Maggie Nolan

Mythologies of Nation-Building in Australia Today

Mythologies of Nation-Building in Australia Today Carolyn Holbrook , Julie Kimber , Maggie Nolan c and Laura Rademaker d Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia; Faculty of Health, Arts & Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; Faculty of Education and Arts, Australian Catholic University, Banyo, QLD, Australia; Institute for Religion & Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University, Strathfield, NSW, Australia

History, Myth and Memory: Temporalities Past and Present

History, Myth and Memory: Temporalities Past and Present Carolyn Holbrook, Julie Kimber, Maggie Nolan and Ellen Smith Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia; Faculty of Health, Arts & Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; Faculty of Education and Arts, Australian Catholic University, Banyo, QLD, Australia; Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Re-presenting the past

Re-presenting the Past Julie Kimber, Maggie Nolan , Thomas Rogers and Ellen Smith School of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia; School of Arts, Australian Catholic University, Brisbane, Australia; Military History Section, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, Australia; School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

Voices from the Community: Reimagining the Past

Many of the articles in this issue of Journal of Australian Studies draw upon oral history and other qualitative methodologies. This process of listening carefully to the stories people tell about their lives is one of the most important ways an interdisciplinary journal such as this contributes to sharing ideas and histories that help us make sense of our worlds. Often these approaches accompany a reimagining of traditional historical practice. Kieran Dolin’s article reflects on histories of inscription in Western Australia, deconstructing the process by which settler law was inscribed on “new lands”, overwriting existing Indigenous knowledge. In his meditation on Anne Neil’s sculpture, Memory Markers, Dolin both frames writing as a “technology of jurisdiction” and explores how members of Perth’s Indigenous community have turned the pen against the Western “scriptural economy” and documented the survival of their stories within the city’s juridical order. Ashley Barnwell and Joseph Cummins also explore relations between Indigenous and settler Australians by considering Andrew McGahan’s 2004 novel, White Earth, through the lens of family history. They suggest that literature is an important site for reckoning with the violent foundations of the nation. For Barnwell and Cummins, the novel offers a means of reflecting on how uncovering knowledge of family secrets leads to an understanding of the conflicted and complex relationship of white Australians to the land and its Indigenous inhabitants. The role of reading is also central to Robert Clarke, Nicholas Hookway, and Rebekah Burgess’s report on a fascinating survey on the importance of book clubs in the cultural and community life of a regional area of northern Tasmania. Contrary to claims that communities are weakening in contemporary Australia, Clarke, Hookway, and Burgess show that book clubs play significant intellectual, social, and communitarian functions that make them worth promoting in regional parts of the country. Carla Pascoe turns to oral histories and popular magazines to find out what their houses meant to 1950s Australians. Architects envisaged modernist designs would enable new domestic efficiency with open kitchens, for example, allowing housewives to simultaneously manage children and dinner. Yet Pascoe finds Australians often disliked “modern” ways of using space and inhabited them differently than how their designers had intended. For most, however, living in “modern” houses was neither a financial nor social possibility. Oral history is also central to Bobbie Oliver’s article, a reflexive exploration of the value of creating people’s history—history that empowers its subjects by giving voice not only to how evidence might be shaped, but to how it is gathered, and the forms that it may take. Through her industrial case studies—the Midland Railway Workshops and the East Perth

Decolonizing reading: the Murri book club

Abstract This article explores the cultural work of the Townsville-based Murri (Indigenous) Book Club. Although a growing body of research relates to book clubs in Britain and the US, little work has been done in the Australian context on what Marilyn Poole has called, ‘one of the largest bodies of community participation in the arts in Australia’ (280). The work that has been done, moreover, suggests that book clubs are an overwhelmingly white phenomenon, through which members ‘maintain their currency as literate citizens through group discussion’. But what of an Indigenous book club and its concerns? This article asserts that the Murri book club challenges traditional book club expectations through its very different relationship to cultures of books and reading. In doing so, the Murri book club has taken a white, middle-class practice and reshaped it for its own purposes: decolonizing the book club as a social, cultural and political institution. By examining the origins of the book club, its approach to books and the lives of some of its members, this article also suggests that the Murri book club challenges expectations about Indigenous professionals and offers insight into the complex ways in which Indigenous professionals negotiate their identities and their relationships with other readers, through communal literary networks.