From Big Brother to porn to women’s magazines to any adult dating site, images of primarily heterosexual (possibly even married) ‘bi-curious’ women are easy to find. While HIV social research acknowledges ‘MSM’ (non-gay identified men who have sex with men), there seems to be very little space in feminist or queer theorising to think about women who have sex with women as anything other than either closeted lesbians (or, begrudgingly, bisexuals) or heterosexual women pandering to male fantasies. This paper discusses same-sex encounters between non-lesbian identified women in swing and bdsm subcultures. Drawing on collaborative research conducted by the University of Sydney and Family Planning NSW, it considers the challenges and possibilities these non-gay-and-lesbian sub-cultural sexual practices and sexual identities present for both critical thinking and sexual health promotion.

A sense of place and national identity is continually being flagged in the aesthetics of Australian contemporary consumer culture. Moreover, the placement of the Australian flag within spaces of commodity culture, serve as banal reminders of nationhood. The appearance of the Australian flag as a fashion item, or in a location in shop’s display also suggests canny marketing in its appeal to patriotism. But the canniness of the flagging of Australia also represents the counter-aesthetic of the uncanny. In the juxtaposition of the flag against consumer goods, an assumed naturalness is evoked in the strangely familiar sight. Nevertheless, the placement of the flag, in turn critiques those items that are unmarked and considered un-Australian and not belonging to our ‘home’.

Significantly, the uncanny according to Freud, is also associated to the German word heimlich which combines the ambivalence of the home and the familiar, with the unhomely and the unfamiliar. This ambivalence is evoked in my photographic project titled ‘Flagging Australia’.

This paper will discuss my photographic documentation concerning the placement of the flag in public and private spaces that presents a range of uncanny sights in the inner-city Perth. The work weaves together theories of nationalism and the uncanny from theorists such as Kristeva and Bhabha together with notions of heterotopia in the reading of the images.

Just under two years ago a cultural and legal controversy erupted in Melbourne over the issue of gender equality and the treatment of child sexual offenders and victims. It was sparked by the sentence imposed on Karen Ellis, a 37-year-old physical education teacher, who pleaded guilty to six counts of sexual penetration of a minor; one of her students - Ben Dunbar - who was 3 months shy of his 16th birthday. Ellis, who initially received a suspended sentence, was immediately compared to Gavin Hopper, the international tennis coach who, only three months earlier, had been sentenced to a minimum jail term of two years and three months for a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old student in the mid-1980s. The Ellis sentence aroused outrage from victims of crimes groups, as well as parents and child abuse support groups. This paper examines this controversy, and the legal challenge it engendered, in order to ask the question of what difference gender makes, and ought to make, to our social and legal understanding and treatment of sex crimes against minors. It suggests that this issue cannot be adequately addressed without engaging the questions of adolescent subjectivity and intersubjective dynamics.

In this paper I will discuss the representations of Australia in the videogames Europa Universalis II and Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun. The first game deals with the historical period of 1400-1820, the second from 1838-1920. In both games Australia is portrayed as an empty space on the game map, which may during the course of play, be revealed and colonized. Many scholars over the past few years have made a point of arguing this type of game involves players uncritically accepting and applying the logic of colonialism. However, an examination of the community forums of these games reveals what I believe is a more complex picture of the players’ engagement with representations of colonialism. Drawing on these sources, and on textual analysis of the games I will argue that these games reflect the colonial ideology by exploiting the potentiality of the empty map which portrays Australia as a virtual non-space waiting to be actualized. Following from this, despite a dominant logic of colonialism an examination of players’ reports of their games reveals that this non-space may be actualized in multiple ways, leading to trajectories of history being actualized within the game that radically diverge from traditional representations of the past. Finally, I will argue that the presentation of Australia as a multiplicity has the consequence of the confronting the players with alternatives to the reality of the colonial moment.

