted to feature Aung San Suu Kyi’s face during then-President Obama’s visit in 2012. The videos also include direct messages related to political entities such as Video #3, which voiced support for the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hlutaw (CRPH), a group of 15 elected MPs who represented the ideals of Gen Z youth (Jordt et al., viii). This would not necessarily be understood by an international viewer. Also of note is the prevalence of the colour red, associated with Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD. Red is one of the three “political” colours formerly banned from paintings under SLORC. The other two were white, associated with the flowers Aung Sang Suu Kyi wore in her hair, and black, symbolic of negative feelings towards the regime (Carlson, 145). The Burmese master Aung Myint chose to paint exclusively in the banned colours as an ongoing act of defiance, and these videos reflect that history. The videos and portraits may propose that culturally, the world is interconnected. But implicit in this position is also the failure of “interconnectedness”. The question that arises with every viewing of a video or Instagram post or Facebook plea or groovy portrait is: what can these protesters, despite the risks they are prepared to take, realistically expect from the rest of the world in terms of help to remove the unwanted military government? Interconnected or not, political misfortune is the most effective form of national border. Perhaps the most powerful imaginative association with both the #100projectors video projections and fashionistas portraits is the promise of transformation, in particular the transformations possible in a city like Rangoon / Yangon. In his discussion of the cosmopolitan space of the city, Christensen notes that although “digital transformations touch vast swathes of political, economic and everyday life”, it is the city that retains supreme significance as a space not easily reducible to an entity beneath the national, regional, or global (556). The city is dynamic, “governed by the structural forces of politics and economy as well as moralities and solidarities of both conservative and liberal sorts”, where “othered voices and imaginaries find presence” in a mix that leads to “contestations” (556). Both the fashionistas and the video artists of the #100projectors use their creative work to contest the ‘national’ space from the interstices of the city. In the studio these transformations of the bodies of Burmese subjects into international “citizens of the world” contest Ne Win’s Burma and reimagine the idea of nation. They take place in the Chinatown, a relic of the old, colonial Rangoon, a plural city and one of the world’s largest migrant ports, where "mobility, foreignness and cross-cultural hybridity" were essential to its make-up (Aung Thin 778). In their instructions on how to project their ideas as a form of public art to gain audience, the #100projectors artists suggest projectors get “full on creative with other ways: projecting on people, outdoor cinema, gallery projection” (#100projectors). It is this idea projection as an overlay, a doubling of the everyday that evokes the possibility of transformation. The #100projector videos screen on Rangoon bridges, reconfiguring the city, albeit temporarily. Meanwhile, Rangoon is doubled onto other cities, towns, villages, communities, projected onto screens but also walls, fences, the sides of buildings in Finland, Scotland, Australia, and elsewhere. Conclusion In this article I have compared the recent #100projectors creative campaign of resistance against the 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar with the “fashionistas” of 1970 and their “secret” photo shoots. While the #100projectors is a contemporary digital campaign, some of the creative tactics employed, such as dissemination and identifying audiences, can be traced back to the practices of Rangoon’s fashionistas of the 1970s. ­­Creative resistance begins with an act of imagination. The creative strategies of resistance examined here share certain imaginative qualities of connection, a privileging of the ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘interconnectedness’ as well as the transformativity of actual space, with the streets of Rangoon, itself a cosmopolitan city. References @100projectors Instagram account. <https://www.instagram.com/100projectors/>. @Artphy_1 Instagram account. <https://www.instagram.com/artphy_1/>. 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I love Darwin, I love it up here, I love the north, I love the swamp. It’s the energy; it’s unpredictable, totally unpredictable. Whether that’s because people are coming and going… It’s probably because of the changeability of the weather; I love the wet season, it’s a dynamic place. I am eventually planning to move down south for a while, I have to, I’ve got family commitments and so on and the thing that worries me most is that it’s all so predictable down there. So Darwin has an energy, it’s alive, I absolutely love it, I absolutely love it. The people that come up here come here because they read that energy I believe; it’s a dynamic place, a very exciting place. Enthusiasm drives all people to make decisions and act, often without thorough thought. It is an important aspect of human life and is needed for development and risk-taking. Much has been written about the key driving role played by enthusiasm in the creative industries in enabling them to thrive (Hesmondhalgh; Leadbeater and Miller). Indeed, much of the focus around enthusiasm and the creative industries has concerned itself with the degree to which exploitation of labour is made possible by the eagerness of creatives to ‘get a foot in the door’, or simply to do the work they love; this is most often discussed in terms of ‘precarious labour’ (Kucklich; Luckman; Neilson and Rossiter; Ross; Terranova). Precarious labour practices , as explained by Neilson and Rossiter, “generate new forms of subjectivity and connection, organised about networks of communication, cognition, and affect”. However there are also other ways in which enthusiasm can be apparent in the work of creative practitioners; for example, not only in relation to their work, but how this relates to, and is inspired by, the spaces and communities within which it is undertaken. As Drake recently argued, the relationship to locality is an important part of creative practice and can, in and of itself, be “a source of aesthetic inspiration” (Drake 512). This article will explore the relationship between enthusiasm, creative industries and place, using interview transcript data generated as part of the ARC funded Linkage project ‘Creative Tropical City: Mapping Darwin’s Creative Industries’. In keeping with the migration statistics which point to Darwin as a city with considerable population turn-over, many of the people who were interviewed discussed moving to Darwin and the reasons they have stayed. This poses important questions, for example: what has enthused people to move to Darwin to practice within their creative industries, and what has motivated them to stay?The Relationship between ‘Enthusiasm’ and ‘Motivation’ Enthusiasm, defined here as “the dynamic motivator that keeps one persistently working toward his goal” (Peale 4) can be manifested in a number of ways. It can enhance creative activities, enable a move, and it can be a motivating factor in creating change. As Kant explains of enthusiasm: “The idea of the good to which affection is superadded is enthusiasm. This state of mind appears to be sublime: so much so that there is a common saying that nothing great can be achieved without it” (90). For enthusiasm to take hold there must first be a passion from which leads to an excitement that appears to be ‘sublime’ (Kant 90). It could be argued that this leads to decisions being made that may be regrettable, however the question remains, what enthuses us to make decisions that will greatly impact our life? There are many decisions that require enthusiasm for a final answer to be produced. Excitement must be present and well established for an enthused decision to be made. Cultural enthusiasm can be produced through mass motivation. As we will see here, the people of Darwin drawn upon here demonstrate such enthusiasm in regards to their creative community, especially when this has involved moving to (distant) Darwin, and leaving family, friends and existing networks. It is arguable that enthusiasm cannot exist without motivation, while motivation can exist without enthusiasm (Maslow, Toward). Motivation drives us to begin and carry through certain acts. Enthusiasm allows us the excitement and passion to create a change but motivation is needed to carry it through. Motivation is another step in the process of decision making from enthusiasm. A person can be enthused to take action, but there needs to be motivation to follow through on the decision. Max Weber argues that there is a “rational understanding of motivation, which consists in placing the act in an intelligible and more inclusive context of meaning” (Weber, Henderson & Parsons, 95). There are rational motivational factors that enable a person to participate in an activity, such as payment or reward. Motivation can be found through both paid and unpaid work, as Weber discusses “elements of the motivation of economic activity under the conditions of a market economy: … the fact that they fun the risk of going entirely without provisions, both for themselves and for those personal dependents, such as children, wives, sometimes parents” (110). Within contemporary capitalist culture there is a requirement to work to be able to provide for oneself as well as family. These opportunities require employment and/or an income. However, as the literature on precarious labour in the creative industries all too readily attests to, volunteer and unpaid work too, require forms of motivation, such a love of one’s work or the possibility of making more lucrative opportunities arise. ‘Enthusiasm’ for Darwin as a Creative Place Enthusiasm can be achieved in many ways, however, in the case of the Darwin creative industry interviewees, what enthuses them to move to, or back to, Darwin? What is attracting them to stay? While leaving one’s home and/or established place of residence is always a big move, the choice to move to and stay in a small, extremely isolated city such as Darwin is almost always circumscribed by a strong emotional connection to the place. It is in this emotional relationship to place that a sense of the sublime can start to become evident, often expressed in terms of the city’s tropical savannah climate or unique remoteness from Australia, but proximity to Asia: It’s just a marvellous place, in terms of the natural environment, I am mesmerised by it and feel a real connection to it, because it is just so marvellous. The other positives are you can't beat the lifestyle, living in shorts and t-shirts and literally outside all the time. And the other thing I love about it is, in terms of the demography of the place, there really is no such thing as the best suburb, or the best street, it is incredible mix, so you can have million dollar mansions with a housing commission block of flats right next door, that you do have black and white and all the shades in between, living in the one street. My entire professional career, has been about promoting understanding and fostering tolerance and appreciation of other cultures. … The community here consider that Asian expanse just to our north as a connecting space.So there are a number of factors connecting creative people to Darwin. On top of the more basic, yet nonetheless motivated reasons for working, there is an enthusiasm evident in peoples’ productive-creative lives. It is a remote area that allows people the time and space to be able to practice their creative activities, including architecture, painting, dance and music as well as the time to think. There are a number of locations that the 61 people who have acknowledged having moved to Darwin from. Some were born in Darwin and moved away for education only to return to practice their creative activities. For example, one acknowledged bringing her skills back with her: Originally from here, I was born in Darwin, so – and I left here when I was 21, and went to live in London, and then I lived in New Zealand for a while. I lived in Sydney … as well, and then came back again. So, bringing those skills, obviously, with me and to try and set up something that you’d find interstate. Inspiration is a vital aspect of enthusiasm. Wordsworth speaks of inspiration in relation to the bible suggesting, “it has an ever-growing adaptation to the future, as the future rises into the present” (420). This idea of inspiration can be carried through to the people of Darwin, as they are inspired to complete works and to stay in Darwin their future ideas meld with the present and are acted out. As one interviewee discusses Darwin is full of inspiration: “The whole of Darwin inspires us because of what Darwin is, because of the natural environment, because of those special characteristics that Darwin has as a city, its different to the other cities in Australia.” In the context of what motivated people to come to Darwin, for some the enthusiasm lies in the people and the situations that Darwin can offer: “One of the reasons I moved here and what I’ve discovered is …It’s less competitive …[there is a] welcoming nature [to] the arts community.” While there may be momentary excitement for an idea following an initial bout of enthusiasm, motivation is required for the idea to progress and manifest into a long-term situation. For a significant proportion of the Darwin-based creative practitioners interviewed as part of this study, this enthusiasm is sustained by the nature and environment of the city which, they believe, encourages and motivates them to stay. As one interviewee suggests: “Absolutely, I think everyone, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that doesn’t appreciate the beauty of living here.” There are numerous factors about Darwin that have enthused people to relocate to the area. The main themes discussed were nature, the weather and family and the opportunities that were available. Interestingly, the isolation provided by Darwin is a factor that enthused people to move to the city: I mean that’s why I came up here, not to Darwin initially; I went out bush for 5 years because isolation, I love it. Darwin’s not truly isolated but it is a long way away from the supposed centres. Darwin is in fact a centre itself but it’s just far away from the other centres. Such enthusing factors are prominent throughout the interviews. Darwin gives the creative community an opportunity to slow down and have the time and space to think, which is not offered by cities such as Melbourne or Sydney. Although some did not specify, six people moved to Darwin from Melbourne, five from Sydney and five from Adelaide. There are opportunities that are offered by Darwin that cannot be matched by such large and tightly packed cities. As will be discussed more shortly, such concepts relate to Abraham Maslow’s theories of Self-Actualisation: the need for privacy, “Independence of culture and environment; resisting enculturation” can lead to people moving to areas such as Darwin that allow for isolation and time (Monte 658). These elements allows the realisation of an individual which relies “on own judgement; trusts in self; resists pressure from others and social norms; able to ‘weather hard knocks’ with calm; resists identification with cultural stereotypes; has autonomous values carefully considered” (Monte 658). By fulfilling their ego, people are able to reach a stage of enthusiastic sublime, where enthusiasm is “an affect, the imagination unbridled” (136). Darwin has the space to allow such functions as resisting the social norms; this is not a function that towns such as Sydney or Melbourne are able to provide. The motivation to slow down and reinspire and re-energise as another interviewee discusses is an important factor that enthused some to move to Darwin: “Darwin produces the most amazing artists, you know, like it's such a wonderful place where you can feel inspired all the time. It's got that lovely country town feeling, but still being big enough to be a city, which makes it really unique.” It is important for Darwin to create enthusiasm such as this regarding the creative roles and opportunities available as for Darwin “creativity is the driving force of economic growth” (Florida xv). This is not the case for all economic growth, however, Darwin requires these creative people. As is explained by Luckman et al.: These sorts of aims (cultural flow, artistic influence, networking) appear to us more fitting reasons for seeking greater numbers of creative class professionals from southern states as ‘desirable residents’, rather than the usual emphasis on their bringing with them entrepreneurial skills, investment and cultural capital (especially given the need to find ways of accepting racial alterity). (6) Darwin’s economy depends on tourism and the creative community. Darwin’s strengths arise from the isolation and the seclusion that is available to artists of all kinds, as is discussed by one person: “I think that its strength lies in its isolation from the rest of the country and the fact that it’s a tropical city.” In regards to the weather of Darwin as an integral part of the charm the interviewee continues, “I think that’s a great selling point in that during the bleak weeks of winter down south you can actually come to a city and be part of an outdoor festival, which you’re not going to freeze, and it actually has a different feel than anywhere else in the country.” Many people have found the extreme weather conditions to be have a positive impact on their work. While some move away for the wet season others use it as time to be the most creative as it gives them time to think. For some it was the weather that enthused them to move to Darwin over any other Australian state, “I just came up for the warm weather really.” For others the wet season allows them time to be creative within different areas: “I like the wet season, I’d prefer it to the dry. It’s too dry for me at this time of the year, I like the rain and I like the humidity and all of that, that’s why I’m here.” Enthusiasm, Creativity and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs As in the case of one interviewee there were motivating factors that caused them to move back to Darwin, but there was not necessarily any enthusiasm involved. “I came back to Darwin actually to look after my grandmother and I’ve been back in Darwin and that’s when I’ve just been in the process of just continuing on with my choreography.” It is not to suggest that there is not enthusiasm involved in the process; however the motivating factors far outweigh the enthusing factors. Not all of the participants who have moved to Darwin have remained enthused about the decision and have very little motivation to stay. As one participant discussed, “I’m here because I’ve got my business here. That’s the only reason now.” Although some have lost their passion for the city, there is a wealth of enthusiasm amongst the majority of interviewees in regards to moving to Darwin to practice their creativity. Maslow establishes motivation as a vital factor in the human condition. There is a certain hierarchy of needs that have to be met for a person to survive and to thrive. “Freedom, love, community feeling, respect, philosophy, may all be waved aside as fripperies that are useless, since they fail to fill the stomach. Such a man may fairly be said to live by bread alone” (Maslow 37). There are many needs that have to be met for a person to be happy and satisfied beyond instinctual gratifications, such as sustenance, habitation and sex. Motivation allows a person to strive for certain needs and standards. For the people of Darwin, creativity, space, isolation, weather and community can be motivating factors to stay within the city. Once one need has been met, others will emerge and motivations will shift. As Maslow explains: The physiological needs, along with their partial goals, when chronically gratified cease to exist as active determinants or organizers of behaviour. They now exist only in a potential fashion in the sense that they may emerge again to dominate the organism if they are thwarted. But a want that is satisfied is no longer a want. (38) Although somewhat simplistic, Maslow’s hierachical schema is useful to deploy amongst the complexity of contradictory gratifications of interviewees. There needs to be both long term and short enthusiasm for a new want and motivation to achieve goals. Motivation needs to be upheld in order for enthusiasm for the practices to be maintained. Within the creative industries there is a constant need for goals to be met, such as sales or delivering quality goals, and there has to be enthusiasm to do so, especially in the face of unsure or no financial return on work or it will not be achieved. Motivations in life will shift and change with the change of lifestyle, job or situation. Darwin needs to be able to motivate the Creative Industry in order to sustain enthusiasm in the long term. There are certain standards and hierarchies that are present in every person’s life. Once the basic needs of life have been met, motivation can lead to self-actualisation. By moving to Darwin, Creative Industry people are allowing for opportunities for the fulfilment of self-actualisation. As Maslow argues: So far as motivational status is concerned, healthy people have sufficiently gratified their basic needs for safety, belongingness, love, respect and self-esteem so that they are motivated primarily by trends to self-actualisation (defined as ongoing actualisation of potentials, capacities and talents, as fulfilment of mission (or call, fate, destiny, vocation), as a fuller knowledge of, and acceptance of, the person’s own intrinsic nature, as an unceasing trend toward unity, integration or synergy within the person. (25) The people who are practicing within the industry have goals and potentials that need to be met and which motivate them into action; for many of the interviewees in this project, a key action undertaken to enable this was moving to or staying in Darwin. As such Darwin is able to absorb the surplus labour of other cities and use it to enhance local industry on its own terms. Here there is an enthusiasm and passion for creative work that operates on a different level to that present in larger, more built-up cities, which cannot be matched by them. Creative work is inherently motivating through the self-actualisation it allows the creative practitioner. While Darwin allows for these aspects of the creative industries, its relatively small size, and slower pace than bigger cities works to enthuse a unique local creative community, which on a national level punches above its weight. AcknowledgementsThis research was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Project funding scheme (project number LP0667445). ReferencesDrake, Graham. “‘This Place Gives Me Space’: Place and Creativity in the Creative Industries.” Geoforum 34.4 (2003): 511-524.Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class. USA: Pluto Press, 2003.Hesmondhalgh, David. Cultural Industries. London: Sage, 2002.Leadbeater, Charles, and Paul Miller. The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts Are Changing Our Economy and Society. London: Demos, 2004.Kant, Immanuel, Werner S. Pluhar, and Mary J. Gregor. Critique of Judgement, USA: Hackett Publishing, 1987.Kucklich, Julian. "Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry." Fibreculture Journal 5 (Sep. 2005). ‹http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5›.Luckman, Susan. “‘Unalienated Labour’ and Creative Industries: Situating Micro-Entrepreneurial Dance Music Subcultures in the New Economy.” Sonic Synergies: Music, Identity, Technology and Community. Eds. Gerry Bloustien, Margaret Peters, and Susan Luckman. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008. 185-194.———, Chris Gibson, Tess Lea, and Chris Brennan-Horley. “Darwin as ‘Creative Tropical City’: Just How Transferable Is Creative City Thinking?” University of South Australia. ‹http://www.unisa.edu.au/soac2007/program/papers/0045.PDF›.Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. USA: Harper and Row Publishers, 1970.———. Self-Actualization. Big Sur Recordings, 1971.———. Toward a Psychology of Being. USA: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968.Moran, Dermot. Introduction to Phenemology. London: Routledge, 2000.Neilson, Brett, and Ned Rossiter. "From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks." Fibreculture Journal 5 (Sep. 2005). ‹http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5›.Peale, Norman Vincent. Enthusiasm Makes the Difference. USA: Simon and Schuster, 2003.Ross, Andrew. "The Mental Labour Problem." Social Text 18.2 (2000): 1-31.Terranova, Tiziana. "Free Labour: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy." Social Text 18.2 (2000): 33-58.Walker, Ralph C.S. The Arguments and Philosophies of Kant. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.Weber, Max, Alexander Morell Henderson, and Talcott Parsons. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. USA: Free Press, 1997.———, Guenther Roth, and Claus Wittich. Economy and Society, USA: U of California P, 1978.Wordsworth, Christopher. Lectures on the Apocalypse; Critical, Expository, and Practical Hulsean Lects., 1848. Oxford University, 1852.

