This article revisits the cultural storm created by the 1994 publication of Helen Demidenko's novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper. Purporting to be quasi-autobiographical, written by a young member of the Ukrainian diaspora, the novel used family oral histories to present an authentic perpetrator perspective. After winning prestigious national awards, Demidenko was unmasked as an Anglo-Australian, Helen Darville. This article argues that critics who have concentrated on the identity hoax, and historians who have attempted to correct the novel's ahistoricity, have missed the role of the novel in accurately reflecting the antisemitism that was part of the war crimes debate in Australia. One (perhaps marginal) value of the book thus lies in its explication of perpetrator justifications within the specific historical context of the Australian debate. Darville/Demidenko was also prescient in her focus on memory within the families of alleged perpetrators who had resettled in the West.
This article examines Tim Winton's Shallows as a novel of unsettled dwelling, arguing that its representations of domestic, coastal and shell-like spaces articulate a specifically settler-colonial form of existential angst. While Shallows has often been read through ecocritical frameworks that emphasise environmental activism, whaling and ecological ethics, this article shifts attention to the spatial and affective dimensions of home, intimacy and belonging. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology of the house and the shell, and reworking it through feminist spatial theory (Elizabeth Grosz) and settler-colonial scholarship (Lisa Slater, Simone Bignall, Lorenzo Veracini), the article reads Winton's dwellings as anxious enclosures that promise refuge and expose the instability of settler emplacement. Through a close reading of the book's central characters, Daniel, Queenie and Cleve, it shows how feelings of emptiness, loneliness and anxious proximity emerge not simply as psychological states but as spatialised affects produced by the unresolved conditions of colonial occupation. The article concludes by reading Queenie's reimagined relation to place as a tentative movement beyond the contracted shell of settler domesticity towards a more open, non-possessive mode of inhabitation.
In post-World War II Australia, wog came to be a slur used against predominantly Southern European migrants, such as Italians and Greeks. However, prior to the war, it was used more benignly to refer to small creatures and minor illnesses, and as a diminutive for the popular golliwog dolls. This article investigates how Australian soldiers' encounters with Others in the Middle Eastern front-both local Arabs and Italian enemies-were shaped by the racial ideologies they brought with them and shaped those with which they returned to Australia. It identifies these experiences in World War II as crucial to changing the meaning of wog in postwar Australia.
The ecological and economic benefits of oysters and the reefs they create are significant and wide-ranging: filtering pollutants, providing habitat and food for other marine species, protecting shorelines and attracting people to coastal communities. Oysters are also a multibillion-dollar international seafood commodity. Globally, oyster and other shellfish reefs are among the world's most endangered marine ecosystems. Seeking to recover oyster and oyster reef benefits, governments and conservation groups in Australia and internationally are investing heavily in restoration projects. This article thinks with Australia's native flat oyster about a benefit missing from the restoration conversation: what if oysters not only clarify water but also help us clarify ecological relations? Are oysters here for our benefit or are we in this together with oysters, and what difference does it make?
Chester Cobb was an Australian modernist writer who published two novels as an expatriate in England, Mr. Moffatt (1925) and Days of Disillusion (1926). Cobb's experimental narrative style was praised by his contemporaries, but his name is now virtually absent from critical work on Australian literary modernism. This article reassesses Cobb's contribution to the modernist novel of the 1920s by examining the narrative style of Mr. Moffatt. The unique contribution of Mr. Moffatt lay in its use of variations in the forms of (free) direct thought to stage the conflict between involuntary and voluntary processes in the flow of everyday consciousness. In this way, Cobb uses stream of consciousness style to advance a plot focused on the spiritual growth of the novel's protagonist as he navigates the complexities of capitalist modernity. In this respect, Cobb deserves attention not simply as a follower of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and other early 20th-century modernists but also as an Australian innovator who made a distinctive contribution to modernist literary styles.
