Creating a Coral Symphony

Conference Programme

2013

Registration: https://alumni.jcu.edu.au/TOIConference2013

Website: http://www.jcu.edu.au/etropic/TOI/index.htm

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | Thursday, July 04, 2013

8 : 3 0 a m – 9 : 0 0 p m Registration, Welcome to Country Opening by Professor Sue McGinty, Director, Cairns Institute

9 : 0 0 a m – 1 0 : 1 5 a m Keynote Address One: Carole Ferrier

Jean Devanny’s Contestation of Patriarchal Whiteness in her Fiction Set in North Queensland from 1936

Room 1

10:15 am – 10 :35 am Morning Tea

1 0 : 3 5 a m - 1 2 : 3 5 p m

Session A: Room 1 Session B: Room 2

10:35 am – 11 :05 am Michael Ackland Going Bush or Going Troppo?: Possession and the Topos of the Painter-Seer in the Work of Patrick White and David Malouf

Ryan Daniel Creativity and Creative Industries in Cairns: Views from the Field

11 :05 am – 11 :35 am Richard Lansdown ‘Dust in the Balance, Atoms in the Gale’: Darwinist Intimations in Pelican Island

Crystal Bustos Career Development and Contemporary Visual Artists: An Investigation of Cairns

11 :35 am – 12 :05 pm Louise Poland & Deborah Jordan ‘The only way to get publicity for a novel’: A Publishing History of Thea Astley

Annie Mitchell The Musical History of Paronella Park

12:05 pm – 12 :35 pm Noela McNamara The Literary Transformation of Transgenerational Memories

Barbara Cheshire Landscape as Experience: An Integration of Senses and Soul

1 2 : 3 5 p m – 1 : 2 5 p m Lunch

1 : 2 5 p m – 2 : 4 0 p m (Singapore 11:25 am – 12:40)

Keynote Address Two: Paul Carter

Archipelago Consciousness: Traditions and Transformations of ‘Worlding’ in the Maritime Tropics

Room 1 with video-conference link to JCU Singapore

2 : 4 0 p m – 3 : 0 0 p m Afternoon Tea

3 : 0 0 p m – 5 : 0 0 p m (Singapore 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm)

Session C: Room 1 with video-conference link to JCU Singapore


Neil Anderson & Tzemin Chung; Co-authors: Munkew Leong & Waiyin Choy Scaffolding Singaporean students to write vividly in the ‘mother tongue’, Mandarin


Hurriyet Babacan Migration, Continuity and Creativity in the Tropics


Angela Meyer & Stephen Naylor The Paradise Problem: Understanding the Tropics through Ideas and Images


Narayan Gopalkrishnan Refugees, Multicultural Arts, Trauma, Integrated Mental Health

6 : 3 0 p m – 1 0 : 0 0 p m Conference Dinner

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | Friday, July 05, 2013

8 : 3 0 a m – 9 : 0 0 p m Registration, Coffee

9 : 0 0 a m – 1 0 : 1 5 a m Keynote Address Three: Barbara Creed

The Tropical Exotic: Nénette at the Jardin des Plantes Ménagerie

Room 1

10:15 am – 10 :35 am Morning Tea

1 0 : 3 5 a m - 1 2 : 3 5 p m

Session D: Room 1 Session E: Room 2

10:35 am – 11 :05 am Amy Forbes Tropical Imaginings and Romantic Nostalgia: 75 Years of Giliw Ko and the Colonial Gaze

Doug Hunt Writing about Blackbirding

11:05 am – 11 :35 am Craig Middleton What cinematic devices can be used to portray mental distress?

Jan Wegner Tropical Visions in 19th Century Queensland Agriculture

11 :35 am – 12 :05 pm Ariella Van Luyn Tropical Landscapes in a Digital Realm

Rosalie Shephard ‘Immaculate’ Perception of the Tropics: The Absence of Women in Envisioning the ‘White North’

12:05 pm – 12:35 pm Robert Johnstone Creating a Coral Symphony

Jessica Gildersleeve TBA

1 2 : 3 5 p m – 1 : 2 5 p m Lunch

1 : 2 5 p m – 2 : 4 0 p m Keynote Address Four: Peter Pierce

Literature of the Pacific, Mainly Australian

Room 1

2 : 4 0 p m – 3 : 0 0 p m Afternoon Tea

3 : 0 0 p m – 5 : 0 0 p m Session F: Room 1

Extra Session if needed

3 : 0 0 p m – 3 : 3 0 p m Deb Anderson Bated Breath: Living with Stories of Cyclone in a Climate-Change World

3 : 3 0 p m – 4 : 0 0 p m Hazel Menehira A Teacher, A Totem, and A True Tropical Story

4 : 0 0 p m – 4 : 3 0 p m Sally Pryor Tropicality and Creative Practice: Temperature, Temperament and Temporality

4 : 3 0 p m – 5 : 0 0 p m Therese Evert Life

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme |

Presenters and Abstracts

Presenter: Michael Ackland Title: Going Bush or Going Troppo?: Possession and the Topos of the Painter-Seer in the work of Patrick White and David Malouf Abstract: Determined to overcome ‘the Great Australian Emptiness’, both Patrick White and David Malouf have sought to reveal the extraordinary in the mundane, as well as new ways of laying claim to, and possessing, the continent. This paper examines one chapter in this larger project: namely, their struggle with inherited concepts of the indigenous and of Australia as a perennial rubbish dump. First the topographical, ethnographical and socio-economical issues feeding mainstream attitudes towards these topics are briefly outlined, then the focus of the paper shifts to White’s audacious but flawed efforts to achieve a transvaluation of these stereotypes in Riders in the Chariot. This is followed by an examination of Malouf’s complementary endeavours, a generation later, in Harland’s Half Acre, which reflect radically changing attitudes in the Australian invader-settler community, and where the locus of change, the site of the crucial rite of passage, shifts from the indeterminate outback to the Queensland tropics. Biography: Professor Michael Ackland is the Margaret and Colin Roderick Chair of English at James Cook University. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Deb Anderson Title: Bated Breath: Living with Stories of Cyclone in a Climate-Change World Abstract: Research shows once climate change “becomes something people can feel, see, or experience close to home”, it becomes all the more meaningful. Sally Bingham, “Climate Change: A Moral Issue,” Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change, eds Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 163.

