Conference Abstracts
Name: Jennifer Alberston
Title: Dismembering and Remembering: The Abject and The Icon
Time & Location: TBA
In "Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection" (1982), Julia Kristeva analyses the ways in which 'proper' subjectivity and sociality require the expulsion of the improper, the unclean and the disorderly. Kristeva maintains that what is excluded can never be fully obliterated but hovers at the borders of our existence, threatening apparently settled unity with disruption and possible dissolution. This paper tells of a search through the minefield of public opinion - and of the subterfuge which must be employed to mythologise, historicise, and fictionalise a private and personal story in the Abject. The story is currently being dismembered from poems, journals, and a feature-film screenplay - written 20 years ago, but never produced - and remembered in a contemporary (2007) novel, SOLUS. At a time when the secret cloister of the priest has been shattered, SOLUS confronts the last bastion of male supremacy and silence: the icon of the soldier. Jennifer will read in-work excerpts from SOLUS, to example the story's situation in the Abject and implication of the Icon. She will also read parts of her original screen-play, THE ANZAC BOY, a work containing similar material.
Name: Dr. Paul Dawson
Title: Sociological Poetics in Creative Writing Pedagogy
Time & Location: TBA
This paper will trace the origins of the main pedagogical strategies of the writing workshop, embodied in the phrases reading as a writer, show don't tell, and discovering a voice, arguing that the formalist poetics of Creative Writing derives from a specifically modernist concept of the creative process, and its attendant use of criticism, alongside the institution of the New Criticism. In order for students and teachers of writing to be seen as literary intellectuals within the academy a new pedagogy for Creative Writing needs to be developed; a critical practice within the workshop which shifts from a formalist poetics to a sociological poetics. This paper will draw on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to elaborate on what this sociological poetics in the aid of an oppositional criticism would look like.
Name: Jo Gardiner
Title: The Architect's Dream
Time & Location: TBA
Part architectural treatise and part ficto-criticism, The Architect's Dream, is infiltrated by a number of different voices in different registers. It considers aspects of our private stories, unwritten narratives, using the language and metaphors of architecture. The dreaming voice is a dangerous one because it subverts the `authentic', public voice of the Author. The Architect looks between the spaces occupied by traditional architecture to the territory of a private place - the garden - which `acts as a meeting point between our private gaze and public inspection'. This story ends in the private realm, where it asserts itself against the public one. Informed by foreign texts, lost plans and unrecoverable sources, it is a yearning for another reality, a reality that is harboured in the Architect's dream.
Name: Associate Professor Jeri Kroll
Title: "Don't Speak to Me About Politics": Political Poems of Sharon Olds
Time & Location: TBA
Since the mid-twentieth century, the media has bombarded citizens of western nations with images and words about political issues designed to provoke as well as inform. Turning strong personal emotions and moral conviction into art, however, often results in propaganda. In the nineteenth century Shelley might have believed that poets were the "unacknowledged legislators of the world," but in the twentieth W.H. Auden could assert that "poetry makes nothing happen." Do writers who try to incorporate their social or political conscience into their art misunderstand the relationship between creativity and politics? This paper looks at the strategies American Sharon Olds, known primarily as a postconfessional poet, exploits in order to treat political content. The key to the success of her poems has to do with finding a personal perspective that goes beyond simply asking readers to empathise with victims or to take a moral stand intellectually. She uses the power of images, not rhetoric, to unsettle and challenge, rather than to preach.
Name: Jennifer Lee
Title: Imaginary Anatomies - working with dream bodies
Time & Location: TBA
What happens when your research infects your dreams? Or when you dream an anatomy you didn't think existed. I discovered intersex by accident when researching abnormal anatomy. I realised that hermaphrodites aren't imaginary. It felt like exposing a meaning to a recurring dream. I had found a subject matter to research that combined some main interest areas: anatomy, the body, gender and sexuality, abnormal psychology, deceit and hidden information. But from this, my dreams want me to feel things too deeply. The bright colours, the blood, deformity, violence, pungent smells and tastes. This paper will dissect the symbiotic relationship between dream and research in the writing of my novel for a PhD at Deaking University. Please note: this paper contains subject matter that may offend some people.
