Published Papers by Cornelis Martin Renes
Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia (JEASA), Vol.5 No.1, 2014. ISSN 2013- 6897. http://www.easa-australianstudies.net/ejournal/show/2/_/7, 2014
David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993) chooses an imagery that evokes a Indigenous-inspired wa... more David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993) chooses an imagery that evokes a Indigenous-inspired way of dealing with historical experience so as to “heal” the nation. Thus, his fictional attempt at the Reconciliation of mainstream and Indigenous Australia partakes in the official revision of contact history which recognises Indigenous claims upon a de-Aboriginalised past from which an Anglo-Celtic national identity has been constructed. Yet, Malouf’s revision of Australianness is as troubling as the official Reconciliation process proved to be. Malouf’s romantic adaptation of the life of the historic James Murrells—emulating the iconic figure of the white man gone native—replicates the tense 1990s debate on Reconciliation and Apology but takes it out of its political context. Unlike his real-life model, the cultural hybrid Gemmy Fairley is consistently infantilised and feminised at his return to white civilisation, which undercuts his possibilities for agency and takes the reader back to the very tensions in race and gender the narrative underplays but cannot overcome. Whereas Malouf’s subscription to a romantic literary project aims to bring the nation into contact with itself through a healing re-Dreaming of history, this produces a f(r)iction in which re-imagination and distortion of the past uncannily circle through each other, unsettling the political correctness the tale aims to forward. This postcolonial uncanny ambiguity, the result of competing histories and world views, is in tune with the open-endedness of Malouf’s novel: as a postmodern Australian explorer narrative, rather than offering a notion of resolution, its longing for a repaired or “full” Australian identity remains trapped in nostalgia.
Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 28(6): 850-861, UK/Australia 2014 . Affiliated with the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10304312.2014.941327. ISSN 1030-4312 (sgPrint), 1469-3666 (Online)., 2014
The awarded film Ten Canoes (2006) broke new ground in the cinematic representation of Indigenous... more The awarded film Ten Canoes (2006) broke new ground in the cinematic representation of Indigenous Australia. Indigenous life in the remote area of Arnhem Land’s Arafura Swamp was both documented and fictionalized in collaboration between the independent Dutch-Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer and the Yolngu community in Ramingining. This essay draws on Homi Bhabha’s work on the articulation of cultural difference in his essay ‘DissemiNation’, published in his volume Nation and Narration (1990), Martin Nakata’s work on the Indigenous/non-Indigenous contact zone in the Australian context (2007), and the film’s accompanying documentary, The Making of Ten Canoes, to analyse the eventful process of Ten Canoes’ creation. The questions and doubts raised about the film’s structure and content inside and outside the Aboriginal community reveal a dynamic yet tense ‘Cultural Interface’ of crosscultural collaboration. Its very nature issues a call to veer away from a nostalgic search for Indigenous-Australian ‘authenticity’, ‘fidelity’ and ‘originality’ when Indigenous- Australian cultural dynamics inevitably move towards the incorporation of new, hybrid means of cultural production, as Ten Canoes’ fruitful spin-off activities amongst the Yolngu prove.
TEXT Journal of Creative Writing and Writing Courses 18(1): 2014, no pag. Australasian Association of Writing Programs. Australia. http://www.textjournal.com.au/ ISSN: 1327-9556, 2014
The following is an edited version of an interview with the writer-scholar-musician Janie Conway-... more The following is an edited version of an interview with the writer-scholar-musician Janie Conway-Herron which took place in the beginning of March 2013. It formed part of a Master’s seminar on Australian identity/-ies taught at the University of Barcelona in which Janie Conway-Herron’s first novel, Beneath the Grace of Clouds (Cockatoo Books 2010) was addressed. The interview explores the links between her creative writing, her sense of belonging and place in Australia and her involvement in the alternative protest movements of the 1960s and beyond, especially her engagement with the Indigenous cause through Rock Against Racism. It aims to flesh out the politics behind her creative agenda, which she formulates as follows on the first pages of Beneath the Grace of Clouds:
"I am a collector. I collect lost stories; the ones that people forget or the ones that people know but don’t tell. You can find them if you look hard enough in the right places. I look for different stories and hold them up to myself like a mirror, searching for the elusive threads that might slip away before I have time to catch them. Holding them tightly in a grid of sentences that give vent to a particular jewel of a moment that shines across the centuries, I give meaning and shape to my own life" (Conway-Herron 2010: 7).