When I saw the word ‘bubbles’ my immediate thought went to the painting by John Millais of a child blowing bubbles that subsequently became part of the advertising campaign for Pears soap. Bubbles blown by children, as we all once did, last but a few seconds and lead on naturally to the theme of transience and constant change. Nothing lasts forever, even if human beings make attempts to impose permanence on the world. A child’s disappointment at having a soap bubble burst represents a deep human desire for permanence which is the focus of this article. Before the modern age, human life could be considered to be somewhat like a bubble in that it could be pricked at any time. This was especially the case with babies and young children who could be easily carried off. As Jeremy Taylor put it: but if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a child, of a careless nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents. (9) More generally, human beings understood that there was nothing permanent about their existing circumstances and that the possibility of famine, disease and, even war was ever present. Pax Romana, which is eulogised by Edward Gibbon as a felicitous time, did not suffer much in the way of war, famine, or epidemics but it was still a time when many Romans would have suffered from a range of diseases and not always have been well nourished. It was, however, a time of considerable security for most Romans who did not need to fear a band of marauders turning up on their doorstep. Disease and war would follow in the wake of climate change during the next century (Harper). Pax Romana was a bubble of relative tranquillity in human history. For a short period of time, climatic conditions, economic circumstances and political stability coalesced to still the winds of time temporarily. But such bubbles were unusual in the European context, which was usually riven by war. Peace reigned, by and large, in the long nineteenth century and in the period following World War II, to which it is possible to attach the name ‘pax moderna’. In China, much longer bubbles have been the norm, but they were succeeded by terrible periods of famine, dislocation, and war. The Ming bubble burst in the seventeenth century amidst a time of cold, famine, and plague (Parker 115-151). In such circumstances there was an appreciation of the precariousness of human existence. This had two major effects: A search for permanence in a world of change and uncertainty, a means of creating a bubble that can resist that change. When living in a time of relative stability, dealing with the fear that that stability will only last so long and that bad things may be just around the corner. These two matters form the basis of this article. Human beings create bubbles as they attempt to control change. They then become attached to their bubbles, even to the extent of believing that their bubbles are the real world. This has the effect of bubbles continuing to exist even if they harm human understanding of the world rather than enhancing it. Impermanence is the great reality of human existence; as Heraclitus (Burnet 136) correctly stated, we cannot place our foot in the same river twice. The extraordinary thing is that human beings possess a plastic nature that allows them to adapt to that impermanence (Melleuish & Rizzo ‘Limits’). The plasticity of human beings, as expressed in their culture, can be seen most clearly in the way that human languages constantly change. This occurs both in terms of word usage and grammatical structure. English was once an inflected language but cases now only really survive in personal pronouns. Words constantly change their meanings, both over time and in different places. Words appear to take on the appearance of permanence; they appear to form bubbles that are encased in lead, even when the reality is that words form multiple fragile bubbles that are constantly being burst and remade. The changing nature of the meaning of words only becomes known to a literate society, in particular a literate society that has a genuine sense of history. In an oral society words are free to change over time and there is little sense of those changes. Writing has the effect of fixing texts into a particular form; at the very least it makes creative reworking of texts much more difficult. Of course, there are counter examples to such a claim, the most famous of which are the Vedas which, it is argued, remained unchanged despite centuries of oral transmission (Doniger104-7). This fixed nature could be achieved because of the strict mode of transmission, ensuring that the hymns did not change when transmitted. As the Vedas are linked to the performance of rituals this exactness was necessary for the rituals to be efficacious (Olivelle xli-xlv). The transmission of words is not the same thing as the transmission of meaning. Nor does it mean that many words that today are used as seemingly universal ideas have always existed. Religion (Nongeri), state (Melleuish, ‘State’), civilisation, and culture (Melleuish, ‘Civilisation’) are all modern creations; ‘identity’ is only about sixty years old (Stokes 2). New words emerge to deal with new circumstances. For example, civilisation came into being partially because the old term ‘Christendom’ had become redundant; ‘identity’ replaced an earlier idea of national character. Words, then, are bubbles that human beings cast out onto the world and that appear to create the appearance of permanence. These bubbles encase the real world giving the thing that they name ‘being’, even as that thing is in flux and a condition of becoming. For Parmenides (loc. 1355-1439), the true nature of the world is being. The solidity provided by ‘being’ is a comfort in a world that is constantly changing and in which there is a constant threat of change. Words and ideas do not form stable bubbles, they form a string of bubbles, with individuals constantly blowing out new versions of a word, but they appear as if they were just the one bubble. One can argue, quite correctly, I believe, that this tendency to meld a string of bubbles into a single bubble is central to the human condition and actually helps human beings to come to terms with their existence in the world. ‘Bubble as being’ provides human beings with a considerable capacity to gain a degree of control over their world. Amongst other things, it allows for radical simplification. A.R. Luria (20-47), in his study of the impact of literacy on how human beings think, noted that illiterate Uzbeks classified colour in a complex way but that with the coming of literacy came to accept the quite simple colour classifications of the modern world. Interestingly, Uzbeks have no word for orange; the ‘being’ of colours is a human creation. One would think that this desire for ‘being’, for a world that is composed of ‘constants’, is confined to the world of human culture, but that is not the case. Everyone learns at school that the speed of light is a constant. Rupert Sheldrake (92-3) decided to check the measurement of the speed of light and discovered that the empirical measurements taken of its speed actually varied. Constants give the universe a smooth regularity that it would otherwise lack. However, there are a number of problems that emerge from a too strong attachment to these bubbles of being. One is that the word is mistaken for the thing; the power of the word, the logos, becomes so great that it comes to be assumed that all the objects described by a word must fit into a single model or type. This flies in the face of two realities. One is that every example of a named object is different. Hence, when one does something practically in the world, such as construct a building, one must adjust one’s activities according to local circumstances. That the world is heterogeneous explains why human beings need plasticity. They need to adapt their practices as they encounter new and different circumstances. If they do not, it may be the case that they will die. The problem with the logos introduced by literacy, the bubble of being, is that it makes human beings less flexible in their dealings with the world. The other reality is human plasticity itself. As word/bubbles are being constantly generated then each bubble will vary in its particular meaning, both at the community and, even, individual, level. Over time words will vary subtly in meaning in different places. There is no agreed common meaning to any word; being is an illusion. Of course, it is possible for governments and other institutions to lay down what the ‘real’ meaning of a word is, much in the same way as the various forms of measurement are defined by certain scientific criteria. This becomes dangerous in the case of abstract nouns. It is the source of ‘heresy’ which is often defined in terms of the meaning of particular words. Multiple, almost infinite, bubbles must be amalgamated into one big bubble. Attempts by logos professionals to impose a single meaning are often resisted by ordinary human beings who generally seem to be quite happy living with a range of bubbles (Tannous; Pegg). One example of mutation of meaning is the word ‘liberal’, which means quite different things in America and Australia. To add to the confusion, there are occasions when liberal is used in Australia in its American sense. This simply illustrates the reality that liberal has no specific ‘being’, some universal idea of which individual liberals are particular manifestations. The problem becomes even worse when one moves between languages and cultures. To give but one example; the ancient Greek word πολις is translated as state but it can be argued that the Greek πολις was a stateless society (Berent). There are good arguments for taking a pragmatic attitude to these matters and assuming that there is a vague general agreement regarding what words such as ‘democracy’ mean, and not to go down the rabbit hole into the wonderland of infinite bubbles. This works so long as individuals understand that bubbles of being are provisional in nature and are capable of being pricked. It is possible, however, for the bubbles to harden and to impose on us what is best described as the ‘tyranny of concepts’, whereby the idea or word obscures the reality. This can occur because some words, especially abstract nouns, have very vague meanings: they can be seen as a sort of cloudy bubble. Again, democracy is good example of a cloudy bubble whose meaning is very difficult to define. A cloudy bubble prevents us from analysing and criticising something too closely. Bubbles exist because human beings desire permanence in a world of change and transience. In this sense, the propensity to create bubbles is as much an aspect of human nature as its capacity for plasticity. They are the product of a desire to ‘tame time’ and to create a feeling of security in a world of flux. As discussed above, a measure of security has not been a common state of affairs for much of human history, which is why the Pax Romana was so idealised. If there is modern ‘bubble’ created by the Enlightenment it is the dream of Kantian perpetual peace, that it is possible to bring a world into being that is marked by permanent peace, in which all the earlier horrors of human existence, from famine to epidemics to war can be tamed and humanity live harmoniously and peacefully forever. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to ‘tame’ history (Melleuish & Rizzo, ‘Philosophy’). This can be done through the idea of progress. History can be placed into a bubble of constant improvement whereby human beings are constantly getting better, not just materially but also intellectually and morally. Progress very easily turns into a utopian fantasy where people no longer suffer and can live forever. The horrors of the first half of the twentieth century did little to dent the power of this bubble. There is still an element of modern culture that dreams of such a world actually coming into being. Human beings may try to convince themselves that the bubble of progress will not burst and that perpetual peace may well be perpetual, but underlying that hope there are deep anxieties born of the knowledge that ‘nothing lasts forever’. Since 1945, the West has lived through a period of peace and relative prosperity, a pax moderna; the European Union is very much a Kantian creation. Underneath the surface, however, contemporary Western culture has a deep fear that the bubble can burst very easily and that the veneer of modern civilisation will be stripped away. This fear manifests itself in a number of ways. One can be seen in the regular articles that appear about the possibility of a comet or asteroid hitting the earth (Drake). Such a collision will eventually occur but it is sixty five million years since the dinosaurs became extinct. Another is the fear of solar storm that could destroy both electricity grids and electronic devices (Britt). Another expression of this fear can be found in forms of artistic expression, including zombie, disaster, and apocalypse movies. These reveal something about the psyche of modernity, and modern democracy, in the same way that Athenian tragedy expressed the hopes and fears of fifth-century Athenian democracy through its elaboration of the great Greek myths. Robert Musil remarks in The Man without Qualities (833) that if humanity dreamed collectively it would dream Moosbrugger, a serial murderer. Certainly, it appears to be the case that when the modern West dreams collectively it dreams of zombies, vampires, and a world in which civilised values have broken down and everyone lives in a Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all against all (Hobbes 86-100). This theme of the bursting of the ‘civilised bubble’ is a significant theme in contemporary culture. In popular culture, two of the best examples of this bursting are the television shows Battlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead. In Galactica, human beings fall prey to the vengeful artificial creatures that they have created and mistreated. In The Walking Dead, as in all post-apocalyptic Zombie creations, the great fear is that human beings will turn into zombies, creatures that have been granted a form of immortality but at the cost of the loss of their souls. The fear of death is primal in all human beings, as is the fear of the loss of one’s humanity after death. This fear is expressed in the first surviving work of human literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh goes unsuccessfully in search of immortal life. In perhaps the bleakest modern portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, we encounter the ultimate Hobbesian universe. This is a world that has undergone an apocalypse of unknown origin. There is only darkness and dust and ash; nothing grows any longer and the few survivors are left to scavenge for the food left behind in tins. Or they can eat each other. It is the ultimate war of all against all. The clipped language, the lack of identity of the inhabitants, leads us into something that is almost no longer human. There is little or no hope. Reading The Road one is drawn back to the ‘House of Darkness’ described in The Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes the afterlife in terms of dust (“The Great Myths”): He bound my arms like the wings of a bird, to lead me captive to the house of darkness, seat of Irkalla:to the house which none who enters ever leaves, on the path that allows no journey back, to the house whose residents are deprived of light, where soil is itself their sustenance and clay their food,where they are clad like birds in coats of feathers, and see no light, but dwell in darkness. The Road is a profoundly depressing work, and the movie is barely watchable. In bursting the bubble of immortality, it plays on human fears and anxieties that stretch back millennia. The really interesting question is why such fears should emerge at a time when people in countries like America are living through a period of peace and prosperity. Much as people dream of a bubble of infinite progress and perpetual peace, they instinctively understand that that particular bubble is very fragile and may very easily be punctured. My final example is the less than well-known movie Zardoz, dating from the 1970s and starring Sean Connery. In it, some human beings have achieved ‘immortality’ but the consequences are less than perfect, and the Sean Connery character has the task, given to him by nature, to restore the balance between life and death, just as Gilgamesh had to understand that the two went together. There are some bubbles that are meant to be burst, some realities that human beings have to face if they are to appreciate their place in the scheme of things. Hence, we face a paradox. Human beings are constantly producing bubbles as they chart their way through a world that is also always changing. This is a consequence of their plastic nature. For good reasons, largely out of a desire for stability and security, they also tend to bring these infinite bubbles together into a much smaller number of bubbles that they view as possessing being and hence permanence. The problem is that these ‘bubbles of being’ are treated as if they really described the world in some sort of universal fashion, rather than treated as useful tools. Human beings can become the victims of their own creations. At the same time, human beings have an instinctive appreciation that the world is not stable and fixed, and this appreciation finds its expression in the products of their imagination. They burst bubbles through the use of their imagination in response to their fears and anxieties. Bubbles are the product of the interaction between the changing nature of both the world and human beings and the desire of those human beings for a degree of stability. Human beings need to appreciate both the reality of change and the strengths and weaknesses of bubbles as they navigate their way through the world. References Berent, M. “Stasis, or the Greek Invention of Politics.” History of Political Thought XIX.3 (1998). Britt, R.R. “150 Years Ago: The Worst Solar Storm Ever.” Space.com, 2 Sep. 2009. <https://www.space.com/7224-150-years-worst-solar-storm.html>. Burnet, J. Early Greek Philosophy. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1892. Doniger, W. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Drake, N. “Why NASA Plans to Slam a Spacecraft into an Asteroid.” National Geographic, 28 Apr. 2020. <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/giant-asteroid-nasa-dart-deflection/>. Gibbons, E. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Vol. 1. New York: Harper, 1836. <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25717/25717-h/25717-h.htm#chap02.1>. “The Great Myths #6: Enkidu in the Underworld.” <https://wordandsilence.com/2017/11/30/6-enkidu-in-the-underworld-mesopotamian/>. Harper, K. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the End of an Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Hobbes, T. Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Kant I. “Perpetual Peace.” In Political Writings, ed. H.S. Reiss. Trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 93-130. Luria, A.R. Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations. Trans. M. Lopez-Morillas and L. Solotaroff. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976. McCarthy, C. The Road. London: Picador, 2006. Melleuish, G.. “The State in World History: Perspectives and Problems.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 48.3 (2002): 322–336. ———. “Civilisation, Culture and Police.” Arts 20 (1998): 7–25. Melleuish, G., and S. Rizzo. “Limits of Naturalism: Plasticity, Finitude and the Imagination.” Cosmos & History 11.1 (2015): 221-238. Melleuish, G., and S.G. Rizzo. “Philosophy of History: Change, Stability and the Tragic Human Condition.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 13.3 (2017): 292-311. Musil, Robert. The Man without Qualities. Vol. 2. Trans. Sophie Wilkins. New York: Vintage International, 1996. Nongeri, B. Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. Olivelle, P. Introduction. Upanisads. Trans. Patrick Olivelle. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Parker, G. Global Crisis: War, Climate & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale, 2013. Parmenides. Fragments: A Text and Translation with an Introduction by David Gallop. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984. Kindle edition. Pegg, M.G. A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Sheldrake, Rupert. The Science Illusion. London: Coronet: 2013. Stokes, G. Introduction. In The Politics of Identity in Australia, ed. Geoffrey Stokes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Tannous, J. The Making of the Medieval Middle East. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2019. Taylor, J. Holy Dying. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2000.

