Catriona Elder

Running Race Reconciliation, Nationalism and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games

This article examines how the idea of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians became entwined with the Sydney 2000 Olympics. It does this by undertaking a critical reading of media stories on the twin issues of Cathy Freeman’s 400 m race, and the fear of Indigenous protest disrupting the games. We argue the Olympic Games helped to reinforce a discourse of reconciliation that best suited non-Indigenous peoples, and that the Games came to be represented as the space where reconciliation could and should take place. We argue that, in combination with nationalist stories, the impending Olympic Games were deployed as a way of disciplining Indigenous people and maintaining a particularly conservative understanding of reconciliation; one that did little to change the unequal power relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

Data and archives: The Internet as site and subject

The Internet has changed the nature of the archive from a paper-based treasure trove overseen by the trained archivist to one of an open, multi-vocal, democratic source with no one in control. New forms of archives have emerged – for example, the haphazard collection of ephemeral – and they now exist alongside the formal public record that has more traditionally been understood as the archive. This article analyses what these changes mean to social scientists working with data that emerge from or are stored on the Internet. Using a small case study based on our own research, we consider ways of thinking through and managing this challenge. We suggest this shift from the institutional to the intimate, from the state to the individual, from the public to the private has changed the way scholars access and interact with data.

Small Screens: Essays on Contemporary Australian Television

where they do appear. In reflecting on their decision to participate in the project interviewees often talked in terms of recording their part in history, as much for the benefit of their families as for the national story as a whole. The authors admit that the opportunity to archive the self was unlikely to be attractive to those for whom life was still a struggle. Anxious to avoid the nostalgia that can arise from oral history projects, the interviewers did delve into the more difficult aspects of the narrators’ lives, but these reflections were constructed in a context where hard times were in the past, and troubles had been overcome. Within these constraints, however, the authors do not shy away from delving into the more painful aspects of the stories recounted by their interviewees, and hence of Australia’s past. Amidst the more positive reflections we read stories of racial and sexual discrimination, the pain of separation and loss both from home and family and through sickness, disability and death. We see the collapse of old certainties, and the conflicts around identity and belonging that have marked Australia in the postwar era. While the book tells the stories of individuals making history, it also illustrates clearly how their ability to do so was shaped by the resources and power to which they had access. Australian Lives has a value beyond its immediate content. It serves as an introduction to a rich resource for historians in the future. Beginning with the excellent short reading lists attached to each of the chapters, serving as a neat summation of current literature in the field, its contribution to ongoing historical research continues through the links to relevant online interviews and the indication that there is richer material to come as current embargoes on often more painful memories expire. While the commentary provided on the material collected here reflects the concerns of the present, the richness of the data hints at the potential for historians in the future whowill read the interviews through the discursive lenses of their own time, raising different questions and offering analyses not yet thought of.

Narratives of national belonging: the domestic, the wild, and the mutant in Australian film

ABSTRACT This article explores understandings of postcolonial national belonging through an analysis of cinematic representations of humans, animals and the environment. It does so by analyzing a series of Australian films about plants, animals or people who are out of place or out of control. The article registers some of the changing representations of Australian flora, fauna and, by association people, as native, domesticated, simpatico, feral and wild; interpreting these shifts as recalibrations of a moral hierarchy of cultural belonging. Films including Lantana (2001) Dir. Ray Lawrence; Razorback (1984) Dir. Russell Mulchay; Rogue (2007) Dir. Greg Mclean; and Black Water (2007) Dirs. David Nerlich and Andrew Traucki are read in terms of political anxieties. Drawing on work ‘that insists humans and animals are currently bound in a complex network of relationships’, I use these films to explore issues of the nation, place, belonging in relation to aliens and natives. Given that in the past 20 years there has been increasing recognition of the history of colonialism and its effects on Indigenous peoples but also a different but related blossoming of environmental nationalism, the key question that animates this research is how these understandings are represented in film and what work animals and plants might have played in filmic cultural representations of national belonging.

Colonialism and Reenactment Television: Imagining Belonging in Outback House

In the last decade or so, as part of an increasing interest in popular history a spate of reenactment television programs have been produced. In Britain there were programs such as 1900 House (1999), 1940s House (2001), The Edwardian Country House (2002). On German television The Black Forest House (2002) and Life in the Manor House (2004) appeared. Australian, New Zealand, American and Canadian production companies have also created series that reenact life from around 150 years ago. In the United States there was Frontier House (2002) and Colonial House (2004). New Zealand had Pioneer House (1999) and Pioneer Quest (2000) screened on Canadian television. The reenactment series produced in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States differ significantly from the European versions. In these nations to reenact the past is to engage with the history of colonialism and nation formation. This chapter focuses on an Australian series and uses it to explore contemporary attitudes to land and belonging as they are represented in a reenactment of pioneer history.

‘Diggers’ Waifs’: Desire, anxiety and immigration in Post‐1945 Australia

After the occupation of Japan by Australian servicemen in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a small group of Japanese‐Australian children living in the Kure district where the troops had been stationed. In the late 1950s a discussion took place in Australia about what to do about these children. There were calls from members of the public that the children, as ‘half Australian, should be brought to this country. However, the governments White Australia Policy made this impossible. This article uses the incident of the children to explore the tensions and contradictions that emerged in this period in terms of what it meant to be Australian.