Coolabah 10 (2013): 177-189. Spain http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/CoolabahMainpage.html. ISSN 1988-5946., 2013
It is nowadays evident that the West’s civilising, eugenic zeal have had a
devastating impact on... more It is nowadays evident that the West’s civilising, eugenic zeal have had a
devastating impact on all aspects of the Indigenous-Australian community tissue, not least the
lasting trauma of the Stolen Generations. The latter was the result of the institutionalisation,
adoption, fostering, virtual slavery and sexual abuse of thousands of mixed-descent children,
who were separated at great physical and emotional distances from their Indigenous kin,
often never to see them again. The object of State and Federal policies of removal and
mainstream absorption and assimilation between 1930 and 1970, these lost children only saw
their plight officially recognised in 1997, when the Bringing Them Home report was
published by the Federal government. The victims of forced separation and migration, they
have suffered serious trans-generational problems of adaptation and alienation in Australian
society, which have been not only documented from the outside in the aforementioned report
but also given shape from the inside of and to Indigenous-Australian literature over the last
three decades. The following addresses four Indigenous Western-Australian writers within
the context of the Stolen Generations, and deals particularly with the semi-biographical
fiction by the Nyoongar author Kim Scott, which shows how a very liminal hybrid identity
can be firmly written in place yet. Un-writing past policies of physical and ‘epistemic’
violence on the Indigenous Australian population, his fiction addresses a way of approaching
Australianness from an Indigenous perspective as inclusive, embracing transculturality within
the nation-space.
Key words: Stolen Generations; absorption; assimilation; eugenics; Indigenous literature;
life-writing; Kim Scott; trauma; displacement; identity formation.
JEASA Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia 2.1 (2011): 102-122. SPAIN. http://www.easa-australianstudies.net/node/254. ISSN 2013-6897, 2013
On 21st June 2007, Alexis Wright won Australia’s most prestigious literary
award, the Miles Fran... more On 21st June 2007, Alexis Wright won Australia’s most prestigious literary
award, the Miles Franklin Prize, for Carpentaria (2006) and received broad national
attention as the first Indigenous Australian to be its sole recipient. This recognition of
Indigenous cultural output coincided with the Federal decision to intervene the highlytroubled,
dysfunctional Aboriginal population in remote communities of the Northern
Territory with a military and police task force. This paradox of recognition-repression
highlights the tense edges of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous interface in contemporary
Australia and reveals the continuing gap between Indigenous fact and fiction, reality
and hope for a better future. As a textual locus of Indigenous cultural regeneration,
Carpentaria questions the invasive nature of the Federal intervention in several ways.
Not only does the novel stand out for bending Western literary genres into an
Indigenous story-telling mode, but also for having “Dreamtime Narrative” critically
engage with the neo-colonial management of Australian resources and human relations.
Mainstream readers are exposed to the “strange cultural survival” (Bhabha 1990: 320)
of the Indigenous diaspora that proposes drastic solutions for the devastation wreaked
upon the Australian land through capitalism and its cultural corollaries. This article
contextualises Wright’s fiction within wider developments in recent Indigenous
literature and history, and traces how her awarded novel Carpentaria activates an
Aboriginal epistemology of understanding human and country which defies mainstream
politics of I/intervention and beckons towards a fresh beginning for Australia through a
profound change of paradigm.
