The Archives

Historical Studies
Voices from the West End
06.02.12 | Permalink | Comment?

On a triangle of land that points out to sea at the mouth of the Swan River is Fremantle’s heritage district, the West End, renowned for its colonial architecture that includes the largest collection of heritage-listed buildings in Western Australia and its oldest public building, the Round House gaol (1831). Although Fremantle has often been threatened by the demands of redevelopment, today it is recognised as one of the world’s best preserved examples of a nineteenth-century port city and colonial townscape. ‘Freo’, as it is known locally, also has an exceptionally diverse multicultural community, lending a special character that is the legacy of its role as a historical gateway to Australia, the first point of contact for generations of migrants and visitors arriving by sea from Europe. This mix of cultures and traditions has shaped the life of the cosmopolitan city, which now has a population of close to 30,000.
Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Literary and Cartographic Projections
06.01.12 | Permalink | Comment?

The early novel was based upon and drew upon the textual traditions of descriptive travel writing, with the narrative structure of the novel mimicking the activity of travelling. The connection is so strong that travelling can be aligned with characteristics of narrative itself. As Paul Carter puts it, “voyaging and storytelling go together” (1998, p. 19). According to another critic, novels share a “spatial metaphor” with the accounts of voyages. The early novel, “more than any other genre,” is “spatial” (Freedman, 1968, p. 72). The spatial impulse is also illustrated when the protagonist takes on the role of the intrepid explorer, a position that removes the character from the familiarity of home and its known geographies and places them in unknown geographies as a discoverer.
Historical Studies
Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia
07.11.11 | Permalink | Comment?

Almost a decade in the making, the Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia, edited by Jenny Gregory and Jan Gothard, is now the most up to date and authoritative composite portrait of the state’s history. This work is a remarkable achievement. It is the result of a sustained collaborative effort that is a credit to the skill and energy of the editorial team and to the more than three hundred contributors, along with hundreds of expert readers. In 1912 J. S. Battye, the well-known State Librarian of Western Australia, produced the Cyclopedia of Western Australia: An Historical and Commercial Review, Descriptive and Biographical Facts, Figures and Illustrations, which remained a central reference resource for WA history throughout the twentieth century. The highly regarded volumes of the sesquicentenary series appeared in 1979, followed in 1981 by the influential A New History of Western Australia, edited by Tom Stannage.
Historical Studies, Life Writing, Literary Studies
Unearthing the Past
20.04.11 | Permalink | Comment?

When Hitler’s troops invaded and occupied the city of Kharkov in Ukraine, my grandparents Nadia, 26, and Petro, 30, had two young children, aged 7 and 5. My mother had not yet been born. In this tense and uncertain period it was unclear whether Ukraine would ultimately be controlled by Stalin or Hitler. There was nothing to recommend one over the other, they often said. Both regimes were brutal and both targeted Ukrainians. Mid-1943 marked a turning point—the end of their lives in Ukraine and the first stage of a journey into the unknown that led to their eventual arrival in Australia in 1949 as post-war refugees. They were packed into railway goods wagons with other Ukrainians and were taken from Kharkov, where they had built their world, to Dwikozy in Poland. This was the place of their first displacement from everything that made up their history and identity—homeland, language, culture, family, community, and career. Like many other refugees my grandparents attempted to compensate for the loss of their past by trying to recover it repeatedly years later in the stories that they told.
Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Virtual Voyages
25.04.10 | Permalink | Comment?

Born out of an ancient geographical theory of balance, the term ‘antipodes’ was first used to refer to the vast uncharted underworld of the southern hemisphere from a northern perspective. The principle behind this belief, as described in the Quarterly Review in the nineteenth century, was ‘that all the land, which had till then been discovered in the southern hemisphere, was insufficient to form a counterpoise to the weight of land in the northern half of the globe’. The idea of the antipodes as a counterbalance, though now remembered only as a peculiar, discredited theory, has been surprisingly influential as an imaginative concept. An antipodean expectancy filled minds, maps, novels and utopian plans, laying the foundations for perceptions of Oceania and Australasia that continue to impact on how this part of the world is seen from a distance as well as from within. The region of the antipodes has been occupied by European settlers and their descendants for a relatively short time. And yet, this brief period is set against a backdrop of one of the longest recorded histories of imagining prior to geographical discovery.
Communication and Media Studies, Historical Studies, Life Writing
Digital Biography
25.07.09 | Permalink | Comment?

This paper reflects on an emerging field that has no accepted name or boundaries but is described here as “digital biography.” The activities, formats, and genres associated with this field are rarely linked with life writing or traditional biographical studies. Rather, this field is seen as the domain of those concerned with digital privacy, copyright, data preservation, and identity management. Over the past decade or so, critics in various disciplines, mainly legal studies, information management, multimedia design, and IT development, as well as sociology, psychology, and marketing, have focused on the complexity of online identity. Though online identity has become such a significant focus of attention in these disciplines, few who study biography have discussed it. Indeed, as Nigel Hamilton points out, biography itself has had less attention than one might expect for a field that “has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years”, a field that, according to Carl Rollyson, is widely recognized as “the dominant non-fiction of our age”.
Communication and Media Studies, Historical Studies, Life Writing
Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing
25.02.09 | Permalink | Comment?

In this first decade of the twenty-first century we are caught up in the midst of a technological shift of the kind that Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, attributed to the increasing popularity of photography in the early twentieth century. The essence of that change was the unprecedented capacity to create infinitely reproducible multiple copies. For the first time the idea of the primacy of the singular work of art was seriously open to question. ‘The history of every art form,’ writes Benjamin, ‘shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, a new art form’. Photography initiated a change that Benjamin recognised as being as profound in its impact on people’s lives as the introduction of the printing press.
Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Teaching and Learning Guide: Antipodean Myths Transformed
08.08.08 | Permalink | Comment?
Sample Syllabus:

Week 1: Introduction and Overview—Exploration and Colonisation of the Great South Land
- - The myth of the antipodes—the allure of the great south land
- - Gaps in maps—spaces for the imagination
Weeks 2–4: Fantasies of the Antipodes
- - The role of imaginary voyage texts—blending reality with fantasy, pre-programming colonisation
- - Myths of extreme difference
- - Myths of Indigenous populations’ welcoming attitude to colonial intrusion
- - Theories of otherness
Weeks 3–5: Entering the Antipodes
- - Early explorers’ contradictory responses to Terra Australis Incognita
- - Utopias and dystopias
- - First contact with Indigenous people—the concept of ‘terra nullius’ framed by myths
Weeks 6–8: Images of Contemporary Australia: Enduring Myths
- - The myth of terra nullius and the impact on Indigenous Australia
- - The ‘dead heart’ of Australia as the last unfathomed antipodean space
Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Antipodean Myths Transformed
25.08.07 | Permalink | Comment?

Australia and the South Pacific held a special status in the eighteenth century: this was the farthest region from Europe and the last part of the earth remaining for Europeans to explore and chart. In the context of European nations’ own histories of discovering and exploring the world beyond Europe’s borders, this region is unique in the sense that no other part of the earth had such a substantial and well-documented body of European thought devoted to it over such a long period of time prior to its physical discovery. The ‘antipodes’ existed in the European imagination for approximately two thousand years before Europeans set foot on antipodean lands. Myths inspired explorers to go searching for the genuine antipodes, and voyages were often undertaken with the specific aim of finding the uncharted places that punctuated otherwise formless maps.