Imagined Australia: Reflections Around the Reciprocal Construction of Identity Between Australia and Europe

Description

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. The Editor: Renata Summo-O'Connell has launched the Imagined Australia international research project after having founded the international organization AILAE. Her background in Aesthetics, Sociolinguistics and Gender Studies directs her effort to develop new models of transnational research, which beyond institutional boundaries, may effectively further international debates and engage in creative projects on artistic and cultural levels. Table of Contents......Page 7 Acknowledgments ix......Page 11 PART ONE IMAGINED AUSTRALIA 1......Page 13 Imagined Australia: A Provocation in Four Stages 3......Page 15 PART TWO SOVEREIGNTY AND DISAPPEARANCE 13......Page 25 A Moment of Mourning On the Threshold of the Pure Gift 15......Page 27 White Possession: The Legacy of Cook’s Choice 27......Page 39 Interstitial Australia’s Vernacular Violence 43......Page 55 Dying to Come to Australia: Asylum Seekers, Tourists and Death 57......Page 69 PART THREE MYTHOLOGIES OF AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE PAST AND FUTURE 89......Page 101 ‘Still Living Like People from Somewhere Else’: Natives and Invasives in Tasmanian Landscape Imagery 91......Page 103 Settler Colonialism and the Formation of Australian National Identity: Praed’s ‘Bunyip’ and Pedley’s ‘Dot and the Kangaroo’ 107......Page 119 Australian Landscape as the Language of a New Identity 123......Page 135 PART FOUR TERRA AUSTRALIS INCOGNITA AND EUROPEAN SOCIAL UTOPIAS 137......Page 149 From Finisterrae to Terra Australis Incognita: Bishop Rosendo Salvado’s Utopian Imaginings and Designs for New Norcia 139......Page 151 The Batavia Legacy: Implications of the Batavia Shipwreck (1629) in History and Imaginary 153......Page 165 ‘ “Heaven on Earth” was a Hell in Reality’: Refl ections on William Lane’s ‘New Australia’ in Britain 171......Page 183 PART FIVE ZONES OF (MIS) TRANSLATION 185......Page 197 Bennelong’s Gambit: the Aboriginal Invention of Modernism 187......Page 199 Mamboing Matilda: Surf-lifestyle T-shirts and Representations of Australian Cultural Identity 201......Page 213 Italy and the Transformation of the Traveller in Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters 215......Page 227 In Other Images: Brett Whiteley’s Image of Europe | Europe’s Image of Brett Whiteley 233......Page 245 PART SIX NATIONS, NARRATIONS AND INDIGENISATION 249......Page 261 Looking for/at Australia: Roots and Repulsion in Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing 251......Page 263 Who’s a Weird Mob? Imagining Assimilation in Postwar Australia 265......Page 277 The ‘Indians’ of New Holland and the Naming Process in English in the Age of Captain Cook 277......Page 289 Images of Australia in Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson 293......Page 305 PART SEVEN MIGRATION AND HOSPITALITY 303......Page 315 Migration and Hospitality: Homologies between Europe and Australia 305......Page 317 PART EIGHT CRITICAL CULTURAL RECASTING AND PRACTICES OF APPROPRIATION 333......Page 345 Contested Grounds: Practices of Re-appropriation in Indigenous Australian Visual Art 335......Page 347 Perceiving Europe and Australia and Constructing an Imagined Australian Identity in The Aunts’ Story by Patrick White 353......Page 365 Imagining Australia: The Architecture of the National Museum of Australia Asks ‘What Community’? 367......Page 379 The Exoticism of the Musée du Quai Branly: a French Perspective on Aboriginal Australia 385......Page 397 Notes on Contributors 395......Page 407