The playful back formation UNAUSTRALIA echoes the national place name

`Australia’, whose inherent contradictions and essential lack the negative

qualifier speaks out. That the prefix sticks to the main word betrays not

only the latter’s national-ideological charge but also its unfounded

tautology (Australia = Australia). The `un-’ thus implies not only

geopolitical contraposition but also a basic absence of position. Referring

to nothing beyond the order of its performative iterability, the name

`Australia’ calls up a placeless UNAUSTRALIA, a kind of abyss or chaos

encroaching from everywhere and nowhere, past and future. That condition is

worldwide. Technologies have progressed to the point where all sense of

particular place (birthplace, burial-ground) is devolved, telegraphed, to

the whole earth, whose terraqueous globe is not itself a place on earth but

a planet wandering among constellations. The descendants of humankind will

inherit this global un-place - ecotechnical crypt of uprooted homelands - as

their uncanny dwelling. Kant, Husserl, Arendt, Derrida and others have

written as from the planet’s unsteady shore, which remains the final venue

for world citizenship and perpetual peace. In this context I shall refer to

the early modern materialism, matter theory and geocentric cosmology of

Francis Bacon (d. 1626) and shall attempt to draw from these seemingly

anachronistic and discredited models of nature some sense of a future,

cosmopolitical aesthetics rooted in the planetary un-place.

The relationship between UNAUSTRALIA and Australia is a tumultuous and porous one. As Australia and UNAUSTRALIA share an ever changing, overlapping and continuous physical and cultural border, it is easy to slip between the two without actually realising.

Over the last few years, people have entered UNAUSTRALIA as they have protested against the war in Iraq or demanded Australia meet its refugee obligations. However, many of us quietly slipped back into Australia as mortgage rates again became important.

At the same time, many Australians have also been forcibly displaced from Australia to UNAUSTRALIA. These newly displaced Australians (now Un-Australians) no longer recognise their Australia as it has radically altered. The border has shifted and many of us have ended up in UNAUSTRALIA feeling like non-citizens.

This paper attempts to identify the cultural turn that has led to this displacement. It is by understanding this turn that we can attempt to reconcile the emergence of these non-persons.

Most studies of merchandising focus on the purely commercial aspects of merchandising, while many media/cultural studies approaches dismiss merchandising as simply synergistic. This paper offers a methodology for considering the textual work of merchandising, its implication in media convergence and its contribution to increasingly complex narrative processes where narrative does not originate from a single organic textual site (e.g. ‘the film’) but rather flows from the interdependence of the film with its merchandising and marketing campaigns. It is suggested that these extra-textual elements of media’s cultural circulation ultimately contribute to its narrative formation, producing a ‘new’ form of convergence, narrative convergence, which is becoming increasingly prevalent in popular culture.

It is hard to tell the difference between Australia and UNAUSTRALIA. This paper investigates this difficulty through a consideration of a number of recent high profile cases of Australian and UnAustralian sexual violence by men against women. It investigates these two kinds of sexual violence by following the tightly woven semiotic chains through which they are constituted and the (disturbingly similar) material objects through which these chains are woven. There are Australian and unAustralian places, sports, laws, telephones, philosophies, religious agencies, feelings, predatory and victimised female and male bodies. The paper hopes to tell/tear Australia and UNAUSTRALIA apart, make it audience feel safe and draws on ‘innovative’ (Knopp & Brown 2003) female anger.

This is an interactive poem about David Hicks in the form of a teapot that can only be heard and felt but does not have any visual presence. Hicks is confined, not by walls, but by an array of invisible forces.

Is it un-Australian to partake in unsafe sex? Is condom use really a marker of white Australian subjectivity? Drawing from Nicole Vitellone’s (2002) reading of the condom as an intelligible object particular to white masculine subjectivity and readings of the biopolitical dimensions of HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns I shall explore the techniques used by a recent state government sexual health campaign to investigate how Australia and UNAUSTRALIA are created within the biopolitical realm of sexual health promotion. With reference to postcolonial theorists Ien Ang and Ghassan Hage I will critique the ideas of cultural difference drawn on in this campaign and the ways in which this creates potentially un-Australian subjects of those who do not practice safe sex.