Figure 1 Recently I was walking down a street in The Mission district of San Francisco, which has a high proportion of the city’s Mexican population, when I was struck by a mural on the side of a shop. Vivid and colourful, the mural depicted a large Aztec face surrounded by lush jungle, aesthetically balanced by a carved stone face on the other end of the mural (Figure 1). It was not the beauty, size or colour of the artwork that most impressed me but the way it replicated art I had seen days before walking around Aztec ruins near Mexico City. The paintings I had seen at these pyramids were close to two thousand years old, and this mural, complete with ‘tags’, was created with spray-paint in (probably) the last few years. One was in the ‘traditional home’ of the Aztecs, Mexico, and the other in the Mexican neighbourhood of a neo-colonial American city. However, while one site was celebrating people long since dead, the other a vibrantly alive culture in the cityscape of San Francisco. The migrant, or the diasporic community, is central to many contemporary discussions on the effect of increased globalisation on human cultures and societies (Chambers ). This is not to suggest, however, that globalisation or its impact on human cultures is only a recent phenomenon. Such an assumption implies a sense of amnesia about the processes of migration and diaspora that both instigated, and developed from, processes such as colonisation. San Francisco’s Mexican community do not represent the colonised indigenous people of the United States (US), but they have been affected by a colonial history of their own and the neo-colonialism of the US through processes such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This rendering, while obviously reductionist, indicates the complex nature of the position of Mexican migrants in San Francisco, and the multiple places, events, histories, countries, politics and policies that shape their journey. The picture of an Aztec face, situated within a largely Mexican neighbourhood, fiercely facing San Francisco presents a number of questions around ideas of culture, hybridity and thirdspace that are connected to theories of complexity. The concept of complexity provides a rich framework through which to engage with themes of culture and hybridity, explored through this symbolic painted presence in the urban landscape. Engagement with complexity theories can illustrate the already present, albeit unarticulated, engagement with complexity in concepts such as cultural hybridity, as well as opening up new ways in which to engage with such ideas. In this paper, I seek to illustrate how complexity can develop concepts in humanities, allowing for a greater exploration and sense of adventure of what is and can be. I will explore the idea of culture and its complexity, and how it can be enriched by complexity. It is an exploration of what can be produced and is emerging rather than the (continued) search for the ‘real’ or an uncovering of bedrock ‘truth’ in social science. As a number of commentators have argued, this idea continues to persist in social science research, despite the apparent changes wrought by poststructuralist thought (Crang, “There Is Nothing”; Crang, “New Orthodoxy”; Lorimer). This article seeks to contribute to current dialogues regarding how theories of complexity might enrich social science research using the concept of culture. The limitations of paper size and breadth of topic shape this article as gesturing towards the possibilities of engaging with the notion of complexity in social science, explored using the symbol of a mural and its location within the Mission District of San Francisco. There are a number of theoretical positions that fall under the notion of complexity; these include chaos theory, catastrophe theory, mathematical complexity and fractals (Manson). From the 1970s, there has been an increasing acceptance and application of complexity theories into social science and popular knowledge, in particular from the late 1990s (Nowotny; Thrift; Manson; Urry, Global Complexity). In my discussion of complexity I am drawing on the translations of these ideas into the domain of social science. I am looking at the disjuncture between cause and effect and the concept of emergence (Thrift; Urry, Global Complexity). These concepts, I argue, can be used to develop areas in the social science such as post-colonial theory that may, at first, seem unrelated. As complexity theory is, well, so complex and really an umbrella term or a "scientific amalgam", it is important to clarify how these theories will be interpreted here (Thrift). Emergence, according to Urry, is the way in which things self-organise over time (Urry, “The Complexities” 33). To expand on this, emergence can be described as the process of self-organisation of things (human and non-human) to create a new entity, an assemblage (Urry, Global Complexity). A central idea of emergence is that complexity is more than ‘complicated’, more than simply the coming together of multiple entities or aspects. The relationship between its parts constitute a new set of entities that make the whole more than the sum of its parts (Urry, Global Complexity; Thrift). It is also the process though which new hybrid entities emerge from this assemblage of previously separate entities. To return to the mural, an analysis of this painting (based on the hypothesis that it has been created by the diaspora from Mexico in San Francisco) would suggest it has emerged through an assemblage of processes of migration, issues of cultural heritage, ideas of authentic tradition, resistance, social inequity, difference and (possibly) a shopkeepers desire for a nice wall. All the known (and unknown) elements, human and non-human, that have (hypothetically) influenced this murals creation do not simply fit together in an equation that automatically results in ‘graffiti art’. Instead it has emerged due to a unique coming together of elements, an assemblage, in a particular time and geographical location. The disjuncture between cause and effect highlighted in a complexity perspective is illustrated here as it is possible to see the process of colonisation of Mexico and the United States has started a chain of events that have lead to the creation of this mural. However, there is no direct line of cause and effect that the act of colonisation would lead to the construction of such a mural. While we can begin to unpack this process in hindsight, the emergent processes that have lead to its creation ensure that such an endeavour will not easily or ever produce a simple equation for its occurrence. Cultural Complexity Social science in many ways relies on the notion that things are not easily analysed, not simply quantifiable or knowable (Dwyer and Limb). The actual language of complexity, however, has generally been missing from such discussions. This absence has limited the ability or, perhaps more accurately, the willingness to articulate logically and rationally what it means to gesture to an unknowingness, to processes of which outcomes cannot be fully predicted or explained (Lorimer; Crang, “There Is Nothing”). It is perhaps only now that it has been ‘validated’ through scientific knowledge such as physics, that we can embrace these ideas explicitly in social science. Using the notion of culture I will illustrate how complexity has been part of social science before it was articulated as such, what complexity theory offers in relation to the social world and how it might be engaged in relation to theory such cultural hybridity. The concept of culture in social science has expanded from the notion of fixed, homogenous ‘way of life’ in a specific geographic space, in early anthropological accounts, to a more complex processual view of culture (Ang, Not Speaking; Couldry). The work of Raymond Williams was seminal in the development of this idea of culture, which continues to be a central aspect of disciplines such as cultural geography and cultural studies (Anderson and Gale; Anderson et al.; Anderson; Ang, “Predicament”; Ang, Not Speaking). This work illustrates the complexities of culture as not only porous and shifting at its boundaries but also internally differentiated so that cultural coherence cannot be assumed (Anderson; Ang, “Predicament”). In terms of complexity theory, the entities that together form a ‘culture’ exist outside of the culture and can in turn work to destabilise and change the culture internally (DeLanda). While recognising that there have always been flows of people, trade and ideas around the world, it has been argued that the current epoch sees these flows at an unprecedented rate (Appadurai; Castells). The level of trans-national migration and movement of people, and the disruption of space and time created by processes of globalisation, further challenge conceptions of culture as fixed or homogenous (Couldry). This expansion of the notion of culture has dual connotations for my reading of the mural. The mural depicts a ‘traditional’ image of Mexican culture before it was affected by contemporary globalisation, but this is being depicted from the position of a diasporic subject in downtown San Francisco. In the painting of this mural it is possible to see the tension between idealisations of more traditional conceptions of a fixed, homogenous culture and the changes wrought on this culture by globalisation. The contrast of the painting’s subject and its location conveys the process of emergence of the (imagined) Mexican-American painter’s hybrid identity. Global Complexity These developments in cultural theory present a complex notion of culture, highlighting the influence of globalisation in creating this complexity. The interjection of complexity theory into social science more recently can enrich these readings of the complexity of cultural systems. It provides an overarching framework through which to organise and analyse concepts such as culture, but also can also connect this dynamic and processual ‘culture’ to a broader system of human and non-human entities. According to Urry, the global “comprises a set of emergent systems possessing properties and patterns that are often far from equilibrium. Complexity emphasises that there are diverse networked time-space paths, that there are often massive disproportionalities between cause and effects, and that unpredictable and yet irreversible patterns seem to characterise all social and physical systems.” (Urry, Global Complexity 8). A key notion of global complexity as discussed by Urry is that the ‘global’ is comprised and created through networks, drawing on the work of Appadurai and Castells. This coming together or connection of a multitude of varied human and non-human entities is seen to produce the emergence of things not connected to their cause, highlighting the disconnection between cause and effect. However, while it emphasises a disjuncture between cause and effect in terms of prediction, complexity theory has also been utilised to illustrate how things assemble together and from these things new things are made. Entities such as cultural hybridity can be seen as emerging from complex assemblages – time, place, people – from which unexpected, unpredictable entities emerge. The mural in San Francisco can be seen as one such entity. Thirdspace To complete gesture towards the use of complexity theory in research on culture, I would like to engage with the notion of thirdspace. This concept contributes to discussions of cultural complexity, as it seeks to describe the emergence of new hybrid forms created by the coming together of different cultural entities. The subject of the migrant, that I have sought to discuss in relation to the mural, is perhaps the epitome of the hybrid figure in the ‘in-between space’ as Ian Chambers has discussed. Chambers discusses the migrant as in-between home and the new country, and the processes of change that migrants undergo, taking on from the new but not letting go completely of the ‘old’, and so to become something different again. Homi Bhabha also discusses the idea of the hybrid, but presents the ‘in-between’ space as a product of the colonial encounter. Bhabha uses to the term ‘thirdspace’ to describe the hybridity that arises from the forced co-existence of groups with different histories, from different places, in a shared space. This creates a ‘thirdspace’ that is not of ‘One nor the Other but something else besides, in between” (Bhabha 219). It is this space of emergence that is simultaneously a space of unknowableness that is being presented by these theorists. The concept of thirdspace engenders an understanding of the complexity that social changes bring about as they facilitate or force the interaction of different groups. While complexity may mean that we do not know what the result is of such a coming together or intersection, the concept of a thirdspace allows us to see the intricacies of the complexity that is created illustrated by the case of the mural. A complexity framework also indicates to the assemblage of multiplicity of entities – human and non-human, material and immaterial – that these hybrid subjects have emerged from, enriching the possible field for social science enquiry. While the hybrid – human or non-human entity – is not simply a sum of its parts, or that which came together to produce it, it does provide pointers to follow in uncovering the intricacies of its make up. It is, however, also the unknowableness, the newness, produced that makes it more than a composite that injects both challenge and wonder into intellectual endeavor. Conclusion In attempting to draw common threads through these examples of cultural theory I wish to highlight how the notion of complexity supports theories such as hybridity that seek to outline rather than map certain social processes. The multiple and complex subjectivities and experiences that emerge from the colonial encounter, or process of migration do not lend themselves to easy counting or mapping. To dissect such experiences for greater understanding, to attempt to put it all together like a puzzle to find a true picture surely creates an incomplete picture. Beginning instead from a position of complexity does not deny the need to explore such processes but suggests different methods and different outcomes are sought. It gestures towards a different framework through which to understanding the world. The interjection of complexity theory into the social sciences offers a rich conceptual framework through which to re-look at and develop ideas already central to such research. As a mural on a wall in San Francisco connects to 2000 year old frescos on pyramids at the edge of Mexico City, so too does it speak to us of diaspora, hybridity, and the thirdspaces that arise post-colonially in a globalised world. The effect of these processes on ideas of culture, identity and place, the local and the global are all engaged and enhanced by complexity theories that present ideas of emergence. Urry argues that complexity breaks down any connection between cause and effect. It tells us of the unknowability of things, and so indicates that what we can map or frame within a research project or paper is always incomplete. It opens a space for wonder, for possibility, for change. It breaks down certainty and the idea that there is a process or reality that can be made known through social inquiry. Adopting this approach may seem like an abdication, suggesting a level of futility to research, a giving up or giving in. However, it can instead inspires us to look beyond what we assume is true or the obvious effect from a particular cause, to explore the complexity of the processes through which things come into being. It is this idea that I have attempted to gesture towards in considering the places, people, time and multiple other entities have assembled in the creation of a single piece of graffiti art. It is to say that the greatest value of complexity theory to social science research is perhaps not that it provides answers but that it gestures to (multiple) beginnings. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Jayde Cahir and my two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, for providing the funding to attend the American Association of Geographers Annual Conference in San Francisco. References Anderson, Kay. “Introduction.” Cultural Geographies. Eds. Kay Anderson and Fay Gale. 2nd ed. Australia: Addision Wesley Longman, 1999. 1-21. Anderson, Kay, et al. “A Rough Guide.” Handbook of Cultural Geography. Eds. Kay Anderson et al. London: Sage, 2003. 1-35. Anderson, Kay, and Fay Gale, eds. Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992. Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. New York: Routledge, 2001. ———. “The Predicament of Diversity: Multiculturalism in Practice at the Art Museum.” ethnicities 5.3 (2005): 305-20. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Public Worlds, Volume 1. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 2004. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture and Identity. London: Routledge, 1994. Couldry, Nick. Inside Culture: Re-Imagining the Method of Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 2000. Crang, Mike. “Qualitative Methods: The New Orthodoxy?” Progress in Human Geography 26.2 (2002): 647-55. ———. “Qualitative Methods: There Is Nothing outside the Text?” Progress in Human Geography 29.2 (2005): 225-33. DeLanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. Dwyer, Claire, and Melanie Limb. “Introduction: Doing Qualitative Research in Geography.” Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers: Issues and Debates. Eds. Claire Dwyer and Melanie Limb. London: Arnold, 2001. 1-22. Lorimer, Hayden. “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-than-Representational’.” Progress in Human Geography 29.1 (2005): 83-94. Manson, Steven M. “Simplifying Complexity: A Review of Complexity Theory.” Geoforum 32 (2001): 405-14. Nowotny, Helga. “The Increase of Complexity and Its Reduction: Emergent Interfaces between the Natural Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences.” Theory, Culture and Society 22.5 (2005): 15-31. Thrift, Nigel. “The Place of Complexity.” Theory, Culture and Society 16.3 (1999): 31-69. Urry, John. “The Complexities of the Global.” Theory, Culture and Society 22.5 (2005): 235-54. ———. Global Complexity. Oxford: Polity, 2003. Williams, Raymond. Culture. Glasgow: Fontanta Paperbacks, 1981. Citation reference for this article MLA Style James, Sarah. "Culture and Complexity: Graffiti on a San Francisco Streetscape." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/07-james.php>. APA Style James, S. (Jun. 2007) "Culture and Complexity: Graffiti on a San Francisco Streetscape," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/07-james.php>.

The use of the term authenticity in the social science literature can be rather eclectic at best and unscrupulous at worst. (Vanini, 74)We live in an age of authenticity, according to Charles Taylor, an era which prizes the finding of one’s life “against the demands of external conformity” (67–68). Taylor’s argument is that, correctly practiced, authenticity need not result in individualism or tribalism but rather a generation of people “made more self-responsible” (77).Philip Vanini has surveyed the turn toward authenticity in sociology. He has parsed the word authenticity, and argued that it has been used in three ways—factual, original, and sincere. A failure to attend to these distinctives, mixed with a “paucity of systematic empirical research” has resulted in abstract speculation (75). This article responds to Taylor’s analysis and Vanini’s challenge.My argument utilises Vanini’s theoretical frame—authenticity as factual, original, and sincere—to analyse empirical data gathered in the study of recent religious innovation occurring amongst a set of (“alternative worship”) Christian communities in the United Kingdom. I am drawing upon longitudinal research I have conducted, including participant observation in digital forums from 1997 to the present, along with semi-structured interviews conducted in the United Kingdom in 2001 and 2012.A study of “alternative worship” was deemed significant given such communities’s interaction with contemporary culture, including their use of dance music, multi-media, and social media (Baker, Taylor). Such approaches contrast with other contemporary religious approaches to culture, including a fundamentalist retreat from culture or the maintenance of a “high” culture, and thus inherited patterns of religious expression (Roberts).I argue that the discourse of “alternative worship” deploy authenticity-as-originality as essential to their identity creation. This notion of authenticity is used by these communities to locate themselves culturally (as authentically-original in contemporary cultures), and thus simultaneously to define themselves as marginal from mainstream religious expression.Intriguingly, a decade later, “alternative worship” was appropriated by the mainstream. A new organisation—Fresh Expressions—emerged from within the Church of England, and the Methodist Church in Britain that, as it developed, drew on “alternative worship” for legitimation. A focus on authenticity provides a lens by which to pay particular attention to the narratives offered by social organisations in the processes of innovation. How did the discourse deployed by Fresh Expressions in creating innovation engage “alternative worship” as an existing innovation? How did these “alternative worship” groups, who had found generative energy in their location as an alternative—authentically-original—expression, respond to this appropriation by mainstream religious life?A helpful conversation partner in teasing out the complexity of these moves within contemporary religious innovation is Sarah Thornton. She researched trends in dance clubs, and rave music in Britain, during a similar time period. Thornton highlighted the value of authenticity, which she argued was deployed in club cultures to create “subcultural capital” (98-105). She further explored how the discourses around authenticity were appropriated over time through the complex networks within which popular culture flows (Bennett; Collins; Featherstone; McRobbie; Willis).This article will demonstrate that a similar pattern—using authenticity-as-originality to create “subcultural capital”—was at work in “alternative worship.” Further, the notions of authenticity as factual, original, and sincere are helpful in parsing the complex networks that exist within the domains of religious cultures. This analysis will be two-fold, first as the mainstream appropriates, and second as the “alternative” responds.Thornton emerged “post-Birmingham.” She drew on the scholarship associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, glad of their turn toward popular culture. Nevertheless she considered her work to be distinct. Thornton posited the construction of “taste cultures” through distinctions created by those inside a particular set of signs and symbols. She argued for a networked view of society, one that recognised the complex roles of media and commerce in constructing distinctions and sought a more multi-dimensional frame by which to analyse the interplay between mainstream and marginal.In order to structure my investigation, I am suggesting three stages of development capture the priority, yet complexity, of authenticity in contemporary religious innovation: generation, appropriation, complexification.Generation of Authenticity-as-OriginalityThornton (26, italics original) writes:authenticity is arguably the most important value ascribed to popular music … Music is perceived as authentic when it rings true or feels real, when it has credibility and comes across as genuine. In an age of endless representations and global mediation, the experience of musical authenticity is perceived as a cure both for alienation … and dissimulation.Thornton is arguing that in this manifestation of youth culture, authenticity is valued. Further, authenticity is a perception, attached to phrases like “rings true” and “feels real.” Therefore, authenticity is hard to measure. Perhaps this move is deliberate, an attempt by those inside the “taste culture” to preserve their “subcultural capital,”—their particular sets of distinctions.Thornton’s use of authentic slides between authenticity-as-sincerity and authenticity-as-originality. For example, in the above quote, the language of “true” and “real” is a referencing of authenticity-as-sincerity. However, as Thornton analysed the appropriation of club culture by the mainstream, she is drawing, without stating it clearly, on both authenticity-as-sincerity and authenticity-as-originality.At around the time that Thornton was analysing club cultures, a number of Christian religious groups in the United Kingdom began to incorporate features of club culture into their worship services. Churches began to experiment with services beginning at club times (9.00 pm), the playing of dance music, and the use of “video-jockeying.” According to Roberts many of these worshipping communities “had close links to this movement in dance culture” (15).A discourse of authenticity was used to legitimise such innovation. Consider the description of one worship experience, located in Sheffield, England, known as Nine o’Clock Service (Fox 9-10, italics original).We enter a round, darkened room where there are forty-two television sets and twelve large video screens and projections around the walls—projections of dancing DNA, dancing planets and galaxies and atoms … this was a very friendly place for a generation raised on television and images … these people … are doing it themselves and in the center of the city and in the center of their society: at worship itself.This description makes a number of appeals to authenticity. The phrase “a generation raised on television and images” implies another generation not raised in digitally rich environments. A “subcultural” distinction has been created. The phrase “doing it themselves” suggests that this ‘digital generation’ creates something distinct, an authentic expression of their “taste culture.” The celebration of “doing it for themselves” resonates with Charles Taylor’s analysis of an age of authenticity in which self-discovery is connected with artistic creation (62).The Nine o’Clock Service gained nationwide attention, attracting attendances of over 600 young people. Rogerson described it as “a bold and imaginative attempt at contextual theology … people were attracted to it in the first instance for aesthetic and cultural reasons” (51). The priority on the aesthetic and the cultural, in contrast to the doctrinal, suggests a valuing of authenticity-as-originality.Reading Rogerson alongside Taylor teases out a further nuance in regard to the