Imagining Australian Space

Barcan (humanities, U. of Western Sydney) and Buchanan (English, U. of Tasmania) present 14 papers which aim to explore a representative range of Australian spaces through a range of perspectives that have contributed to Australian cultural studies, including semiotics, discourse analysis, phenomeno

From Terra Nullius to Land of Opportunities and Last Frontier, the European dream has constructed and deconstructed Australia to feed its imagination of new societies. At the same time Australia has over the last two centuries forged and re-invented its own liaisons with Europe arguably to carve out its identity. From the arts to social sciences, to society itself, a complex dynamic has grown between the two continents in ways that invite study and discussion. A transnational research group has begun its collective investigation project of which this first volume is the outcome. The book is a substantial multidisciplinary collection of current research and offers critical perspectives on culture, literature and history around themes at the heart of the Imagined Australia project. The essays instigate reflection, discovery and discussion of how reciprocal imagining between Australia and Europe has articulated itself and ways and dimensions in which a relationship between communities, imagined and not, has unfolded.

‘Imagined Sound’ is a unique cartography of the artistic, historical and political forces that have informed the post-World War II representation of Australian landscapes. It is the first book to formulate the unique methodology of ‘imagined sound’, a new way to read and listen to literature and music that moves beyond the dominance of the visual, the colonial mode of knowing, controlling and imagining Australian space. Emphasising sound and listening, this approach draws out and re-examines the key narratives that shape and are shaped by Australian landscapes and histories, stories of first contact, frontier violence, the explorer journey, the convict experience, non-Indigenous belonging, Pacific identity and contemporary Indigenous Dreaming. ‘Imagined Sound’ offers a compelling analysis of how these narratives are reharmonised in key works of literature and music.

An analysis of the depiction of Australia’s landscape in its films and literature. Imagined Landscapes teams geocritical analysis with digital visualization techniques to map and interrogate films, novels, and plays in which space and place figure prominently. Drawing upon A Cultural Atlas of Australia, a database-driven interactive digital map that can be used to identify patterns of representation in Australia’s cultural landscape, the book presents an integrated perspective on the translation of space across narrative forms and pioneers new ways of seeing and understanding landscape. It offers fresh insights on cultural topography and spatial history by examining the technical and conceptual challenges of georeferencing fictional and fictionalized places in narratives. Among the items discussed are Wake in Fright, a novel by Kenneth Cook, adapted iconically to the screen and recently onto the stage; the Australian North as a mythic space; spatial and temporal narrative shifts in retellings of the story of Alexander Pearce, a convict who gained notoriety for resorting to cannibalism after escaping from a remote Tasmanian penal colony; travel narratives and road movies set in Western Australia; and the challenges and spatial politics of mapping spaces for which there are no coordinates. “It will likely be the indispensable touchstone for any future work in these areas with respect to Australian cultural studies.” —Robert T. Tally, Texas State University “Definitely original in its approach, since it combines a conceptual approach with a more applied one. The book is a serious contribution to the field of mapping spatial narratives and to a better understanding of the production and spatial structure of fictional places.” —Sébastien Caquard, Concordia University

Re-Imagining the City: Art, Globalization, and Urban Spaces examines how contemporary processes of globalization are transforming cultural experience and production in urban spaces. It maps how cultural productions in art, architecture, and communications media are contributing to the reimagining of place and identity through events, artifacts, and attitudes. This book recasts how we understand cities--how knowledge can be formed, framed, and transferred through cultural production and how that knowledge is mediated through the construction of aesthetic meaning and value.

This book critically examines the history and current issues on the migration of Indian students to Australia.

Space is the first accessible text which provides a comprehensive examination of approaches that have crossed between such diverse fields as philosophy, physics, architecture, sociology, anthropology, and geography. The text examines the influence of geometry, arithmetic, natural philosophy, empiricism, and positivism to the development of spatial thinking, as well as focusing on the contributions of phenomenologists, existentialists, psychologists, Marxists, and post-structuralists to how we occupy, live, structure, and perform spaces and practices of spacing. The book emphasises the multiple and partial construction of spaces through the embodied practices of diverse subjects, highlighting the contributions of feminists, queer theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and post-colonial scholars to academic debates. In contrast to contemporary studies which draw a clear line between scientific and particularly quantitative approaches to space and spatiality and more ‘lived’ human enactments and performances, this book highlights the continual influence of different mathematical and philosophical understandings of space and spatiality on everyday western spatial imaginations and registers in the twenty-first century. Space is possibly the key concept underpinning research in geography, as well as being of central importance to scholars and practitioners working across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences.

This book maps the seascape borders of Australia's insular imagination. It explores how the boundaries and contours of the nation were made and remade in the first years of the war on terror, offering a striking reassessment of the territoriality of 'the island continent'.

Positing the washroom as an onto-epistemological site which exemplifies the way in which school spaces govern how gender is experienced, normalized, and understood by youth, this text illustrates how current school policies and practices around bathrooms fail to dismantle cisnormativity and recognize trans lives. Drawing on media-policy analysis, empirical study, and arts-based methodologies, it demonstrates how school spaces must be re-thought via a trans-centred epistemology, to be reflected in teacher education, policy, and curricula. Beginning with a review of the theoretical constellation of the heterotopia and critical trans-ing informing the analysis of data, it moves to offer a critical media and policy analysis of how trans and gender-diverse students are de-limited, erased, or harmed. This position is supported by analysis of empirical data from a school bathroom project, including student photographs of washrooms, and other visual expressions of gender-diverse and gender-complex individuals. These elements—the media-policy analysis, the empirical study, and the archival online material—ultimately combine to offer new justifications for critical trans-informed policies and practices in education that recognize and centre trans and gender-diverse knowledges, expressions, and experiences. Centring the specific and nuanced debates around trans phenomena via an innovative methodology, it makes a unique and extremely timely contribution to the debate on gender-inclusive bathrooms, as well as trans rights to self-identification. As such, it will appeal to scholars, postgraduates, educators, and faculty working in the area of gender and sexuality in education, with interests in trans phenomena.

This book examines the perceptions of European travelling writers about southern Western Australia between 1850 and 1914. Theirs was a narrow vision of space and people in the region, shaped by their individual personalities, their position in society, and the prevailing discourses and ideologies of the age. Christian, Enlightenment, and Romantic philosophies had a major influence on their responses to the land – its cultivation and conservation, and its aesthetic qualities – and on their views of both indigenous and settler colonial society – their class and assumptions of race and ethnicity. The travelling men and women perpetuated an idealised view of a colonised landscape, and a “pioneer” community that eliminated class struggle and inequality, even though an analysis of their observations suggests otherwise. Nevertheless, although limited, their narratives are invaluable as a reflection of opinions, attitudes and knowledge prevalent during an age of imperialism. Their perspectives reveal unique viewpoints that differ from those of immigrants who wrote about their hopes and fears in making a new life for themselves. These travellers were economically secure, literate and educated; foundations which provide an insight into the way power and privilege, implicit in their writings, governed the way they imagined Western Australia in the colonial and immediate post-federation period. The tinted lenses through which European travelling writers narrowly observed space and people, presented a mythical, imagined sense of southern Western Australia.