I make digital photographs of iconic autobiographical objects and transform them with text. Such auto/graphic images can become new coded objects in themselves, functioning as sites for the location of a reworked personal history. They are places where the past can be re-visited and altered; palinodes.

My use of text and digital manipulation in creating such transformed images mediates the referents. If the original object, the referent, in the photograph represents Barthes’ studium, a general interest, my added text and treatment reveal my personal punctum and allows the objects to speak for themselves, but through my voice. I also use other text/images of dreams and landscapes to express and rework the emotions of past autobiographical events. In all these auto/graphic images, the text is an integral, synergetic part of the image, it is not a caption or explanation.

Memories are articulated in these auto/graphic images: past and present become blurred, as do the boundaries between truth and fiction. Through such contestation and re-cognition, difficult memories and notions of loss can be reinvented through re-engaging with the past, and can bring renewal and empowerment in the present.

The transformed images become new objects, replete with Lacan’s ‘Tuche’, fragile representations projected onto a skin, yet owning their own trails of thoughts and memories, and their own powers of evocation. During the process of articulating these re-workings, each auto/graphic image becomes a trompe l’oeil that seems sufficient to engage the magical power of my eye/I. The process of articulation transforms my self.

Each ‘season’ the fashion industry marks time with an illusion of novelty and spontaneity. As consumers we are meant to be enticed and respond to the fashionable element at the level of detail which gives a garment its tension or significance in the fashion system.

In The Fashion System. (1967) Roland Barthes analyses fashion at a complex level of ‘substances’ which included looking at the material, the photography and the language. And certainly more than most scholars of fashion he wrote about the actual detail of the garment, prefiguring his later use of the concept of the punctum.

How we think about fashion today, perhaps always, is not at the level of the perception of a total system, but with the experience of accretion of detail. It is the detail that takes your eye; the tear in the shirt, the stain, the ruffled collar. The detail pierces through the appearance; the smoothness of the image. Barthes, in talking about photography in Camera Lucida describes this as the punctum, denoting the wounding and touching detail that establishes a direct relationship with an object and subject viewing.

Barthes, was, of course, preoccupied with death (of his mother in particular) and if fashion always creates it own death what is it about the detail that gives a garment life and then pushes it towards obscurity. A detail can just as easily mark a garment as hopelessly out of date.

This paper, after direct observation of street fashion in Paris during the summer of 2006, and hopefully a glimpse of the Louis Vuitton orange vinyl mini dress, will analyse the accretion of details and their relationship with time.

The recent Australian horror movie Wolf Creek (2005) was one of the surprise international film success stories of last year. Premiering at last year’s Sundance film festival, it was picked up for international promotion and distribution by Miramax. An important part of its promotion was its foregrounding of real-life Australian true-crime stories such as the Ivan Milat hitchhiker killings. While many reviews of the film constantly made constant reference to the negative effect this film would have on the Australian tourism industry, the opposite case may be true. Such touristy thrill-seeking is confirmed in the phenomenon of ‘danger-zone tourism,’ a putatively more authentic kind of adventure travel from conventional mass tourism, one that skirts the margin between disaster and pleasure. Yet what is important to note is that this tourism acts to control danger.

This paper seeks to explore the line between terror and tourism through the cultural conduit of the transnational horror film. While Zizek has famously argued that Americans used Hollywood to libidinally invest fantasies of destruction that came true in September 11, does the recent trend in travel-based horror (Wolf Creek, Hostel) connote a similar desire? In the case of Wolf Creek, there seems to be something comforting about the generic space of this horror film with its one-dimensional killer. Similar to the closely-policed space of ‘danger-zone tourism,’ I argue that the form of this film creates a rehearsal space for the unnameable horrors that are currently caused by contemporary types of terrorism. Wolf Creek, therefore, becomes ‘unAustralian’ to the extent that it represents a transnational zone of safety, which the imaginary of mainstream cinema helps to promote.