application of authenticity. Rogerson described the Nine o’Clock Service as offering “an alternative way of living in a materialist and acquisitive world” (50). This resonates with Charles Taylor’s argument that authenticity can be practiced in ways that make people “more self-responsible” (77). It suggests that the authenticity-as-originality expressed by the Nine o’Clock Service not only appealed culturally, but also offered an ethic of authenticity. We will return to this later in my argument.Inspired by the Nine o’Clock Service, other groups in the United Kingdom began to offer a similar experience. According to Adrian Riley (6):The Nine O’clock Service … was the first worshipping community to combine elements of club culture with passionate worship … It pioneered what is commonly known as “alternative worship” … Similar groups were established themselves albeit on a smaller scale.The very term “alternative worship” is significant. Sociologist of religion Abby Day argued that “boundary-marking [creates] an identity” (50). Applying Day, the term “alternative” is being used to create an identity in contrast to the existing, mainstream church. The “digitally rich” are indeed “doing it for themselves.” To be “alternative” is to be authentically-original: to be authentically-original means a participant cannot, by definition, be mainstream.Thornton argued that subcultures needed to define themselves against in order to maintain themselves as “hip” (119). This seems to describe the use of the term “alternative.” Ironically, the mainstream is needed, in order to define against, to create identity by being authentically-original (Kelly).Hence the following claim by an “alternative worship” organiser (Interview G, 2001):People were willing to play around and to say, well who knows what will happen if we run this video clip or commercial next to this sixteenth century religious painting and if we play, you know, Black Flag or some weird band underneath it … And what will it feel like? Well let’s try it and see.Note the link with music (Black Flag, an American hard core punk band formed in 1976), so central to Thornton’s understanding of authenticity in popular youth cultures. Note also the similarity between Thornton’s ascribing of value in words like “rings true” and “feels real,” with words like “feel like” and “try and see.” The word “weird” is also significant. It is deployed as a signifier of authenticity, a sign of “subcultural capital.” It positions them as “alternative,” defined in (musical) distinction from the mainstream.In sum, my argument is that authenticity-as-originality is present in “alternative worship”: in the name, in the ethos of “doing it themselves,” and in the deploying of “subcultural capital” in the legitimation of innovation. All of this has been clarified through conversation with Thornton’s empirical research regarding the value of authenticity in club culture. My analysis of “alternative worship” as a religious innovation is consistent with Taylor’s claim that we inhabit an age of authenticity, one that can be practiced by “people who are made more self-responsible” (77).Mainstream AppropriationIn 2004, the Church of England produced Mission Shaped Church (MSC), a report regarding its future. It included a chapter that described recent religious innovation in England, grouped under twelve headings (alternative worship and base ecclesial communities, café, cell, network and seeker church models, multiple and mid week congregations, new forms of traditional churches, school and community-based initiatives, traditional church plants, youth congregations). The first innovation listed is “alternative worship.”The incoming Archbishop, Rowan Williams, drew on MSC to launch a new organisation. Called Fresh Expressions, over five million pounds was provided by the Church of England to fund an organisation to support this religious innovation.Intriguingly, recognition of authenticity in these “alternative” innovations was evident in the institutional discourse being created. When I interviewed Williams, he spoke of his commitment as a Bishop (Interview 6, 2012):I decided to spend a certain amount of quality time with people on the edge. Consequently when I was asked initially what are my priorities [as Archbishop] I said, “Well, this is what I’ve been watching on the edge … I really want to see how that could impact on the Church of England as a whole.In other words, what was marginal, what had until then generated identity by being authentic in contrast to the mainstream, was now being appropriated by the mainstream “to impact on the Church of England as a whole.” MSC was aware of this complexity. “Alternative worship” was described as containing “a strong desire to be different and is most vocal in its repudiation of existing church” (45). Nevertheless, it was appropriated by the mainstream.My argument has been that “alternative worship” drew on a discourse of authenticity-as-originality. Yet when we turn to analyse mainstream appropriation, we find the definitions of authenticity begin to slide. Authenticity-as-originality is affirmed, while authenticity-as-sincerity is introduced. The MSC affirmed the “ways in which the Church of England has sought to engage with the diverse cultures and networks that are part of contemporary life” (80). It made explicit the connection between originality and authenticity. “Some pioneers and leaders have yearned for a more authentic way of living, being, doing church” (80). This can be read as an affirmation of authenticity-as-originality.Yet MSC also introduced authenticity-as-sincerity as a caution to authenticity-as-originality. “Fresh expressions should not be embraced simply because they are popular and new, but because they are a sign of the work of God and of the kingdom” (80). Thus Fresh Expressions introduced authenticity-as-sincerity (sign of the work of God) and placed it alongside authenticity-as-originality. In so doing, in the shift from “alternative worship” to Fresh Expressions, a space is both conflated (twelve expressions of church) and contested (two notions of authenticity). Conflated, because MSC places alternative worship as one innovation alongside eleven others. Contested because of the introduction of authenticity-as-sincerity alongside the affirming of authenticity-as-originality. What is intriguing is to return to Taylor’s argument for the possibility of an ethic of authenticity in which “people are made more self-responsible” (77). Perhaps the response in MSC arises from the concern described by Taylor, the risk in an age of authenticity of a society that is more individualised and tribal (55-6). To put it in distinctly ecclesiological terms, how can the church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic be carried forward if authenticity-as-originality is celebrated at, and by, the margins? Does innovation contribute to more atomised, self-absorbed and fragmented expressions of church?Yet Taylor is adamant that authenticity can be embraced without an inevitable slide in these directions. He argued that humans share a "horizon of significance" in common (52), in which one’s own "identity crucially depends on [one’s] dialogical relations with others" (48). We have already considered Rogerson’s claim that the Nine o’Clock Service offered “an alternative way of living in a materialist and acquisitive world” (50). It embraced a “strong political dimension, and a concern for justice at local and international level” (46). In other words, “alternative worship’s” authenticity-as-originality was surely already an expression of “the kingdom,” one in which “people [were] made more self-responsible” (77) in the sharing of (drawing on Taylor) a "horizon of significance" in the task of identity-formation-in-relationships (52).Yet the placing in MSC of authenticity-as-sincerity alongside authenticity-as-originality could easily have been read by those in “alternative worship” as a failure to recognise their existing practicing of the ethic of authenticity, their embodying of “the kingdom.”Consequent ComplexificationMy research into “alternative worship” is longitudinal. After the launch of Fresh Expressions, I included a new set of interview questions, which sought to clarify how these “alternative worship” communities were impacted upon by the appropriation of “alternative worship” by the mainstream. The responses can be grouped into three categories: minimal impact, a sense of affirmation and a contested complexity.With regard to minimal impact, some “alternative worship” communities perceived the arrival of Fresh Expressions had minimal impact on their shared expression of faith. The following quote was representative: “Has had no impact at all actually. Apart from to be slightly puzzled” (Interview 3, 2012).Others found the advent of Fresh Expressions provided a sense of affirmation. “Fresh expressions is … an enabling concept. It was very powerful” (Focus group 2, 2012). Respondents in this category felt that their innovations within alternative worship had contributed to, or been valued by, the innovation of Fresh Expressions. Interestingly, those whose comments could be grouped in this category had significant “subcultural capital” invested in this mainstream appropriation. Specifically, they now had a vocational role that in some way was connected to Fresh Expressions. In using the term “subcultural capital” I am again drawing on Thornton (98–105), who argued that in the complex networks through which culture flows, certain people, for example DJ’s, have more influence in the ascribing of authenticity. This suggests that “subcultural” capital is also present in religious innovation, with certain individuals finding ways to influence, from the “alternative worship” margin, the narratives of authenticity used in the complex interplay between alternative worship and Fresh Expressions.For others the arrival of Fresh Expressions had resulted in a contested complexity. The following quote was representative: “It’s a crap piece of establishment branding …but then we’re just snobs” (Focus group 3, 2012). This comment returns us to my initial framing of authenticity-as-originality. I would argue that “we’re just snobs” has a similar rhetorical effect as “Black Flag or some weird band.” It is an act of marginal self-location essential in the construction of innovation and identity.This argument is strengthened given the fact that the comment was coming from a community that itself had become perhaps the most recognizable “brand” among “alternative worship.” They have developed their own logo, website, and related online merchandising. This would suggest the concern is not the practice of marketing per se. Rather the concern is that it seems “crap” in relation to authenticity-as-originality, in a loss of aesthetic quality and a blurring of the values of innovation and identity as it related to bold, imaginative, aesthetic, and cultural attempts at contextual theology (Rogerson 51).Returning to Thornton, her research was also longitudinal in that she explored what happened when a song from a club, which had defined itself against the mainstream and as “hip,” suddenly experienced mainstream success (119). What is relevant to this investigation into religious innovation is her argument that in club culture, “selling out” is perceived to have happened only when the marginal community “loses its sense of possession, exclusive ownership and familiar belonging” (124–26).I would suggest that this is what is happening within “alternative worship” in response to the arrival of Fresh Expressions. Both “alternative worship” and Fresh Expressions are religious innovations. But Fresh Expressions defined itself in a way that conflated the space. It meant that the boundary marking so essential to “alternative worship” was lost. Some gained from this. Others struggled with a loss of imaginative and cultural creativity, a softening of authenticity-as-originality.More importantly, the discourse around Fresh Expressions also introduced authenticity-as-sincerity as a value that could be used to contest authenticity-as-originality. Whether intended or not, this also challenged the ethic of authenticity already created by these “alternative worship” communities. Their authenticity-as-originality was already a practicing of an ethic of authenticity. They were already sharing a "horizon of significance" with humanity, entering into “dialogical relations with others" that were a contemporary expression of the church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic (Taylor 52, 48). ConclusionIn this article I have analysed the discourse around authenticity as it is manifest within one strand of contemporary religious innovation. Drawing on Vanini, Taylor, and Thornton, I have explored the generative possibilities as media and culture are utilised in an “alternative worship” that is authentically-original. I have outlined the consequences when authenticity-as-originality is appropriated by the mainstream, specifically in the innovation known as Fresh Expressions and the complexity when authenticity-as-sincerity is introduced as a contested value.The value of authenticity has been found to exist in a complex relationship with the ethics of authenticity within one domain of contemporary religious innovation.ReferencesBaker, Jonny. “Alternative Worship and the Significance of Popular Culture.” Honours paper: U of London, 2000.Bennett, Andy. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity, and Place. New York: Palgrave, 2000.Cronshaw, Darren, and Steve Taylor. “The Congregation in a Pluralist Society: Rereading Newbigin for Missional Churches Today.” Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies 27.2 (2014): 1-24.Day, Abby. Believing in Belonging. Belief and Social Identity in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.Collins, Jim, ed. High-Pop. Making Culture into Popular Entertainment. Oxford: Blackwells, 2002.Cray, Graham. Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Culture, London: Church House Publishing, 2004.Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991.Fox, Matthew. Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996.Guest, Matthew, and Steve Taylor. “The Post-Evangelical Emerging Church: Innovations in New Zealand and the UK.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 6.1 (2006): 49-64.Howard, Roland. The Rise and Fall of the Nine o’Clock Service. London: Continuum, 1996.Kelly, Gerard. Get a Grip on the Future without Losing Your Hold in the Past. Great Britain: Monarch, 1999.Kelly, Steven. “Book Review. Alt.Culture by Steven Daly and Nathaniel Wice.” 20 Aug. 2003. ‹http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/books/cult.html›.McRobbie, Angela. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.Riley, Adrian. God in the House: UK Club Culture and Spirituality. 1999. 15 Oct. 2003 ‹http://www.btmc.org.auk/altworship/house/›.Roberts, Paul. Alternative Worship in the Church of England. Cambridge: Grove Books, 1999.Rogerson, J. W. “‘The Lord Is here’: The Nine o’Clock Service.” Why Liberal Churches Are Growing. Eds. Ian Markham and Martyn Percy. London: Bloomsbury T & T, 2006. 45-52.Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.Taylor, Steve. “Baptist Worship and Contemporary Culture: A New Zealand Case Study.” Interfaces: Baptists and Others. Eds. David Bebbington and Martin Sutherland. Carlisle: Paternoster, 2013. 292-307.Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures. Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover: UP New England, 1996.Vanini, Philip. “Authenticity.” Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture. Ed. Dale Southerton. Los Angeles: Sage, 2011. 74-76.Willis, Paul E., et al. Common Culture. Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young. Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1990.

Historically the impact of the printing press on Western culture is a truism. Print gave rise to the mass reproduction and circulation of information with wide reaching consequences in all fields: political, social, and economic. An aspect that this paper wishes to focus on is that this moment also saw the birth (and necessity) of copyright legislation, to administer and protect this new found ability to package and disseminate text. The term copyright itself, used freely in debates surrounding contemporary topics such as iTunes, DVD piracy, and file-sharing, is not only semantically anachronistic but, as will be shown, is an anachronistic problem. The history that it carries, through almost three hundred years, underscores the difficulties at the heart of copyright in the contemporary scene. Indeed the reliance on copyright in these debates creates an argument based on circular definitions relating to only the statutory conception of cultural rights. No avenue is really left to imagine a space outside its jurisdiction. This paper asserts that notions of the “culture industry” (as opposed to some other conception of culture) are also inherently connected to the some three hundred years of copyright legislation. Our conceptions of the author and of intellectual pursuits as property can also be traced within this relatively small period. As clarified by Lord Chief Baron Pollock in the English courts in 1854, “copyright is altogether an artificial right” that does not apply at common law and relies wholly on statute (Jeffreys v Boosey). Foucault (124-42) highlights, in his attack on Romantic notions of the author-genius-God, that the author-function is expressed primarily as a legal term, through the legal concepts of censorship and copyright. Copyright, then, pays little attention to non-economic interests of the author and is used primarily to further economic interests. The corporate nature of the culture industry at present amounts to the successful application of copyright legislation in the past. This paper suggests that we look at our conception of literary and artistic work as separate from copyright’s own definitions of intellectual property and the commercialisation of culture. From Hogarth to File-Sharing The case of ‘DVD Jon’ is instructive. In 1999, Jon Lech Johansen, a Norwegian programmer, drew the ire of Hollywood by breaking the encryption code for DVDs (in a program called DeCSS). More recently, he has devised a program to circumvent the anti-piracy system for Apple’s iTunes music download service. With this program, called PyMusique, users still have to pay for the songs, but once these are paid for, users can use the songs on all operating systems and with no limits on copying, transfers or burning. Johansen, who publishes his wares on his blog entitled So Sue Me, was in fact sued in 1999 by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for copyright infringement. He argued that he created DeCSS as part of developing a DVD player for his Linux operating system, and that copying DVD movies was an ancillary function of the program for which he could not be held responsible. He was acquitted by an Oslo district court in early 2003 and again by an appeals court later that year. During this time many people on the internet found novel ways to publish the DeCSS code so as to avoid prosecution, including many different code encryptions incorporated into jpeg images (including the trademarked DVD logo, owned by DVD LLC) and mpeg movies, as an online MUD game scenario, and even produced in the form of a haiku (“42 Ways to Distribute DeCSS”). The ability to publish the code in a format not readily prosecutable owes less to encryption and clandestine messages than it does to anachronistic laws regarding the wholly legal right to original formats. Prior to 1709, copyright or licensing related to the book publishing industry where the work as formatted, pressed and disseminated was more important to protect than the text itself or the concept of the author as the writer of the text. Even today different copyrights may be held over the different formatting of the same text. The ability for hackers to attack the copyright legislation through its inherent anachronism is more than smart lawyering or a neat joke. These attacks, based on file sharing and the morphing fluid forms of information (rather than contained text, printed, broadcast, or expressed through form in general), amount to a real breach in copyright’s capability to administer and protect information. That the corporations are so excited and scared of these new technologies of dissemination should come as no surprise. It should also not be seen, as some commentators wish to, as a completely new approach to the dissemination of culture. If copyright was originally intended to protect the rights of the publisher, the passing of the Act of Anne in 1709 introduced two new concepts – an author being the owner of copyright, and the principle of a fixed term of protection for published works. In 1734, William Hogarth, wanting to ensure profits would flow from his widely disseminated prints (which attracted many pirate copies), fought to have these protections extended to visual works. What is notable about all this is that in 1734 the concept of copyright both in literary and artistic works applied only to published or reproduced works. It would be over one hundred years later, in the Romantic period, that a broader protection to all artworks would be available (for example, paintings, sculpture, etc). Born primarily out of guild systems, the socio-political aspect of protection, although with a passing nod to the author, was primarily a commercial concern. These days the statute has muddied its primary purpose; commercial interest is conflated and confused with the moral rights of the author (which, it might be added, although first asserted in the International Berne Convention of 1886 were only ratified in Australia in December 2000). For instance, in a case such as Sony Entertainment (Australia) Ltd v Smith (2005), both parties in fact want the protection of copyright. On one day the DJ in question (Pee Wee Ferris) might be advertising himself through his DJ name as an appropriative, sampling artist-author, while at the same time, we might assume, wishing to protect his own rights as a recording artist. Alternatively, the authors of the various DeCSS code works want both the free flow of information which then results in a possible free flow of media content. Naturally, this does not sit well with the current lords of copyright: the corporations. The new open-source author works contrary to all copyright. Freed Slaves The model of the open source author is not without precedent. Historically, prior to copyright and the culture industry, this approach to authorship was the norm. The Roman poet Martial, known for his wit and gifts of poetry, wrote I commend to you, Quintianus, my little books – if I can call them mine when your poet recites them: if they complain of their harsh servitude, you should come forward as their champion and give your guarantees; and when he calls himself their master you should say they are mine and have been granted their freedom. If you shout this out three or four times, you will make their kidnapper (plagiario) feel ashamed of himself. Here of course the cultural producer is a landed aristocrat (a situation common to early Western poets such as Chaucer, Spencer and More). The poem, or work, exists in the economy of the gift. The author-function here is also not the same as in modern times but was based on the advantages of reputation and celebrity within the Roman court. Similarly other texts such as stories, songs and music were circulated, prior to print, in a primarily oral economy. Later, with the rise of the professional guild system in late medieval times, the patronage system did indeed pay artists, sometimes royal sums. However, this bursary was not so much for the work than for upkeep as members of the household holding a particular skill. The commercial aspect of the author as owner only became fully realised with the rise of the middle classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and led to the global adoption of the copyright regime as the culture industry’s sanction. Added to this, the author is now overwhelmingly a corporation, not an individual, which has expanded the utilisation of these statutes for commercial advantage to, perhaps, an unforeseen degree. To understand the file-sharing period, which we are now entering at full speed, we cannot be confused by notions found in the copyright acts; definitions based on copyright cannot adequately express a culture without commercial concerns. Perhaps the discussion needs to return to concepts that predate copyright, before the author-function (as suggested by Foucault) and before the notion of intellectual property. That we have returned to a gift economy for cultural products is easily understood in the context of file-sharing. But what of the author? Here the figure of the hacker suggests a movement towards such an archaic model where the author’s remuneration comes in the form of celebrity, or a reputation as an exciting innovator. Another model, which is perhaps more likely, is an understanding that certain material disseminated will be sold and administered under copyright for profit and that the excess will be quickly and efficiently disseminated with no profit and with no overall duration of protection. Such an amalgamated approach is exemplified by Radiohead’s Kid A album, which, although available for free downloads, was still profitable because the (anachronistic) printed version, with its cover and artwork, still sold by the millions. Perhaps cultural works, the slaves of the author-corporation, should be granted their freedom: freedom from servitude to a commercial master, freedom to be re-told rather than re-sold, with due attribution to the author the only payment. This is a Utopian idea perhaps, but no less a fantasy than the idea that the laws of copyright, born of the printing press, can evolve to match the economy today that they purport to control. When thinking about ownership and authorship today, it must be recalled that copyright itself has a history of useful fictions. References Michel Foucault; “What Is an Author?” Twentieth-Century Literary Theory. Eds. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller. Albany: State UP of New York, 1987. 124-42. “42 Ways to Distribute DeCSS.” 5 Jun. 2005 http://decss.zoy.org/>. Jeffreys v Boosey, 1854. Johansen, Jon Lech. So Sue Me. 5 Jun. 2005 http://www.nanocrew.net/blog/>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Phillips, Dougal, and Oliver Watts. "Copyright, Print and Authorship in the Culture Industry." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/06-phillipswatts.php>. APA Style Phillips, D., and O. Watts. (Jun. 2005) "Copyright, Print and Authorship in the Culture Industry," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/06-phillipswatts.php>.