This paper is founded on the premise that Wet Tropics residents’ experience of extreme weather presents a poignant opportunity to generate new knowledge on the core interpretive problems of climate change. A pilot study is under way in far north Queensland to document, contextualise, interpret and represent how people live with stories of cyclone. Drawing upon oral histories of living memorynotably, of Yasi (2011) and Larry (2006)this paper explores a constructive and imaginative engagement with climate. While mapping the environmental, political and economic forces shaping apprehension of extreme weather in the Wet Tropics, this work argues for the cultural and historical dimensions of climateto deepen understanding in the national climate conversation ‘beyond’ the science. Biography: Deb Anderson’s fascination with storytelling and climate likely stems from having grown up in the Wet Tropics, on the Atherton Tablelands. An oral historian and journalist, Deb Anderson spent a decade writing for The Age in Melbourne before joining Monash University to teach and research on issues of environment, media and culture. In her PhD she recorded stories for Museum

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | Victoria on the lived experience of drought and shifting perceptions of climate change in southeast Australia. With a new project on cyclone and climate change, her focus has shifted back north. Contact: [email protected]

Presenters: Neil Anderson & Tzemin Chung; Co-authors: Munkew Leong & Waiyin Choy Title: Scaffolding Singaporean students to write vividly in the ‘mother tongue’, Mandarin. Abstract: This paper details results from a three-year study investigating how to help students in Singapore write vivid compositions in Mandarin, the Chinese ‘mother tongue’. Mastery of the mother tongue by Singaporean students has become an important government priority in recent years. The strategies included the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) mediated scaffolds such as collaborative mind maps and online peer editing to help students learn micro-writing strategies. This paper outlines the process of using various scaffolds to support students to learn and apply the action chain micro-writing strategy. A class of 31 Primary 4 from a neighbourhood school participated in this study. Findings indicated that students were very enthusiastic about writing in the ICT-mediated environment. Contrary to the teacher’s initial belief, students could be scaffolded to write action chains quickly. Findings highlighted the potential of scaffolding students in learning small chunks of writing strategy in an ICT-mediated environment that enabled them to practice these strategies in their composition writing until they could master and apply them. These micro-writing strategies gradually built up to a complex set of skills, including expressive writing. Moreover, students enjoyed working in groups and editing their peers’ work online. This showed that peers could be engaged as scaffolders in the classroom to free up the teacher’ time, allowing the teacher more time to spend with students who were not performing well. Keywords: collaborative learning, pedagogical issues, elementary education, teaching/learning strategies, applications in subject areas Biography: Tzemin Chung, Neil Anderson, Munkew Leong & Waiyin Choy are from James Cook University and National University of Singapore. This paper will be presented by Professor Neil Anderson and Dr Tzemin Chung Contact: [email protected] & [email protected]

Presenter: Hurriyet Babacan Title: Migration, Continuity and Creativity in the Tropics Abstract: Tropical Australia is a multicultural mosaic fashioned by various waves of migration and ancient Indigenous cultures. Migration, cultural diversity and multiculturalism have been at the heart of nation building in Australia. Tropical Australia represents a unique blend of cultures, landscapes and traditions. Stories of migration, by the host society and by the immigrants, themselves are embedded with celebratory and fearful narratives. Immigrants to Tropical Australia have used their culture, arts, food and handcrafts as the initial point of building bridges with the society they found themselves transposed into. The early policies of multiculturalism were founded on recognition of cultural practice. This paper explores the role of creativity and multicultural arts in contemporary Tropical Australia from an enriching or a critical perspective. It is argued that the role of multicultural arts has been underestimated in Australia generally. The building of a pluralistic and inclusive society requires genuine representation (and voice) of all groups, shared experiences and a narrative that

