Nation
The Commitment to Nation in Literary History
Embedded within any statistical analysis of Australian literature are definitional issues over the research sample.
Editions from Elsewhere?
For quite a while, I’ve been shaping up my response to the recent Productivity Commission Research Report …
A Policy of Splendid Isolation
The tension between British and Australian publishers has long been a central thesis of antipodean print culture histories.
10,175 Australian Novels?
Perhaps new empiricism, in its perceived relevance to Australian literature and the humanities in general, is a system of analysis that represents what Fredric Jameson lamented as the ‘depthlessness’ of postmodernism, privileging the consumption of visual images over deeper, critical forms of thinking?
Still Waters Run Deep
The nature of this article is to question the basis for the Sydney- and Melbourne-centric view of Australian literary production … but to do so from a regional state-by-state (and territory) statistical perspective.
Expended in An Hour, Gallipoli!
While Australians and New Zealanders acknowledge Anzac Day, it is important to look beyond modern perceptions and to review what our ancestors thought about the events which ultimately led to this national annual remembrance.
Critical Foresight: Unfinished?
King Solomon once wrote that ‘where there is no vision the people perish’. [1] It is arguable that vision is a strong and necessary foundation in the building up of society, its members and the projects of civilisation. From this viewpoint it is not unreasonable to say that the vision or future envisioned differentiates the citizen, community or society from its peers. Different visions modify emotion, intellect, politics, vocation, ethics and behaviour in different ways. To act as an ombudsperson of these processes of modification — to ensure an expansion of options rather than an artificial narrowing — is an ambitious task. It is prudent then to expect generalisations of many kinds collecting around ‘vision’ and ‘future’ where critical and reflexive thinking of the kind described in previous chapters is not utilised. For example, statements of the nature below gather much attention in newspapers, radio broadcasts and publications.
Critical Foresight: New Ways
Hugh Mackay in Turning Point: Australians Choosing Their Future (1999) writes that ‘Attitudes are the symptoms of a society’s state of mind. They reveal our responses to the things that have happened to us and, occasionally, they offer a glimpse of the kind of future we are hoping for’.[2] Using a selection of personal interviews and group discussions which form the 1994 edition of The Mackay Report as representations of these ‘attitudes’ and interests of society, Mackay explores the notion that contemporary Australians are participants within a radical form of culture shift, one that ‘amounts to the discovery of a new way of thinking about Australia’.[3] Mackay’s identification and use of contradiction within these collective beliefs and evaluations of Australian citizens develops the theme of a ‘turning point’, that the dissonance existing between our value judgements about Australian socialisation articulates an emergent cultural identification with resolution or ‘turning point’. Such a ‘turning point’ is enacted by active citizenship: ‘This is the time’, Mackay writes in an inspirational tone, ‘for setting our goals and directions, but there’s no short cut to depth and maturity. We are still, in cultural terms, in our adolescence … [But] what’s wrong with being young? Why not relish the chance to shape our future; to create this Australia in our own image?’. [4]
Critical Foresight: Alt. Styles
Through this investigation of contemporary futurestext I argue that fragmentation of Australia’s future perspective along apocalyptic fault lines is most visible during the last decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, apocalyptic subjects exercise a strong influence over Australia’s internal styles of thinking about the future towards the close of the 1990s. During this period, many religious organisations through their publishing arms provided an intellectual justification and articulated account of their apocalyptic and endist positions that usually always opposed dominant cultural values of progress. The default view is to regard their accounts as positioned on the margins of society. Yet their styles of futures-thinking — which suggested a form of apocalyptic anticipation towards the times ahead — were produced and expressed within a specific historical, cultural and symbolic conjuncture of late twentieth century globalisation, postmodernism and pre-millennial apocalyptic expectation inclusive of society.
Critical Foresight: Anodyne Futures
To make a closer study of how uses of texts about the future are implicated in the construction of futures knowledges and subjectivities, a metalanguage is needed to provide an analysis of futures-thinking beyond the ‘insightful interpretation’ phase, a theorisation that brings ‘Australian studies’, ‘text’ and ‘future’ into new relations with each other under the field of AFS.
Critical Foresight: What is Time?
During the second half of the twentieth century, it was commonly accepted that ‘we can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present’. [2] But if, as Stambaugh asserts, ‘temporality is … the occurrence, the taking place of thinking’, where thoughts and actions in time are contextualised by a taxonomy of tense, then any meaning, significance and value ascribed to the epochal moment like say the ‘turning of the millennium’ is a mere linguistic and imagined projection of our current prejudices, interests and concerns, and is in no way attached in any real sense to the advent itself. [3] In the words of metaphysical philosopher J R Lucas, ‘whereas the present and past are real, the future, as long as it is still future, is not’. [4] On this view, it may be reasonable to ask why it was fashionable during the late 1990s in Australia to gather futures around the number 2000?