Official Australian art history discourse has rarely dealt with the issue of work of emigre visual artists of diverse cultural backgrounds in Australia in the 20th century. For example, the oeuvre of the ‘father of Australian modernism’ Danila Vassilieff is barely mentioned in some recently published books on Australian art and its history, and the construct of cultural heritage/cultural memory, evident in the work of this, and many other emigre artists in Australia, has so far been largely ignored. Is their contribution to Australian art (and its history) unAustralian?

Australian art institutions, such as the Australia Council for the Arts, have been dealing with this issue since the early 1970s, supporting various categories of ‘folk,’ ‘ethic,’ even ‘national’ (in contrast to Australian), ‘NESB’ art practice mostly through its Community Cultural development Fund/Committee/Board, and focusing on the collective (in contrast to the individual) art practice of ‘folk,’ ‘ethic,’ ‘national,’ ‘NESB’ communities, thus marginalizing the practice of individual emigre artists, and the significance of their contribution to Australian art scene.

My paper examines in great depth the place of emigre artists of diverse cultural backgrounds in Australian 20th century art practice and the reasons which rendered them marginalized in Australian art history. Thus, my paper demonstrates the existence of an art history of an alternative UNAUSTRALIA, and, importantly, it suggests a manner in which these artists’ work should be seen within the Australian art history context.

Australia is committed to privatisation of infrastructure, and the resource of water. Yet unexpectedly, like a high wind on the surface of a dam, comes a notable back-down, on the privatisation of Snowy Hydro Limited. Lobbyists include supporters of multiculturalism, irrigators, celebrities and environmentalists. In this case it appears to go against Australian values to surrender local control of a national asset, and of water. The Snowy provides an iconic reference point over which to consider the issue of water storage, water shares and water sales. If the content of major Australian water storages should not be privatised, what about water as it diffuses across landscapes downstream? This paper refers to the claims of contemporary and historical promoters of Australian schemes to maximise the benefits available from water. It examines the legacy of dam infrastructure, and questions of sovereignty, in relation to water, taking up the theory of late Derrida.

Remember those plain gold bangles girls wore at school? The ones they eventually had to get cut off their arms? In my memory, everyone seemed to have one. This paper traces the Australian history of that treasured bangle. Investigations into the Nellie Stewart bangle lie at a nexus of Australian theatre history, and a cultural studies focus on celebrity and fashion. But more than this, they reveal a significant example of ritual practices of gender-based gift giving, lasting for over forty years.

Nellie Stewart was one of Australia’s first stage celebrities of light opera, and a fashion icon of Collins Street, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She was the most adored performer of her time and was called Australia’s Idol! As a reward for a fundraising event in 1885, her partner and theatrical manager, George Musgrove, gave her twenty-five gold sovereigns and a design for a plain gold bangle. From then on, she never removed the bangle from her arm. As Musgrove and Stewart were unable to be married, this item of jewellery bears a special significance in its resemblance to a wedding ring. As the Australian public were then unaware of the history of the original bangle, it is ironic that subsequently they were often given as wedding gifts to the bridal party, as evidenced in newspaper social pages, and archival photographs.

Over the following decades, the Nellie Stewart bangle became one of Australia and New Zealand’s most coveted fashion accessories, by those wishing to emulate her style. ‘There was a time when no really smart girl would be without one. A friend tells me that he counted over three hundred on women going to the theatre in Sydney one night’ (Stewart,1923:159).

This paper looks at the importance of the Nellie Stewart bangle as a trendsetter in Australian jewellery history, its physical changes in the 1920s as part of an evolution in style, and its status as ceremonial gift.

Reference

Stewart, Nellie (1923) My Life’s Story, John Sands, Sydney.

I would like to try to present a way of illustrating how we think about a future place-that is if we admit to concern about the future, and not the future that is the usual tele-visual stuff of gorgeous or apocalyptic images; technological redemption or drowning damnation; miniaturisation and mass entertainment. The future I am thinking of might best be illustrated just for argument’s sake as something like a resort. With the mere mention of the word ‘resort’ you have already imagined what this future resort will look like, simultaneously light and dark, colourful and grey, paradoxically relaxing and exciting, exotic and familiar. Let me also say that because we can imagine this resort we also know that the future, animated by the technologies that we have at our disposal, could become real. However, there are two images that always blur our illustrations of the future-ecology and democracy. This paper explores the gap between the idea and the place.