Name: Joint Presentation by Postgraduate Students from Deakin University
Title: Anyone Feeling Dangerous?
Time & Location: TBA
Anyone feeling dangerous? This writing is loaded, cocked and ready to go off. Deakin postgraduate writing students will fill your afternoon (or evening) with short plays, audio-visual graffiti, prose and poetry. You will be subjected to palatable (bite-sized) pieces of our work so come and heckle us.
Name: Paul Monaghan
Title: The Poetry of a Political Theatre
Time & Location: TBA
In this paper I will discuss the recent creation and performance of a theatre work called Asylum. The work was created and directed by myself, co-created and performed by Theatre Studies students from the School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne. The paper will consider the private effect (on both me and the students) of this very public and disturbing story, and how that effect translated into our `public dreaming'. Situating this work in the tradition of `documentary theatre', we nevertheless made a crucial decision to create the work in a mode far more `poetic' and abstract than `realistic'. Aristotle's often misunderstood notion of mimesis will be invoked to frame the remodelling of experience that underscored our creative response to this ugly political situation.
Name: Tom Shapcott
Title: Tracking the Tracker
Time & Location: TBA
A story, "The Tracker" by B. Wongar was originally published in 1977 in Jean-Paul Satre's literary magazine, LES TEMPS MODERNES and was included in his first published collection of stories, THE TRACK TO BRALGU. The work is still in print. In 2002 a film, written and produced by Rolf de Heer, "The Tracker" was the opening film at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August 2002. There is an uncanny resemblance between the two narratives. My paper will look at the aspects of development from short story to film treatment, and then at the moral and legal implications. It will also speculate on the wider political implications, as well as possible reasons Rolf de Heer may have been unwilling to concede any similarity to, or moral responsibility for refusing to acknowledge in any way the Wongar story.
Name: Bruno Starrs
Title: Suicide Ideation is Dangerous Dreaming
Time & Location: TBA
Suicide ideation is dangerous dreaming. Sociologists claim that people may model their behaviour on suicides portrayed in the media and have dubbed this the Werther Effect after Goethe's 1776 epistolary novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers which resulted in dozens of imitative suicides by readers. Several stage adaptations in the late 1700's have failed to faithfully represent it and there's been no attempt to measure the Werther Effect on audience members. In my candidacy for M.C.A. I am writing a stage adaptation of fidelity to the original with the objective of testing viewers' suicide ideation before and after a performance. I wish to present a report on my progress at the 2002 Dangerous Dreaming conference.
Name: Dr. Denise Varney
Title: White-out: theatre as and agent of border patrol
Time & Location: TBA
The recent arrival of middle Eastern refugees has revived debate about who enters this country and who controls that entry, which reprises our historical treatment of the indigenous population. Underneath is the reappearance of an official white Australia, of a discourse that lies dormant within the culture. On the stae, despite a few atttempts at multiculturism, the hegemony of whiteness is stronger than ever. The mainstream theatre is complicit in the normalisation of the white subject and in spite of thirty years of feminism and an active women's theatre, there is still an unconscious assumption that there is a universal figure of woman and that she is white. This is a `white-out'. White-out in Australia is produced through two operations: wilful amnesia and border patrols. My paper will out this whiteness as a resistance to the dangerous conservative politics that pervades Australian culture. For this paper, I intend to do an analysis of the kind of theatre that is going on in Australia while hostilities are being played out in the desert and on the edges of its island. My subject is a recent women's production, This Way Up by Elizabeth Coleman (Playbox Melbourne, 2001). As a feminist critic I want to examine the representational codes that maintain the status quo and the xenophobia of our national imaginary. By reading theatre in the context of broader social and political discourses I want to produce some knowledge about white ideology in women's theatre.