Critical Foresight: The Present
The future is socially constructed; it is not an element of empirical reality. As with time in general, the future is constitutive of a social and cultural order. Our conception of time and modes of time keeping are also culturally specific. For Australian society does not regard time nor keep time in the same manner or form as say Indian or Chinese cultures. How Australians reckon the pattern of passing moments is culturally specific to a western scheme of calibration and temporality. Similarly, Australian responses and reactions to patterns of time reckoning are also culturally specific. In Australia, citizens are inculcated to react to socio-temporal cues like, say, Australia Day on January 26 or Anzac Day on April 25. Other cultures do not respond to these cues in the same way that Australians choose and are often required to. Responses to socio-temporal cues are learnt.
Critical Foresight: Introduction
Towards Critical Cultural Foresight addresses the manner in which knowledge of the future (or ‘futurestext’, that is, information positioned and empowered as being ‘relevant’ to the future and significant to the construction and formation of the ‘future’ subject) was created, propagated and given prominence in Australian culture and Australian Studies during the calendar move from the second to the third millennium. It argues that the future can be positioned as a text subject to various desires and uses and that from such positioning a form of apocalyptic thinking can be observed as a deep cultural process guiding interpretations of the future for Australians. Situated within the often overlooked discipline of Australian Studies, a field succinctly described by Ffion Murphy as ‘a discursive formation and cluster of theoretical and methodological strategies for scholarly inquiry into Australia’, [2] this thesis interrogates the politics behind processes actively inventing the future.
Just A Little Conflict Investment
I’m growing very tired of the superhero genre lately and its rather repetitive instances of urban gang warfare between chemical, genetic, extraterrestrial, supernatural or technologically-enhanced freaks. As Theodor Adorno might say, contemporary cinema is certainly providing the public with an “unconscious canon of what they do not want, that is, something different from what they are presently being fed”. How many times should we endure the same narrative structures and sequences, the same beats, the same super-augmented character battling it out with another super-powered character in a city or highway setting, throwing cars and people about like raging toddlers with their toys? It was innovative the first time in Superman 2 (1980) but after Hulk, Fantastic Four, X-Men 3, and now Ironman (and Edward Norton’s soon-to-be-released The Incredible Hulk), it seems probable that road rage is becoming the metaphor of our times and the lazy conflict device of contemporary cinema.
Australia, the Failed Idea?
The question on my mind this evening, the night before the Australian people evict John Howard from his seat of power, is: did the fake “Islamic Australian Federation” leaflet damage John Howard’s re-election campaign? For the record, I don’t really think so and certainly not anymore than say Pauline Hanson did in the late 1990s or the “Children Overboard” affair might have in 2001. After all, Mr Howard has eloquently side-stepped alleged links between himself and racist forms of thinking, via a kind of plausible deniability, while at the same time benefiting from the support of those voters who peddle a broad-spectrum racist sentiment. Given his election win in 2001 and subsequently in 2004, I’d wager that’s a lot of people who do. Sure, Mr Howard dissociates himself from the recent example and claims the leaflet is not part of his campaign. He even “condemned it” and “was appalled about it” while avoiding “some kind of personal responsibility”.
Spare A Thought For …
From Double Bay to Cottesloe a self-evident truth is known. If more than one thousand people want to do something, then it simply is not worth doing. Populist, popular, POPPY-COCK. No decent tradition is evah passed down to the masses but only to the lords and ladies of the manor born. This goes along with another important truism. If something can be taught, it is simply not worth learning. Status, leadership, destiny are innate gifts that have been genetically honed by centuries of breeding and privilege. These important, nay vital ingredients of a higher life can neva be acquired by the accidental or lucky purchase of a dot.com stock.
Our Threshold of Responsibility
Like everyone else, when I talk with other people who share living on this land that I call Australia and home, I often slip into using the term “we” and “our” when referring to the actions or inaction of the Australian government on issues I align myself for or against. It’s an easy slip for me to make, for I am encouraged to identify with the actions of strangers as my own on a daily basis. The intensity of one’s support for various football teams and AFL players I have never shared a beer with is an easy example; one’s support for or against Australian soldiers in Iraq is another. But both reflect our participation in a system that we are not major decision-makers in but which we are coerced into identifying with so that we become almost inseperable from them: “our team won!”, “our boys in Iraq are doing their bit!”, “our preferred political party is in office!”.
The Death of Gregarious Australia
A member of the armed forces once told me that there were two reasons Australians had a much lower casualty rate than Americans in war/peace-keeping scenarios. The first is that we didn’t arrogantly telegraph our arrival into a potentially dangerous situation with loud, often culturally offensive music, making it much harder to ambush us. The second was our reputation for gregariousness. Australians have long been known as the blokes who would talk to and have a drink with just about anyone. We were famous for our happy-go-lucky drinking exploits and were welcome pretty much anywhere because of it. Is this really something to be ashamed of? In a combat situation, it translated into troops who spoke to everyone they encountered, if for no other reason than to find out where the nearest pub was. The “digger” stereotype rang true as we were seen as friendly, hard working, thirsty folk, with a history of being used as canon folder by the British.This reputation has suited me just fine throughout my international travels as I heartily did my best to reinforce it, making a good many friends in the process.
Categories
Professional Avatars
Arts Naked Reviews
Order Smashed Apricot
Twitter Arts Naked
YouTube Arts NakedPersonal Avatars
Facebook
Flickr