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | supports a deeper understanding of diversity. Using examples from Tropical Australia, the paper posits that multicultural arts and creativity are important elements of identity development across generations of immigrant families and communities, legacy transmission and cultural preservation, social cohesion, social inclusion and citizenship and civic participation. Biography: Prof Hurriyet Babacan is a Professorial Research Fellow at James Cook University and the former foundation director of the Cairns Institute. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Crystal Bustos Title: Career Development and Contemporary Visual Artists: An Investigation of Cairns, Australia Abstract: The regional city of Cairns in Queensland has an active contemporary visual arts community. In addition, there is local, state and federal government support for the sector. However, in various forums and discussions, numerous visual artists have raised questions about the current processes of developing career pathways. Hence, in order to explore issues relevant to career development opportunities, interviews were held with gallery directors and curators. Surveys were also sent to contemporary visual artists to seek their views and insights. The data were analysed by a stakeholder group, after which key themes were compared across the groups to identify similarities and differences. The findings reveal that visual artists, curators and gallery directors have contrasting views on career development. Further, the data reveal that there are numerous opportunities to create clearer pathways and developmental opportunities for contemporary visual artists based in Cairns. Biography: Crystal Bustos is currently completing a Bachelor of Creative Industries Honours degree at James Cook University in Cairns, under the guidance of Professor Ryan Daniel. Winner of a School of Creative Arts Honours bursary, Crystal has a background in graphic arts, photography, media and visual arts. She has played an active role in the arts sector in Cairns, co-directing an artist run initiative, working with exhibiting artists and she is currently participating as an assistant curator at the Tanks Art Centre. Crystal has interests in the creative industries and in particular the improvement of opportunities for artists in Cairns and the Far North. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Paul Carter Title: Archipelago Consciousness: Traditions and Transformations of ‘Worlding’ in the Maritime Tropics Abstract: The focus of this address is on the potential of tropical geographies to inform and transform western epistemologies. The Humboldt brothers establish an identification of the tropics with (simultaneously) the origin of evolutionary development and its finest, most diversified realization. In contrast, an imperial overlay of continentally imagined national territories has, particularly in the Indonesian, Malaysian and Philippine archipelago, imposed a counter-narrative of truncated regional development and exacerbated social disenfranchisement. This paper looks at the scope to

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | reconfigure ocean connections between formerly connected tropical communities. It suggests that such a project does not drive towards a unitary outcome (a new raft of international legislation, for example) but towards a radically different model of coexistence. In this the performance of sociability is indistinguishable from the protocols governing travel. The emergence of ‘archipelago consciousness’ has, it is proposed, direct implications for the formation of creative communities able to cooperate because of their commitment to managing complexity in concrete situations. The communication thus evolved is, like the navigation of the archipelago, dialogical, poetically mediated and fluid. Biography: Paul Carter is a writer, artist and philosopher. His new book is Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). He is currently working on a project called ‘Ocean Connections and New Cultures of Care’ with Charles Darwin University. He is Professor of Design (Urbanism) at RMIT University. Contact: [email protected]

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | Presenter: Barbara Cheshire Title: Landscape as Experience: An Integration of Senses and Soul Abstract: The extent to which experiential and spiritual perceptions of the senses - in response to an event or place - can be transformed into visual art as a vehicle of communication, is yet to be understood. This paper, therefore, examines if a cohesive physical representation from a structured, visual art system is capable of developing a Christian experiential visual language that communicates a sensorial and transcendental experience of place; in this case North Queensland. Commentary on the physical representation subsequently tests if a holistic integration of one human’s sensorial response to place and an internal experience of Christian spirituality in that place can be communicated to the viewer through an art exhibition. The analysis found evidence to suggest that a spiritual essence of place - seeing place from inside and out - could be communicated and experienced by viewers of the exhibition. Biography: Barbara Cheshire is a visual artist and arts educator from Townsville, North Queensland. Her current professional artwork focuses on the visual language of Christian spirituality and which forms the basis of her practice-based PhD research. The research considers how the awareness of the integration of the senses and spirituality can help us understand the creative process itself and to communicate the spiritual essence of place. Over the course of Barbara’s life she has considered the recognition of a complete human experience; the marriage of the physical and spiritual connection through various cultural symbolic methodologies. Works on paper reflecting this aim were awarded the Medici Medal in Florence Italy at the Biennial of International Contemporary Art, as well as several other national Art Awards. Barbara’s practice has slowly shifted to an experiential encoding which has opened up a very different form of visual communication. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Barbara Creed Title: The Tropical Exotic: Nénette at the Jardin des Plantes Ménagerie Abstract: This paper will explore the tropical exotic in relation to the widespread European fascination with the orangutan, which intensified after the publication of Darwin’s classic work On The Origin of Species in 1859. Discussion will focus on the recent documentary film, Nénette directed by Nicholas Philibert in 2010. Born in Borneo, Nénette is the oldest inhabitant of the Jardin des Plantes where Rousseau painted his exotic jungle scenes. It will examine the establishment of the first zoos, and private collections of Tropical flora and fauna. The paper will argue that these various places of exhibition create an uncanny zone in which the European subject is able to encounter the ape as human double/other while not necessarily reaffirming an anthropocentric world view. It will also explore John Berger’s essay, Why Look at Animals? in relation to the tropical/exotic. Texts discussed will include: Rousseau’s jungle paintings; Gillian’s Beer’s paper ‘Darwin’s Backbone Shiver’; Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue; Robert Florey’s film of Poe’s novel; H.G. Well’s Island of Doctor Moreau; Max Ernst’s paintings of tropical jungles; and the documentary film Nénette. Biography: Barbara Creed is a graduate of Monash and La Trobe Universities. Her doctoral thesis was on the cinema of horror, feminism and psychoanalysis. This was published as The Monstrous-

