Captain Cook Chased a Chook

Captain Cook has been marked again and again as culturally and historically significant. Even mentioning his name risks a set of responses: The Great Navigator, The Original Invader, The Marker of Modern Australia and The Discoverer. One of the challenges to think history `experimentally was to consider how and why and if we could redeem aspects of the past which have fallen outside what has been monumentalised as historically significant. But equally, how could we make new kinds of interpretative spaces within well circulated and official histories such as those which simply leave Cook as a `discoverer of Australia? The challenge in attempting to interrupt Cook as only a historical figure is that he already works through replication and chaotic proliferation that solemnly monumentalise him with a fake reason and at the same time popularise him in delirious rhyme. He is the figure represented through statues and `discovery sites that invent him as a foundational national figure and he is displayed and circulated through banal activities such as Captain Cook cruises and take away shops. As Chris Healy suggests of the multiple experiences of `Captain Cooks Cottage

Dumb Places

This paper is concerned with a very violent incident that was carried out by the perpetrators of the Myall Creek Massacre after that massacre in 1838 and when the party was still on their killing spree. I apologise for the particular distress talking about such things may have for the Wirrayaraay peoples, for other Indigenous peoples and for women in particular but also others who may have experienced direct violence. It is very understandable that you would not want to read again the detail of such events. I do not see my decision to talk about such things as at all straightforward and I remain anxious about my ability to tread a path between ideas of testimony, wanting to write it differently and wanting to expand what writing can do for a hopeful postcolonialism

Animated documentary and the scene of death: Experiencing Waltz with Bashir

When brought together in the animated documentary, animation with its tradition of comic storytelling and gothic graphic fiction and the documentary film with its tradition of "realism" create new possibilities for understanding the relationship between spectatorship and memory. In this form memory and reality are volatile and changeable, yet believable. In the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman, 2008), the animated form of the bulk of the film is ultimately juxtaposed with television footage and still shots of the massacre within the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The film's final sequence of live footage, some of which would have appeared on most of our television screens across the world, makes of those passing seconds a death scene. As a "death scene" we see again but really for the first time the horror and the miracle of survival. The preceding animation with its intertwining flows of dreams and reality not only interrogates but enacts how memory can be seen

Memory and materiality

This article explores the idea of memory effects, that is, memory and materiality as intertwined producers of something we can call memory effects. This article argues that memory is an 'effect' produced through and with materiality, rather than something only produced by a human-centred consciousness. Through an exploration of the scale of memory in the shapes of a tiny Captain Cook painted on a matchbox and a giant Captain Cook, which stands as 'Big Cook' in Cairns in northern Queensland (Australia), new paths of perception and connection that may better account for the circulations and translations of memory are established. To think of memory as having a scale is to see memory as always simultaneously physical and temporal. These are memory effects. To think memory as memory effects is to give memory a key place not just in orders of concatenating events that we may over-determine as 'national' but as an order of perception given to us by the things themselves. © The Author(s) 2013

Sovereign Hospitalities?

The indigenous person, the refugee and the new and old 'settler' sit in an awkward arrangement of relationship which is radically exposed through the reality of indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous sovereignty insists the question is asked: Who are strangers? The situation of the refugee insists the question is asked: Who is able to practice hospitality? All of these questions within Australia move between the imaginary of a continent simultaneously surrounded by beaches and shores

Time is a Traveller: The Localness of Meaghan Morris

My aural introduction was Peter Allen’s song, ‘Tenterfield Saddler’. And most of you willknow that ‘At Henry Parkes Motel’, Meaghan’s famous essay on mobility, comfort, desire andbanality, is situated in Tenterfield where Meaghan’s early childhood took place

Place, Space and Memory in the Old Jewish East End of London: an Archaeological Biography of Sandys Row Synagogue, Spitalfields and its Wider Context

Sandys Row (London E1) is the only functioning Ashkenazi (Eastern European Jewish) Synagogue in Spitalfields and the oldest still functioning Ashkenazi synagogue in London. Located in an area, which from the mid­late nineteenth century until WWII was the centre of London’s Jewish population, it is one of the last surviving witnesses to a once vibrant and dynamic heritage that has now virtually disappeared. This area has been the first port of call for refugees for centuries, starting with French Protestant Huguenots in the eighteenth century, then Jews fleeing economic hardship and pogroms in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century followed by Bangladeshi Muslims in the twentieth century. Using a broadly archaeological analysis based very closely on the sort of practice widely used in church archaeology, the authors argue that much can be inferred about wider social and cultural patterns from a study of architectural space at Sandys Row and its associated material culture. This is the first such archaeological study undertaken of a synagogue in Britain and offers a new perspective on wider issues regarding the archaeological definition of religious practice and religious material culture