Leigh Boucher

“I Ain't Queer”: Love, Masculinity and History in Brokeback Mountain

Ang Lees big gay tragic historical love story, Brokeback Mountain, was released internationally in late 2005 and early 2006. Lees film told the story of two cowboys who fell in love while shepherding on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming in 1963. Although the film narrated a demonstrably American story, appeals to a socio-historical connection were widespread in Australia. Indeed, Brokeback Mountains cinematic release in this country coincided with “Australia Day,” a national day of celebration in which beginnings, nationhood, and “settlement” are reaffirmed. In this article, we track the explosion of publicly-audible conversations that took place in Brokeback Mountains wake in Australia in 2006. On the one hand, we seek to historicize this film; on the other, we also consider the political ways in which it historicized. As the “noise” about Brokeback Mountain became almost impossible to ignore in Australia, we noticed the film tended to be viewed as a cause for celebration. Through an analysis of the politics of historical stories and the gendered politics of emotion, we seek to complicate the notion that this film signified a radical departure from homophobic cinematic and cultural traditions.

Victorian liberalism and the effect of sovereignty: a view from the settler periphery

Abstract Postcolonial thinking has offered ‘new imperial’ historians productive avenues to reconsider the relationship between nineteenth-century liberalism and the British Empire. Questions of territory and sovereignty have, however, often been seen as secondary in these new histories of the citizen-subject of liberalism. From an Antipodean perspective, this seems a remarkable elision. Through an examination of the ideas of liberals in colonial Victoria, this article explores whether we might consider sovereignty as a ghost in the machine of everyday liberalism and asks whether these questions should remain safely on the imperial margins. Drawing on theorisations of settler-colonialism that have emerged in Antipodean historical research, this article proposes to read the political subject of the mid-nineteenth-century liberal imagination as both effecting and an effect of sovereignty. This article has been peer reviewed.

'Soliciting sixpences from township to township' : moral dilemmas in mid-nineteenth-century Melbourne

Abstract In the middle of the nineteenth century, as a nascent ‘public sphere’ took shape in Port Phillip and then Victoria, a set of questions emerged about the past, present and future relationship between Aboriginal people and British colonizers in the colonys imaginative and intellectual life. In the context of urban developments best considered explosive in speed and transformation, a group of Melbourne thinkers were forced to consider the relationship between dispossession, violence and the apparent historical progress of settler society itself. Unlike other settler colonial cities, where the flowering of a truly ‘urban’ political and intellectual culture was far removed from the brute violence of the frontier (in both historical and geographic terms), in Melbourne the accident of the gold rush condensed historical development in ways that threw this violence and cultural development into the same historical frame. How could a settler colonial city and its community imagine itself when the moral problems of dispossession were politically, culturally and materially present? This article traces how an emerging urban intellectual elite discursively and morally managed the problem of Aboriginal survival (and the haunting of theft and violence it always implied). In so doing, this article offers a new reading of the 1869 ‘Protection Act’ as an attempt to deflect, remove and contain the problem that a swindled and exploited Aboriginal population posed in a city understood by many as a beacon of progress and development.

Re-Orienting Whiteness: A New Agenda for the Field

Since whiteness studies made its dramatic entrance into the U.S. academy in the early 1990s it has generated tremendous scholarly output. Monographs and edited collections have proliferated across and between numerous disciplines. Amongst all this intellectual activity, however, the question of whiteness and colonialism remains a significant and curious absence. As its Saidian-inspired title signals, Re-Orienting Whiteness emerges from our desire to address this gap by pushing “whiteness studies” toward a more sustained engagement with critical postcolonial thought and the history of colonialism. Despite their many obvious synergies, there has been remarkably little cross-fertilization between these approaches to understanding the modalities of race, past and present. There is a clear need for this radical separation to be addressed. This collection offers an explicit challenge both to work on race in the United States (which has tended to elide the foundational significance of its settler-colonial origins), and to historical scholarship on British empire-building (which remains deeply conflicted over the significance of race)3. Our work is based on the conviction that the construction of whiteness and the phenomena of European colonialism are fundamentally interconnected, and that whiteness studies must be “Re-Oriented” to take this into account. Equally, a greater and more rigorous focus on whiteness as a racial category has much to offer to our understandings of the historical operations of colonialism and its ongoing effects.

‘Studying Modern History gives me the chance to say what I think’: learning and teaching history in the age of student-centred learning

Abstract This article critically interrogates university history students’ ‘learning narratives’ in relation to the rise of ideas about student-centred learning in Australian universities. Drawing on interviews with third-year students, it suggests that we need to more carefully consider how students make choices about their educational activities and the ways in which some transformations in student culture may inadvertently sustain the possibility for students to ‘opt out’ of key learning activities. In short, this article calls for scholar-teachers to historicise our student cohorts carefully and use this understanding to disrupt some of the instrumentalising tendencies of late modern university life. This article has been peer reviewed.