Key words: Alexis Wright; Indigenous Australian literature; Northern Territory
Intervention
European Journal Of English Studies 15.1 (2011): 45-56. UK. http://www.essenglish.org/ejes.html ISSN 1382-5577., 2011
The racial trouble that affected the well-known ‘Aboriginal’ author and academic Mudrooroo politi... more The racial trouble that affected the well-known ‘Aboriginal’ author and academic Mudrooroo politicised the Australian identity debate at the close of the nineteen-nineties. The questioning of the ‘authenticity’ of the Indigenous ancestry of some public figures was part of the backlash against the Aboriginal minority under conservative rule, and Mudrooroo was undoubtedly its most emblematic target. Unable to substantiate his claim to Indigenous descent, he was forced to relinquish his frontline position as an Aboriginal representative in the debate on Australianness, and to move to, and eventually beyond, the margins of Australia’s cultural and geographical space. Yet, his fin-de-siècle vampire trilogy represents the author’s return to the discursive space of Australianness from a haunted and haunting identitarian non-location. This paper analyses how the Mudrooroo Affair came about, how it was inscribed in determinist notions of race as well as gender and class, and how Mudrooroo’s latest fiction has responded to the issue of identity formation through the employment of the Gothic figure of the vampire, engaging with questions of identity politics in ways which resonate with Derrida’s work on spectrality.
Lives in Migration: Rupture and Continuity. Australian Studies Centre UB (2011): 30-49. Barcelona, Spain. http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/welcome.html</a. Legal deposit B.44596-2010 (E-book)., 2014
The case of territorial dispossession affecting Indigenous Australia (Aborigines and Torres-Strai... more The case of territorial dispossession affecting Indigenous Australia (Aborigines and Torres-Straight Islanders) over the last two centuries, an instance of forced migration to the margins of white settler society, may speak back to European fears of displacement by the ethnic Other. This chapter analyses the ways in which Australian settler society has dealt with the Aboriginal population in its colonising thrust, and what strategies it has employed to effect Aboriginal cultural and physical displacement from their tribal lands in its aim to control vital resources. White frontier violence, the dispossession of ancestral country, the relocation to missions and reserves, child removal and institutionalisation have all played their role in a process of displacement often considered genocidal. The Indigenous law expert Larissa Berendt observes that “the political posturing and semantic debates do nothing to dispel the feeling Indigenous people have that [genocide] is the word that adequately describes our experience as colonized people” (in Moses 2005: 17). This essay will take Berendt’s cue in focusing on the plight and testimony of the Stolen Generations, a large group of mixed-descent children forcibly removed at great distances from their Aboriginal families and raised to fit into white society. Their vicissitudes have lately become visible, worded and documented in human-right reports, academic study and artistic and literary work. It is these children that became the main focus of assimilative government action; it is in their defencelessness that the breach of basic human rights is salient; it is also in their current recovery as Indigenous rather than white Australians that the resilience and ongoing presence of the Aboriginal communities and cultures are manifest, as shown in the Bringing-Them-Home Report. After an overview of Australian assimilative policies and these children’s location in these, this chapter will address their testimony of diasporic displacement in some representative Indigenous literary output from the state of Western Australia.
Miscel·lània 44 (2011): No pag. Spain. http://www.miscelaneajournal.net/index.php?option=Paper_frontpage&Itemid=1 ISSN 1137-6368, 2011
Alan Duff’s novel Once Were Warriors (1990) became an instant bestseller in his home country, New... more Alan Duff’s novel Once Were Warriors (1990) became an instant bestseller in his home country, New Zealand, and immediately established his reputation as a powerful writer. Dealing with contemporary Maori alienation in New Zealand’s urban areas from a harsh self-critical perspective that other renowned indigenous authors had never employed, it propounds a shifting of the responsibility and solution for the indigenous predicament from white mainstream society to the Maori themselves. Generally, the recasting of the politics of guilt and blame the novel projects has not readily met with acceptance from progressive readership. On account of exaltation of western individualisme and exposure of the rigidities of the tribal caste system and male-dominated gender division in traditional Maori society, Duff has often been identified as collaborating with an assimilative European mainstream agenda. Part-Maori director Lee Tamahori, who turned this novel into the widely-acclaimed homonymous film, has a more balanced view of the Duff case. He states it was the first time someone had made an authorized attempt to write about the harsh living conditions of the disenfranchised Maori urban underclass. Yet,Duff wrote an original screenplay that Tamahori rejected because he considered Duff too personally involved “to make the changes to keep people in their seats”. Thus, Laurence Simmons (1998: 334) points out that Tamahori’s cinematic transfer of Duff’s semi-autobiography highlights the “complexity and [...] ambivalence of the relationship between the political and the commercial”. Given these controversies, this essay will analyse what postcolonial ‘third’ spaces of Maoritanga (Maoriness) the written and filmed version of Once Were Warriors negotiate within New Zealand neocoloniality from a Bakhtinian perspective of identity formation.
Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 18 (2010): 77-90. Spain. http://revistas.ucm.es/portal/modulos.php?name=Revistas2&id=EIUC ISSN 1133- 0392, 2010
Sally Morgan’s auto/biography My Place played an important but contested role in recovering the I... more Sally Morgan’s auto/biography My Place played an important but contested role in recovering the Indigenous heritage for the national self-definition at Australia’s Bicentennial in 1988, an emblematic moment of mainstream celebration which glorified the start of the continent’s British colonisation in 1788. My Place is strategically placed at a cultural and historical crossroads that has raised praise as well as criticism for its particular engagement with mainstream readership. Much Indigenous and non-Indigenous academic debate has been dedicated to the ways in which Morgan’s novel reaches out to mainstream readers in order to display the plight of the Stolen Generations, and whether, by facilitating mainstream identification with its not-so-white protagonist, it works towards an assimilative conception of white reconciliation with an unacknowledged past of Indigenous genocide. Two decades after its publication, these legitimate worries born out of the text’s hybrid nature may be put at rest. A sophisticated merger of Indigenous and non-Indigenous genres of story-telling boosting a deceptive transparency, My Place inscribes Morgan’s Aboriginality performatively as part of a long-standing, more complex commitment to a re(dis)covered identity. On the final count, My Place’s engaged polyphony of Indigenous voices traces a textual songline in the neglected and silenced history of the Stolen Generations, performing a hybrid Aboriginal inscription of Sally Morgan’s identity within and without the text.
Australian Studies (BASA) 1.1 (2009). No pag. UK/Australia. http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/australian-studies/index ISSN 2042-5120, 2009
As a sample of the Australian female Gothic, critical discussion of Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well (... more As a sample of the Australian female Gothic, critical discussion of Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well (1986) has centrally focused on issues of gender, but not considered its racial inscription. This lack is especially relevant when criticism, despite praising the author’s experimentation with narrative technique and genre, tends to voice dissatisfaction with the novel’s conclusion in medias res, which never solves the tension between a presumed return to the patriarchal norm and the voicing of liberating alternatives. After reviewing issues of genre, gender and class, this paper proposes a postcolonial perspective so as to come to terms with this dilemma, and argues that the text signals the impossibility of suppressing the Native from the contemporary Australian land and textscape, whose Gothic articulation in the uncanny shape of the male well-dweller haunts the novel’s engagement with female empowerment. The female protagonist may only start overcoming a crippling gender discourse in the White postcolonial pastoralist setting by inscribing herself into ‘Australianness’. Reconciling her body with the land is significantly staged in terms of an Aboriginal cosmogony, as it is a ‘walkabout’ that allows Hester to start controlling her body and story. Thus, The Well may be
understood to be inconclusive because it struggles to map gender across race at a time of Aboriginal-exclusive multiculturalism. Written in the mid 1980s, it announces a point of inflection in thinking about native-nonnative relationships which would soon lead to attempts at ‘Reconciliation’ by mainstream Australia.
Bells 17 (2009). Department of English and German studies, UB, Spain. http://www.ub.es/filoan/bells.html ISSN: 1697-1612, 2009
This paper reassesses Derek Jarman’s film The Tempest (1979) against recent developments in film ... more This paper reassesses Derek Jarman’s film The Tempest (1979) against recent developments in film adaptation theory in order to reach conclusions about its controversial handling of the Shakespearean source material. After locating the film’s lack of general critical acclaim in the practice of fidelity criticism, an overview of film adaptation theory is given, and recent ideas are applied to the film’s content and structure, placing it in the context of British counterculture in the 1970s. Jarman’s Tempest is analysed by discussing the film’s protagonists in terms of gender, considering its director’s choices of characterisation and plot against the backdrop of queer politics. First Miranda’s relationship with Prospero and Ferdinand is placed within a gendered context of geopolitical conflict; next, the characterisation of Caliban as non-racialised, non-threatening and essentially human is seen as the result of Jarman’s queer agenda; finally, Ariel and Caliban are contrasted as conflicting sexual tendencies within Prospero, interiorising the film’s action in his mind as an allegory of the release of homoerotic desire. As a result, Jarman’s rewriting of the original is seen as a subversive deconstruction in service of his gay politics, to be appreciated as an independent piece of art.