In Australia, the debate over the urgent anti-terrorism legislation passed in November 2005, among other drastic legislation changes, has caused renewed claims that public debate in Australia fails to represent or engage the public, and does not enable the public to influence or participate in public policy or legislation. This disenchantment and the lack of trust in the Australian government and institutions are reflected in the various calls for something new in order to come to terms with today’s challenging events and developments. Mark Latham, for example has called for a new political party in Australia. Many other Australians (politicians, policy-makers, journalists, teachers, and so forth) have called for more public debate with more and new thinkers and new ideas that matter on the new pressing issues.

In Australia debates about public debate, public intellectuals, and public intellectual life in general have a long tradition. Traditionally, this debate has been mostly polemic: controversial and disputatious, often melancholic or even bitter, but also often merely consisting of sound bites and catchy phrases. The polemic approach to public life and debate in Australia, such as the recent Please Just F*** Off It’s Our Turn Now, Holding Baby Boomers to Account, rely on simplistic dichotomies: us vs. them, young vs. old, elite vs. non-elite, and so forth. Such dichotomies are easily flourished and easily repeated in commentaries and opinion pieces, but do not necessarily help to understand them and their underlying processes. Nor do they necessarily help to further public debate on issues that matter.

In this situation, it is time to take another approach than a polemic one. This essay offers observations and some critical reflections on the current debate in Australia over public intellectual life, and analyses how the idea of public intellectuals and public debate currently works in Australia.

Since the mid-nineteen nineties, Australian equestrian culture has been infiltrated and destabilised by a new brand of horsemanship that came galloping full throttle out of the American west. To the uninitiated it is a magical and mysterious process dubbed ‘horse whispering’; in reality it is a training system based on the observation of horse behaviour that the aficionados call ‘natural horsemanship’. The movement, with its overt American flavour, marketing hype and branded equipment sales, is regarded as profoundly unAustralian by some horsemen. They view it as a threat not only to existing Australian equestrian cultural values, but also to the survival of such popular archetypal figures as the outback stockman and The Man from Snowy River. Contemporary equestrian culture however, is a field dominated by women and it is horsewomen who enthusiastically embrace natural horsemanship which raises questions about the authenticity of these popular equestrian icons. Do they truly represent modern equestrian culture, or has their time passed in favour of a more feminised horsiness? In this paper I explore the impact of the modern natural horsemanship movement on an Australian culture born from British roots and conservative European influences and framed in overt assumptions of masculinity and ask if there is such a thing as modern Australian horsemanship, or is it simply UnAustralian?

In 1957 Sydney TV reviewer Alexander Macdonald described the inexplicable urge to watch Keith Walshe’s weeknight variety show Sydney Tonight as ‘the deadly magnetism of sheer horror.’ He mentioned this syndrome in order to describe a TV viewing event so horrible as to free the viewer from this fascination: the experience of seeing Walshe do a live hook-up with In Melbourne Tonight host Graham Kennedy. Macdonald commented that ‘Mr Kennedy does the honours for Melbourne Tonight, and from the look of him, I’d sooner have Mr Walshe-although this choice is tantamount to playing favourites between a trapdoor spider and a death adder (Daily Telegraph, August 23, 1957:43).’

In this paper, I want to look at these two flagship tonight shows as a reminder of the very local nature of television in the fifties and of the quite different invitations held out to viewers in Melbourne and Sydney. This archaeological exercise functions as an antidote to current memorialisations of Australian TV and problematises the collective national consecration of Graham Kennedy as the King of Australian television. Moreover, this process of exhumation provides a focus for the way that television has become inextricably implicated in the ahistorical inflection of the past for present purposes.