The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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Australian Seascapes
No full textIn his unusual mid-20th century epic poem ‘Captain Quiros,’ Australian poet James McAuley reimagines European exploration of the southern hemisphere in retelling the two Pacific voyages of the lay Franciscan Portuguese sea captain (Pedro Fernandes de Queirós). “Quiros” crossed the Pacific in search for the fabled, utopia-laden Terra Australis with the last Spanish voyages of discovery of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The well-researched, deliberately ‘out-of-fashion’ long poem, drew on the 1904 Hakluyt society English translation from Spanish (1876) of the 17th century chronicle of Quiros and his secretary Belmonte and on McAuley’s own post-war experience in the Australian administration of New Guinea. This article focusses on the text’s compelling representation of the ocean through which the expeditions travel rather than on the narration of events and encounters. In exploring the archetype of early global travel it examines how, in his depiction of oceanic space, an alternative to an Australian inland ‘horizonal sublime’, McAuley embellishes the original Spanish text from his reading about ancient maps, the Portuguese Luis de Camões’ epic ‘Os Lusíadas’, and histories of South Pacific exploration and also, the mid-20th century perspective of pioneer environmental writer Rachel Carson. Her landmark ‘The Sea Around Us’ combined powerful scientific and literary descriptions of oceanic phenomena, some of which are traced in the high mimetic descriptive passages of McAuley’s poetic narrative.(1) McAuley’s portrait of ‘Ocean’ and its crossing conjures the sphere of the in-between between continent and islands, known and unknown places and peoples, past and future, faith and the abyss. This ambivalent ocean of indeterminate space, alternatively benign, chaotic and indifferent, is the stage on which the reader sees Quiros’ voyages to the land of desire unfold and transform into a dystopian, if more sombre, understanding of the world and more recent Australian history. In the identity-ridden 1950s, the poem helped elaborate Australia’s hitherto little acknowledged oceanic identity within a wider region, offering a richer variant on its customary insular interior profile.
1- Cf. Rachel Carson: The Sea Around Us
Die Hütte als experimentelle Kontaktszene in Romanen von Marlen Haushofer, Laura Beatty und Céline Minard
No full textDie Hütte ist ein modernes Symbol für den Traum von einem ›alternativen‹ Leben. Sie verspricht denjenigen Vereinfachung und Entschleunigung, die die Freiheit besitzen, sich zu beschränken. Deshalb geben fiktionale Hütten Auskunft darüber, was eine Gesellschaft an sich selbst letztlich überflüssig findet. Darüber hinaus etabliert sich die Hütte im Rahmen der industriellen Revolution als Labor für Beziehungsweisen zwischen Menschen, aber auch zwischen Menschen und Nicht-Menschen. Ausgehend von den Paradigmen der Hütten-Imagination seit dem 19. Jahrhundert untersucht dieser Artikel drei Romane, die die Hütte nutzen, um experimentelle Kontaktszenen zu erkunden. Indem sie generische Konventionen an entscheidenden Stellen verschieben, können sie den zugleich kulturkritischen und sentimentalen Hüttentraum stören und in Frage stellen. Marlen Haushofers Die Wand , Laura Beattys Pollard und Céline Minards Le grand jeu produzieren vielmehr ein Wissen, dass seine epistemischen Bedingungen als epistemologische und kulturelle Inszenierung mitdenkt.The Aesthetics of Survival. Cabins as Experimental Contact Scenes in Novels by Marlen Haushofer, Laura Beatty and Céline Minard
The cabin is a modern symbol for the dream of an ›alternative‹ life. It offers simplification and deceleration to those who are free to limit themselves. Fictional cabins therefore speak of the things a society deems actually superfluous. Moreover, during the industrial revolution cabins became a laboratory for ways of relating to humans and non-humans alike. Beginning with the paradigms of the history of cabin-imaginaries, this article reads three novels which use cabins to conduct experimental contact scenes. By displacing crucial generic conventions, the novels disrupt and challenge the equally sentimental cultural criticism of more typical cabin-dreams. Thus, Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand , Laura Beatty’s Pollard und Céline Minard’s Le grand jeu produce knowledge that reflects its own conditions as the effect of an epistemological and cultural mise-en-scène.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.Technische Universität Dresden (1019
Indigenous Australia in the Anthropocene
No full textPolice played an important role in the collecting of Aboriginal objects for colonial and imperial museums. Although ostensibly in a policing role, after 1835 the colonial police acted as a paramilitary force in frontier colonies, enabling colonisation. Although most scholars have noted the unequal power relationship that occurred when police ‘collected’ Aboriginal objects on the frontier, scholarship has not previously explored the ‘authority’ of the police to collect objects. Recent research by Knapman and Boonstra has demonstrated that colonial plunder, far from being an unregulated activity – as previous scholarship has assumed – was actually highly regulated by Western law, although rarely enforced. This article examines three police collections to investigate the formal powers that police had to abide by in order to collect objects at the time. The article examines the collecting activities of three colonial police constables: Harry Ord (who sent Aboriginal cultural material to the British Museum), Ernest Cowle (whose collections are in the South Australian Museum and Museum Victoria) and William Willshire (whose large collection has disappeared but some objects were purchased at an auction by the South Australian Museum in the 1990s). The article argues that in best case scenarios, police collecting may have represented an unequal exchange, but more than likely police collecting was illegal under Western law and can be better described as illegal plunder. The taking of Aboriginal objects was theft under Western law and unsupported by any colonial legal regimes