In Four Four: A Sydney Writers\u27 Festival Event

Four very special authors - Barbara Blackman, Brian Castro, Gretchen Miller and Gerry Turcotte - tell their own stories about nights spent dancing. Four extraordinary musicians - Sandy Evans (saxophones), Alister Spence (piano), Brett Hirst (double bass), and Philip South (percussion) - bring the stories to life through music. As the writers tell their stories the musicians respond to the words, weaving lines of emotion and adding layers of meaning. The result is a multi-dimensional performance experience arising from a shifting spiral of text, speech music and sound. Concept, composition and design by Gretchen Miller. Written and performed by Barbara Blackman, Brian Castro, Gretchen Miller and Gerry Turcotte. Music performed by Sandy Evans, Brett Hirst, Phillip South and Alister Spence. Lighting design by Neil Simpson Dramaturgy by Virginia Baxter. A download of this live performance is currently unavailable at ResearchOnline@ND. The Media Release for this performance may be downloaded for further information

The Kangaroo Gargoyles: Footnotes to an Australian Gothic Script

For many, the opening swells of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Toccata & Fugue in D Minor” (1703-1707) will immerse them immediately in the world of classical music. But for most people, a rather more sinister image is conjured up—perhaps (pre-Lloyd Weber), the Phantom of the Opera, pining for his loved one. Disfigured, injured by society and nature, wounded in body and soul, the Phantom broods on his tragic fate, dreaming of love and music, which he will conjoin in a grotesque fugue that will culminate in kidnapping and murder. A tad melodramatic, perhaps, but then again, for connoisseurs of the Gothic, this will no doubt strike a chord. A thunderstorm, threatening in the background, complements the image, yet another in a long line of “atmospherics,” which have become quintessentially associated with the Gothic and its haunted landscape. Of course, few would disagree that Gothic landscapes can be dark and sinister. What surprised many when this essay was first appeared was the thought that this Gothic landscape could be in any way Australian. This essay, and the radio program it developed out of, originated from an early interest in charting a comparative theoretics examining colonial Gothic fiction in Australia and Canada and its postcolonial developments. The work began as a PhD thesis that appeared in 1990. When I told people of my research interest, I was often met with disbelief. “Surely there’s not much Australian Gothic Literature,” I was told by one researcher studying Christina Stead. Another, who had just read through Hal Porter’s short stories, suggested that the Gothic was all in my mind. A British scholar I met on a guided tour of Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney thought I was mad. Australia was “provincial,” he assured me, but “Gothic” never. So we visited the University of Sydney where I pointed out a Kangaroo Gargoyle on one of the principal towers of the main quadrangle—all of which, like Saint Mary’s Cathedral, is built in the Gothic style. And just for good measure, I read him a passage from Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902). ISBN 81-902282-1-

CRC Perspective

Gerry Turcotte, President Communications Research Centre Canad

The Story-teller\u27s Revenge: Kate Grenville Interviewed by Gerry Turcotte

1 never quite know how to begin with that question. I had a few false starts when I was at school. I wrote a short story and sent it to the Australian Women\u27s Weekly, and when I was at university I wrote a novel and a few short stories which I didn\u27t finish. But then I got going seriously when I went to England in 1976. I\u27d always had a yearning to see if I muld write or not so I thought I\u27d take six months off and live on my savings in a garret in Paris. I thought if I was going to do the cliche I might as well go the whole hog! So I wrote two novels in the space of nine months which are both absolutely appalling. They\u27re the ones you write to get a certain amount of junk out of your system before you can start really writing. The urge to write came out of the fact that I couldn\u27t find anything to read that seemed to be about the kind of life that I lived, the kind of problems that I was dealing with. There was a lot of that rather uplifting feminist writing, like Erica Jong and Lisa Alther, and they made me feel discouraged because they were so cheery. In spite of their anguish and self doubts they had some kind of control over their lives. And they had gusto and they weren\u27t afraid. I was terribly timid. And then at the other extreme there were those British women: Angela Carter, Emma Tennant, Micheline Wandor, the Women\u27s Press sort of books. And they seemed to me like another extreme. They were writing a kind of highly analytical feminist fiction, and I wasn\u27t one of those either. And I felt as a reader I was caught between two stools, and when I began to write I realized that I was still falling between two stools. I sent some of the early stories to the Women\u27s Press and they were rejected, with a note saying they weren\u27t feminist enough. I sent the same stories to conventional outlets too, and the men there also rejected them, saying they were too radically feminist and angry. So I started writing out of that sort of frustration of there being no reflection anywhere of the reality that I seemed to be dealing with