Working drawings are produced, when a house is designed, to envisage an imagined building. They are a tangible representation of an object that has no tangible existence. These working drawings act as a manual for constructing the house; they represent that which is to be built. The house comes into being, therefore, via this set of drawings. This is known as documentation. However, these drawings record the house at an ideal moment in time; they capture the house in stasis. They do not represent the future life of the house, the changes and traces the inhabitants make upon a space, nor do they document the path of the person, the arc of their actions, within the space of the house. Other types of documentation of the house allow these elements to be included. Documentation that is produced after-the-event, that interprets ‘the existing’, is absent from discourses on documentation; the realm of post factum documentation is a less examined form of documentation. This paper investigates post factum documentation of the house, and the alternative ways of making, producing and, therefore, thinking about, the house that it offers. This acknowledges the body in the space of architecture, and the inhabitation of space, and as a dynamic process. This then leads to the potential of the‘model of an action’ representing the motion and temporality inherent within the house. Architecture may then be seen as that which encloses the inhabitant. The word ‘document’ refers to a record or evidence of events. It implies a chronological sequence: the document comes after-the-event, that is, it is post factum. Within architecture, however, the use of the word documentation, predominantly, refers to working drawings that are made to ‘get to’ a building, drawings being the dominant representation within architecture. Robin Evans calls this notion, of architecture being brought into existence through drawing, the principle of reversed directionality (Evans 1997, 1989). Although it may be said that these types of drawings document the idea, or document the imagined reality of the building, their main emphasis, and reading, is in getting to something. In this case, the term documentation is used, not due to the documents’ placement within a process, of coming after the subject-object, but in referring to the drawings’ role. Other architectural drawings do exist that are a record of what is seen, but these are not the dominant drawing practice within architecture. Documentation within architecture regards the act of drawing as that process upon which the object is wholly dependent for its coming into existence. Drawing is defined as the pre-eminent methodology for generation of the building; drawings are considered the necessary initial step towards the creation of the 1:1 scale object. During the designing phase, the drawings are primary, setting out an intention. Drawings, therefore, are regarded as having a prescriptive endpoint rather than being part of an open-ended improvisation. Drawings, in getting to a building, draw out something, the act of drawing searches for and uncovers the latent design, drawing it into existence. They are seen as getting to the core of the design. Drawings display a technique of making and are influenced by their medium. Models, in getting to a building, may be described in the same way. The act of modelling, of making manifest two-dimensional sketches into a three-dimensional object, operates similarly in possessing a certain power in assisting the design process to unfurl. Drawing, as recording, alters the object. This act of drawing is used to resolve, and to edit, by excluding and omitting, as much as by including, within its page. Models similarly made after-the-fact are interpretive and consciously aware of their intentions. In encapsulating the subject-object, the model as documentation is equally drawing out meaning. This type of documentation is not neutral, but rather involves interpretation and reflection through representational editing. Working drawings record the house at an ideal moment in time: at the moment the builders leave the site and the owners unlock the front door. These drawings capture the house in stasis. There is often the notion that until the owners of a new house move in, the house has been empty, unlived in. But the life of the house cannot be fixed to any one starting point; rather it has different phases of life from conception to ruin. With working drawings being the dominant representation of the house, they exclude much; both the life of the house before this act of inhabitation, and the life that occurs after it. The transformations that occur at each phase of construction are never shown in a set of working drawings. When a house is built, it separates itself from the space it resides within: the domain of the house is marked off from the rest of the site. The house has a skin of a periphery, that inherently creates an outside and an inside (Kreiser 88). As construction continues, there is a freedom in the structure which closes down; potential becomes prescriptive as choices are made and embodied in material. The undesignedness of the site, that exists before the house is planned, becomes lost once the surveyors’ pegs are in place (Wakely 92). Next, the skeletal frame of open volumes becomes roofed, and then becomes walled, and walking through the frame becomes walking through doorways. One day an interior is created. The interior and exterior of the house are now two different things, and the house has definite edges (Casey 290). At some point, the house becomes lockable, its security assured through this act of sealing. It is this moment that working drawings capture. Photographs comprise the usual documentation of houses once they are built, and yet they show no lived-in-ness, no palimpsest of occupancy. They do not observe the changes and traces the inhabitants make upon a space, nor do they document the path of the person, the arc of their actions, within the space of the house. American architects and artists Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have written of these traces of the everyday that punctuate floor and wall surfaces: the intersecting rings left by coffee glasses on a tabletop, the dust under a bed that becomes its plan analog when the bed is moved, the swing etched into the floor by a sagging door. (Diller & Scofidio 99) It is these marks, these traces, that are omitted from the conventional documentation of a built house. To examine an alternative way of documenting, and to redress these omissions, a redefinition of the house is needed. A space can be delineated by its form, its edges, or it can be defined by the actions that are performed, and the connections between people that occur, within it. To define the house by what it encapsulates, rather than being seen as an object in space, allows a different type of documentation to be employed. By defining a space as that which accommodates actions, rooms may be delineated by the reach of a person, carved out by the actions of a person, as though they are leaving a trace as they move, a windscreen wiper of living, through the repetition of an act. Reverse directional documentation does not directly show the actions that take place within a house; we must infer these from the rooms’ fittings and fixtures, and the names on the plan. In a similar way, Italo Calvino, in Invisible Cities, defines a city by the relationships between its inhabitants, rather than by its buildings: in Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or grey or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain … Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form. (Calvino 62) By defining architecture by that which it encapsulates, form or materiality may be given to the ‘spiderwebs of intricate relationships’. Modelling the actions that are performed in the space of architecture, therefore, models the architecture. This is referred to as a model of an action. In examining the model of an action, the possibilities of post factum documentation of the house may be seen. The Shinkenchiku competition The Plan-Less House (2006), explored these ideas of representing a house without using the conventional plan to do so. A suggested alternative was to map the use of the house by its inhabitants, similar to the idea of the model of an action. The house could be described by a technique of scanning: those areas that came into contact with the body would be mapped. Therefore, the representation of the house is not connected with spatial division, that is, by marking the location of walls, but rather with its use by its inhabitants. The work of Diller and Scofidio and Allan Wexler and others explores this realm. One inquiry they share is the modelling of the body in the space of architecture: to them, the body is inseparable from the conception of space. By looking at their work, and that of others, three different ways of representing this inhabitation of space are seen. These are: to represent the objects involved in a particular action, or patterns of movement, that occurs in the space, in a way that highlights the action; to document the action itself; or to document the result of the action. These can all be defined as the model of an action. The first way, the examination of the body in a space via an action’s objects, is explored by American artist Allan Wexler, who defines architecture as ‘choreography without a choreographer, structuring its inhabitant’s movements’ (Galfetti 22). In his project ‘Crate House’ (1981), Wexler examines the notion of the body in a space via an action’s objects. He divided the house into its basic activities: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room. Each of these is then defined by their artefacts, contained in their own crate on wheels, which is rolled out when needed. At any point in time, the entire house becomes the activity due to its crate: when a room such as the kitchen is needed, that crate is rolled in through one of the door openings. When the occupant is tired, the entire house becomes a bedroom, and when the occupant is hungry, it becomes a kitchen … I view each crate as if it is a diorama in a natural history museum — the pillow, the spoon, the flashlight, the pot, the nail, the salt. We lose sight of everyday things. These things I isolate, making them sculpture: their use being theatre. (Galfetti 42–6) The work of Andrea Zittel explores similar ideas. ‘A–Z Comfort Unit’ (1994), is made up of five segments, the centrepiece being a couch/bed, which is surrounded by four ancillary units on castors. These offer a library, kitchen, home office and vanity unit. The structure allows the lodger never to need to leave the cocoon-like bed, as all desires are an arm’s reach away. The ritual of eating a meal is examined in Wexler’s ‘Scaffold Furniture’ (1988). This project isolates the components of the dining table without the structure of the table. Instead, the chair, plate, cup, glass, napkin, knife, fork, spoon and lamp are suspended by scaffolding. Their connection, rather than being that of objects sharing a tabletop, is seen to be the (absent) hand that uses them during a meal; the act of eating is highlighted. In these examples, the actions performed within a space are represented by the objects involved in the action. A second way of representing the patterns of movement within a space is to represent the action itself. The Japanese tea ceremony breaks the act of drinking into many parts, separating and dissecting the whole as a way of then reassembling it as though it is one continuous action. Wexler likens this to an Eadweard Muybridge film of a human in motion (Galfetti 31). This one action is then housed in a particular building, so that when devoid of people, the action itself still has a presence. Another way of documenting the inhabitation of architecture, by drawing the actions within the space, is time and motion studies, such as those of Rene W.P. Leanhardt (Diller & Scofidio 40–1). In one series of photographs, lights were attached to a housewife’s wrists, to demonstrate the difference in time and effort required in the preparation of a dinner prepared entirely from scratch in ninety minutes, and a pre-cooked, pre-packaged dinner of the same dish, which took only twelve minutes. These studies are lines of light, recorded as line drawings on a photograph of the kitchen. They record the movement of the person in the room of the action they perform, but they also draw the kitchen in a way conventional documentation does not. A recent example of the documentation of an action was undertaken by Asymptote and the students at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture in their exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2000. A gymnast moving through the interior space of the pavilion was recorded using a process of digitisation and augmentation. Using modelling procedures, the spatial information was then reconstructed to become a full-scale architectural re-enactment of the gymnast’s trajectory through the room (Feireiss 40). This is similar to a recent performance by Australian contemporary dance company Chunky Move, called ‘Glow’. Infra-red video tracking took a picture of the dancer twenty-five times a second. This was used to generate shapes and images based on the movements of a solo dancer, which were projected onto the floor and the dancer herself. In the past, when the company has used DVDs or videos, the dancer has had to match what they were doing to the projection. This shifts the technology to following the dancer (Bibby 3). A third way of representing the inhabitation of architecture is to document the result of an action. Raoul Bunschoten writes of the marks of a knife being the manifestation of the act of cutting, as an analogy: incisions imply the use of a cutting tool. Together, cuts and cutting tool embrace a special condition. The actual movement of the incision is fleeting, the cut or mark stays behind, the knife moves on, creating an apparent discontinuity … The space of the cut is a reminder of the knife, its shape and its movements: the preparation, the swoop through the air, the cutting, withdrawal, the moving away. These movements remain implicitly connected with the cut as its imaginary cause, as a mnemonic programme about a hand holding a knife, incising a surface, severing skin. (Bunschoten 40) As a method of documenting actions, the paintings of Jackson Pollack can be seen as a manifestation of an act. In the late 1940s, Pollack began to drip paint onto a canvas laid flat on the floor; his tools were sticks and old caked brushes. This process clarified his work, allowing him to walk around it and work from all four sides. Robert Hughes describes it as ‘painting “from the hip” … swinging paintstick in flourishes and frisks that required an almost dancelike movement of the body’ (Hughes 154). These paintings made manifest Pollack’s gestures. As his arm swung in space, the dripping paint followed that arc, to be preserved on a flat plane as pictorial space (Hughes 262). Wexler, in another study, recorded the manifestation of an action. He placed a chair in a one-room building. It was attached to lengths of timber that extended outdoors through slots in the walls of the building. As the chair moved inside the building, its projections carved grooves in the ground outside. As the chair moved in a particular pattern, deeper grooves were created: ‘Eventually, the occupant of the chair has no choice in his movement; the architecture moves him.’ (Galfetti 14) The pattern of movement creates a result, which in turn influences the movement. By redefining architecture by what it encapsulates rather than by the enclosure itself, allows architecture to be documented by the post factum model of an action that occurs in that space. This leads to the exploration of architecture, formed by the body within it, since the documentation and representation of architecture starts to affect the reading of architecture. Architecture may then be seen as that which encloses the inhabitant. The documentation of the body and the space it makes concerns the work of the Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz. His exploration is of the body and the space it makes. Makovecz, and a circle of like-minded architects and artists, embarked on a series of experiments analysing the patterns of human motion and subsequently set up a competition based around the search for a minimum existential space. This consisted of mapping human motion in certain spatial conditions and situations. Small light bulbs were attached to points on the limbs and joints and photographed, creating a series of curves and forms. This led to a competition called ‘Minimal Space’ (1971–2), in which architects, artists and designers were invited to consider a minimal space for containing the human body, a new notion of personal containment. Makovecz’s own response took the form of a bell-like capsule composed of a double shell expressing its presence and location in both time and space (Heathcote 120). Vito Acconci, an artist turned architect by virtue of his installation work, explored this notion of enclosure in his work (Feireiss 38). In 1980 Acconci began his series of ‘self-erecting architectures’, vehicles or instruments involving one or more viewers whose operation erected simple buildings (Acconci & Linker 114). In his project ‘Instant House’ (1980), a set of walls lies flat on the floor, forming an open cruciform shape. By sitting in the swing in the centre of this configuration, the visitor activates an apparatus of cables and pulleys causing walls to rise and form a box-like house. It is a work that explores the idea of enclosing, of a space being something that has to be constructed, in the same way for example one builds up meaning (Reed 247–8). This documentation of architecture directly references the inhabitation of architecture. The post factum model of architecture is closely linked to the body in space and the actions it performs. Examining the actions and movement patterns within a space allows the inhabitation process to be seen as a dynamic process. David Owen describes the biological process of ‘ecopoiesis’: the process of a system making a home for itself. He describes the building and its occupants jointly as the new system, in a system of shaping and reshaping themselves until there is a tolerable fit (Brand 164). The definition of architecture as being that which encloses us, interests Edward S. Casey: in standing in my home, I stand here and yet feel surrounded (sheltered, challenged, drawn out, etc.) by the building’s boundaries over there. A person in this situation is not simply in time or simply in space but experiences an event in all its engaging and unpredictable power. In Derrida’s words, ‘this outside engages us in the very thing we are’, and we find ourselves subjected to architecture rather than being the controlling subject that plans or owns, uses or enjoys it; in short architecture ‘comprehends us’. (Casey 314) This shift in relationship between the inhabitant and architecture shifts the documentation and reading of the exhibition of architecture. Casey’s notion of architecture comprehending the inhabitant opens the possibility for an alternate exhibition of architecture, the documentation of that which is beyond the inhabitant’s direction. Conventional documentation shows a quiescence to the house. Rather than attempting to capture the flurry — the palimpsest of occupancy — within the house, it is presented as stilled, inert and dormant. In representing the house this way, a lull is provided, fostering a steadiness of gaze: a pause is created, within which to examine the house. However, the house is then seen as object, rather than that which encapsulates motion and temporality. Defining, and thus documenting, the space of architecture by its actions, extends the perimeter of architecture. No longer is the house bounded by its doors and walls, but rather by the extent of its patterns of movement. Post factum documentation allows this altering of the definition of architecture, as it includes the notion of the model of an action. By appropriating, clarifying and reshaping situations that are relevant to the investigation of post factum documentation, the notion of the inhabitation of the house as a definition of architecture may be examined. This further examines the relationship between architectural representation, the architectural image, and the image of architecture. References Acconci, V., and K. Linker. Vito Acconci. New York: Rizzoli, 1994. Bibby, P. “Dancer in the Dark Is Light Years Ahead.” Sydney Morning Herald 22 March 2007: 3. Brand, S. How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built. London: Phoenix Illustrated, 1997. Bunschoten, R. “Cutting the Horizon: Two Theses on Architecture.” Forum (Nov. 1992): 40–9. Calvino, I. Invisible Cities. London: Picador, 1979. Casey, E.S. The Fate of Place. California: U of California P, 1998. Diller, E., and R. Scofidio. Flesh: Architectural Probes. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. Evans, R. Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. ———. “Architectural Projection.” Eds. E. Blau and E. Kaufman. Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation: Works from the Collection of the Canadian Center for Architecture. Exhibition catalogue. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. 19–35. Feireiss, K., ed. The Art of Architecture Exhibitions. Rotterdam: Netherlands Architecture Institute, 2001. Galfetti, G.G., ed. Allan Wexler. Barcelona: GG Portfolio, 1998. Glanville, R. “An Irregular Dodekahedron and a Lemon Yellow Citroen.” In L. van Schaik, ed., The Practice of Practice: Research in the Medium of Design. Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2003. 258–265. Heathcote, E. Imre Mackovecz: The Wings of the Soul. West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1997. Hughes, R. The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980. Kreiser, C. “On the Loss of (Dark) Inside Space.” Daidalos 36 (June 1990): 88–99. Reed, C. ed. Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996. “Shinkenchiku Competition 2006: The Plan-Less House.” The Japan Architect 64 (Winter 2007): 7–12. Small, D. Paper John. USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. Wakely, M. Dream Home. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Macken, Marian. "And Then We Moved In: Post Factum Documentation of the House." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/04-macken.php>. APA Style Macken, M. (Aug. 2007) "And Then We Moved In: Post Factum Documentation of the House," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/04-macken.php>.