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993) and has been republished five times, and recently translated into Korean (Alterity Press, 2008). Her areas of research include contemporary film, surrealism, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, the impact of Darwinian theory on the cinema, the cinema of human rights and human/animal studies. She has recently published Darwin's Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema (MUP, 2009) and Phallic Panic: Film, Horror & the Primal Uncanny (MUP, 2005). She has also co-edited the anthologies Body Trade (2001) and Don't Shoot Darling (1987). Her articles have been translated into various foreign languages including Swedish, Italian, Russian, Japanese and German. She has been invited to speak at various overseas universities including Oxford, Manchester, Lancaster, Paris, UCLA, Frankfurt, Lancaster, Hawaii, Hanoi, the British Film Institute and the Freud Institute, London. Barbara is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is on a number of international editorial boards and acts as a reader for various international publishing houses and journals. She is an international assessor for the Australian Research Council. Barbara is an active figure in the film community as a film reviewer, speaker and writer. She has served on the Boards of the Melbourne Writers Week, the Melbourne International Film Festival and the VCA School of Film and Television. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Ryan Daniel Title: Creativity and Creative Industries in Cairns: Views from the Field Abstract: The regional tropical city of Cairns, most well known as a major location for tourism, is also a vibrant creative place in northern Australia. Creativity and the creative industries in Cairns, however, have received little research attention since the turn of the 21st century. Hence, this preliminary study seeks to explore key features of the sector and the participants involved. Survey data was initially obtained from 78 creative industries stakeholders, after which interviews were held with 20 of these participants to further explore key issues. The findings are significant and which reveal the creative qualities and strengths of the city and its region, a range of impediments to creativity, as well as numerous opportunities to grow the creative industries sector in Cairns. Biography: Professor Ryan Daniel has interests in creative industries in northern Australia, multidisciplinary collaboration, and continuous improvement in higher education arts environments. He maintains an active publishing profile in leading journals such as the British Journal of Music Education, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, CoDesign and Music Education Research. Recent book chapters include those in Articulating Design Thinking (Libri) and Music Business and the Experience Economy: the Australasian Case (Springer). Professor Daniel has twice been awarded the JCU Vice Chancellor’s citation for outstanding contributions to student learning as well as winning a national citation award from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Therese Evert Title: Life

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | Abstract: In writing the tropical imagination the writer posits herself in “one of those extravagant pole homes surrounded by five acres of rainforest,” and reflects upon what it means to really “live” in the rainforest. After being attacked by bugs during the night she inspects the damage the next morning and wonders whether the rainforest is “pushing her into a shift.” Her introspection leads her to think about; a) the fertility of the rainforest and her own declining fertility, b) why she continues to live there now that the “old people have gone” and c) what it really means to “belong” to a place. The narrator takes the audience, through a performance that incorporates acting, theatre sport, and photography on a journey from the prolifically fertile rainforests of North Queensland to the deceivingly barren landscapes of Central Western Queensland connecting them, through water, in a dream where the protagonist learns that a sense of belonging can be found in both land and kin. Biography: Therese Evert was born in 1960, in Winton, Central-Western Queensland, where her family owned and operated The Royal Theatre, an open-air cinema. She attended boarding school in Townsville and worked as a School Dental Therapist in Mt. Isa, eventually settling in Cairns in 1987 where she worked for herself as an opal cutter. After fifteen years in retail she now works with her husband in their manufacture/wholesale business, Opal Art. In 2011 she completed a Bachelor of Arts degree and is currently studying English Honours at James Cook University. The West, cinema, boarding school, and current affairs all feature in the short story Life. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Carole Ferrier Title: Jean Devanny’s Contestation of Patriarchal Whiteness in her Fiction Set in North Queensland from 1936 Abstract: Devanny was a largely forgotten and disregarded figure in Australian political and literary history by the 1960s, but the newly revitalised feminist, race-conscious and postcolonial analyses of the 1970s allowed her work a new relevance. Devanny’s first novels were written in Wellington in the 1920s, and some feature Maori men in relationships with white women. Her Queensland novels begin when she visited the North engaged in political support for the Weil’s disease strike, out of which came Sugar Heaven (1936), and then Paradise Flow (1938)—both of which show white women choosing Migrant men (Italian and Jugoslav) over their white husbands—and after that, a planned cane industry trilogy, of which only the first volume, Cindie (1949), in which the white lady of the house has sex with a South Sea Islander indentured worker, would be published. The (also unpublished) “The Pearlers” offers a depiction of a white patriarch in simultaneous relationships with white and Indigenous women on Thursday Island, where she spent some time in 1948. Devanny moved to Townsville in 1950 to live; she published very little after that, although the already written Travels in North Queensland came out in 1951. The paper will consider how far Devanny can be viewed as working with an early style of 1990s “whiteness theory”, and also how, in this regard, one might think about her depiction (often scanty) of Indigenous characters in her north Queensland fictions. Biography: Carole Ferrier has degrees from London and Auckland, and is Professor of Literature and Women's Studies in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at The University of Queensland, where she has worked since 1973. She has published widely in the field of women's and gender studies, including ten books; among them, Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth Century Australian Women’s Fiction; As Good As a Yarn With You; Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | (after twenty years’ research), and Radical Brisbane. She has been editor of the international journal, Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women's Liberation (since 1975) and the Australian Women's Book Review (for the past ten years). Current research includes a book on Australasian women's fiction in transnational frames; a book on New Zealand women's fiction; two edited collections of the letters between Vance and Nettie Palmer, The Courtship Correspondence and The Palmers and Spain. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Amy Forbes Title: Tropical Imaginings and Romantic Nostalgia: 75 Years of Giliw Ko and the Colonial Gaze Abstract: In 1998, Australia restored the 1939 film musical, Giliw Ko, the earliest extant film ever produced in the Philippines. Through its National Film and Sound Archive, the film was presented as a gift to the Filipino people to mark 100 years of independence. Celebrating its 75th year of production next year, the film as gift is ironical as it can be argued that the Philippines never gained independence, at least not from the strong colonizing effects of over 50 years of US rule. Giliw Ko tackles themes of a people’s infatuation and confusion over Hollywood images and what it means to be cultured and Westernized. They struggle to locate themselves in their own Western imaginings and hark to a romantic nostalgia for preserving the equally imagined tropical exotic that was the Philippines. Biography: Dr Amy Forbes is the Head of Journalism studies at James Cook University. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Jessica Gildersleeve Title: TBA Abstract: TBA Biography: TBA Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Narayan Gopalkrishnan Title: Refugees, Multicultural Arts, Trauma, Integrated Mental Health Abstract: Refugees are people who move involuntarily from their country of residence often witnessing disasters, wars and the deaths of immediate family members prior to fleeing. In each of these instances, refugees experience traumatic situations that provoke strong reactions and emotions. This is often exacerbated by difficult refugee processing systems, detention and waiting in refugee camps, all of which make migration patterns and settlement processes for refugees very different from those of other migrants. The psychological effects of the trauma experienced by refugees tend to be enduring and long-lasting. This paper explores the link between refugee mental health and wellbeing and multicultural arts in the tropics. The contention of the paper is that multicultural arts allows for sensitivity to a person’s identity, heritage and experience and is an important component of healing and well-being. Drawing from research undertaken with refugees, the paper uncovers how multicultural arts enables