Spectrality in indigenous women’s cinema: Tracey Moffatt and Beck Cole

This paper addresses two recent Aboriginal ghost stories produced by Aboriginal fi lm-makers Tracey Moffatt (beDevil) and Beck Cole (Plains Empty), in order to examine the relationship of these fi lms to a type of spectral rewriting of the Australian nation state. This paper examines the role of spectrality as a revisionist process that exorcizes, but also celebrates, the ghosts that underpin and/or undermine narratives of belonging and place and investigates the dynamic potential of Indigenous fi lm, not so much as a device that eradicates colonial encounters and their postcolonial legacy, but as texts that unsettle and contest, that empower and initiate debate by way of dismantling, or at least diminishing, dominant representations of Indigenous identities

New numerical approaches for modeling thermochemical convection in a compositionally stratified fluid

Seismic imaging of the mantle has revealed large and small scale heterogeneities in the lower mantle; specifically structures known as large low shear velocity provinces (LLSVP) below Africa and the South Pacific. Most interpretations propose that the heterogeneities are compositional in nature, differing in composition from the overlying mantle, an interpretation that would be consistent with chemical geodynamic models. Numerical modeling of persistent compositional interfaces presents challenges, even to state-of-the-art numerical methodology. For example, some numerical algorithms for advecting the compositional interface cannot maintain a sharp compositional boundary as the fluid migrates and distorts with time dependent fingering due to the numerical diffusion that has been added in order to maintain the upper and lower bounds on the composition variable and the stability of the advection method. In this work we present two new algorithms for maintaining a sharper computational boundary than the advection methods that are currently openly available to the computational mantle convection community; namely, a Discontinuous Galerkin method with a Bound Preserving limiter and a Volume-of-Fluid interface tracking algorithm. We compare these two new methods with two approaches commonly used for modeling the advection of two distinct, thermally driven, compositional fields in mantle convection problems; namely, an approach based on a high-order accurate finite element method advection algorithm that employs an artificial viscosity technique to maintain the upper and lower bounds on the composition variable as well as the stability of the advection algorithm and the advection of particles that carry a scalar quantity representing the location of each compositional field. All four of these algorithms are implemented in the open source FEM code ASPECT

In–Flight History: the Canadian–Australian Literary Prize and the Question of Nationalism

[Extract] .... the Canadian–Australian Prize may well be celebrating a shaky reality indeed, if the premise for the award is merely to showcase a mythical uniformity of landscape. The wide variety of winners over what is almost two decades contests this reading, if only because it continually redefines and problematizes what it means to be Australian or Canadian. In doing so it encourages its readers to acknowledge, and hopefully to celebrate, the value of multiplicity and difference. Despite this, as the prize approaches its second decade, and as its administrators in both countries decide whether or not the award will continue beyond this time frame, they will have serious questions to ask. Not just questions about whether the prize has achieved sufficient publicity, or successfully promoted the respective countries to each other (a legitimate enough query given the “goal” of the prize), but also whether it should continue to exclude French Canadian writers (or indeed any non-English writers in translation), whether indigenous writers have been given significant opportunity to be short-listed for the prize (none have won in eighteen years), and, in Australia’s case, whether women writers have had that opportunity as well (only two in nine years). Essentially, the question will be, has the Canadian–Australian Prize Committee done everything in their power to articulate the diversity of voices which speak beneath the aegis of Canadian and Australian nationalisms

FATHOMS: the cartography of ghosts

Poe

\u27Perfecting the Monologue of Silence\u27: An Interview with Louis Nowra

Louis, for the benefit of those who may not know your work, I wonder if you could discuss how you started writing, and whether playwrighting was always your major interest