IntroductionThere are two types of Africa. The first is a place where people and cultures live. The second is the image of Africa that has been invented through colonial knowledge and power. The colonial image of Africa, as the Other of Europe, a land “enveloped in the dark mantle of night” was supported by western states as it justified their colonial practices (Hegel 91). Any evidence that challenged the myth of the Dark Continent was destroyed, removed or ignored. While the looting of African natural resources has been studied, the looting of African knowledges hasn’t received as much attention, partly based on the assumption that Africans did not produce knowledge that could be stolen. This article invalidates this myth by examining the legacy of Ethiopia’s indigenous Ge’ez literature, and its looting and abduction by powerful western agents. The article argues that this has resulted in epistemic violence, where students of the Ethiopian indigenous education system do not have access to their books, while European orientalists use them to interpret Ethiopian history and philosophy using a foreign lens. The analysis is based on interviews with teachers and students of ten Ge’ez schools in Ethiopia, and trips to the Ethiopian manuscript collections in The British Library, The Princeton Library, the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and The National Archives in Addis Ababa.The Context of Ethiopian Indigenous KnowledgesGe’ez is one of the ancient languages of Africa. According to Professor Ephraim Isaac, “about 10,000 years ago, one single nation or community of a single linguistic group existed in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Horn of Africa” (The Habesha). The language of this group is known as Proto-Afroasiatic or Afrasian languages. It is the ancestor of the Semitic, Cushitic, Nilotic, Omotic and other languages that are currently spoken in Ethiopia by its 80 ethnic groups, and the neighbouring countries (Diakonoff). Ethiopians developed the Ge’ez language as their lingua franca with its own writing system some 2000 years ago. Currently, Ge’ez is the language of academic scholarship, studied through the traditional education system (Isaac, The Ethiopian). Since the fourth century, an estimated 1 million Ge’ez manuscripts have been written, covering religious, historical, mathematical, medicinal, and philosophical texts.One of the most famous Ge’ez manuscripts is the Kebra Nagast, a foundational text that embodied the indigenous conception of nationhood in Ethiopia. The philosophical, political and religious themes in this book, which craft Ethiopia as God’s country and the home of the Ark of the Covenant, contributed to the country’s success in defending itself from European colonialism. The production of books like the Kebra Nagast went hand in hand with a robust indigenous education system that trained poets, scribes, judges, artists, administrators and priests. Achieving the highest stages of learning requires about 30 years after which the scholar would be given the rare title Arat-Ayina, which means “four eyed”, a person with the ability to see the past as well as the future. Today, there are around 50,000 Ge’ez schools across the country, most of which are in rural villages and churches.Ge’ez manuscripts are important textbooks and reference materials for students. They are carefully prepared from vellum “to make them last forever” (interview, 3 Oct. 2019). Some of the religious books are regarded as “holy persons who breathe wisdom that gives light and food to the human soul”. Other manuscripts, often prepared as scrolls are used for medicinal purposes. Each manuscript is uniquely prepared reflecting inherited wisdom on contemporary lives using the method called Tirguamme, the act of giving meaning to sacred texts. Preparation of books is costly. Smaller manuscript require the skins of 50-70 goats/sheep and large manuscript needed 100-120 goats/sheep (Tefera).The Loss of Ethiopian ManuscriptsSince the 18th century, a large quantity of these manuscripts have been stolen, looted, or smuggled out of the country by travellers who came to the country as explorers, diplomats and scientists. The total number of Ethiopian manuscripts taken is still unknown. Amsalu Tefera counted 6928 Ethiopian manuscripts currently held in foreign libraries and museums. This figure does not include privately held or unofficial collections (41).Looting and smuggling were sponsored by western governments, institutions, and notable individuals. For example, in 1868, The British Museum Acting Director Richard Holms joined the British army which was sent to ‘rescue’ British hostages at Maqdala, the capital of Emperor Tewodros. Holms’ mission was to bring treasures for the Museum. Before the battle, Tewodros had established the Medhanialem library with more than 1000 manuscripts as part of Ethiopia’s “industrial revolution”. When Tewodros lost the war and committed suicide, British soldiers looted the capital, including the treasury and the library. They needed 200 mules and 15 elephants to transport the loot and “set fire to all buildings so that no trace was left of the edifices which once housed the manuscripts” (Rita Pankhurst 224). Richard Holmes collected 356 manuscripts for the Museum. A wealthy British woman called Lady Meux acquired some of the most illuminated manuscripts. In her will, she bequeathed them to be returned to Ethiopia. However, her will was reversed by court due to a campaign from the British press (Richard Pankhurst). In 2018, the V&A Museum in London displayed some of the treasures by incorporating Maqdala into the imperial narrative of Britain (Woldeyes, Reflections).Britain is by no means the only country to seek Ethiopian manuscripts for their collections. Smuggling occurred in the name of science, an act of collecting manuscripts for study. Looting involved local collaborators and powerful foreign sponsors from places like France, Germany and the Vatican. Like Maqdala, this was often sponsored by governments or powerful financers. For example, the French government sponsored the Dakar-Djibouti Mission led by Marcel Griaule, which “brought back about 350 manuscripts and scrolls from Gondar” (Wion 2). It was often claimed that these manuscripts were purchased, rather than looted. Johannes Flemming of Germany was said to have purchased 70 manuscripts and ten scrolls for the Royal Library of Berlin in 1905. However, there was no local market for buying manuscripts. Ge’ez manuscripts were, and still are, written to serve spiritual and secular life in Ethiopia, not for buying and selling. There are countless other examples, but space limits how many can be provided in this article. What is important to note is that museums and libraries have accrued impressive collections without emphasising how those collections were first obtained. The loss of the intellectual heritage of Ethiopians to western collectors has had an enormous impact on the country.Knowledge Grabbing: The Denial of Access to KnowledgeWith so many manuscripts lost, European collectors became the narrators of Ethiopian knowledge and history. Edward Ullendorff, a known orientalist in Ethiopian studies, refers to James Bruce as “the explorer of Abyssinia” (114). Ullendorff commented on the significance of Bruce’s travel to Ethiopia asperhaps the most important aspect of Bruce’s travels was the collection of Ethiopic manuscripts… . They opened up entirely new vistas for the study of Ethiopian languages and placed this branch of Oriental scholarship on a much more secure basis. It is not known how many MSS. reached Europe through his endeavours, but the present writer is aware of at least twenty-seven, all of which are exquisite examples of Ethiopian manuscript art. (133)This quote encompasses three major ways in which epistemic violence occurs: denial of access to knowledge, Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts, and the handling of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts from the past. These will be discussed below.Western ‘travellers’, such as Bruce, did not fully disclose how many manuscripts they took or how they acquired them. The abundance of Ethiopian manuscripts in western institutions can be compared to the scarcity of such materials among traditional schools in Ethiopia. In this research, I have visited ten indigenous schools in Wollo (Lalibela, Neakutoleab, Asheten, Wadla), in Gondar (Bahita, Kuskwam, Menbere Mengist), and Gojam (Bahirdar, Selam Argiew Maryam, Giorgis). In all of the schools, there is lack of Ge’ez manuscripts. Students often come from rural villages and do not receive any government support. The scarcity of Ge’ez manuscripts, and the lack of funding which might allow for the purchasing of books, means the students depend mainly on memorising Ge’ez texts told to them from the mouth of their teacher. Although this method of learning is not new, it currently is the only way for passing indigenous knowledges across generations.The absence of manuscripts is most strongly felt in the advanced schools. For instance, in the school of Qene, poetic literature is created through an in-depth study of the vocabulary and grammar of Ge’ez. A Qene student is required to develop a deep knowledge of Ge’ez in order to understand ancient and medieval Ge’ez texts which are used to produce poetry with multiple meanings. Without Ge’ez manuscripts, students cannot draw their creative works from the broad intellectual tradition of their ancestors. When asked how students gain access to textbooks, one student commented:we don’t have access to Birana books (Ge’ez manuscripts written on vellum). We cannot learn the ancient wisdom of painting, writing, and computing developed by our ancestors. We simply buy paper books such as Dawit (Psalms), Sewasew (grammar) or Degwa (book of songs with notations) and depend on our teachers to teach us the rest. We also lend these books to each other as many students cannot afford to buy them. Without textbooks, we expect to spend double the amount of time it would take if we had textbooks. (Interview, 3 Sep. 2019)Many students interrupt their studies and work as labourers to save up and buy paper textbooks, but they still don’t have access to the finest works taken to Europe. Most Ge’ez manuscripts remaining in Ethiopia are locked away in monasteries, church stores or other places to prevent further looting. The manuscripts in Addis Ababa University and the National Archives are available for researchers but not to the students of the indigenous system, creating a condition of internal knowledge grabbing.While the absence of Ge’ez manuscripts denied, and continues to deny, Ethiopians the chance to enrich their indigenous education, it benefited western orientalists to garner intellectual authority on the field of Ethiopian studies. In 1981, British Museum Director John Wilson said, “our Abyssinian holdings are more important than our Indian collection” (Bell 231). In reaction, Richard Pankhurst, the Director of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, responded that the collection was acquired through plunder. Defending the retaining of Maqdala manuscripts in Europe, Ullendorff wrote:neither Dr. Pankhurst nor the Ethiopian and western scholars who have worked on this collection (and indeed on others in Europe) could have contributed so significantly to the elucidation of Ethiopian history without the rich resources available in this country. Had they remained insitu, none of this would have been possible. (Qtd. in Bell 234)The manuscripts are therefore valued based on their contribution to western scholarship only. This is a continuation of epistemic violence whereby local knowledges are used as raw materials to produce Eurocentric knowledge, which in turn is used to teach Africans as though they had no prior knowledge. Scholars are defined as those western educated persons who can speak European languages and can travel to modern institutions to access the manuscripts. Knowledge grabbing regards previous owners as inexistent or irrelevant for the use of the grabbed knowledges.Knowledge grabbing also means indigenous scholars are deprived of critical resources to produce new knowledge based on their intellectual heritage. A Qene teacher commented: our students could not devote their time and energy to produce new knowledges in the same way our ancestors did. We have the tradition of Madeladel, Kimera, Kuteta, Mielad, Qene and tirguamme where students develop their own system of remembering, reinterpreting, practicing, and rewriting previous manuscripts and current ones. Without access to older manuscripts, we increasingly depend on preserving what is being taught orally by elders. (Interview, 4 Sep. 2019)This point is important as it relates to the common myth that indigenous knowledges are artefacts belonging to the past, not the present. There are millions of people who still use these knowledges, but the conditions necessary for their reproduction and improvement is denied through knowledge grabbing. The view of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts dismisses the Ethiopian view that Birana manuscripts are living persons. As a scholar told me in Gondar, “they are creations of Egziabher (God), like all of us. Keeping them in institutions is like keeping living bodies in graveyards” (interview, 5 Oct. 2019).Recently, the collection of Ethiopian manuscripts by western institutions has also been conducted digitally. Thousands of manuscripts have been microfilmed or digitised. For example, the EU funded Ethio-SPaRe project resulted in the digital collection of 2000 Ethiopian manuscripts (Nosnitsin). While digitisation promises better access for people who may not be able to visit institutions to see physical copies, online manuscripts are not accessible to indigenous school students in Ethiopia. They simply do not have computer or internet access and the manuscripts are catalogued in European languages. Both physical and digital knowledge grabbing results in the robbing of Ethiopian intellectual heritage, and denies the possibility of such manuscripts being used to inform local scholarship. Epistemic Violence: The European as ExpertWhen considered in relation to stolen or appropriated manuscripts, epistemic violence is the way in which local knowledge is interpreted using a foreign epistemology and gained dominance over indigenous worldviews. European scholars have monopolised the field of Ethiopian Studies by producing books, encyclopaedias and digital archives based on Ethiopian manuscripts, almost exclusively in European languages. The contributions of their work for western scholarship is undeniable. However, Kebede argues that one of the detrimental effects of this orientalist literature is the thesis of Semiticisation, the designation of the origin of Ethiopian civilisation to the arrival of Middle Eastern colonisers rather than indigenous sources.The thesis is invented to make the history of Ethiopia consistent with the Hegelian western view that Africa is a Dark Continent devoid of a civilisation of its own. “In light of the dominant belief that black peoples are incapable of great achievements, the existence of an early and highly advanced civilization constitutes a serious anomaly in the Eurocentric construction of the world” (Kebede 4). To address this anomaly, orientalists like Ludolph attributed the origin of Ethiopia’s writing system, agriculture, literature, and civilisation to the arrival of South Arabian settlers. For example, in his translation of the Kebra Nagast, Budge wrote: “the SEMITES found them [indigenous Ethiopians] negro savages, and taught them civilization and culture and the whole scriptures on which their whole literature is based” (x).In line with the above thesis, Dillman wrote that “the Abyssinians borrowed their Numerical Signs from the Greeks” (33). The views of these orientalist scholars have been challenged. For instance, leading scholar of Semitic languages Professor Ephraim Isaac considers the thesis of the Arabian origin of Ethiopian civilization “a Hegelian Eurocentric philosophical perspective of history” (2). Isaac shows that there is historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence that suggest Ethiopia to be more advanced than South Arabia from pre-historic times. Various Ethiopian sources including the Kebra Nagast, the works of historian Asres Yenesew, and Ethiopian linguist Girma Demeke provide evidence for the indigenous origin of Ethiopian civilisation and languages.The epistemic violence of the Semeticisation thesis lies in how this Eurocentric ideological construction is the dominant narrative in the field of Ethiopian history and the education system. Unlike the indigenous view, the orientalist view is backed by strong institutional power both in Ethiopia and abroad. The orientalists control the field of Ethiopian studies and have access to Ge’ez manuscripts. Their publications are the only references for Ethiopian students. Due to Native Colonialism, a system of power run by native elites through the use of colonial ideas and practices (Woldeyes), the education system is the imitation of western curricula, including English as a medium of instruction from high school onwards. Students study the west more than Ethiopia. Indigenous sources are generally excluded as unscientific. Only the Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts is regarded as scientific and objective.ConclusionEthiopia is the only African country never to be colonised. In its history it produced a large quantity of manuscripts in the Ge’ez language through an indigenous education system that involves the study of these manuscripts. Since the 19th century, there has been an ongoing loss of these manuscripts. European travellers who came to Ethiopia as discoverers, missionaries and scholars took a large number of manuscripts. The Battle of Maqdala involved the looting of the intellectual products of Ethiopia that were collected at the capital. With the introduction of western education and use of English as a medium of instruction, the state disregarded indigenous schools whose students have little access to the manuscripts. This article brings the issue of knowledge grapping, a situation whereby European institutions and scholars accumulate Ethiopia manuscripts without providing the students in Ethiopia to have access to those collections.Items such as manuscripts that are held in western institutions are not dead artefacts of the past to be preserved for prosperity. They are living sources of knowledge that should be put to use in their intended contexts. Local Ethiopian scholars cannot study ancient and medieval Ethiopia without travelling and gaining access to western institutions. This lack of access and resources has made European Ethiopianists almost the sole producers of knowledge about Ethiopian history and culture. For example, indigenous sources and critical research that challenge the Semeticisation thesis are rarely available to Ethiopian students. Here we see epistemic violence in action. Western control over knowledge production has the detrimental effect of inventing new identities, subjectivities and histories that translate into material effects in the lives of African people. In this way, Ethiopians and people all over Africa internalise western understandings of themselves and their history as primitive and in need of development or outside intervention. African’s intellectual and cultural heritage, these living bodies locked away in graveyards, must be put back into the hands of Africans.AcknowledgementThe author acknowledges the support of the Australian Academy of the Humanities' 2019 Humanities Travelling Fellowship Award in conducting this research.ReferencesBell, Stephen. “Cultural Treasures Looted from Maqdala: A Summary of Correspondence in British National Newspapers since 1981.” Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 231-246.Budge, Wallis. A History of Ethiopia, Nubia and Abyssinia. London: Methuen and Co, 1982.Demeke, Girma Awgichew. The Origin of Amharic. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2013.Diakonoff, Igor M. Afrasian Languages. Moscow: Nauka, 1988.Dillmann, August. Ethiopic Grammar. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2005.Hegel, Georg W.F. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover, 1956.Isaac, Ephraim. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church. New Jersey: Red Sea Press, 2013.———. “An Open Letter to an Inquisitive Ethiopian Sister.” The Habesha, 2013. 1 Feb. 2020 <http://www.zehabesha.com/an-open-letter-to-an-inquisitive-young-ethiopian-sister-ethiopian-history-is-not-three-thousand-years/>.Kebra Nagast. "The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelik I." Trans. Wallis Budge. London: Oxford UP, 1932.Pankhurst, Richard. "The Napier Expedition and the Loot Form Maqdala." Presence Africaine 133-4 (1985): 233-40.Pankhurst, Rita. "The Maqdala Library of Tewodros." Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 223-230.Tefera, Amsalu. ነቅዐ መጻህፍት ከ መቶ በላይ በግዕዝ የተጻፉ የእኢትዮጵያ መጻህፍት ዝርዝር ከማብራሪያ ጋር።. Addis Ababa: Jajaw, 2019.Nosnitsin, Denis. "Ethio-Spare Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia: Salvation, Preservation and Research." 2010. 5 Jan. 2019 <https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/ethiostudies/research/ethiospare/missions/pdf/report2010-1.pdf>. Ullendorff, Edward. "James Bruce of Kinnaird." The Scottish Historical Review 32.114, part 2 (1953): 128-43.Wion, Anaïs. "Collecting Manuscripts and Scrolls in Ethiopia: The Missions of Johannes Flemming (1905) and Enno Littmann (1906)." 2012. 5 Jan. 2019 <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00524382/document>. Woldeyes, Yirga Gelaw. Native Colonialism: Education and the Economy of Violence against Traditions in Ethiopia. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2017.———. “Reflections on Ethiopia’s Stolen Treasures on Display in a London Museum.” The Conversation. 2018. 5 June 2018 <https://theconversation.com/reflections-on-ethiopias-stolen-treasures-on-display-in-a-london-museum-97346>.Yenesew, Asres. ትቤ፡አክሱም፡መኑ፡ አንተ? Addis Ababa: Nigid Printing House, 1959 [1951 EC].