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | a dialogue around issues with forced migration, powerlessness, humiliation and anger and promotes social inclusion and belonging. The paper concludes by arguing that multicultural and multidimensional approaches are needed to achieve an integrated approach to the mental health of refugees. Biography: Narayan Gopalkrishnan is an internationally recognized academic with extensive experience, in Australia and overseas working in universities, NGOs and the private sector over the last 30 years. He lectures at James Cook University in the areas of community work, working with diverse communities, and mental health. Narayan was formerly the Founding Director of the Centre for Multicultural and Community Development, an academic research centre of the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, which focused on research and development relating to multiculturalism and community development. Narayan’s teaching and research interests relate to Community Development, Community and Ecological Sustainability, Cultural Diversity and Multiculturalism, Social Determinants of Health and Well Being, Integrated Medicine and Complementary Therapies, and he has published widely in these areas. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Doug Hunt Title: Writing about Blackbirding Abstract: This year marks 150 years since the arrival in Brisbane of the first indentured Pacific Island labourers in August 1863. Over the following forty years, some 60,000 ‘kanakas’ came to Queensland to work on agricultural plantations, mainly in the sugar industry. In both the oral tradition of the descendants of those workers, and Australian mainstream popular culture, their recruitment is presented as ‘blackbirding’. This reflects a belief that the Islanders were all abducted, coerced, or at best deceived into boarding recruiting vessels, thence transported to the colony where they worked in slave-like conditions. Blackbirding has spawned a substantial literature, encompassing contemporary accounts, history of variable scholarship, some works of fiction, and the memoirs of Islanders themselves. Against the prominent depiction of kidnapping, however, since the 1970s historians have argued that most Islanders willingly participated in the labour trade. This paper samples the literature in an attempt to explain this dichotomy of understandings. Biography: Associate Professor Doug Hunt teaches Politics at the Cairns Campus of James Cook University. His research interests revolve around employment relations policy, labour history and Pacific migration. Recent publications include papers on the early years of the Pacific labour trade. Doug is also honorary consultant to the Vanuatu Cultural Council's Blackbirding Project and is a member of the historical advisory panel to the Australian South Sea Islanders 150 Project. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Robert Johnstone

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | Title: Creating a Coral Symphony Abstract: There is a rich history of artists representing the visible world through imagery. What of the invisible? What if you could harness hidden voices of the natural environment? This paper describes the background and development of Coral Symphony - a Sound Art installation unveiling voices from the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. Installation constituent materials evolved from the sonification of ecological data over twenty years, supplemented with field recordings. Artistic sonification is an emerging artistic endeavour at the intersection of mathematics and music, which sees big data transformed into sound. The work exploits the power of electronic art to work as provocateur; highlighting ecological challenges and issues. It sonically manifests, accents and illuminates the natural environment. Can a radical transformation of nature positively impact on how we engage with our ecology? Can Sound Art function as an artistic lens through which to view ecological change? Biography: Robert Johnstone is a Masters student at James Cook University where he is the William Williams scholar. He uses sonification techniques to reveal the unseen connections between people and the environment. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Richard Lansdown Title: ‘Dust in the Balance, Atoms in the Gale’: Darwinist Intimations in Pelican Island Abstract: James Montgomery was born into the Moravian Brotherhood in Ayrshire in 1771. An abolitionist and defender of chimney sweeps, in later life he was twice imprisoned for sedition (for celebrating the Fall of the Bastille in 1795, and criticising the magistracy in 1796). He edited Sheffield’s leading newspaper, the Iris, between 1794 and 1825, and was also a hymn-writer — and a poet, who published lengthy items like The World Before the Flood in 1812 and Greenland in 1819. These cosmic and topographic interests came together in a nine-canto poem of 1828, Pelican Island. Coinciding as it largely did with the era of the Napoleonic wars and the restoration of the monarchies thereafter, the Romantic period was not one in which a good deal of Pacific exploration was carried out. One exception was Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia between 1801 and 1803, during which Flinders entered shallow Nepean Bay on Kangaroo Island, off present-day South Australia — a massive colony for pelicans:

Flocks of old birds were sitting upon the beaches of the lagoon, and it appeared that the islands were their breeding places; not only so, but from the number of skeletons and bones there scattered, it should seem that they had for ages been selected for the closing scene of their existence. Certainly none more likely to be free from disturbance of every kind could have been chosen, than these islets in a hidden lagoon of an uninhabited island, situate upon an unknown coast near the antipodes of Europe; nor can any thing be more consonant to the feelings, if pelicans have any, than quickly to resign their breath, whilst surrounded by their progeny, and in the same spot where they first drew it.

