Grace Moore

Music and trauma: the relationship between music, personality, and coping style

In a world that is dominated by news of conflict, violence and natural disasters affecting millions of people around the globe, there is a need for effective strategies for coping with trauma. The effects of such trauma on both individuals and communities, are deep and long-lasting (Sutton, 2002). Cultural techniques play an important role in helping communities to recover from trauma. Sports and games, for example, have been used in numerous settings with individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (Lawrence et al., 2010). Other arts-based therapies such as reading or creative writing are also proving to be effective means for dealing with the aftermath of traumatic events. Music can also play a role in helping individuals and communities to cope with trauma, whether it be through the intervention of music therapists, community music making programs or individual music listening. However, despite the abundance of positive examples of the value of the arts in trauma recovery, music, and the arts receives little recognition by leaders in global health issues (Clift et al., 2010). This paper will argue, therefore, that there is a need for a solid empirical evidence base that can illuminate the mechanisms by which music and arts therapies are effective, as well as consideration of how individual differences in personality and coping style can moderate participant responses to such therapies.

Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Reptiles: Anthony Trollope and the Australian Acclimatization Debate

This chapter considers Trollope’s examination of the tensions between indigenous and introduced species in his travelogue Australia and New Zealand (1873). Examining his engagement with “ecological imperialism,” it discusses his representation of Australian native animals, which Trollope frequently depicts as lacking in vigor, and the difficulties that they often faced when confronted with predatory species introduced from Europe. The chapter addresses what it means to be a “pest” in nineteenth-century Australia, while considering how discussions of native animals became conduits for wider debates surrounding invasion and guilt. The chapter considers the animal as a commodity, while engaging with questions of exoticism and domestication, seeking to situate Trollope in relation to the work of regional Acclimatization Societies within Australia.

‘The Floodgates of Inkland were Opened’: Aestheticising the Whitechapel Murders

The 1888 Whitechapel murders shook late Victorian society to the core. Violence was endemic to London’s East End, as has been catalogued exhaustively in fiction and in fact. To the area’s worn-down inhabitants, the deaths of five prostitutes would have been unremarkable were it not for the horrific manner in which these women were killed. Inevitably, newspaper coverage of these killings was sensational and lurid. However, the murders—for which the (possibly) self-styled ‘Jack the Ripper’ was one of many to claim responsibility—also swiftly made their way into fiction, as writers sought to attribute meaning of one kind or another to the vicious slayings. Then, as now, these murders exercised an extraordinary hold on the imaginations of writers from a range of backgrounds, partly because of their sensational nature and partly because the Ripper’s identity remained elusive. In this chapter I will examine the earliest attempts to textualise the Ripper murders, paying particular attention to three popular novels that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the killing spree—J.F. Brewer’s sensational The Curse Upon Mitre Square (1888), Margaret Harkness’s In Darkest London (1889) and Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery (1892)—along with contemporary materials from newspapers and journals. I shall consider why these brutal murders made their way into fiction so swiftly, and ask what it meant to transpose a real-life killer into a work of fiction so soon after the murders had taken place. As Jess Nevins notes, The Curse Upon Mitre Square, published only six weeks after the Ripper claimed his first victim, ‘began the trend of portraying Jack the Ripper as a being of more-than-human evil’ (2014, p. 349). I shall also consider the role played by the media in creating a fictitious Ripper in the absence of any real knowledge of the killer, before examining his migration from the pages of the newspapers into popular fiction. My argument here is informed by Dallas Liddle’s astute assertion that dialogues between the press and novelists with an interest in sensational writing were seldom a question of influence in a single direction (2004, pp. 89–104).

Colonial Dickens: What Australians Made of the World's Favourite Writer

the local Australian Labor Party (ALP) anti-conscriptionists to be editor of the Westralian Worker, led a spirited anti-conscription campaign, which, although it did not lead to a vastly different result, surely warranted mention. Bollard states that the General Strike involved every state (112) – but the waterside workers in WA did not strike as part of the General Strike. He also asserts that after the Bloody Sunday riot on Fremantle Wharf, the Fremantle police station was “abandoned for several months” (166). I am unaware of this being the case, despite having read extensive police, government and ALP reports of the period. The scab unionists were referred to as “Nationals” (165) because they were members of the National Waterside Workers Union, the union formed by Billy Hughes – not because it was a “local euphemism for the scabs”. Many of the book’s references are drawn from newspapers. For example, 41 of 52 endnotes to Chapter 4 (the 1916 referendum) are from newspapers, and only two are primary sources. I expected much greater use of primary sources in a study that purports to be breaking new ground. Additionally, while I cannot comment on the accuracy of other references, in the citation for my own book (endnotes 19 and 20 of Chapter 8) my name is misspelt, the book title is incorrect and the page numbers are wrong. Bollard’s study is interesting, well written and lacks the typographical errors that often mar publications, but regrettably, New South Publishing has resorted to using “toilet paper” for their history titles. It looks cheap and nasty and does no credit to the press, the discipline of history, the author or the book. I hope they will desist from this practice.

Rehabilitating the Nineteenth Century: The Revisionist Novel

Reinventing the nineteenth century is certainly not a new phenomenon, although the last twenty years have seen a veritable explosion of novels that revise or memorialize the period. Raphael Samuel has attributed this revival of interest to conservative efforts to assert so-called “Victorian values,” although, of course, many writers of so-called “neo-Victorian” fiction return to the nineteenth century as a way of combating conservatism, rather than celebrating it. Samuel helpfully terms this re-animation of the past “resur-rectionism,” a term that neatly taps into the Dickensian idea of “recalling to life” (1984, p. 40). It is also a term that has been adopted by postcolonial critics, including Kathleen Renk, to encapsulate the way in which the past can impinge upon the present (1999). This chapter will consider some of the challenges associated with teaching the neo-Victorian novel and the role that revisionist texts can play in introducing students to the literature of the nineteenth century and a range of theoretical perspectives.