Like any genre or mode, the Gothic is malleable, changing according to time and place. This is particularly apparent when what is considered Gothic in one era is compared with that of another. The giant helmet that falls from the sky in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) is a very different threat to the ravenous vampires that stalk the novels of Anne Rice, just as Ann Radcliffe’s animated portraits may not inspire anxiety for a contemporary reader of Stephen King. The mutability of Gothic is also apparent across various versions of national Gothic that have emerged, with the specificities of place lending Gothic narratives from countries such as Ireland, Scotland and Australia a distinctive flavour. In New Zealand, the Gothic is most commonly associated with Pakeha artists exploring extreme psychological states, isolation and violence. Instead of the haunted castles, ruined abbeys and supernatural occurrences of classic Gothics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as those produced by writers as diverse as Charles Brockden Brown, Matthew Lewis, Edgar Allen Poe, Radcliffe, Bram Stoker and Walpole, New Zealand Gothic fiction tends to focus on psychological horror, taking its cue, according to Jenny Lawn, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which ushered in a tendency in the Gothic novel to explore the idea of a divided consciousness. Lawn observes that in New Zealand “Our monsters tend to be interior: they are experiences of intense psychological states, often with sexual undertones within isolated nuclear families” (“Kiwi Gothic”). Kirsty Gunn’s novella Rain (1994), which focuses on a dysfunctional family holidaying in an isolated lakeside community, exemplifies the tendency of New Zealand Gothic to omit the supernatural in favour of the psychological, with its spectres being sexual predation, parental neglect and the death of an innocent. Bronwyn Bannister’s Haunt (2000) is set primarily in a psychiatric hospital, detailing various forms of psychiatric disorder, as well as the acts that spring from them, such as one protagonist’s concealment for several years of her baby in a shed, while Noel Virtue’s The Redemption of Elsdon Bird (1987) is another example, with a young character’s decision to shoot his two younger siblings in the head as they sleep in an attempt to protect them from the religious beliefs of his fundamentalist parents amply illustrating the intense psychological states that characterise New Zealand Gothic. Although there is no reason why Gothic literature ought to include the supernatural, its omission in New Zealand Gothic does point to a confusion that Timothy Jones foregrounds in his suggestion that “In the absence of the trappings of established Gothic traditions – castles populated by fiendish aristocrats, swamps draped with Spanish moss and possessed by terrible spirits” New Zealand is “uncertain how and where it ought to perform its own Gothic” (203). The anxiety that Jones notes is perhaps less to do with where the New Zealand Gothic should occur, since there is an established tradition of Gothic events occurring in the bush and on the beach, while David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968) uses a derelict slaughterhouse as a version of a haunted castle and Maurice Gee successfully uses a decrepit farmhouse as a Gothic edifice in The Fire-Raiser (1986), but more to do with available ghosts. New Zealand Gothic literature produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries certainly tends to focus on the psychological rather than the supernatural, but earlier writing that utilises the Gothic mode is far more focused on spooky events and ghostly presences. There is a tradition of supernatural Gothic in New Zealand, but its representations of Maori ghosts complicates the processes through which contemporary writers might build on that tradition. The stories in D. W. O. Fagen’s collection Tapu and Other Tales of Old New Zealand (1952) illustrate the tendency in colonial New Zealand literature to represent Maori in supernatural terms expressive both of anxieties surrounding Maori agency and indigeneity, as well as Western assumptions regarding Maori culture. In much colonial Gothic, Maori ghosts, burial grounds and the notion of tapu express settler anxieties while also working to contain those anxieties by suggesting the superstitious and hence backward nature of indigenous culture. In Fagan’s story “Tapu”, which first appeared in the Bulletin in 1912, the narrator stumbles into a Maori burial ground where he is confronted by the terrible sight of “two fleshless skeletons” that grin and appear “ghastly in the dim light” (37). The narrator’s desecration of land deemed tapu fills him with “a sort of nameless terror at nothing, a horror of some unknown impending fate against which it was useless to struggle and from which there was no escape” (39). This expresses a sense of the authenticity of Maori culture, but the narrator’s thought “Was there any truth in heathen devilry after all?” is quickly superseded by the relegation of Maori culture as “ancient superstitions” (40). When the narrator is approached by a tohunga following his breach of tapu, his reaction is outrage: "Here was I – a fairly decent Englishman, reared in the Anglican faith and living in the nineteenth century – hindered from going about my business, outcast, excommunicated, shunned as a leper, my servant dying, all on account of some fiendish diablerie of heathen fetish. The affair was preposterous, incredible, ludicrous" (40). Fagan’s story establishes a clear opposition between Western rationalism and “decency”, and the “heathen fetishes” associated with Maori culture, which it uses to infuse the story with the thrills appropriate to Gothic fiction and which it ultimately casts as superstitious and uncivilised. F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand (1863) includes an episode of Maori women grieving that is represented in terms that would not be out of place in horror. A group of women are described as screaming, wailing, and quivering their hands about in a most extraordinary manner, and cutting themselves dreadfully with sharp flints and shells. One old woman, in the centre of the group, was one clot of blood from head to feet, and large clots of coagulated blood lay on the ground where she stood. The sight was absolutely horrible, I thought at the time. She was singing or howling a dirge-like wail. In her right hand she held a piece of tuhua, or volcanic glass, as sharp as a razor: this she placed deliberately to her left wrist, drawing it slowly upwards to her left shoulder, the spouting blood following as it went; then from the left shoulder downwards, across the breast to the short ribs on the right side; then the rude but keen knife was shifted from the right hand to the left, placed to the right wrist, drawn upwards to the right shoulder, and so down across the breast to the left side, thus making a bloody cross on the breast; and so the operation went on all the time I was there, the old creature all the time howling in time and measure, and keeping time also with the knife, which at every cut was shifted from one hand to the other, as I have described. She had scored her forehead and cheeks before I came; her face and body was a mere clot of blood, and a little stream was dropping from every finger – a more hideous object could scarcely be conceived. (Maning 120–21) The gory quality of this episode positions Maori as barbaric, but Patrick Evans notes that there is an incident in Old New Zealand that grants authenticity to indigenous culture. After being discovered handling human remains, the narrator of Maning’s text is made tapu and rendered untouchable. Although Maning represents the narrator’s adherence to his abjection from Maori society as merely a way to placate a local population, when a tohunga appears to perform cleansing rituals, the narrator’s indulgence of perceived superstition is accompanied by “a curious sensation […] like what I fancied a man must feel who has just sold himself, body and bones, to the devil. For a moment I asked myself the question whether I was not actually being then and there handed over to the powers of darkness” (qtd. in Evans 85). Evans points out that Maning may represent the ritual as solely performative, “but the result is portrayed as real” (85). Maning’s narrator may assert his lack of belief in the tohunga’s power, but he nevertheless experiences that power. Such moments of unease occur throughout colonial writing when assertions of European dominance and rational understanding are undercut or threatened. Evans cites the examples of the painter G. F. Angus whose travels through the native forest of Waikato in the 1840s saw him haunted by the “peculiar odour” of rotting vegetation and Edward Shortland whose efforts to remain skeptical during a sacred Maori ceremony were disturbed by the manifestation of atua rustling in the thatch of the hut in which it was occurring (Evans 85). Even though the mysterious power attributed to Maori in colonial Gothic is frequently represented as threatening, there is also an element of desire at play, which Lydia Wevers highlights in her observation that colonial ghost stories involve a desire to assimilate or be assimilated by what is “other.” Wevers singles out for discussion the story “The Disappearance of Letham Crouch”, which appeared in the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine in 1901. The narrative recounts the experiences of an overzealous missionary who is received by Maori as a new tohunga. In order to learn more about Maori religion (so as to successfully replace it with Christianity), Crouch inhabits a hut that is tapu, resulting in madness and fanaticism. He eventually disappears, only to reappear in the guise of a Maori “stripped for dancing” (qtd. in Wevers 206). Crouch is effectively “turned heathen” (qtd. in Wevers 206), a transformation that is clearly threatening for a Christian European, but there is also an element of desirability in such a transformation for a settler seeking an authentic New Zealand identity. Colonial Gothic frequently figures mysterious experiences with indigenous culture as a way for the European settler to essentially become indigenous by experiencing something perceived as authentically New Zealand. Colonial Gothic frequently includes the supernatural in ways that are complicit in the processes of colonisation that problematizes them as models for contemporary writers. For New Zealanders attempting to produce a Gothic narrative, the most immediately available tropes for a haunting past are Maori, but to use those tropes brings texts uncomfortably close to nineteenth-century obsessions with Maori skeletal remains and a Gothicised New Zealand landscape, which Edmund G. C. King notes is a way of expressing “the sense of bodily and mental displacement that often accompanied the colonial experience” (36). R. H. Chapman’s Mihawhenua (1888) provides an example of tropes particularly Gothic that remain a part of colonial discourse not easily transferable into a bicultural context. Chapman’s band of explorers discover a cave strewn with bones which they interpret to be the remains of gory cannibalistic feasts: Here, we might well imagine, the clear waters of the little stream at our feet had sometime run red with the blood of victims of some horrid carnival, and the pale walls of the cavern had grown more pale in sympathy with the shrieks of the doomed ere a period was put to their tortures. Perchance the owners of some of the bones that lay scattered in careless profusion on the floor, had, when strong with life and being, struggled long and bravely in many a bloody battle, and, being at last overcome, their bodies were brought here to whet the appetites and appease the awful hunger of their victors. (qtd. in King) The assumptions regarding the primitive nature of indigenous culture expressed by reference to the “horrid carnival” of cannibalism complicate the processes through which contemporary writers could meaningfully draw on a tradition of New Zealand Gothic utilising the supernatural. One answer to this dilemma is to use supernatural elements not specifically associated with New Zealand. In Stephen Cain’s anthology Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side (1996) there are several instances of this, such as in the story “Never Go Tramping Alone” by Alyson Cresswell-Moorcock, which features a creature called a Gravett. As Timothy Jones’s discussion of this anthology demonstrates, there are two problems arising from this unprecedented monster: firstly, the story does not seem to be a “New Zealand Gothic”, which a review in The Evening Post highlights by observing that “there is a distinct ‘Kiwi’ feel to only a few of the stories” (Rendle 5); while secondly, the Gravatt’s appearance in the New Zealand landscape is unconvincing. Jones argues that "When we encounter the wendigo, a not dissimilar spirit to the Gravatt, in Ann Tracy’s Winter Hunger or Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, we have a vague sense that such beings ‘exist’ and belong in the American or Canadian landscapes in which they are located. A Gravatt, however, has no such precedent, no such sense of belonging, and thus loses its authority" (251). Something of this problem is registered in Elizabeth Knox’s vampire novel Daylight (2003), which avoids the problem of making a vampire “fit” with a New Zealand landscape devoid of ancient architecture by setting all the action in Europe. One of the more successful stories in Cain’s collection demonstrates a way of engaging with a specifically New Zealand tradition of supernatural Gothic, while also illustrating some of the potential pitfalls in utilising colonial Gothic tropes of menacing bush, Maori burial caves and skeletal remains. Oliver Nicks’s “The House” focuses on a writer who takes up residence in an isolated “little old colonial cottage in the bush” (8). The strange “odd-angled walls”, floors that seem to slope downwards and the “subterranean silence” of the cottage provokes anxiety in the first-person narrator who admits his thoughts “grew increasingly dark and chaotic” (8). The strangeness of the house is only intensified by the isolation of its surroundings, which are fertile but nevertheless completely uninhabited. Alone and unnerved by the oddness of the house, the narrator listens to the same “inexplicable night screeches and rustlings of the bush” (9) that furnish so much New Zealand Gothic. Yet it is not fear inspired by the menacing bush that troubles the narrator as much as the sense that there was more in this darkness, something from which I felt a greater need to be insulated than the mild horror of mingling with a few wetas, spiders, bats, and other assorted creepy-crawlies. Something was subtlely wrong here – it was not just the oddness of the dimensions and angles. Everything seemed slightly off, not to add up somehow. I could not quite put my finger on whatever it was. (10) When the narrator escapes the claustrophobic house for a walk in the bush, the natural environment is rendered in spectral terms. The narrator is engulfed by the “bare bones of long-dead forest giants” (11) and “crowding tree-corpses”, but the path he follows in order to escape the “Tree-ghosts” is no more comforting since it winds through “a strange grey world with its shrouds of hanging moss, and mist” (12). In the midst of this Gothicised environment the narrator is “transfixed by the intersection of two overpowering irrational forces” when something looms up out of the mist and experiences “irresistible curiosity, balanced by an equal and opposite urge to turn and run like hell” (12). The narrator’s experience of being deep in the threatening bush continues a tradition of colonial writing that renders the natural environment in Gothic terms, such as H. B. Marriot Watson’s The Web of the Spider: A Tale of Adventure (1891), which includes an episode that sees the protagonist Palliser become lost in the forest of Te Tauru and suffer a similar demoralization as Nicks’s narrator: “the horror of the place had gnawed into his soul, and lurked there, mordant. He now saw how it had come to be regarded as the home of the Taniwha, the place of death” (77). Philip Steer points out that it is the Maoriness of Palliser’s surroundings that inspire his existential dread, suggesting a certain amount of settler alienation, but “Palliser’s survival and eventual triumph overwrites this uncertainty with the relegation of Maori to the past” (128). Nicks’s story, although utilising similar tropes to colonial fiction, attempts to puts them to different ends. What strikes such fear in Nicks’s narrator is a mysterious object that inspires the particular dread known as the uncanny: I gave myself a stern talking to and advanced on the shadow. It was about my height, angular, bony and black. It stood as it now stands, as it has stood for centuries, on the edge of a swamp deep in the heart of an ancient forest high in this remote range of hills forming a part of the Southern Alps. As I think of it I cannot help but shudder; it fills me even now with inexplicable awe. It snaked up out of the ground like some malign fern-frond, curving back on itself and curling into a circle at about head height. Extending upwards from the circle were three odd-angled and bent protuberances of unequal length. A strange force flowed from it. It looked alien somehow, but it was man-made. Its power lay, not in its strangeness, but in its unaccountable familiarity; why did I know – have I always known? – how to fear this… thing? (12) This terrible “thing” represents a return of the repressed associated with the crimes of colonisation. After almost being devoured by the malevolent tree-like object the narrator discovers a track leading to a cave decorated with ancient rock paintings that contains a hideous wooden creature that is, in fact, a burial chest. Realising that he has discovered a burial cave, the narrator is shocked to find more chests that have been broken open and bones scattered over the floor. With the discovery of the desecrated burial cave, the hidden crimes of colonisation are brought to light. Unlike colonial Gothic that tends to represent Maori culture as threatening, Nicks’s story represents the forces contained in the cave as a catalyst for a beneficial transformative experience: I do remember the cyclone of malign energy from the abyss gibbering and leering; a flame of terror burning in every cell of my body; a deluge of shrieking unreason threatening to wash away the bare shred that was left of my mind. Yet even as each hellish new dimension yawned before me, defying the limits even of imagination, the fragments of my shattered sanity were being drawn together somehow, and reassembled in novel configurations. To each proposition of demonic impossibility there was a surging, answering wave of kaleidoscopic truth. (19) Although the story replicates colonial writing’s tendency to represent indigenous culture in terms of the irrational and demonic, the authenticity and power of the narrator’s experience is stressed. When he comes to consciousness following an enlightenment that sees him acknowledging that the truth of existence is a limitless space “filled with deep coruscations of beauty and joy” (20) he knows what he must do. Returning to the cottage, the narrator takes several days to search the house and finally finds what he is looking for: a steel box that contains “stolen skulls” (20). The narrator concludes that the “Trophies” (20) buried in the collapsed outhouse are the cause for the “Dark, inexplicable moods, nightmares, hallucinations – spirits, ghosts, demons” that “would have plagued anyone who attempted to remain in this strange, cursed region” (20). Once the narrator returns the remains to the burial cave, the inexplicable events cease and the once-strange house becomes an ideal home for a writer seeking peace in which to work. The colonial Gothic mode in New Zealand utilises the Gothic’s concern with a haunting past in order to associate that past with the primitive and barbaric. By rendering Maori culture in Gothic terms, such as in Maning’s blood-splattered scene of grieving or through the spooky discoveries of bone-strewn caves, colonial writing compares an “uncivilised” indigenous culture with the “civilised” culture of European settlement. For a contemporary writer wishing to produce a New Zealand supernatural horror, the colonial Gothic is a problematic tradition to work from, but Nicks’s story succeeds in utilising tropes associated with colonial writing in order to reverse its ideologies. “The House” represents European settlement in terms of barbarity by representing a brutal desecration of sacred ground, while indigenous culture is represented in positive, if frightening, terms of truth and power. Colonial Gothic’s tendency to associate indigenous culture with violence, barbarism and superstition is certainly replicated in Nicks’s story through the frightening object that attempts to devour the narrator and the macabre burial chests shaped like monsters, but ultimately it is colonial violence that is most overtly condemned, with the power inhabiting the burial cave being represented as ultimately benign, at least towards an intruder who means no harm. More significantly, there is no attempt in the story to explain events that seem outside the understanding of Western rationality. The story accepts as true what the narrator experiences. Nevertheless, in spite of the explicit engagement with the return of repressed crimes associated with colonisation, Nicks’s engagement with the mode of colonial Gothic means there is a replication of some of its underlying notions relating to settlement and belonging. The narrator of Nicks’s story is a contemporary New Zealander who is placed in the position of rectifying colonial crimes in order to take up residence in a site effectively cleansed of the sins of the past. Nicks’s narrator cannot happily inhabit the colonial cottage until the stolen remains are returned to their rightful place and it seems not to occur to him that a greater theft might underlie the smaller one. Returning the stolen skulls is represented as a reasonable action in “The House”, and it is a way for the narrator to establish what Linda Hardy refers to as “natural occupancy,” but the notion of returning a house and land that might also be termed stolen is never entertained, although the story’s final sentence does imply the need for the continuing placation of the powerful indigenous forces that inhabit the land: “To make sure that things stay [peaceful] I think I may just keep this story to myself” (20). The fact that the narrator has not kept the story to himself suggests that his untroubled occupation of the colonial cottage is far more tenuous than he might have hoped. References Ballantyne, David. Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Melbourne: Text, 2010. Bannister, Bronwyn. Haunt. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2000. Calder, Alex. “F. E. Maning 1811–1883.” Kotare 7. 2 (2008): 5–18. Chapman, R. H. Mihawhenua: The Adventures of a Party of Tourists Amongst a Tribe of Maoris Discovered in Western Otago. Dunedin: J. Wilkie, 1888. Cresswell-Moorcock, Alyson. “Never Go Tramping Along.” Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side. Ed. Stephen Cain. Wellington: IPL Books, 1996: 63-71. Evans, Patrick. The Long Forgetting: Postcolonial Literary Culture in New Zealand. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2007. Fagan, D. W. O. Tapu and Other Tales of Old New Zealand. Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1952. Gee, Maurice. The Fire-Raiser. Auckland: Penguin, 1986. Gunn, Kirsty. Rain. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Hardy, Linda. “Natural Occupancy.” Meridian 14.2 (October 1995): 213-25. Jones, Timothy. The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic. PhD thesis. Wellington: Victoria University, 2010. King, Edmund G. C. “Towards a Prehistory of the Gothic Mode in Nineteenth-Century Zealand Writing,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 28.2 (2010): 35-57. “Kiwi Gothic.” Massey (Nov. 2001). 8 Mar. 2014 ‹http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwpubafs/magazine/2001_Nov/stories/gothic.html›. Maning, F. E. Old New Zealand and Other Writings. Ed. Alex Calder. London: Leicester University Press, 2001. Marriott Watson, H. B. The Web of the Spider: A Tale of Adventure. London: Hutchinson, 1891. Nicks, Oliver. “The House.” Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side. Ed. Stephen Cain. Wellington: IPL Books, 1996: 8-20. Rendle, Steve. “Entertaining Trip to the Dark Side.” Rev. of Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side, ed. Stephen Cain. The Evening Post. 17 Jan. 1997: 5. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. Patrick Nobes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Steer, Philip. “History (Never) Repeats: Pakeha Identity, Novels and the New Zealand Wars.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 25 (2007): 114-37. Virtue, Noel. The Redemption of Elsdon Bird. New York: Grove Press, 1987. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. London: Penguin, 2010. Wevers, Lydia. “The Short Story.” The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. Ed. Terry Sturm. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991: 203–70.