Name: Dr. Brenda Walker
Title: Deflection, Defection and Disclosure: Telling Stories in Australia
Time & Location: TBA
In Nicholas Shakespeare's biography of Bruce Chatwin, the anthropologist Geoff Bagshaw complains that `There is something intolerable in the West about secret knowledge. Everything has to be transparent.' This lack of transparency, which is a refusal to accept the over-riding authority of the novelist and the novel, is said to have irritated Chatwin during his research in Central Australia. In Chatwin's novel Songlines Russia stands for masculine solitude and enterprise. Arkady, the Russian character, mediates Aboriginal experience and confirms the narrator's convictions about mobility and independence. There is another Russian character, or pair of characters, who have had secret stories to tell in Australia. The Petrovs were the mediators of KGB secrets, after their defection in the fifties. In an article in The Australian marking the death of Evdokia Petrov we are told that Vladimir Petrov at one point laid aside his Australian disguise and declared his identity to his local doctor. The doctor is said to have replied, `in a quintesentially Australian response..."Go on!".' This distinctively Australian response is in fact not an invitation to continue. It is disarming, casual and ironic. It is a way of deflecting story. Narrative would not get very far without the exchange and circulation of story, the gathering of cultural communalities, the taking up of the experiences of others, and the exposure of imagined secrets. In this paper I will draw on my own work as a writer and a teacher in order to raise questions about some of these issues in a specifically Australian context of disclosure.
Name: Brenda Glover
Title: Private Grief and Creative Women's Place in the Public Sphere: Carol Shields
Time & Location: TBA ,
The Canadian academic and novelist, Carol Shields, has been battling breast cancer since 1998. In her recent, and probably final novel, Unless, shields has effectively written her private grief and outrage into a public fictional work that is not about her personally, but expresses her concerns for the acceptance of women as legitimate participants in the arts. `Cancer makes one serious, and awake. I have had time to pay attention to certain questions that have been hovering for years. And since it is probably my last novel, I feel I can be braver.' Shields states that, in this novel, she is expressing `feminist rage' at a time when she perceives that women continue to be substantially unrecognised in the public sphere and that far too many injustices and inequities for western women still exist, in spite of the progress that has been made over the last century. In this paper, I will discuss the ways in which Carol Shields translates her private gief into an effective public statement about creative women's place in the public sphere through her fictional writing.
Name: Dr. Patrick West
Title: "And Thus, The Night...":Animals, Humans and Politics
Time & Location: TBA ,
My presentation is a combined paper and reading. I am interested in the relations between animals and humans. Of course language complicates these relations and is complicated by them. There is much here for creative writers to consider. But my particular interest is in the possibilities for human politics of writing that involves animals. Allegory might spring to mind first but it is by no means all that we can do. A lot of people don't like my short story "And Thus, The Night..." Why? It has animals and humans and politics. I think there is lots to talk about.
Name: Rae Luckie
Title: Dangerous Awakenings: Reality, fiction and metaphor
Time & Location: TBA ,
An uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolises. Sigmund Freud in Joseph Grixti Terrors of Uncertainty 1989. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent reality. J.G. Ballard in Drusilla Modjeska Give me the real thing 2002. Then I started to get scared Mr King. Real scared. The newspaper stories began to terrify me. Home invasions, elderly folks getting their heads bashed in-all for a few dollars for drugs. I check there's no-one around before I reach my arm out and pick up the paper which is delivered at 7am sharp every morning. I read truth that's even stranger than fiction and fact that's more fearful than your horror. Rae Luckie Morning News 2000. One can awaken from a dream in a state of terror; the fear calmed when the conscious mind says, `there, there, dear, it's only a dream-it's not real'. Towards the end of the last century, while postmodern writers blurred the boundaries of fiction, fact and criticism, the reading of non-fiction, memoir and auto/biography flourished. Recently, it seems, there is a move to put fact and fiction back into their `respective boxes' as Carmel Bird once described it. What impact will September 11 have on writing? Where does writing move when metaphors of war and `the terrors of uncertainty' pervade the every day?