Estudios Irlandeses. Journal of Irish Studies 2 (2007): 93- 106. Spain. http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/ ISSN: 1699-311X, 2007
This paper analyses Alan Parker’s Angela’s Ashes (1999) against John Ford’s seminal The Quiet Man... more This paper analyses Alan Parker’s Angela’s Ashes (1999) against John Ford’s seminal The Quiet Man (1952). Both Hollywood productions reflect on the Irish return myth, adapting the homonymous memoir by Frank McCourt (1996) and short story by Maurice Walsh (1933) respectively. Although Angela’s Ashes reverses The Quiet Man’s mythical depiction of early 20th c. west of Ireland as rural paradise, the urban ‘inferno’ the former paints can be equally understood as the product of a romantic mindset which combines Irish émigré nostalgia with male quest narrative. Both views are the result of the objective each male protagonist pursues –a return to Ireland in The Quiet Man and to the USA in Angela’s Ashes– and, thus, the divergence in their perception of Ireland may be explained as instances of romance in which Ireland and its culture is reduced to opposing caricatures in the service of wish-fulfilment. Not surprisingly, the criticism of capitalist, industrial America embedded in Walsh’s story, masked as psychological conflict in Ford’s screenplay, and the rags-to-riches American immigrant success story of McCourt’s memoir were adapted to the screen with different degrees of independence from mainstream US film production. This gives additional clues on each film’s use of traditional Irish imagery to the point that Ford’s The Quiet Man may be understood to deliver a more emancipatory perspective on Irish identity than Parker’s Angela’s Ashes.
Eucalypt 2 (2002): 76-102. Journal of the Australian Studies Centre UB, Spain., 2002
Alexis Wright’s novel Plains of Promise leaves non-Aboriginal readers with a vast array of unansw... more Alexis Wright’s novel Plains of Promise leaves non-Aboriginal readers with a vast array of unanswered questions which, in fact, forces them in a position similar to one of the story’s central characters, Mary, who unsuccessfully tries to unravel the mysteries of her past in order to establish a sense of identity and place. The protective silence that envelops the core of her novel reflects Wright’s claim that “there are a lot of things that need to be said to the country and I found fiction was one way of saying them without exposing people from my traditional area to the kind of scrutiny that a conventional history would have risked” (Ravencroft 1998, my italics). However, if her text forecloses a complete understanding of Aboriginal culture to the uninitiated, where does this impossibility to gain full access lead the mainstream reader? It is this paper’s contention that Wright’s novel, in not facilitating a definitive reading of its crucial events to mainstream readership, propels the latter to exercises of self-scrutiny and self-criticism, propounding an evaluation of how Westerners see themselves and the surrounding world. To support the idea that Plains of Promise points this way for non-Aboriginal readership, it will also deal with the novel Remembering Babylon by one of Australia’s foremost non-indigenous writers, David Malouf, and try to establish to what extent both works may have intersecting political agendas against the background of Australia’s multiculturalist policies throughout the decade of the 1990s.
Journal issues by Cornelis Martin Renes
This second, trilingual issue of Blue Gum with contributions in English, Catalan and Spanish sees... more This second, trilingual issue of Blue Gum with contributions in English, Catalan and Spanish sees the light just before the Christmas period, and so is a gift of sorts. It boasts a broad range of authors, some international and others from Catalonia. Five contributions are from Australia and a spin-off from research in Barcelona as part of a university student exchange programme between the University of Barcelona and the University of Southern Cross in the Northern Rivers region in New South Wales. The students in question all have a visual art and media studies background, and their writing moves between non-fiction and fiction. We have also received contributions in the shape of fiction and its critique from young Catalan academics, as well as poetry from students, postgraduates and lecturers from Catalonia. In the end we have opted for presenting the work in three balanced sections: fiction, non-fiction and poetry; its listing within each section is done alphabetically according to the authors' family names.
