Captain Cook Chased a Chook

How can we write the contemporary 'histories' of Captain Cook when they include such textual and material diversity? When that diversity ranges from children's rhymes to convenience stores as well as journals now claimed as iconic documents of the enlightenment? How might the insights of Bruno Latour into how the 'experimental' is produced in the laboratory be helpful in showing how Cook is produced in a settler culture? How does revealing the 'experimental' (the material and textual ethnography) of history show us new ways of 'doing' history that engages with its textual as well as its material diversity

Beyond Nation? Ludwig Leichhardt’s Transnationalism

Inspired by the conference theme of ‘Looking Back to Look Forward’ this paper examines the multiple ways in which the Prussian explorer of northern Australia, Ludwig Leichhardt, provides possible new directions for rethinking contemporary concepts such as transnationalism and nationalism. While the paper in its genealogical fashion assumes that the past is not simply available to us to be looked upon but rather is made to appear to us through various, material and ideological productions; it is still inspired by the possibility that re-imagining the past in the present can produce alternative and better future

In-Between the Memorial, the Library and the Lesbian: Moments in Postcolonial Community

This paper is a multi-faceted engagement with the idea of hybridity and postcolonial community in a settler culture, questioning the relationships between movement, identity and knowledge through the figuring of the memorial, the library and the lesbian. The paper carries those concerns within its own creations. It was written on Gundungurra land, first presented on Eora country and may be read anywhere. I would therefore like to warn readers that I refer to the Myall Creek massacre, which may cause distress, particularly to the Wirrayaraay people

Ecologue

Let me propose a new simple definition of ecology for now: ‘The study of the relations of an environment to plants and animals’. But since the simple divisions between plant and animal, and study and environment no longer hold in any simple way, an adapted definition could be: ‘the writing of relations that are an environment’. This ecology is one suited for a time when our second natures, miming on, lead us to a copy we cannot complete. We have an itch to become natural, to copy and so connect with what we see but cannot always be

Useless History

If you think you can know the body of history by simply reading it as a discrete entity, an independent body that can be walked around, wholly mapped, wholly disciplined, then you will never feel its breath. If you are here and the body is there, then you cannot think about the way in which that body continues its own minute motions, has its own momentum. Heart rate slowing, blood vessels pushing, pushing, pushing, against a loss of fluid and those labouring lungs flooded with the hope of final rest. How will these small changes tell their emerging stories? Neither long enough nor lived enough to be generational, these transformations cannot be told as history. They are the folds of the past from which new words emerge

Editorial: Mobilities

Editorial by Chris Healy and Katrina Schlunke