Name: Dr. Anna Gibbs
Title: Terror, Shame, Disgust and Contempt: Writing as Affect
Time & Location: TBA ,
Writing acts directly on the body to move us to laughter or to tears, to seduce us, impassion us, enrage us, incite us to action or absorb us in reflection. It is a space of `public dreaming' whose associations are primarily affectively-linked and whose mode of effectivity is first and foremost that of contagion. Hence, from Madame Bovary to The Well of Loneliness, from Lady Chatterley's Lover to American Psycho, fiction has been thought to be possessed of dangerous powers and figured as a `poison' capable of corrupting and degrading its readers, and all the more since women have historically been its largest readership. Yet this representation exists alongside a desire to see the space of fiction as an innocuous and `purely imaginary' and private space. This ficto-critical presentation is an exploration of writing as affect in both its public and private dimensions.
Name: Steve Evans
Title: Something Borrowed, Something Blue
Time & Location: TBA ,
The wedding is a most public performance of private issues. Not surprisingly then, writers have used it to kick-start a multitude of stories and to provide a critically open ending to many more. As a plot option, a wedding often supplies the electric fizz of a key decision point; a time of taking stock before commitement- `I do, or do I?' This paper looks at the way in which recent poetry employs the wedding as a dramatic ingredient and how it refers, tacitly or otherwise, to the great narrative of the wedding story.
Name: Grant Caldwell
Title: "Falling Shadows"
Time & Location: TBA ,
The reading/performance of a sequence of poems taken from the books: The Nun Wore Glasses (1984); The Life of a Pet Dog (1992); You Know What I Mean (1996) and Falling Shadows (tenatative title - to be published late 2002). The question of the need to write may be examined as part of the reading.
Name: Linda Neil
Title: Portrait of the Artist as a Mad Girl
Time & Location: TBA ,
Like an alchemist, the artist or writer must undergo the process of turning his/her base metal into gold. In order to do this, the writer surrenders herself to the underbelly of experience, dredging up from her sub-conscious sometimes unacceptable and "dangerous" things. The transformation of this material into the written or spoken word is often fraught with danger. Is bringing the dream into the real, and, in the process, the inner world to the surface a meaningful process or is it dangerous madness? A multi-faceted presentation from writer and musician, Linda Neil, PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A MAD GIRL, involves the written and spoken word (and some music).
Name: Philip Salom
Title: An Alternative Verse Novel: an Exploration of Alternation
Time & Location: TBA ,
Verse novels in verse worry me. I am writing of a character split by amnesia and am using the intense grab of the 14 line sonnet and ghazal adding to while puncturing through a more conventional prose narrative to create a more jagged, more isolated sense of character and consciousness. I am keen to extend the verse novel as a form by alternation and segue between the brief, strange and`mental' poem and the realist world of prose narrative. The story is of dissociative fugue amnesia and how that condition is in itself a trope of alternative narratives. Narrative with windows of sonnet, the loom shuttled by lexias. I will talk to and read from this work-in-progress.
Name: Donna Lee Brien & Tess Brady
Title: The Girls Guide to Real Estate as case study
Time & Location: TBA ,
Collaboration is a key function of so many parts of the publishing process that while it could be argued that writing can be an isolate activity, publication involves collaboration between whole teams of participants. Yet a literature survey on collaborative process in writing reveals only a paucity of material. This paper, a collaboration in itself, examines as a case study the processes undertaken by the authors in their The Girls Guide to Real Estate (Allen & Unwin, 2002). Donna Lee Brien and Tess Brady wrote their multi-genre text (information, self help and humour) with such intense collaboration that neither author can be completely sure which bits she actually wrote, let alone thought of. Indeed, every part of the writing and publishing process - from conception, writing and editing through to the production and promotion of the resulting text - involved collaboration (together with fairy wings and a fair amount of pacing), although a process analysis reveals that the collaboration required varied through the course of creating, publishing and distributing the book. This paper explores these differences, beginning the process of isolating various modes of collaboration appropriate for the writing process.
Name: Ali Alizadeh
Title: Site-seeing Poet: Location Research for Creative Writers
Time & Location: TBA ,
In July and August of this year, thanks to a travel grant at Deakin University, I was enabled to travel to France and conduct the field research essential to my PhD creative writing project `La Pucelle - An Epic of Joan of Arc'. Drawing on this experience, my paper discusses the need, methods and outcomes of location research in the field of Creative Writing.
