Mandy Treagus

Schooling the public on boys: the ongoing salience in media representations of the “crisis” in boys’ education

Abstract This paper explores the salience of the “crisis” in boys’ education as it is articulated in Australian print media. We will consider the ways in which this crisis is expressed through a gendered language which simultaneously represents boys as “forgotten” by teaching practices thought to be prioritising girls’ learning, and as an equity (disadvantaged) grouping who require specialised teaching methods different from those currently offered within the Australian school system. Further, we will examine the extent to which feminist-inspired reforms in education are either implicitly or explicitly referenced as an explanation for boys’ apparently poor education attainment, and relatedly consider the work of “experts” supporting claims of a pro-feminine bias that adversely affects boys’ learning outcomes, particularly those experts offering neurological or psychological/cognitive findings which assert a biological basis for gender difference. In this context, we argue that rather than advancing gender equity in schools, popular public discourse, as presented in Australian print media, reinforces and perpetuates notions of gender difference and masculine entitlement.

Representing Pacific tattoos: Issues in postcolonial critical practice

This article questions certain practices in postcolonial criticism, asking whether such criticism is in danger of performing a neo‐colonial commodification of texts. In our assertion of subjugated knowledges, do we risk essentializing the cultures from which they come, thereby performing an act of primitivism? It examines two contemporary representations of Pacific tattooing, namely Samoan novelist Sia Figiel’s second novel, They Who Do Not Grieve, and the film Once Were Warriors, directed by Lee Tamahori and based on the novel by Alan Duff. In the analysis of tattooing in these texts, the article seeks to avoid the dangers of essentialism in favour of examining how Pacific peoples might utilize the tradition of tattooing as a contemporary identity practice with links to pre‐contact culture.

Looking Back at Samoa: History, Memory, and the Figure of Mourning in Yuki Kihara’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Samoan Japanese artist Yuki Kihara’s photographic series Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (2013) focuses on sites of current and historical significance in Samoa. In taking on the title of French artist Paul Gauguin’s 1897 work, Kihara signals her desire to engage with the history of representation of the Pacific in Western art through dialogue with Gauguin and the history of colonial photography. Casting herself as a version of Thomas Andrew’s Samoan Half Caste (1886), a figure in Victorian mourning dress, she directs the viewer’s gaze and invites all to share her acts of mourning at these sites. The literal meaning of the title also indicates how the series engages with history via the Samoan concept of vā , collapsing time in space, to produce an understanding of both the country’s present and the potential future such history invites.

Yuki Kihara’s Culture for Sale and the History of Pacific Cultural Performance

One or more dancers in traditional Samoan dress are located on raised platforms; in a darkened adjacent area there is a row of slot machines. The performers, and slot machines, are static unless a viewer interacts with them. In the case of the machines, placing 20 cents in the slot activates a short film loop, featuring one of the performers doing a particular Samoan dance. Similarly, each live performer has a bowl at his or her feet. When a viewer drops money into the bowl, the dancer delivers a short rendering—about 45 seconds—of a dance, each one performing a different traditional form. This is Culture for Sale, a video, installation and performance work, first staged in its full realisation at the Campbelltown Arts Centre for the Sydney Festival in 2012.1 It was part of the New Zealand Arts Festival in February 2014 at City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, and also featured at Rautenstrauch Joest Museum, Cologne, in January of the same year. Culture for Sale has been explicitly connected by artist Yuki Kihara to the German administration of Samoa and the ‘exotic’ entertainments provided by

From Whakarewarewa to Oxford: Makereti Papakura and the Politics of Indigenous Self-Representation

This paper concerns Makereti Papakura (1873-1930), celebrity tourist guide of Rotorua, performer, tour organiser, English landed gentry and ultimately anthropologist. Known as ‘Maggie’ to tourists who found Makereti a challenge, she was famous enough in the first decade of the twentieth century in Aotearoa/ New Zealand for a letter addressed to ‘Maggie, New Zealand’ actually to reach her (Makereti Papers). Though still well known in Aotearoa, she is little remembered elsewhere. Makereti made three voyages from New Zealand to England, and each is indicative of choices she made about her roles and the ways in which she would or would not be represented. The first was in 1911 as the organiser of a Maori concert party attending exhibitions associated with the Coronation of George V and Queen Mary in June of that year. The second was soon after in 1912, when she returned to marry the Englishman, Richard Staples-Brown, and take up residence on his estate in Oxfordshire. Later, having begun anthropological studies at Oxford University, research for her thesis brought her back to her home village of Whakarewarewa for six months of intensive field work and consultation in the first half of 1926. That voyage back to England in July 1926 was her last. In these quite distinct phases of her life, Makereti undertook a variety of tactics in response to both the range of colonising forces arrayed against her and the particular opportunities afforded her as a woman of mixed race. In this article I seek to examine how such tactics, though considerably varied over her lifetime, demonstrate a continuing assertion of Makereti’s own agency; because of her identification with the Arawa people, this invariably resulted in an accompanying assertion of Te Arawa agency.