Sama,. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, prov... more Sama,. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. Abstract. Finland is internationally valorised for its education system, quality of life and high-tech, innovative, competitiveness. However, a critical focus on institutional dynamics and trajectories of higher education careers illuminates questions about the reproduction of global inequities, rather than the societal transformation Finland's education system was once noted for. The purpose of this self-ethnography of career trajectories within Finnish higher education is designed to call attention to institutional social dynamics that have escaped the attention of scholarly literature and contemporary debates about academic work and practice within highly situated research groups, departments and institutes. Our analysis illuminates emergent stratification, in a country and institution previously characterized by the absence of stratification and the ways in which this reinforces-and is reinforced by – the tension between transnational academic capitalism, methodological nationalism and the resulting global division of academic labour that now cuts across societies, manifesting within the one institution Finland's general population trusts to explain, engage and ameliorate stratification: Higher Education.
The present Coolabah volume, nr 15, flows from the January 2014 Watershed congress at the Univers... more The present Coolabah volume, nr 15, flows from the January 2014 Watershed congress at the University of Barcelona, organized by the Philology Faculty’s Centre for Australian Studies (ASC) in collaboration with the Centre for Peace and Social Justice (CPSJ) at the University of Southern Cross, Australia. A select number of delegates have contributed to the making of this volume of essays, which, as is usual with our post-congress issues, covers a wide range of topics relating to the congress theme—Watershed—and so offers an eclectic, yet therefore challenging mix of papers within the field of postcolonial and cultural studies. Part of what is left after the water has been shed and the streams of conversation have settled down (without drying up) becomes visible in this compilation.
When Ruby Langford-Ginibi passed away in 2011, Janie was invited by Dr Sue Ballyn, Coolabah edito... more When Ruby Langford-Ginibi passed away in 2011, Janie was invited by Dr Sue Ballyn, Coolabah editor, Founder and Co-Director of the University of Barcelona Australian Studies Centre and good friend of Ruby’s, to work on a special edition to commemorate Ruby’s life and work. Janie gracefully accepted and naturally turned to Pamela to co-write a monographic piece in dialogic form. This structure intimately reflected the border-crossing nature of their contact, which had already delivered other pieces of a similar collaborative shape in their academic life and attended to the issues of Indigeneity and Australianness, which also included contributions by the late Dr Lorraine Johnson Riordan. When Pamela herself died suddenly, unexpectedly and prematurely in February last year, once again Sue Ballyn asked Janie Conway if she were interested in preparing a memorial issue, now for her deceased friend and sister in arms. After due contemplation Janie decided to accept and found several members from Pam’s circle of family, friends and colleagues willing to contribute to this volume. The result is an eclectic variety of pieces, representative of Pam’s complex, inspiring personality, which left no-one indifferent.
We are pleased to present what we believe is an excellent collection of articles conceived and de... more We are pleased to present what we believe is an excellent collection of articles conceived and developed around the theme of “Pacific Solutions”, a conference organised by the Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Barcelona (ASC) and The Centre for Peace and Social Justice at Southern Cross University (CPSJ), celebrated at the University of Barcelona in December 2011. Their yearly meetings have acquired and are characterized by a plural nature. The inter- and trans-disciplinary philosophy of both Centres enables ways to create new forms of knowledge and, therefore, innovative and potentially empowering articulations of culture(s).
As guest editor of this Coolabah issue I will be brief when introducing this monograph on the lat... more As guest editor of this Coolabah issue I will be brief when introducing this monograph on the late, great Indigenous-Australian story teller, author and activist Ruby Langford-Ginibi. The recollections gathered in the following pages should be left to speak for her by themselves. They honour, remember and assess Ruby´s contribution to the Indigenous Australian cause and culture over the past decades, a commitment that, as a mother, was first and foremost born out of her own and family´s circumstances but, as an Elder, also embedded in her awareness of community and her perception of the racism that continues to permeate settler Australia. Ruby´s work and activism speak for themselves, but have also been recognized institutionally, as in her Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Southern Cross, located in Bundjalung country.