Name: Dr Marcelle Freiman
Title: Dangerous Dreaming: Unpacking creativity in the academic discipline
Time & Location: TBA ,
Walter Benjamin relates the parable of the dreamer who tells the dream on an empty stomach, before breakfast, only capable of telling the dream `as if he were talking in his sleeep' (One Way Street and Other Writings, Harcourt Brace, 1979:45-6). If he is not to betray himself in telling the dream too soon, he must allow the necessary rupture between the `sway of the dream' and its recollection `in broad daylight'. Benjamin's model assists us as we unpack the creative process in terms of teaching and learning. For the learner, the perception of creativity as `dreaming' affords a romantic view, a kind of innocence, which, although it opens valuable doors and can act to subvert the limitations of culture, is also dangerous in its potential refusal to enter broad daylight. Those who both teach and learn in the creative writing discipline confront the interface between a category of creativity as `dreaming' only, and a view of creative writing that includes the acts of `reading', interpretation and understanding - the construction knowledge, according to constructivist learning theory, which constitutes learning. This paper will begin to explore this interface of creative `dreaming' and learning in creative writing.
Name: Alicia Sometimes
Title: Creative Freedom through Performance
Time & Location: TBA ,
I will be exploring the concept of the creative freedom through performance. The way we stop ourselves from fully exploring our originality and creativity, how we become uncomfortable with exposing our inner selves, how we view censorship and choice. I will use text and sound performance. The way we use our voice and face can influence text and the power of expression. I would like to also explore embarrassment through words.
Name: Kate Deller-Evans & Reem Al-Mahmood
Title: Creative Diversity: the public and the private of learning disabilities
Time & Location: TBA ,
Students with learning disabilities (LD) entering tertiary studies encounter many challenges. Information processing often presents difficulties for LD students and underlies their struggle with writing. Psychological assessments often reveal above-average abilities mixed with problem areas and students may not be able to display their creativity in public. How then do creative writing LD students cope? Just what can teachers of writing specifically and universities generally do to accommodate these students? The authors of this paper will discuss the creative and emotional expressions and frustrations of LD students in a creative dialogue.
Name: Christine Balint
Title: The Musical Dream of a Forgotten Woman
Time & Location: TBA ,
French composer Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique (1830) tells the story of a young romantic falling into an opium-induced sleep in which he dreams his beloved has turned into a witch. The narrator imagines killing his beloved and eventually dreams his own execution. The work, inspired by the composer's obsession with Irish actress Harriet Smithson and precipitating their union, demonstrates the dangerous consequences of blurring the public and private, dreams and reality. Through his music and his various narratives, Berlioz's romantic ideals, closely aligned with the revolutionary politics of the day, were played out and Harriet Smithson as an individual and an artist in her own right, was largely sacrificed. I will discuss and read from my novel on the life of Harriet Smithson (1800-1854).
Name: Glenda Guest
Title: A Dreaming Place
Time & Location: TBA ,
Seamus Heaney writes in his essay, `The Sense of Place': I think there are two ways in which a place is known and cherised...One is lived, illiterate and unconscious, the other learned, literate and conscious. In the literary sensibility, both are likely to exist in a conscious and unconscious tension. In the pre-thinking about the novel, it was this tension that excited my imagination; the extruding and intruding of each into the other. But how to tell the stories of the town of Siddon Rock? How to build a novel with a shape that was the form of the content. This is a reading of a section of the novel-in-progress with an associated exploration of the process undergone to arrive at the place in the novel.
Name: Nicole Wong Chun Chi
Title: Dreaming into Being: Pressure and Autonomy of Young Writers in Hong Kong Literature in English
Time & Location: TBA ,
In discussing my experience as a student and tutor of creative writing, I wish to highlight the problems a young writer encounters in establishing herself in Hong Kong literature in English. Student writers struggle for public recognition through university publications, and against their insecurities as non-natives in English. The hybridity of language triggers the search for a new voice. In asserting their new literary imagination, young writers remain haunted by the recurrent themes, e.g. politics, East versus West, in the older works. An increasing number of publications of/on students' writings has given young writers a gleam of hope, while the realization of their dream - to be recognized as a Hong Kong writer - still has a long way to go.
