Thor Kerr

Reproducing temples in Fremantle

This paper explores the production and reproduction of a sacred-soliciting built environment in the Western Australian port town of Fremantle, drawing attention to temple iconography produced in the first century of European settlement and its preservation and reproduction at the hands of local and national heritage movements since the 1970s. I show how Fremantle’s High Street solicits a sense of the sacred in its visitors, operating in a similar fashion to temple complexes such as Sukuh in Java. From purifying passage through the Whalers Tunnel under the Round House (the temple’s porch), the visitor will be guided up High Street through an assemblage of neoclassical facades to Kings Square (the temple’s house) with its mix of artefacts for Anglican, Masonic and nation-building narratives. The reading continues up High Street to the War Memorial on Monument Hill (the temple’s Holy of Holies) for which a draft conservation plan was released in 2010.

A case for reimagining Australia: Dialogic registers of the Other, truth-telling and a will to justice

It would appear that the effects of sustained overuse of the planet’s resources is straining the natural world to its limits. The consequences of staying on this path may be catastrophic for both planet and humankind. At this time, when the ecosphere which sustains us all is so fragile, it seems imperative that we address the nature of the fundamental relationship between humans and their environment. Hence, we should perhaps undertake to reimagine our relationship with nature, with place and with each other if we are to counteract such malign influences. This paper will argue that localised, direct democratic action offers us one way in which we may begin to redeem these relationships by providing an account of the way in which an assortment of subcultures in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales united to successfully oppose mining for coal seam gas. The Northern Rivers is renowned for its natural endowments and a community which boasts great diversity. A variety of motivations led to an array of groups exerting their collective power and unity at grassroots level to defeat the attempt to introduce unconventional methods of gas extraction. In this process, a sense of place emerged as an important factor for many of those resisting the mining. The movement as it unfolded ‘on the ground’ proposes an alternative way of being and belonging, developed through a different relationship to place, community and the ecosphere.More than 50 years after American feminist Susan Brownmiller (1976, p. 15, original italics) controversially claimed that rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,” Australian girls and women continue to be raped, continue to suffer the consequences of rape in the aftermath, and continue to fear the possibility of being raped. In order to reimagine an Australia where the rape of women and children is socially and culturally unacceptable, we need to understand more fully the long-term and multiple impacts of violence of this nature. This paper reports on Australian research that uses innovative arts-based methodologies to shift the emphasis from the primacy of the psychological impact of childhood rape to the enduring, though less understood, multiple and embodied impact of childhood rape. The research holds important insights for women’s and children’s health professionals, for women who have experienced, and continue to experience the trauma of childhood rape, and for the discursive construction of a country where acts of sexual violence are unthinkable.The history of Perth, Western Australia, has been characterised by the incremental loss of its wetlands. While disputes about wetlands are often framed solely in terms of the environment, they are places of cultural significance too. The extensive wetlands of central Perth, food gathering and meeting places for Noongar people are now expunged from the landscape. Urban dwellers of Perth are largely unaware that the seasonal lakes and wetlands of the centre of the city were the larders, gardens, hideouts, dumps and playgrounds of previous generations; both Noongar and Settler. The loss of social memory of these lost cultural/natural places entails the framing of wetlands as aberrant and continues to influence Perth’s development and the sense of place of its inhabitants. Reimagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands was a project which attempted to reimagine the pre-colonial landscape using archival material. Reimagining the past allows connections to be made to the last remaining wetlands in the wider metropolitan area. The fight to save the Beeliar Wetlands in southern suburban Perth as a cultural/natural place illustrates the changing value of wetlands and the laying down of social memories of place.This paper takes as its starting point, the acknowledgement that the Indigenous nations of the continent of Australia have never ceded their sovereignty and as such the current nation-state of Australia constitutes a nation in occupation of other people’s lands. From a philosophical perspective, the Settler-citizens of the occupied territories of Australia therefore emerge into the world as occupier beings. As the inheritors of a still post-colonising nation, can contemporary Settler Australians find a way to live together ethically with the Indigenous population? This paper uses topologically based philosophical thinking of place in an effort to seek more expansive ways of thinking that might furnish us with productive questions about the meanings of place and identity in a settler-colonial context. I apply topological thinking to reveal the interrelated nature of Settler identity and the key constructs of settler-colonial Australia, the “possessive logics” of the political and legal systems that enact and maintain the occupation. The paper concludes with a call to thinking for place as a mode of acting in attentive awareness of the interests of a place as a whole, and in so doing realising an ethical relationship with both place and all the beings enfolded in it. Through recognising and relinquishing Occupier subjectivity, Settlers might begin to transform and decolonise themselves and engage in a process of becoming other than Occupier.This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. The metaphor of the threshold as a point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. It is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. During this (w)rite of passage something new is made. For a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative). Yet the threshold is not only a metaphor for the creative process; it is a liminal space where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. The word ‘liminal’ literally means “[to occupy] a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (OED). In an Australian postcolonial context, the threshold as a productive space in literature or art is particularly resonant because of the kinds of terrains that may be crossed and spoken across the threshold—the productive capacity of the middle ground. This paper will discuss the poems of Inside My Mother (2015) by Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha South Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann that inhabit the threshold as both an unsettled and productive space in contemporary Australian postcolonial poetics. Writing on the threshold, Cobby Eckermann is engaged in reimagining such poeticsLiving with difference is an unavoidable part of living in Australia. How we live with difference, therefore, impacts how people imagine and reimagine Australia. This paper considers the matter of reimagining Australia as a phenomenon that is located within the microecology of our everyday urban spaces. It is interested in knowing about these spaces and how they can contribute to the reimagining of Australia at the microlevel of society. It considers two examples of spaces that engage people in this task and advances the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection, framing reimagining within Anthony Kwame Appiah’s vision of cosmopolitanism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s vision of coexistence.This special double issue of Coolabah, numbers 24&25, was developed from selected presentations at Reimagining Australia: Encounter, Recognition, Responsibility , the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) Conference 2016, hosted by the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, and held in Fremantle, Western Australia, on 7-9 December. The double issue addresses the urgent need for Australia to be reimagined as inclusive, conscious of its landscape and contexts, locale, history, myths and memory, amnesia, politics, cultures and futures; reimagined via intense conversations and inter-epistemic dialogue; reimagined through different ways of knowing, belonging and doing. Key agendas, polemics and contestations at stake in this two-part publication project are raised in Tony Birch’s thought-provoking article that serves equally as an introductory essay.