As the guest editor of the present issue of Coolabah (No. 5, 2011), entitled Food for Afterthough... more As the guest editor of the present issue of Coolabah (No. 5, 2011), entitled Food for Afterthought, I have had the honour and pleasure of dealing with a series of challenging essays derived from the congress Food for Thought, held from 1st to 5th February 2010 at the University of Barcelona. This event was organised by the Australian Studies Centre of the University of Barcelona, Spain, together with the Centre for Peace and Social Justice of the University of Southern Cross, Lismore, Australia, directed by Dr Susan Ballyn and Dr Baden Offord respectively. Their commitment and work front and backstage both in Barcelona as well as in Australia are responsible for the range and depth of this international conference. Indeed, Food for Thought forms part of a cycle of congresses on Australian Studies that started out commuting between Australia and Spain, but since 2008 have had Barcelona as their one and only venue, without losing their original international and interdisciplinary appeal and objective.
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Published Papers by Cornelis Martin Renes
"I am a collector. I collect lost stories; the ones that people forget or the ones that people know but don’t tell. You can find them if you look hard enough in the right places. I look for different stories and hold them up to myself like a mirror, searching for the elusive threads that might slip away before I have time to catch them. Holding them tightly in a grid of sentences that give vent to a particular jewel of a moment that shines across the centuries, I give meaning and shape to my own life" (Conway-Herron 2010: 7).
devastating impact on all aspects of the Indigenous-Australian community tissue, not least the
lasting trauma of the Stolen Generations. The latter was the result of the institutionalisation,
adoption, fostering, virtual slavery and sexual abuse of thousands of mixed-descent children,
who were separated at great physical and emotional distances from their Indigenous kin,
often never to see them again. The object of State and Federal policies of removal and
mainstream absorption and assimilation between 1930 and 1970, these lost children only saw
their plight officially recognised in 1997, when the Bringing Them Home report was
published by the Federal government. The victims of forced separation and migration, they
have suffered serious trans-generational problems of adaptation and alienation in Australian
society, which have been not only documented from the outside in the aforementioned report
but also given shape from the inside of and to Indigenous-Australian literature over the last
three decades. The following addresses four Indigenous Western-Australian writers within
the context of the Stolen Generations, and deals particularly with the semi-biographical
fiction by the Nyoongar author Kim Scott, which shows how a very liminal hybrid identity
can be firmly written in place yet. Un-writing past policies of physical and ‘epistemic’
violence on the Indigenous Australian population, his fiction addresses a way of approaching
Australianness from an Indigenous perspective as inclusive, embracing transculturality within
the nation-space.
Key words: Stolen Generations; absorption; assimilation; eugenics; Indigenous literature;
life-writing; Kim Scott; trauma; displacement; identity formation.
award, the Miles Franklin Prize, for Carpentaria (2006) and received broad national
attention as the first Indigenous Australian to be its sole recipient. This recognition of
Indigenous cultural output coincided with the Federal decision to intervene the highlytroubled,
dysfunctional Aboriginal population in remote communities of the Northern
Territory with a military and police task force. This paradox of recognition-repression
highlights the tense edges of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous interface in contemporary
Australia and reveals the continuing gap between Indigenous fact and fiction, reality
and hope for a better future. As a textual locus of Indigenous cultural regeneration,
Carpentaria questions the invasive nature of the Federal intervention in several ways.
Not only does the novel stand out for bending Western literary genres into an
Indigenous story-telling mode, but also for having “Dreamtime Narrative” critically
engage with the neo-colonial management of Australian resources and human relations.
Mainstream readers are exposed to the “strange cultural survival” (Bhabha 1990: 320)
of the Indigenous diaspora that proposes drastic solutions for the devastation wreaked
upon the Australian land through capitalism and its cultural corollaries. This article
contextualises Wright’s fiction within wider developments in recent Indigenous
literature and history, and traces how her awarded novel Carpentaria activates an
Aboriginal epistemology of understanding human and country which defies mainstream
politics of I/intervention and beckons towards a fresh beginning for Australia through a
profound change of paradigm.