Introduction Our home is the most intimate space we inhabit. It is the centre of daily existence – where our most significant relationships are nurtured – where we can impart a sense of self in both physical and psychological ways. To lose this place is overwhelming, the physical implications far-reaching and the psychological impact momentous. And yet, there is little research on what happens when home is lost as a consequence of relationship breakdown. This paper provides an insight into how the meaning of home changes for those going through separation and divorce. Focusing on heterosexual couples, my research reveals that intense feelings of grief and loss are expressed as individuals in a relationship dispute reflect on different aspects of home which are destroyed as a consequence of their partnership collapse. Attitudes to the physical dwelling often reflect the changing nature of the relationship as it descends into crisis. There is a symbolic element as well, which is mirrored in the ways that the physical space is used to negotiate power imbalances, re-establish another life, maintain continuity for children, and as a bargaining tool to redress intense anger and frustration. A sense of empowerment eventually develops as the loss of the relationship is accepted and life adjustments made. Home: A Place of Profound Symbolic and Physical Meaning Home is the familiar, taken-for-granted world where most of us are nurtured, comforted and loved. Home is where we can dream and hope, relax and be ourselves, laugh and cry. For the majority, home is a safe and welcoming place, although positive associations are not universal as some experience home as a negative, threatening and unloving place. Home transcends the domestic physical structure, encompassing cultural, symbolic and psychological significance, as well as extending to the neighbourhood, city, region and nation. Home provides a sense of belonging in the world and is a refuge from the dangers and uncertainty of the environment at large. It is the centre of important human relationships and their accompanying domestic roles, rituals and routines. Home is where the bonds between partners, child and parent, brother and sister are reinforced, along with extended family members and close friends Home is a symbol of personal identity and worth, where the individual can exercise a degree of power and autonomy denied elsewhere. Significant life events, both sad and happy, learning experiences, and celebrations of varying type and magnitude, all occur at home. These are the bases for our memories of home and its importance to us, serving to imbue the notion with a sense of permanence and continuity over time. Home represents the interface between public and private worlds; a place where cultural and societal norms are symbolically juxtaposed with expressions of individuality. There has been a range of research from “humanistic-literary” to “empirical-behavioural” perspectives showing that home has “complex, multiple but inter-related meanings” (Porteous and Smith 61). And while this intellectual endeavour covers a wide range of disciplines and perspectives (for good overviews see Blunt and Dowling; Mallett; Chapman and Hockey) research on the loss of home is more limited. Nevertheless, there are some notable exceptions. Recent work by Robinson on youth homelessness in Sydney illustrates that the loss of home affects the way in which it is desired and valued, and how its absence impacts on self identity and the grief process. Fried’s seminal and much older study also tells of intense grieving, similar to that associated with the death of a loved one, when residents were forcibly removed from their homes – places perceived as slums by the city planners. Analogous issues of sorrow are detailed by Porteous and Smith in their discussion of situations where individuals and entire communities have lost their homes. The emphasis in this moving text is on the power and lack of understanding displayed by those in authority. Power resides in the ability to destroy the home of others; disrespect is shown to those who are forced to relocate. There is no appreciation of the profound meanings of home which individuals, communities and nations hold. Similarly, Read presents a range of situations involving major disruptions to meanings of home. The impact on individuals as they struggle to deal with losing a house or neighbourhood through fire, flood, financial ruin or demolition for redevelopment, demonstrates the centrality of notions of home and the devastation that results when it is no longer. So too do the many moving personal stories of migrants who have left one nation to settle in another (Herne et al), as well as more academic explorations of the diaspora (Rapport and Dawson) and resettlement and migrant women home-making (Thompson). Meanings of home are also disrupted, changed and lost when families and partnerships fall apart. Given the prevalence of relationship breakdown in our society, it is surprising that very little work has focussed on the changed meanings of home that follow. Cooper Marcus examined disruptions in bonding with the home for those who had to leave or were left following the end of a marriage or partnership. “The home may have been shared for many years; patterns of territory, privacy, and personalisation established; and memories of the past enshrined in objects, rooms, furniture, and plants” (222). Gram-Hanssen and Bech-Danielsen explore both the practical issues of dissolving a home, as well as the emotional responses of those involved. Anthony provides further illumination, recommending design solutions to help better manage housing for families affected by divorce. She concludes her paper by declaring that “…the housing experiences of women, men, and children of divorce deserve much further study” (15). The paucity of research on what happens to meanings of home when a relationship breaks down was a key motivation for the current work – a qualitative study involving self-reflection of the experience of relationship loss; in-depth interviews with nine people (three men and six women from English speaking middle class backgrounds) who had experienced a major partnership breakdown; and focus group sessions and one in-depth interview with nine professional mediators (six women and three men) who work with separating couples. The mediators provided an informed overview of the way in which separating partners negotiate the loss of a shared home across the range of its physical and psychological meanings. Their reflections confirmed that the identified themes in the individual stories were typical of a range of experiences, feelings and actions they had encountered with different clients. Relationship Breakdown and Meanings of Home: What the Research Revealed The Symbolism of Home The interview, focus group and reflective data all confirmed the centrality of home and its multi-dimensional meanings. Different physical and symbolic elements were uncovered, mirroring theoretical schemas in the literature. These meanings go far beyond a physical space and the objects therein. They represent different aspects of the individual’s sense of self, well-being and identity, as well as their roles and feelings of belonging in a family and the broader social and cultural setting. Home was described as a place to be one’s self; where one can relax away from the rest of the world. Participants talked about home creating a sense of belonging and familiarity. This was achieved in many ways including physical renovation of the structure, working in the garden, enjoying the dwelling space and nurturing family relationships. As Helen said, …the home and children go together… I created belonging by creating a space which was mine, which was always decorated in a very particular way which is mine, and which was my place of belonging for me and my kin… that’s my home – it’s just absolutely essential to me. Home was described as an important physical place. This incorporated the dwelling as a structure and the special things that adorn it. Objects such as the marital bed, family photos, artifacts and pets were important symbols of home as a shared place. As the mediators pointed out, in the splitting up process, these often take on huge significance as a couple try to decide who has what. The division is typically the final acknowledgement that the relationship is over. The interviewees told me that home extended beyond the dwelling into the wider neighbourhood. This encompassed networks of friendships, including relationships with local residents, business people and service providers, to the physical places frequented such as parks, shops and cafes. These neighbourhood connections were severed when the relationship broke down. The data revealed home as a shared space where couples undertook daily tasks such as preparing meals together and doing the housework. There was pleasure in these routines which further reinforced home as a central aspect of the partnership, as Laura explained: But for the most part it [my marriage relationship] was very amicable… easy going, and it really was a whole thing of self-expression. And the house was very much about self-expression. Even cooking. We both loved to cook, we’d have lots of dinner parties… things like that. With the loss of the relationship the rhythm and comfort of everyday activities were shattered. Sharing was also linked to the financial aspects of home, with the payment of a mortgage representing a combined effort in working towards ownership of the physical dwelling. While the end of a relationship usually spelt severe financial difficulty, if not disaster, it also meant the loss of that shared commitment to build a secure financial future together extending into old age. The Deteriorating Relationship A decline in the physical qualities of the dwelling often accompanied the demise of the inter-personal relationship. As the partnership descended into crisis, the centrality of home and its importance across both physical and symbolic elements were increasingly threatened. This shift in meaning impacted on the loss experienced and the subsequent translation into conflict and grief. It [the house] was quite run down, but I think it kind of reflected our situation at the time which was fairly strained in terms of finances and lack of certainty about what was happening… tiny little damp house and no [friendship] network and no money and no stability, that’s how it felt. (Jill) Not only did home begin to symbolise a battleground, it started to take on lost dreams and hopes. For Helen, it embodied a force that was greater than the relationship she had shared with her husband. And that home became the symbol of our fight… a symbol of how closely glued we were together… And I think that’s why we had such enormous difficulty breaking up because the house actually held us together in some way … it was as though the house was a sort of a binding force of the relationship. The home as the centre of family relationships and personal identity was threatened by the deteriorating relationship. For Jill this represented ending her dream that being a wife and mother were what she needed to define her identity and purpose in life. I was very unhappy. I’d got these two babies, I’d got what I thought was quite a catch husband, who was doing very well… but yet somehow I felt very unhappy and insecure, very insecure, and I realised that the whole role I had carved out for myself wasn’t going to do it. The End of the Relationship: Disruption, Explosion, Grief and Loss While the relationship can be in crisis for many months, eventually there is a point where any hope of reconciliation disappears. For some separating couples this phase was heralded by a defining, shattering and shocking moment when it was clear that their relationship was over. Both physical and emotional violence were reported by my interviewees, including these comments from Helen. And so my parting from the home was actually very explosive. In fact it was the first time he ever hit me, and it was in the hitting of me that I left home… And while the final stage was not always dramatic or violent, there was a realisation that this was the end of the dream – the end of home. A deep sadness resulted, as evident in Greg’s story: I was there in the house by myself and I can remember the house was empty, all the furniture had been shifted out…I actually shed a few tears as I left the house because…the strongest feeling I had was that this was a house that had such a potential for me. It had such a potential for a good loving relationship and I just felt that it did represent, leaving then, represented the kind of the dashing of the hope that I had in that relationship. In some cases the end of the relationship was accompanied by feelings of guilt for shattering the home. In other cases, the home became a battleground as the partners fought over who was going to move out. …if they’re separated under the one roof and nobody’s moved out, but certainly in one person’s mind the marriage is over, and sometimes in both… there’s a big tussle about who’s going to move out and nobody wants to go… (Mediator) The loss of home could also bring with it a fear of never having another, as well as a rude awakening that the lost home was taken for granted. Cathy spoke of this terror. I became so obsessed with the notion that I’d never have a home again, and I remember thinking how could I have taken so much for granted? The end of a relationship was accompanied by a growing realisation of impending loss – the loss of familiar and well-loved surroundings. This encompassed the local neighbourhood, the dwelling space and the daily routine of married life. I can remember feeling, [and] knowing the relationship was coming to an end, and knowing that we were going to be selling the house and we were going to be splitting…, feeling quite sad walking down the street the last few times… realising I wouldn’t be doing this much longer. I was very conscious of the fact that I was… going up and down those railway station escalators for the last few times, and going down the street for the last few times, and suddenly…[I felt]… an impending sense of loss because I liked the neighbourhood… There was also a loss in the sense of not having a physical space which I kind of wanted to live in… [I] don’t like living in small units or rented rooms… I just prefer what I see as a proper house… so downsizing [my accommodation] just kind of makes the whole emotional situation worse …there was [also] a lack of domesticity, and the kind of sharing of meals and so on that does…make you feel some sort of warmth… (Greg) Transitions: Developing New Meanings of Home Once there was an acknowledgment – whether a defining moment or a gradual process – that the relationship was over, a transitional phase dawned when new meanings of home began to emerge. Of the people I interviewed, some stayed on in the once shared dwelling, and others moved out to occupy a new space. Both actions required physical and psychological adjustments which took time and energy, as well as a determination to adapt. Organising parenting arrangements, dividing possessions and tentative steps towards the establishment of another life characterised this phase. While individual stories revealed a variety of transitional approaches, there were unifying themes across the data. The transition could start by moving into a new space, which as one mediator explained, might not feel like home at all. …[one partner has] left and often left with very little, maybe just a suitcase of clothes, and so their sense of home is still the marital home or the family home, but they’re camping at a unit somewhere, or mother’s spare room or a relative’s backyard or garage or something… They’re truly homeless. For others, while setting up a new space was initially very hard and alien, with effort and time, it could take on a home-like quality, as Helen found. I did take things from the house. I took all the things I’d hidden in cupboards that were not used or second-hand… things that weren’t used everyday or on display or anything… things I’d take like if you were going camping… I wasn’t at home… it was awful…[but gradually]… I put things around… to make it homely for me and I would spend hours doing it, Just hours… paintings on the wall are important, and a stereo system and music was important. My books were important…and photographs became very important. Changes in tenure could also bring about profound feelings of loss. This was Keith’s experience: Well I’m renting now which is a bit difficult after having your own home… you feel a bit stifled in the fact that you can’t decorate it, and you can’t do things, or you can’t fix things… now I’m in a place which is drab and the colours are horrible and I don’t particularly like it and it’s awful. The experience of remaining in the home once one’s partner leaves is different to being the one to leave the formerly shared space. However, similar adaptation strategies were required as can be seen from Barbara’s experience: …so, I rearranged the lounge room and I rearranged the bedroom…I probably did that fairly promptly actually, so that I wasn’t walking back into the same mental images all the time…I’m now beginning to have that sense of wanting to put my mark on it, so I’ve started some painting and doing things… Laura talked about how she initially felt scared living on her own, despite occupying familiar surroundings, but this gradually changed as she altered the once shared physical space. Sally spoke about reclaiming the physical space on her own and through these deliberative actions, empowering herself as a single person. Those with dependent children struggled in different ways during this transition period. Individual needs to either move or reclaim the existing space were often subjugated to the requirements of their off-spring – where it might be best for them to live and with whom they should principally reside. I think the biggest issue is where the children are going to be. So whoever wants the children also wants the family home. And that’s where the pull and tug starts… it’s a big desire not to disrupt the children and to keep a smooth life for them. (Mediator) Finally, there was a sense of moving along. Meanings of home changed as the strength of the emotional attachment weakened and those involved began to see that another life was possible. The old meanings of home had to be confronted and prized apart, just as the connections between the partners were painstakingly severed, one by one. Sally likened this time consuming and arduous process to laboriously unpicking the threads of a tightly woven cloth. Empowerment: Meanings of Home to Mirror a New Life …I’ve realized too that I’m the person I am today because of that experience. (Sally) The stories of participants in this research ended with hope for the future. Perhaps this reflects my interviewees’ determination to build a new life following the loss of their relationship, most having the personal resources to work through their loss, grief and conflict. This is not however, always the case. Divorce can lead to long lasting feelings of failure, disappointment and a sense that one has “an inability to love or care…” (Ambrose 87). However, “with acceptance of the separation many come to see the break-up as having been beneficial and report feeling they have an improved quality of life” (88). This positive stance is mirrored in my mediator focus group data and other literature (for example, Cooper Marcus 222-238). Out of the painful loss of home emerges a re-evaluation of one’s priorities and a revitalized sense of self, as illustrated by Barbara’s words below. That’s come out of the separation, suddenly going, ‘Oh, hang on, I can do what I want to do, when I want to do it’. It’s quite nice really… I’ve decided [to] start pursuing a few of the things I always wanted to do, so I’m using a bit of the space [in the house] to study… I’m doing a lot of stuff that nurtures me and my interest and my space… Feelings of liberation were entwined with meanings of home as spaces were decorated afresh, and in some cases, a true home founded for the first time. [since the end of the relationship]… I actually see my space differently, I want less around me, I’ve been really clearing out things, throwing things out, clearing cupboards… kind of feung shui-ing every corner and just really keeping it clear and clean… I’ve painted the whole house. It was like it needed a fresh coat of something over it… (Laura) Empowerment embodied lessons learnt and in some cases, a more cautious redefining of home. Barbara put it this way: I’m really scared of losing what I’ve now got [my home on my own] and that sense of independence… maybe I will not go into a relationship because I don’t want to put that at risk. Finally, meanings of home took on different dimensions that reflected the new life and hope it engendered. …it’s very interesting to me to be in a house now that is a very solid, square, double brick house… [I feel] that it’s much more representative of who I am now… the solidness is very much me… I feel as though I inhabit my home more now… I have much more sense of peace around my home now than I did then in the previous house… it’s the space where I feel extremely comfortable… a space to meditate on… I’m home – I can now be myself… (Helen) I don’t know whether… [my meaning of home] is actually a physical structure any more…Now it’s come more into … surrounding myself with things that I love, like you know bits and pieces that you can take, your photographs and your pet… it’s really much more about being happy I think, and being happy in a space with somebody that you love, rather than living in a box like a prison, with somebody that you really despise (Keith) Conclusion … the physical moving out from my own home was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my entire life. (Jane) The trauma of divorce is a crisis that occurs in many of our lives, and one which often triggers a profound dislocation in person-dwelling relations. (Cooper Marcus 222) This paper has presented insights into the ways in which multi-dimensional meanings of home change when an intimate familial relationship breaks down. The nature and degree of the impacts vary from one individual to another, as do the ways in which the identifiable stages of relationship breakdown play out in different partnership situations. Nevertheless, this research revealed a transformative journey – from the devastation of the initial loss to an eventual redefining of home across its symbolic, psychological and physical constructs. References Ambrose, Peter J. Surviving Divorce: Men beyond Marriage. Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983. Anthony, Kathryn H. “Bitter Homes and Gardens: The Meanings of Home to Families of Divorce.” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 14.1 (1997): 1-19. 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Smith. Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens UP, 2001. Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson, eds. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. New York: Oxford, 1998. Read, Peter. Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Robinson, Catherine. “‘I Think Home Is More than a Building’: Young Home(less) People on the Cusp of Home, Self and Something Else.” Urban Policy and Research 20.1 (2002): 27–38. Robinson, Catherine. “Grieving Home.” Social and Cultural Geography 6.1 (2005): 47–60. Thompson, Susan. “Suburbs of Opportunity: The Power of Home for Migrant Women.” In K. Gibson and S. Watson, eds. Metropolis Now: Planning and the Urban in Contemporary Australia. Australia: Pluto Press, 1994. 33-45. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Thompson, Susan. "Home and Loss: Renegotiating Meanings of Home in the Wake of Relationship Breakdown." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/07-thompson.php>. APA Style Thompson, S. (Aug. 2007) "Home and Loss: Renegotiating Meanings of Home in the Wake of Relationship Breakdown," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/07-thompson.php>.