Anja Schwarz

‘Not this year!’ reenacting contested pasts aboard the ship

This article is interested in exploring what happens when historical reenactments are faced with the task of reproducing events whose legacy for the present is disputed among different social groups. It focuses on The Ship, a 2002 television recapitulation of Cooks 1770 Endeavour voyage of imperial discovery along the east coast of the Australian continent. The ‘increasing division on board about just what Cooks legacy to history means’ opens out for consideration The Ships positioning within the shifting field of postcolonial historiography and contemporary Australian debates on reconciliation. The show engages with these themes by means of a ‘psychoanalytical emplotment’ of the journeys twenty-first-century repetition, suggesting that the divisive past requires a ‘working through’ in order to ‘heal’ the commemorative division. The article proposes an alternative understanding of such processes of reconciliation in which reenactments of imperial history are implicated. This approach draws on Derridas notion of ‘hauntology’, as well as on recent insights from performance studies and speech act theory; it conceptualizes reenactments as open-ended processes of heritage production.

‘…Just as It would have been in 1861’: Stuttering Colonial Beginnings in ABC’s Outback House

In July 2005, Australian novelist Kate Grenville was invited by Radio National’s Books and Writing programme to talk about The Secret River, her latest novel loosely based on the life of her ancestor Solomon Wiseman, who had been transported to the penal colony of New South Wales in 1817 and later settled on the Hawkesbury River.1 The show’s host, Ramona Koval, congratulated Grenville on the poetic tone and language of her narrative and praised the text as ‘a wonderful and disturbing novel, full of detail about life and work in the colony … and daring descriptions of the land and the strangeness of the encounters between black and white people’.2 Grenville, in turn, read a passage from the book and reflected comprehensively on what had motivated her to write it. Then came Koval’s final question and Grenville’s reply which would irritate and preoccupy the country’s historians for months to come: ‘So, where would you slot your book’, Koval had enquired, ‘if you were laying out books on the history wars? Whereabouts would you slot yours?’ Australia’s ‘history wars’, heated debates among historians and public intellectuals over the nature of the country’s colonial legacy,3 had over the previous decade caused a deep rift between the so-called black armband historians on the political left and conservative scholars accused of wearing a ‘white blindfold’4 on the right.

The greatest son of our Heimat: reading German Leichhardts across the National Socialist era

The article discusses German commemorations of Ludwig Leichhardt (1813–1848) in the National Socialist era when officials, journalists, educators and writers, spurred by the double anniversary of the explorers 125th birthday and the 90th anniversary of his disappearance, began to re-imagine the explorers life and fate in the light of the ideological imperatives of the day. Our analysis of this period pays particular attention to how these reimagined Leichhardts emphasise or neglect some of the key elements that make up his story to this day, among them: Leichhardts ethnicity; his sense of attachment to place and home; his homosocial relationships; his evasion of Prussian military service; his role in the British colonial project; and finally, his engagements with Aborigines. On the one hand, our analysis reveals, how Leichhardt was portrayed first on the local and, later, the national level in ways that increasingly sought to elide ambiguous aspects of his life and deeds. However, it also uncovers some of the ideological labour required to render him useful to the National Socialist cause. Often enough, these re-imagined Leichhardts escaped party politics, and cast up some of the logical inconsistencies and limits to key terms in National Socialist thinking.

‘That’s Not A Story I Could Tell.’ Commemorating the Other Side of the Colonial Frontier in Australian Literature of Reconciliation

On 15 February 2010, exactly two years after Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered the Apology to Australia’s Indigenous People as the first act of the reconvened parliament, Australian author Kate Grenville was invited to contribute an opinion piece to the Guardian. In her article, Grenville looked back on the progress that the project of reconciliation had since made and conceded that, while there had been some movement, ‘the Rudd government can’t point to any spectacular policy changes or huge improvement in outcomes’. Rejecting the notion, however, that the Apology had been just ‘hot air, a cynical exercise in spin’, Grenville discussed the difficulties faced by the government’s housing programme for Indigenous communities as one example of ‘just how tangled the problems are’. While symbolic acts were never enough, she concluded, the Apology remained an ‘overdue and necessary first step’.1