Key words: Alexis Wright; Indigenous Australian literature; Northern Territory
Intervention
understood to be inconclusive because it struggles to map gender across race at a time of Aboriginal-exclusive multiculturalism. Written in the mid 1980s, it announces a point of inflection in thinking about native-nonnative relationships which would soon lead to attempts at ‘Reconciliation’ by mainstream Australia.
Journal issues by Cornelis Martin Renes
"I am a collector. I collect lost stories; the ones that people forget or the ones that people know but don’t tell. You can find them if you look hard enough in the right places. I look for different stories and hold them up to myself like a mirror, searching for the elusive threads that might slip away before I have time to catch them. Holding them tightly in a grid of sentences that give vent to a particular jewel of a moment that shines across the centuries, I give meaning and shape to my own life" (Conway-Herron 2010: 7).
devastating impact on all aspects of the Indigenous-Australian community tissue, not least the
lasting trauma of the Stolen Generations. The latter was the result of the institutionalisation,
adoption, fostering, virtual slavery and sexual abuse of thousands of mixed-descent children,
who were separated at great physical and emotional distances from their Indigenous kin,
often never to see them again. The object of State and Federal policies of removal and
mainstream absorption and assimilation between 1930 and 1970, these lost children only saw
their plight officially recognised in 1997, when the Bringing Them Home report was
published by the Federal government. The victims of forced separation and migration, they
have suffered serious trans-generational problems of adaptation and alienation in Australian
society, which have been not only documented from the outside in the aforementioned report
but also given shape from the inside of and to Indigenous-Australian literature over the last
three decades. The following addresses four Indigenous Western-Australian writers within
the context of the Stolen Generations, and deals particularly with the semi-biographical
fiction by the Nyoongar author Kim Scott, which shows how a very liminal hybrid identity
can be firmly written in place yet. Un-writing past policies of physical and ‘epistemic’
violence on the Indigenous Australian population, his fiction addresses a way of approaching
Australianness from an Indigenous perspective as inclusive, embracing transculturality within
the nation-space.
Key words: Stolen Generations; absorption; assimilation; eugenics; Indigenous literature;
life-writing; Kim Scott; trauma; displacement; identity formation.
award, the Miles Franklin Prize, for Carpentaria (2006) and received broad national
attention as the first Indigenous Australian to be its sole recipient. This recognition of
Indigenous cultural output coincided with the Federal decision to intervene the highlytroubled,
dysfunctional Aboriginal population in remote communities of the Northern
Territory with a military and police task force. This paradox of recognition-repression
highlights the tense edges of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous interface in contemporary
Australia and reveals the continuing gap between Indigenous fact and fiction, reality
and hope for a better future. As a textual locus of Indigenous cultural regeneration,
Carpentaria questions the invasive nature of the Federal intervention in several ways.
Not only does the novel stand out for bending Western literary genres into an
Indigenous story-telling mode, but also for having “Dreamtime Narrative” critically
engage with the neo-colonial management of Australian resources and human relations.
Mainstream readers are exposed to the “strange cultural survival” (Bhabha 1990: 320)
of the Indigenous diaspora that proposes drastic solutions for the devastation wreaked
upon the Australian land through capitalism and its cultural corollaries. This article
contextualises Wright’s fiction within wider developments in recent Indigenous
literature and history, and traces how her awarded novel Carpentaria activates an
Aboriginal epistemology of understanding human and country which defies mainstream
politics of I/intervention and beckons towards a fresh beginning for Australia through a
profound change of paradigm.
Key words: Alexis Wright; Indigenous Australian literature; Northern Territory
Intervention
understood to be inconclusive because it struggles to map gender across race at a time of Aboriginal-exclusive multiculturalism. Written in the mid 1980s, it announces a point of inflection in thinking about native-nonnative relationships which would soon lead to attempts at ‘Reconciliation’ by mainstream Australia.
European norm, privilege and superiority. By writing back from the inside but contextualising their analysis within a non-European framework of thinking, the authors achieve the critical leverage necessary to lay bare and deconstruct the cultural locatedness and limitations of European universalism.