The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act: Vernacular ethnography and the governance of Aboriginal subjects

In 1864, Theo Sumner, Vice-President of the Victorian Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines (CBPA) noted with some frustration that members of the Board worked ‘under severe disadvantages at present [and] many of their schemes are thwarted’.1 According to his annual report, the instantiation of the Board at the request of the Governor after an 1858 Select Committee represented a chance to ‘attend to the wants of the blacks’ who were clearly struggling for survival in the wake of the violent transformations of settler colonial dispossession and its continuing effects.2 However, Sumner argued the CBPA occupied an untenably ambiguous position within the legislative and institutional frameworks of colonial governance. This was not simply an appeal for more financial support; the CBPA’s projects of protection, Sumner argued, were ‘thwarted and some have been abandoned solely for the want of power to give effect to them’. The CBPA asked for legislative authority to intervene into the lives of Aboriginal people, their relationships with the colonial state and their engagements with colonial employers. Sumner regretted that whilst ‘a very short Bill would contain all that is necessary to enable them to extend their labours ... their urgent solicitations for some amendment of the laws affecting the blacks have not yet received attention’.3 To be fair, endemic government instability in the 1860s in Victoria meant that many reforming projects struggled to negotiate the game of musical ministers that unfolded in colonial parliament. Finally, however, in 1869 the CBPA’s desire for more power was fulfilled. As what would become the Aborigines Protection Act 1869 (Vic) made smooth progress between the upper and lower houses of colonial parliament, legislators suggested this was ‘the performance of a very tardy act of justice to a long neglected portion of the human family ... whose lands we have to a large extent usurped’. Sumner must have been pleased to finally hear parliamentarians acknowledge that the ‘enlargement ... of the powers of the Board’, would enable the CBPA and its

Thinking Transnationally About Sexuality: Homosexuality in Australia or Australian Homosexualities?

This chapter considers the intersections between the transnational and the intimate. Examining arguments for the decriminalisation of homosex in late 1970s Victoria, it suggests that ideas about sexual identity and life, even as they were felt and experienced as personal and intimate, were transnationally produced. At the same time, though, claims for law reform and rights provide an important example of the ways in which these transnational technologies of the self were always textured with and by local specificities.

Modern British history from the Antipodes

This article has been peer reviewed.

Public Emotions and their Personal Consequences: The Nationalizing Affects of the Australian Football League since 1990

This article examines the historical and emotional consequences of the Victorian Football Leagues decision to ‘go national’. Many saw the emergence of the Australian Football League (AFL) as a threat to the authentic attachments of supporters. As many localized social practices were ‘rationalized’, however, engagement with the League increased across Australia. This article suggests that this success can be explained, in part, by the ways in which public representations of the AFL provided new points of identification for supporters. Drawing on recent work by critical theorists of emotion, I suggest that the already passionate culture of Australian rules supporting has been reworked by the animation of nationalistic attachments and the increasingly intimate representation of players in Australian public life. Ironically, though, these new modes of representation have opened the AFL out to heated debates about the emotions of the players themselves. The contested emergence of the crying AFL player in Australian public life since 2000 is both a product of these shifts and an example of the unruliness of identification and idealization. Attachments to players in the language of national identity, I suggest, are psychically volatile because they are connected to how supporters understand their own identities, lives, and losses.

Manly Affections: The Photographs of Robert Gant 1885–1915.

to contend with. They had to strive to achieve ‘independence’, but had to balance work and leisure; they had to keep a lid on their emotions and practise ‘self-discipline’; they were beset by anxieties about status and were urged by the authors of conduct books to deport themselves in a prescribed manner; they were encouraged to venture forth to the colonies and at the same time maintain a family; at home families and wives were potentially effeminising, in the colonies they were a civilising presence. One way men managed these competing demands and achieved some sort of coherence from often contradictory admonitions was by keeping a journal or diary. Journal and diary keeping was both reflective and instrumental. Downing demonstrates that self-narratives were a means by which men could articulate their anxieties and attempt to resolve them. New South Wales sheep farmer Farqhar Mackenzie wrote, ‘I must learn to think clearly ... to govern my mind & passions, & to devote to this purpose a certain space out of every 24 hours during which time I must endeavour to exclude worldly thoughts’ and ‘impress upon my mind the truths of Christianity’ (37). ‘Restlessness’ is the central trope in Downing’s work. In her argument restlessness was the manifestation of the unsettling tensions in men’s lives which resulted from the contradictory ideals, conventions, ambitions and material circumstances that men were subject to. In the first half of the nineteenth century this restlessness found an outlet in immigration to the Australian colonies. In the colonies was the land that men associated with independence, and their personal writings reveal common themes of the pursuit of wealth, renewal and ‘improvement’. Many men invoked Robinson Crusoe as the inspiration and motivation for their migration, both actual and psychological. Downing’s text is very neatly situated in the historiography of masculinity. Thematically it complements John Tosh’s A Man’s Place and Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches. Chronologically it occupies the early end of the nineteenth-century spectrum on which Robert Hogg’s Men and Manliness on the Frontier sits in the middle, and Martin Crotty’s Making the Australian Male occupies the end. In her introduction Downing elucidates the meaning of several terms and explains why she has chosen not to engage with some of the debates that often feature in studies of masculinity and gender, including the ‘separate spheres’ argument. Certainly concepts such as hegemonic masculinity, manliness, and separate spheres have been debated comprehensively, but some readers may feel that at least some nod in this direction would have been worthwhile. Karen Downing has made a valuable and engaging contribution to the literature on masculinities. Her scholarship is exceptional and her book deserves to be read by all who are interested in this field.