This passage went on to become the inspiration for Pelican Island: an amibitious attempt on Montgomery’s part to reconcile orthodox Christian belief with the evidence of earth’s antiquity apparently provided by a discovery like Flinders’. Montgomery still clings to the Biblical explanations

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | of such things: that the age of the earth is measured in thousands of years, not millions; and that anomalies can be accounted for by Noah’s flood. And the poem as a whole brings us through pre-history up to primitive humanity, which instinctively bows to God due to the beauty of creation. But the earlier cantos, dealing (erroneously, but not completely so) with Pelican Island’s origins as a coral reef have a genuinely Darwinian appetite for time and for natural competition, the cruelty of which causes the author some disquiet, but also wonder. Pelican Island is ‘set’ on Kangaroo Island, which is far from the tropics: but it concentrates with great imaginative vigour on the birth of coral islands, as coralline activity was understood in the late 1820s. So it remains an obscure, but powerful, instance in the history of what we would now understand as a peculiarly tropical phenomenon. Biography: Richard Lansdown is Associate Professor of English, James Cook University, Cairns. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Noela McNamara Title: The Literary Transformation of Transgenerational Memories Abstract: Artistic and cultural representations of space, place, memory, and belonging are some of the fundamental aspects of fictional narratives. This paper focuses on how the tropics evolve as a place of belonging in Terri Janke’s Butterfly Song through literary transformation of generational memories of personal experience and historical fact. The notion of the tropics as ‘different’ is examined through complex relationships between the place where the protagonist, Tarena Shaw, lives in Sydney and the place that she calls home, Cairns. Family stories and layers of memory unfold in contemporary cultural life to ensure the return of a butterfly broach lost for nearly forty years. Components of culture, a love story, a connection of things to ancestors and people, and history of the Torres Straits and Cairns combine in Janke’s novel to demonstrate how multiple perspectives of place and memory can enrich the literary imagination and in turn, enlighten Australian readers to the historical past and present life of tropical North Queensland. Biography: Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Hazel Menehira Title: A Teacher, A Totem, and A True Tropical Story Abstract: A transformative spiritual experience with an Aboriginal rainforest family was not on the radar in 1999 when Hazel Menehira spent some spectacular months in Kuranda, Far North Queensland working with the Aboriginal Mayi Wunba (Native Honey Bee) Dance Troupe. The aim of this visit was to enhance the vocal strengths of the performance and to contribute text and dialogue required within the culture to include female dancers in the programme. This is my perspective of the cross cultural creative and spiritual impact of it. Embraced by the rainforest family this antipodean writer resident in Cairns since 2001 was in rich story territory. She has drawn on this experience and also her affiliated Maori cultural background to present stories grounded in unique indigenous values often rooted in past eras. You will hear some extracts from one such story called Hunting Grounds. It is fictional but many aspects of it resonate with the personal account given to me of one part of an

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | Djabugay elder’s ritual passage into manhood. The spiritual reconnection with this episode of my life came to the fore recently whilst writing my memoirs. Biography: Hazel Menehira (FTCL. ANZDA. RTSCA) is a Fellow of Trinity College, London, and an internationally recognized speech and drama teacher, examiner and adjudicator. A member of both the New Zealand and Australian Society of Authors, and Book Creator’s Circle (Cairns), Hazel’s background includes 50 years in journalism, writing educational text books, short stories, reviews and poetry, as well as a career in professional theatre. Her published books include Snowbird Collectables; Three Dramatic Decades--Four Seasons Professional Theatre, 1970-2000 ;Vocal Enrichment--Enlightenment Through Voice (Interactive Publications, Brisbane) and a historical novel The Seer Stone. In the last four years she has published Beguiled; Blast Off; Kowhai Park Community Success Story; and two more books of poetry for children. A resident in Cairns since 2001 Hazel is a mentor for new and aspiring writers and a workshop tutor. Nothing as Posh as a Memoir will be released for her 80th birthday. Web: http://www.bookcreatorscircle.com.au/a/Writers/HAZEL_MENEHIRA Contact: [email protected]

Presenters: Angela Meyer & Stephen Naylor

Title: The Paradise Problem: Understanding the Tropics through Ideas and Images

Abstract: For all intents and purposes Australian art is predicated on a European paradigm. Our history is written through a European gaze whereby the Antipodes could never be more than an imitation of the Mother Country and would always be imagined through a narrowly defined lens. The work by Australian art historians such as Bernard Smith and Robert Hughes generated a foundation on which to classify and compartmentalise Australian painting from colonial times through to the contemporary, within a range of Western norms. Despite some acknowledgement of the Pacific by Smith (1960) and some visitations by established southern artists in a fleeting flirtation with the North as an adventure in a tropical exotic paradise (gathering source material to be painted back home in studios of the temperate zone), there has been little reference of the contributions of contemporary painters working within the tropical regions of northern Australia. This research challenges some of the late 19th century and early 20th century filters established by the painters Gauguin, Matisse and Henri Rousseau in defining the tropics as paradise, through the presentation of data collected from the selection of artists working in the tropics, teasing out the contradictions within the work of Humboldt, Said and Felix Driver. Biography: Angela Meyer is currently undertaking a PhD titled Tropical Paradise: its light and its shadows, she is also an established painter in the Cairns region. Prof Stephen Naylor is the campus Dean James Cook University Singapore and currently Supervising Angela Meyer in her PhD. His career demonstrates active participation in education, teaching & learning and the creative arts for more than 30 years.