In Australia and other settler colonial states, guilt is postulated as being a psychological legacy of colonisation. The guilt-driven narrative has dominated academic and political discourses of reconciliation, especially during the Voice referendum in 2023. However, the distinction between "in-group" and "out-group" in respect to supposed feelings of guilt is arbitrary and contested. Little is known about the invocation of collective guilt beyond White people. The rejection or denial of guilt is considered emotionally callous, racially condescending, or politically indifferent. It is necessary to identify the dissonances and overlaps between dominant settler society and multicultural groups in respect to feelings of guilt arising from colonial injustices. Drawing on a range of empirical and statistical research on Chinese Australian responses to the Voice referendum, this article will examine whether Chinese Australians satisfy the antecedents that lead to guilt, thereby evaluating the effectiveness and limits of guilt as a postcolonial strategy. It will shed light on the politics of presumed overarching guilt and how it applies to multicultural communities. By moving beyond a simplistic Black-White binary, it offers an alternative lens to envision the paths for reconciliation in contemporary multicultural Australia.
In 1868 eminent Australian author Marcus Clarke wrote a gothic tale for his own Colonial Monthly Magazine titled "Cannabis Indica", purportedly under the influence of hashish. Contemporaneous reviewers discussed this little-known short story as merely a curio, and modern scholars have followed suit. However, the experimental short story is distinguished as one of the first fictional portrayals of altered consciousness and drug use in Australia by an Australian author. Scholars have primarily considered depictions of altered states of consciousness and drug use by European and American writers rather than colonial authors due to the plethora of international fictional and scientific accounts of drug taking. This article argues that Clarke's story acknowledges and modifies these international understandings, gothicising the experience of drug taking and adapting colonial touchpoints of understanding about the drug, including its oriental origins and link to medical perceptions of insanity, to engage in a literary experiment into colonial consciousness and what it means to be torn by the duality of rational and irrational, of scientific thought and fantastical thinking, and of being both a colonial and part of the empire.
Between 1967 and 1975, psychiatrist Dr Howard Whitaker directed a program for the legal use of LSD and psilocybin in Victoria, Australia. His controversial practices were marred by misconduct, unscientific methods and evidence of malpractice. This study explores Whitaker's LSD-assisted therapy in the 1970s through interviews with former staff of Mayday Hills Psychiatric Hospital in Beechworth, Victoria. These staff members share their experiences working with Whitaker and implementing groundbreaking techniques. The interview data, collected in a broader social history project about Mayday Hills, sheds light on Whitaker's unconventional and unethical approaches and reminds us that the 1970s was a time of reform in Victorian mental institutions. The current research in psychedelic drug therapies shows remarkable similarities to Whitaker's early positive findings from over 50 years ago.
The creation of visual artefacts for First Nations Peoples, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, requires a nuanced approach that accurately reflects the multiple existing diverse identities and cultures across so-called Australia. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) programs, such as DALL-E, over the past five years, with their ability to generate visual depictions from text prompts, concerns about gaps, inaccuracies and misrepresentations for diverse populations have become increasingly prominent. This article highlights the challenges we faced when using AI to visually represent First Nations Peoples' identities and cultural themes in the production of two project newsletters. Given AI's growing influence in areas such media, education and technology, its ability to shape or twist cultural narratives is profound. Misrepresentations generated by AI can perpetuate harmful stereotypes and contribute to the ongoing erasure of Indigenous cultures. Central to this issue is the lack of First Nations voices in AI development and the ethics of Indigenous data sovereignty. Through an eight-step framework, we show how to maintain sovereignty over this knowledge within digital spaces, allowing First Nations Peoples to control their own stories, identities and visual representations.
In reply to several letters from readers, the editor of Australian Sun & Health, a nudist magazine, asked, "Does it really matter?" This question arose regarding circumcision and the foreskin after multiple contributors voiced their opinions on circumcision in Australia and its relation to nudism. This article examines those letters and the discussions surrounding the penis, foreskin and circumcision at a time when the latter was becoming less prevalent in Australia. I contend that nudism offers a vital perspective on these debates as nudists routinely confront the body in all its raw complexity. Therefore, nudists may provide valuable insights into this conversation, especially since the body is not regarded as taboo, and due to historical and ongoing interests in concepts of the natural, specifically the body in its unaltered state. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Australian Sun & Health served as a platform where readers could view the penis in its authentic form, facilitating discussions about its various representations. Thus, Australian Sun & Health played a role in normalising the foreskin within a circumcising culture.
