Lyn McCredden

Postcolonial displacements, popular music and the sacred

This essay, through a theorized analysis of Australian popular song lyrics, investigates a range of understandings of “home”, including the exclusions and sacred connotations that inform the term. Against accusations of mere sentimentality or nostalgia regarding a desire for “home” as familiar and comforting and in response to Levinas’s related arguments that a desire for home is at the root of splitting “humanity into natives and strangers”, it argues that it is necessary for postcolonial Australia to embrace “homelessness” at the heart of any understanding of “home”.

The fiction of Tim Winton: relational ecology in an unsettled land

I: Abstract II: Complicating the processes of belonging in place, for non-Indigenous Australians, is the growing realization that they live in a huge, diverse land, a place in which they are not native. The fiction of popular Anglo-Saxon Australian novelist Tim Winton echoes the understanding of poet Judith Wright, for whom “two strands – the love of the land we have invaded and the guilt of the invasion – have become part of me. It is a haunted country” (Wright 1991: 30). This essay will explore Winton’s novels in which there is a pervasive sense of unease and loss experienced by the central characters, in relation to place and land. Winton’s characters Queenie Cookson and her traumatic witnessing of the barbaric capture and flaying of whales; Fish Lamb’s near-drowning in the sea, and Lu Fox’s quest for refuge in the wilderness, prophet-like, after the tragedy of his family’s death are all written with a haunting sense of white unsettlement and displacement, where such natural forces – the sea and its creatures, the land’s distances and risks – confront and re-form the would-be dominators. A complicare il processo di appartenenza degli australiani non indigeni, c’è la consapevolezza di vivere in una terra sconfinata e composita, un posto di cui non sono nativi. La narrativa del celebre romanziere anglo-australiano Tim Winton riecheggia il pensiero della poetessa Judith Wright, per la quale “Due sentimenti sono diventati parte di me – l’amore per la terra che abbiamo invaso e il senso di colpa per averla invasa. È un luogo stregato” (Wright 1991: 30). Il presente saggio esplora i romanzi di Winton nei quali si avverte un intenso senso di malessere e perdita, in relazione ai luoghi e alla terra, da parte dei personaggi principali. I personaggi di Winton Wueenie Cookson che testimonia dolorosamente alla cattura barbarica e alla mattanza delle balene; Fish Lamb quasi annegato in mare; Lu Fox alla ricerca di un rifugio nella natura selvaggia, da profeta, dopo la tragedia della morte della sua famiglia – sono tutti accompagnati da un senso spettrale di insediamento fallito ed esilio, in cui le forze naturali – il mare e le sue creature, le distanze e i rischi del posto – si contrappongono e fanno ravvedere gli aspiranti dominatori.II: Complicating the processes of belonging in place, for non-Indigenous Australians, is the growing realization that they live in a huge, diverse land, a place in which they are not native. The fiction of popular Anglo-Saxon Australian novelist Tim Winton echoes the understanding of poet Judith Wright, for whom “two strands – the love of the land we have invaded and the guilt of the invasion – have become part of me. It is a haunted country” (Wright 1991: 30). This essay will explore Winton’s novels in which there is a pervasive sense of unease and loss experienced by the central characters, in relation to place and land. Winton’s characters Queenie Cookson and her traumatic witnessing of the barbaric capture and flaying of whales; Fish Lamb’s near-drowning in the sea, and Lu Fox’s quest for refuge in the wilderness, prophet-like, after the tragedy of his family’s death are all written with a haunting sense of white unsettlement and displacement, where such natural forces – the sea and its creatures, the land’s distances and risks – confront and re-form the would-be dominators. A complicare il processo di appartenenza degli australiani non indigeni, c’è la consapevolezza di vivere in una terra sconfinata e composita, un posto di cui non sono nativi. La narrativa del celebre romanziere anglo-australiano Tim Winton riecheggia il pensiero della poetessa Judith Wright, per la quale “Due sentimenti sono diventati parte di me – l’amore per la terra che abbiamo invaso e il senso di colpa per averla invasa. È un luogo stregato” (Wright 1991: 30). Il presente saggio esplora i romanzi di Winton nei quali si avverte un intenso senso di malessere e perdita, in relazione ai luoghi e alla terra, da parte dei personaggi principali. I personaggi di Winton Wueenie Cookson che testimonia dolorosamente alla cattura barbarica e alla mattanza delle balene; Fish Lamb quasi annegato in mare; Lu Fox alla ricerca di un rifugio nella natura selvaggia, da profeta, dopo la tragedia della morte della sua famiglia – sono tutti accompagnati da un senso spettrale di insediamento fallito ed esilio, in cui le forze naturali – il mare e le sue creature, le distanze e i rischi del posto – si contrappongono e fanno ravvedere gli aspiranti dominatori. Tim Winton, Australian novelist of place, land and identity, writes from a curiously ambiguous position in Australian culture. Winton is a literary author but also a popular one, writing in vernacular language, with a keen sense of earth and ecology, even as his prose simultaneously reaches towards what might be called a transcendent understanding of place

Crete: Dorothy Porter, exuberance, and the limits of art

This essay argues that the poetry of Australian poet Dorothy Porter, exemplified in her collection, Crete, operates along contrapuntal lines. The poets daemonic energy celebrates the ancient island culture, expressed variously in outbursts of democratic irreverence or pagan sensuousness or hierophantic exuberance or queer subversiveness. However, this celebration is met by what reaches out beyond the celebration of aesthetic energy, towards a sifting, self-questioning ethics. This ethics questions the limits of the aesthetic and gives Porters Crete its richest, most disturbing depths. This double action of Porters poetry puts aesthetics—its powers and its limits—into question.

Ten canoes : engaging difference

ABSTRACT In a reading of the Rolf de Heer film Ten Canoes this article explores the pervasive, contemporary challenge of culture difference and its representation. Focusing on notions of sacredness, as one node of extreme difference, the article argues that older formulations of sacredness which bifurcated spirit and flesh are now being replaced by more holistic understandings. As western film audiences engage with representations of difference in Indigenous cultures, a set of questions are raised: what is the nature of real dialogue between different cultures? Can such dialogues move beyond mute recording, or silent respect, or automatic celebration? Can they enter a new space of dialectical relationship in which different cultural perspectives can be fully investigated, without making the other culture a static, or oversimplified or iconic abstraction?

‘untranscended / life itself’ : The Poetry of Pam Brown

Pam Browns cynicism, satire, attractions and repulsions seem built around an absent centre, something always already in the poetry lost in the tedious non-occurrences of contemporary Australian life. Brown has typically published in a scattered, small-press way and while this small-press, small-readership approach is something most Australian poets know intimately, Brown has made it into an art form, and one which seems in keeping with her own ironic and at times cynical approach to the world of appearance, celebrity and media hype.

Homage to John Forbes [Book Review]

Homage to John Forbes, edited by Ken Bolton. Rose Bay, NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2002. Paperback,

Intimate horizons : the post-colonial sacred in Australian literature

28.95.