The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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Mudrooroo (1938 – 2019)
No full textThe chapter traces the events leading to the exclusion of Mudrooroo from the circle of Indigenous Australian authors, resulting in the erasure of the previously celebrated writer and critic from scholarly discourse, and eventually in the cancellation of his life work from the country’s institutions of cultural memory. The intervention of a local Aboriginal organisation to reject Mudrooroo’s claim to Indigenous ancestry was widely regarded as a final verdict of the ‘community’, paving the way for Aboriginal writer Anita Heiss to suppress his name in influential anthologies and websites, edited by Heiss during her brief career as an academic. Similarly, Irish-Australian Maureen Clark published a Ph. D. thesis and a series of articles aimed at delegitimizing Mudrooroo’s literary work that found a receptive scholarly audience. Clark explains Mudrooroo’s meeting with his mentor Mary Durack as a key to his career: he supposedly “negotiated” his Aboriginal identity in dialogue with Durack, with both “involved in a conscious act of complicity”. Heiss’ and Clark’s writings are equally characterized by an essentialist understanding of Aboriginality based solely on bloodline, as well as duplicitous scholarship and a wilful disregard of Mudrooroo’s complex personality and the unconventional trajectory of his life story
Australian Seascapes
No full textIn my 2020 poem ‘Confessions of a Littoralist’, I declared: “The coast, not the bush, calls me | despite the smell of gums and the yellow of winter wattle … | We Australians are littoralists, | people of the coast, the shoreline, | the space between hills and water. | [While a few swim, surf or sail and the] | sea is a part of a collective unconscious | [for me] the water is touched lightly, | by slightly sandy, accidentally salty, feet | We need the shores of our dreaming, | but dreaming does not demand diving in | Or even getting wet”. Over eight generations, the settler-invaders’ world evolved between coast and mountains. In sprawling suburban cities, the water is often far away, and many, including me, feel uncomfortable in water. Our dreaming was shaped by footy ovals and indigenous and exotic suburban gardens. Despite Isolated Country Syndrome, worldly awareness is engendered by port cities, trade and immigration. A different side is parochial ignorance and fear. One cultural result is the other sea theme, the odyssey or journey, the ‘Big Trip’, once back to London and Europe, then Asia, now New York, which I addressed in the poem ‘Innocents Abroad’ – “We came by boat | Last of a generation”
Indigenous Australia in the Anthropocene
No full textMajor museums across the world are being approached by Indigenous communities for the return of Ancestral remains and other cultural property. Apart from a very small number of specialists, many museum professionals, in particular senior decision makers, have limited knowledge of the actual collections they hold and the cultural significance of those objects, both in the past, the present, and into the future. They thus apply limited and restricted criteria in assessing the merits of an application for repatriation. This paper discusses some of
the forms of affiliation that enable Australian First Nations peoples to claim rights of affiliation and authority in Ancestral Remains and other cultural materials. It argues that there are many forms of affiliation and bestowal of rights and authority that legitimise First Nations claims to interests in Ancestral Remains and cultural heritage
Analyzing Whatsapp Communication Behavior Before, During, and After the COVID-19 Lockdown
No full textThe strict restrictions introduced by the COVID-19 lockdowns, which started from March 2020, changed people’s daily lives and habits on many different levels. In this work, we investigate the impact of the lockdown on the communication behavior in the mobile instant messaging application WhatsApp. Our evaluations are based on a large dataset of 2577 private chat histories with 25,378,093 messages from 51,973 users. The analysis of the one-to-one and group conversations confirms that the lockdown severely altered the communication in WhatsApp chats compared to pre-pandemic time ranges. In particular, we observe short-term effects, which caused an increased message frequency in the first lockdown months and a shifted communication activity during the day in March and April 2020. Moreover, we also see long-term effects of the ongoing pandemic situation until February 2021, which indicate a change of communication behavior towards more regular messaging, as well as a persisting change in activity during the day. The results of our work show that even anonymized chat histories can tell us a lot about people’s behavior and especially behavioral changes during the COVID-19 pandemic and thus are of great relevance for behavioral researchers. Furthermore, looking at the pandemic from an Internet provider perspective, these insights can be used during the next pandemic, or if the current COVID-19 situation worsens, to adapt communication networks to the changed usage behavior early on and thus avoid network congestion