Name: Dr Jennifer Webb
Title: Dreams and nightmares in the Kingdom of Capital
Time & Location: TBA ,
Anecdotal evidence from teachers of creative practice is that our students have high rates of depression and mental illness; and many of us have experienced the shock and sorrow of losing a student through suicide. My rather melodramatic title to this paper addresses this dark matter, and raises some research that has emerged recently about the association between high rates of suicide and conservative governments. It makes sense to me that life might seem unattactive or unsupportable in, say, Thatcher's England, or Bush's USA, or Howard's Australia, and I'm concerned to think through the links between government ethos, creative practice and the nightmare of depression. Given our constant immersion in the envoloping semiotic of the media, and the commodisation of virtually everything we do, are or can be, I wonder whether it's now possible to make works of imagination, ethics and sensation/sensuality that aren't bound and directed by market forces and media inflections. And I wonder too whether an inevitable response to this isn't a sort of Freudian melancholy, predicated on a sense of loss and emptiness, that infects ourselves and our students with sadness. Reading Baudrillard's Death and Symbolic Exchange along with Freud's `Morning and melancholia', and `Creative writers and daydreaming', I attempt to tease out these issues as they touch on writers and writing in the global economy.
Name: Glen Phillips
Title: Writing In Landscapes Downunder
Time & Location: TBA ,
The W.I.L.D. courses were inaugurated in 2001 to provide `on the road learning' experiences, principally of an interdisciplinary nature, for international students of Australian Studies. In this paper I will give an account of the theoretical precepts behind this `edutourism' venture, which catered initially for advanced creative writing and/or literature students. The originators, Profesors Andrew Taylor, John Kinsella and I, were aiming to bring the students to unique regions of Western Australia which had already fascinated authors ranging from Jonathon Swift and D H Lawrence to Jack Davis, Dorothy Hewett and Randolph Stow, and are identified with contemporary writers such as Tim Winton, Elizabeth Jolley, Joan London, Mudrooroo and John Kinsella. Their published work would be studied `in situ' as students moved from one regional location to another. Scientific, anthropological and historical writers were also in mind, as well as visual artists. The conception and conduct of the courses was also linked to the current popularity for integrating journeys along historic walks or trails with generation of written and/or visual texts. Reference will therefore be made to British artists such as Mark Atkins, Hamish Fulton, Fiona Templeton and Richard Long, and Australians, Domenico De Clario and Gregory Pryor. Authors such as John Kinsella, Rod Mengham and Les Murray will be mentioned for similar work. A brief account of the successful first experience with two W.I.L.D. units will be made and it will be linked to a short video documentary.
Name: Nancy Tsui Yuk Chun
Title: Teaching Creative Writing in English in Hong Kong
Time & Location: TBA ,
In this paper I raise a range of issues relating to the challenge of teaching of creative writing in English to university students whose first language is not English. I draw on my own experience as a native speaker of Cantonese. I have been both a student and a graduate teaching assistant in creative writing courses at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I have also had my work published. These are some key issues as I see them: 1.Students who have no language of the `inner life' in English have difficulties with expressing emotions and states of feeling, which are essential to creative writing. 2. Limitations of English as a language to depict people's manner of speaking in dialects in Hong Kong. 3.Students find it difficult to render the common phenomenon of code-mixing of Cantonese and English when writing in English. 4.Possibility of transforming the literary qualities that students acquire from Chinese literature to creative writing in English. 5.Imitating Chinese poetry as an exercise to help students write poetry in English. 6.Inspiring students to write about or explore the issue of cultural identity by showing historical pictures of Hong Kong.