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | Contact: mailto:[email protected] & [email protected]

Presenter: Craig Middleton Title: What cinematic devices can be used to portray mental distress? Abstract: The project is a platform to explore primarily, the representation of symptoms associated with mental illness in film. By using the disciplines of film production as a guide, the research may lead to ‘new ways’ of representing mental illness. The outcome of this research will be a screenplay and detailed shot list, for a short film that deals with mental health issues. The challenge is the juxtaposition of faithfully depicting the subjective reality of mental illness in the dramatic format of narrative cinema. A potential outcome of this “ping-pong” is a filmmakers guide to portraying mental illness. The guide can contribute to the anti-stigma discourse by providing a resource to filmmakers interested in portraying mental illness and to media critics as a tool in their evaluation of on-screen portrayals of mental illness. Creative practices that deal with the representation of mental illness potentially have significant social value and relevance. The literature review indicates there is little resource for filmmakers interested in portraying mental illness. My personal motivation is to develop greater understanding and skills as a practicing filmmaker. Biography: Craig Middleton is a cineaste and an avant-garde filmmaker. A graduate of the University of Wolverhampton (UK) in Electronic Media, he worked in television broadcasting in both London and Sydney. He currently lectures in the School of Creative Arts at JCU and is looking to upgrade his Masters project to PhD level. His filmmaking goal is to produce his first narrative short film from the resulting screenplay. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Annie Mitchell, Title: The Musical History of Paronella Park Abstract: I am conducting research about the musical history of Paronella Park, its contribution to local culture, themes of migration and tourism development. The paper will also evaluate Paronella Park's ongoing contribution to tourism and cultural life in topical North Queensland in the light of its 75th anniversary in 2010 and the musical theatre show that was produced and performed to commemorate this event. My research aligns with the Tropics of the Imagination Conference themes of: Creative Arts in the tropics, voyage and migration in the tropics, ethnic subjectivities in the tropics and the 'tropical exotic". Biography: Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Peter Pierce

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | Title: Literature of the Pacific, Mainly Australian. Abstract: This lecture is in some ways the ‘lost’ chapter of The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009), one eventually not written because the projected author could find not enough literary material even in that vast Pacific Ocean, or perhaps found – as mariners have – only far separated specks in that ocean. Yet Australian literature about the nation’s Pacific littoral and the islands within the ocean and the ocean itself is varied, considerable, and often eccentric. Our greatest drinking song is Barry Humphries’s ‘The Old Pacific Sea’. The Japs and the jungle are the hallmarks of fiction, poetry and reportage of the Pacific War of 1942-5. New Guinea has attracted such writers as James McAuley, Peter Ryan, Trevor Shearston, Randolph Stow and Drusilla Modjeska. The short stories of Louis Becke are the most extensive and iconoclastic writing about the Pacific by any Australian. Yet the literature of the Pacific littoral seems thinner than that of the Indian Ocean. The map on the title page of Rolf Boldrewood’s A Modern Buccaneer (1894) shows those afore-mentioned specks in a vast expanse of water. What aesthetic challenges have Pacific writing posed and how have they been met? Have the waters of the Pacific satisfied Australians as a near offshore playground but defeated wider efforts of the imagination? Biography: Peter Pierce is Adjunct Professor in the School of Journalism, Australian and Indigenous Studies at Monash University. He was Professor of Australian Literature at James Cook University from 1996-2006. His books include Australian Melodramas: The Fiction of Thomas Keneally (1994), The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (1999) and, as editor, The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009). He has written extensively about literature of the Pacific, especially from the time of the war in New Guinea, and about art, notably the paintings of Ray Crooke. He is currently editing and revising once more a history of his mother’s time in Tasmania. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Louise Poland & Deborah Jordan Title: ‘The only way to get publicity for a novel’: A Publishing History of Thea Astley Abstract: ‘I’m beginning to think the only way to get publicity for a novel is to tear into Queensland’ wrote Thea Astley to Penguin Books Publishing Director Brian Johns in 1983. Astley had been interviewed for the University of Queensland newssheet and asked what she thought of the city of Cairns, to which she had replied that it was ‘full of Real Estate Agents and hookers’. ‘All hell broke loose’ she wrote, resulting in more publicity than she bargained for. This letter to Johns was one of several in which she expressed her frustration at the inadequate publicity given to her books, particularly those set in Queensland, by either Penguin or the University of Queensland Press (UQP). In a recent discussion of Astley’s progression as a writer, Susan Sheridan suggests that Brisbane in the 1950s was a backwater, and observes that it was rather surprising to find a teacher, and a woman, emerging from Brisbane to become one of Australia’s most significant writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet if Brisbane was a literary backwater, what of the tropical far north where Astley not only worked as a teacher in the mid-1940s but also retired in the 1980s as a critically acclaimed Australian novelist and short fiction writer, but one who was still little known to the general public? This paper focuses directly on Thea Astley’s publishing history from the time of her involvement with Brisbane’s avant garde in the 1960s, her early inclusion in regional collections, and her emergence as a Miles Franklin prize-winning author, through the enabling pen and advocacy of