One Day in Fremantle: TV representation of this alternative to Australia Day

It would appear that the effects of sustained overuse of the planet’s resources is straining the natural world to its limits. The consequences of staying on this path may be catastrophic for both planet and humankind. At this time, when the ecosphere which sustains us all is so fragile, it seems imperative that we address the nature of the fundamental relationship between humans and their environment. Hence, we should perhaps undertake to reimagine our relationship with nature, with place and with each other if we are to counteract such malign influences. This paper will argue that localised, direct democratic action offers us one way in which we may begin to redeem these relationships by providing an account of the way in which an assortment of subcultures in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales united to successfully oppose mining for coal seam gas. The Northern Rivers is renowned for its natural endowments and a community which boasts great diversity. A variety of motivations led to an array of groups exerting their collective power and unity at grassroots level to defeat the attempt to introduce unconventional methods of gas extraction. In this process, a sense of place emerged as an important factor for many of those resisting the mining. The movement as it unfolded ‘on the ground’ proposes an alternative way of being and belonging, developed through a different relationship to place, community and the ecosphere.More than 50 years after American feminist Susan Brownmiller (1976, p. 15, original italics) controversially claimed that rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,” Australian girls and women continue to be raped, continue to suffer the consequences of rape in the aftermath, and continue to fear the possibility of being raped. In order to reimagine an Australia where the rape of women and children is socially and culturally unacceptable, we need to understand more fully the long-term and multiple impacts of violence of this nature. This paper reports on Australian research that uses innovative arts-based methodologies to shift the emphasis from the primacy of the psychological impact of childhood rape to the enduring, though less understood, multiple and embodied impact of childhood rape. The research holds important insights for women’s and children’s health professionals, for women who have experienced, and continue to experience the trauma of childhood rape, and for the discursive construction of a country where acts of sexual violence are unthinkable.The history of Perth, Western Australia, has been characterised by the incremental loss of its wetlands. While disputes about wetlands are often framed solely in terms of the environment, they are places of cultural significance too. The extensive wetlands of central Perth, food gathering and meeting places for Noongar people are now expunged from the landscape. Urban dwellers of Perth are largely unaware that the seasonal lakes and wetlands of the centre of the city were the larders, gardens, hideouts, dumps and playgrounds of previous generations; both Noongar and Settler. The loss of social memory of these lost cultural/natural places entails the framing of wetlands as aberrant and continues to influence Perth’s development and the sense of place of its inhabitants. Reimagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands was a project which attempted to reimagine the pre-colonial landscape using archival material. Reimagining the past allows connections to be made to the last remaining wetlands in the wider metropolitan area. The fight to save the Beeliar Wetlands in southern suburban Perth as a cultural/natural place illustrates the changing value of wetlands and the laying down of social memories of place.This paper takes as its starting point, the acknowledgement that the Indigenous nations of the continent of Australia have never ceded their sovereignty and as such the current nation-state of Australia constitutes a nation in occupation of other people’s lands. From a philosophical perspective, the Settler-citizens of the occupied territories of Australia therefore emerge into the world as occupier beings. As the inheritors of a still post-colonising nation, can contemporary Settler Australians find a way to live together ethically with the Indigenous population? This paper uses topologically based philosophical thinking of place in an effort to seek more expansive ways of thinking that might furnish us with productive questions about the meanings of place and identity in a settler-colonial context. I apply topological thinking to reveal the interrelated nature of Settler identity and the key constructs of settler-colonial Australia, the “possessive logics” of the political and legal systems that enact and maintain the occupation. The paper concludes with a call to thinking for place as a mode of acting in attentive awareness of the interests of a place as a whole, and in so doing realising an ethical relationship with both place and all the beings enfolded in it. Through recognising and relinquishing Occupier subjectivity, Settlers might begin to transform and decolonise