Seminar Series 2001

Affiliated Research Centres

Seminar Series 2001

Somercotes, Tasmanian midlands
16 February

Papers Presented:

Pam Allen Hybrid Identities: The Progeny of Colonialism.
Julie Gough Trying Times: Visual Reconsiderations of Historical Narratives
Ian Green Colonialism and Its Linguistic Aftermath: Aboriginal English at Wallaby Cross
Barbara Hatley Coloniality, Sexuality and Modern Indonesian Writing
Herb Kimmel Governor Arthur's Press Gang
Greg Lehman The Mythic Proportions Of Palawa: Transformations in Tasmanian Indigenous Identity
Eva Meidl A Donation to the Colony
Mike Powell The Colonial Contribution to Colonialism: Tasmanian Rev JF Goldie in the Solomons 1903-1948
Lucy Frost Unearthing Trugernanna: Preliminary  Reflections on the Archeology of Memory
Anna Johnston Colonial Textuality and the Conscience of Empire
Deborah Malor Major Wingate's Masque
Anne Neale The Picturesque as Lion-Tamer: Living with the Sublime
Fiona Polack  Of Knots and Rivers:  Writing Newfoundland and Tasmania
Mitchell Rolls The Meaninglessness of Aboriginal Cultures


Hybridity and Diaspora
University of Tasmania
27 July

Papers Presented

Pam Allen: The enigmatic Indo
The paper examines the status of the Indo (Eurasian) in colonial Dutch East Indies and in postcolonial Indonesia to suggest that the Indos occupy what Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin call the 'psychological abyss between cultures'.

Cassandra Pybus: Gilbert Robertson: that troublesome mulatto
Gilbert Robertson, free settler, radical newspaper editor and Aboriginal conciliator, son of a wealthy West Indian planter and his slave mistress, fitted uneasily into the colonial gentry mould. This paper considers how he embodies both the concept of diaspora and of hybridity.

Mitchell Rolls: The Meaninglessness of Aboriginal Cultures
This paper considers the issue of cultural identites and whether they fit within deterministic models of identity, or are more fluid and vulnerable to assumption. In pointing to the existence of an Aboriginal diaspora, the paper also considers the sort of cultural identity pursued and privileged by the diaspora.

Julie Gough: The gaze, guise, ruse of 'hybridity'
The paper considers how in current western thinking the 'now' operates within the guise of dealing with the past and how the introduction of terms like 'hybridity' is about obscuring and layering; twisting and binding, and is ultimately distanced from reality.

Nigel Penn: 'Drosters', 'Bastaards' and 'Oorlams':
Hybrid societies of the Northern Cape frontier zone
The paper will consider the colonial interaction between the Boer settlers and later the British with the imported slave community and the indigenous Khoi and San people of the Cape.

Kirsty Reid: It cuts me even to the hart: Love and Separation in the Convict Diaspora
The paper will examine a series of nineteeth century letters from convicts and their families to explore the issues of love and separation generated by the process of penal transportation.

Clare Anderson: Convict Women and Border Crossings in the Nineteeth Century Indian Ocean World
This paper will explore the context in which women went from Australia to Calcutta and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean and how ordinary working people tapped into the oral culture of the Indian Ocean world, to become part of the flow of people and information crossing the seas.

Barbara Hatley: The Tyranny of Authenticity: Female Identity and Women's Writing in Post-Colonial Contexts
The paper will be looking mainly at Indonesian texts in a broad framework exploring the particular way women in colonial/ postcolonial societies experience authenticity and East-West hybridity as putative bearers of authentic cultural tradition.

Removing the Boundaries at the St Ives
Lucy Frost and Susan Ballyn (Barcelona University): Exiles of a Diaspora: the Sephardi Convicts in V.D.L.
On the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, there were claims that the Sephardi were being written out of the record as they had been pushed out of the space half a millenium before. This paper will consider the Sephardi diaspora in London and those transported to Van Diemens Land.