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | one of Angus & Robertson’s finest fiction editors, Beatrice Davis, to the establishment in the 1980s of Astley’s ultimate author-publisher relationship with Penguin Books and her own overseas literary agent. It will also examine the publishing trajectory of selected novels released and re-issued by UQP and Penguin Books, and revisit the divides between nation and region, avant garde and the use of the exotic, and the enabling inspiration and promotion of difference and place, in the context of a gendered history of publishing and an assessment of Angus & Robertson, Penguin Books and the University of Queensland Press. Biography: Dr Deborah Jordan is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the National Centre for Australian Studies in the School of Journalism, Australian and Indigenous Studies at Monash University. She was previously Senior Research Fellow in English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland where she was engaged on both the ARC Discovery Project ‘Australian Books, American Publishers’ and the ARC Discovery Project, ‘Australian Literary Publishing and its Economies, 1965–95’. Dr Louise Poland is a Lecturer in the School of Journalism, Australian and Indigenous Studies at Monash University where she teaches in the Graduate Publishing and Editing Program. Prior to her appointment at Monash, she held an ARC research fellowship on the ARC Discovery Project, ‘Australian Literary Publishing and its Economies, 1965–95’, in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. Contact: [email protected] & [email protected]

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | Presenter: Sally Pryor Title: Tropicality and Creative Practice: Temperature, Temperament and Temporality Abstract: This paper will explore a range of factors affecting creative practice in the tropics through reference to the experience of the author and selected local and international artists. Major themes include: the impact of heat and humidity on the creative process, the particular qualities of tropical light for the artist and the ephemerality of the tropical (art) object. The author will conclude with a short screening of her recent animated work, “Tropicality 1.1”. Biography: Dr Sally Pryor is an internationally award-winning new media artist, designer and lecturer in Media Design at the School of Creative Arts, JCU. Sally’s qualifications and experience cross a number of disciplines (science, computing, the arts), cultures (academia, business, hospitals) and locations (Australia, USA, Europe, North Africa). Sally has been working with computers since 1979 and was amongst the international pioneers in 3D computer animation and new media art. Sally’s PhD extended the Integrationist theory of human communication through the production of an interactive artwork, “Postcard From Tunis”, a personal portrait where users could learn to read basic Arabic. http://www.jcu.edu.au/soca/staff/JCU_096006.html Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Rosalie Shephard Title: ‘Immaculate’ Perception of the Tropics: The Absence of Women in Envisioning the ‘White North’ Abstract: The 19th Century Queensland government policy of closer settlement and settling the north coincided with the development and implementation of the new Federal government’s “white Australia” policy. Both government policies were developed amidst popular social ideology that white men could not successfully settle permanently and work in the hot tropical sun. The governments’ determined push to settle sparsely populated Australian tropical regions such as northern Queensland encouraged closer settlement with a largely agricultural vision of a white yeomanry on family farms. Political ideologies of the tropics encouraged settlement and population with white families, yet rarely actually mention white women and how the tropical conditions would affect them . Yet, given the frequent references to ‘families’, their participation was clearly expected, and subsequently overlooked and taken for granted, in achieving the vision. It almost appears that white males would produce those children in a reverse ‘immaculate conception’. This study looks at the absence of women from writings and photographs, and what these sources should/could have included had women been recognized. Biography: Rosalie Shephard is a PhD candidate at James Cook University where she is currently researching and writing her thesis Cultural landscape in the historical perspective of White settlement in the wet tropics: A Case Study of the Redlynch Valley. She is also a regular volunteer at the Cairns Historical Society, and has researched and written a History of the Cairns Motorboat Club. In her spare time she is involved in tracing and recording her family history Contact: [email protected]

Tropics of the Imagination Conference 2013 Programme | Presenter: Ariella Van Luyn Title: Tropical Landscapes in a Digital Realm Abstract: This presentation will describe the initial stages of an applied research project, Fostering Storytelling in the Tropics, which documents how digital place-based storytelling tools can be used to engage with and foster grassroots writing communities in the tropics, and how these technologies affect the creative writing craft. The project involves establishing a writers’ collective in collaboration with the Townsville Writers and Publishers Centre (TWPC) and inviting members of the group to work with the chief investigator to produce short stories using place-based technology. The stories produced will symbolically explore tropical landscapes.

Adam Koehler (2013) has stated that, in creative writing scholarship, ‘one set of concerns remains largely unaddressed: the ways in which creative writing, or creative writing studies, engages with, understands, responds to and thrives in an age of digital writing.’ This presentation will provide an overview of the literature on creative writing at the nexus of new digital technologies and representations of tropical landscapes. Biography: Dr Ariella Van Luyn completed a practice-led PhD in creative writing at the Queensland University of Technology. She now lectures in writing in the Department of English at JCU. Her PhD investigates the dialogue between fiction writing and oral history practice in Australia. Ariella is co-editor of LiNQ and chair of the editorial board of the Oral History Association of Australia Journal. She has articles published in OHAA Journal, Ejournalist and Text. Contact: [email protected]

Presenter: Jan Wegner Title: Tropical Visions in 19th Century Queensland Agriculture Abstract: In the 19th century Europeans establishing themselves in the Australian tropics were not bound by British ideas of agriculture and were thus receptive to a wider range of potential crops than in southern Australia. In tropical Queensland, agricultural writers enthusiastically endorsed several ideas for tropical agriculture: fibre and oil crops, rubber, flavourings such as vanilla and pepper, tropical fruits and nuts, beverage crops like tea and coffee. The resulting industries were small and short-lived, only sugar becoming commercially successful, but the visions are important for what they reveal about turn of the 20th century culture in Queensland. Writers imagined a society of smallholdings, worked by white farmers and their families, helped by mechanization to become sustainable and producing tropical ‘luxury’ crops of high value. Biography: Dr Jan Wegner teaches history on the Cairns Campus of JCU and has researched various topics in the social, economic and environmental history of tropical Queensland. Contact: [email protected]

Creating a Coral Symphony

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Transcript of Creating a Coral Symphony