themselves and engage in a process of becoming other than Occupier.This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. The metaphor of the threshold as a point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. It is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. During this (w)rite of passage something new is made. For a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative). Yet the threshold is not only a metaphor for the creative process; it is a liminal space where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. The word ‘liminal’ literally means “[to occupy] a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (OED). In an Australian postcolonial context, the threshold as a productive space in literature or art is particularly resonant because of the kinds of terrains that may be crossed and spoken across the threshold—the productive capacity of the middle ground. This paper will discuss the poems of Inside My Mother (2015) by Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha South Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann that inhabit the threshold as both an unsettled and productive space in contemporary Australian postcolonial poetics. Writing on the threshold, Cobby Eckermann is engaged in reimagining such poeticsLiving with difference is an unavoidable part of living in Australia. How we live with difference, therefore, impacts how people imagine and reimagine Australia. This paper considers the matter of reimagining Australia as a phenomenon that is located within the microecology of our everyday urban spaces. It is interested in knowing about these spaces and how they can contribute to the reimagining of Australia at the microlevel of society. It considers two examples of spaces that engage people in this task and advances the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection, framing reimagining within Anthony Kwame Appiah’s vision of cosmopolitanism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s vision of coexistence.This special double issue of Coolabah, numbers 24&25, was developed from selected presentations at Reimagining Australia: Encounter, Recognition, Responsibility , the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) Conference 2016, hosted by the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, and held in Fremantle, Western Australia, on 7-9 December. The double issue addresses the urgent need for Australia to be reimagined as inclusive, conscious of its landscape and contexts, locale, history, myths and memory, amnesia, politics, cultures and futures; reimagined via intense conversations and inter-epistemic dialogue; reimagined through different ways of knowing, belonging and doing. Key agendas, polemics and contestations at stake in this two-part publication project are raised in Tony Birch’s thought-provoking article that serves equally as an introductory essay.

Facades of diversity

This article focuses on urban space and heritage. Our aim is to understand how ordinary streets in Perth respond to urban change and how much these urban streets represent Western Australia’s heritage. The intention is to eschew the dominant branding of WA as Australia’s mining state and shift the spotlight so that in addition to the economic and material, light is also shed on the socio-cultural in the everyday and the vernacular. This project uses Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis approach to explore a contrapuntal reading of heritage that disrupts the deserving, dominant and fixed histories of High Road in Willetton and High Street in Fremantle. Amid the tides of migration, commerce, and cultures, heritage facades on High Street Fremantle appear singular and fixed, whereas multiple cultures have been extracted for sale on High Road. Superficially High Road seems diverse, but the overarching impulse across both sites is commerce – ‘Business as usual’ reigns.

Negotiating green space between ecological threats and beloved objects

This paper is directed at furthering understandings of the function of space, time and sensory experience in environmental discourse. It does this through an empirical study of the publicity campaigns and counter-campaigns around North Port Quay, proposed as a sustainable property development project for coastal waters off Fremantle in Western Australia. The case demonstrates how a proposed ecological improvement project is contested in discursive struggles over the space and time of environmental problems. It shows how representations of an immediate threat to local environment can be more powerful than representations of a model solution to future global ecological crisis. The radical imposition of a futuristic island town by the beach triggered an effective, localized popular movement unified through peoples desire to restore their sensual experiences of local environment. This desire linked peoples diverse demands for conservation behind a discursive frontier against anyone supporting North Port Quay. Standing for ‘our beaches’ against the proposed sustainable development not only blocked the project through localized practices of institutional democracy, it also helped transform the institutional political landscape of Fremantle.