Name: Jan Harrow
Title: Flight
Time & Location: TBA ,
My novel Flight, explores the intimate intersections of the lives of those forced to flee (due to the impositions of war) and those who offer refuge. It examines individual culpability in witnessing and being part of personal and political violence. I am interested in the ethical imploications of narra5tive choices such as point of view and the use of dream, memory and archetypes for positioning both the refugee and the "free" agent in an overlapping experience.
Name: Dr Gaylene Perry
Title: Eucalyptus regnans, or, the forest and the trees
Time & Location: TBA ,
This paper explores the dangers, challenges and passions in creating the personal within the institutional. I discuss the presentation of text and artefacts in some areas of the Melbourne Museum and make some comparisons with practices of writing personal and/or autobiographical stories within university settings. Throughout the paper a story unfurls: the story of a mountain ash viewed through a window and of a poem being written about that mountain ash after a visist to the Forest Gallery at the Museum.
Name: Amanda Johnson
Title: Eugen's Falls
Time & Location: TBA ,
Eugen's Falls is a novelistic reconstruction of the early journeys of Eugen von Guerard, landscape artist and citizen of colonial Melbourne. It is a poetic re-presentation of a colonial life, retracing the German migrant's journey from Europe to Melbourne, to the country of the Taungurong (Waring-illam-baluk clan) around The Great Dividing Range. During the late 1850's and early 1860's, Eugen von Guerard traversed the tributaries of the Goulburn River in search of pastoral commissions. He also sought to discover locations that would appease a Victorian desire for wilderness scenographies, as well as fulfilling an obsession with `capturing' the penultimate waterfall view. The `broken' quest story shifts and fractures across a range of European and Australian locations. Eugen is a modern `waterfallist' par excellence, a man forced to move fluidly between continents, cities, epochal schisms and relationships. A man who, by nature of his fluid inheritance, traverses a whole range of historical-tales-of-woe, too many for the tale of his simple life to be translated heroically, Germanically, or legibly against the unifying pageant of nineteenth century endeavour. I would like to present three fictional montages that re-construct and re-image von Guerard's passage through central Victoria in 1862. These fragments accumulate as a critique of colonial imaging, `exhuming' and situating narratives of indigenous and environmental dislocation against a Romanticist quest for wilderness subjects as visual epiphany. Issues of writing history as fiction and developing a research ethic in relation to the use of indigenous material, will be touched on here.
Name: Dr Nigel Krauth
Title: Spirit of Place: Writers and their Settings
Time & Location: TBA ,
Setting is an acknowledged concern for creative writers. In saying so, we usually think of the creation of setting in fiction, drama or poetry. But also there is the setting of the actual site for the writing. This paper contends that writers make significant choices about the places in which they write. It looks at several real-life settings where great works were written.
Name: Sari Smith
Title: Dreaming out Loud: Reading and Writing Memoir
Time & Location: TBA ,
Nancy Mairs claims in her memoir The Bone House that we cannot "relive the past" exactly. You may relive the past, she says, but only as your present self. This paper will explore some questions about memoir: what is this genre and why is it suddenly so popular? Is a memoir, as Mairs claims, simply one person's "dream" of what happened and if so, how might the memoir be different from or similar to the autobiographical novel in its demand for historical veracity? Do we read memoirs differently? Is there a politics inherent in the decision to classify a work as memoir rather than fiction?
Name: Helen Milte Bastow
Title: Dialogues with a 'body' called the research journal
Time & Location: TBA ,
Recording the mystery that accompanies the process of writing is almost impossible. What can be seen are traces - the collected patterns, images, and motifs from an unconscious research, souvenirs of the semiotic world, which are collected in the process called the research journal. This paper will discuss the journal's facility to hold onto primitive transactions, of rhythmic and imaginary language, the unconscious exchanges between the novelist and herself, reminiscent of the imaginary exchanges within the maternal world and object relations. The paper will describe the enactment of a body dialogue, in the journal's holding onto, and 'projective identification' of, traces of unconscious fantasy, imaginary language and emotion, left behind in the daily pages of the novel. The paper will discuss this intimate and poetic language of a 'body' called the research journal, and the question of its association, or not, with the more abstract, public and [phal]logocentric order of the academic thesis.