Programs and Activities - 2005
Honours and Postgraduate Seminar -
"Performing the Nation" Series
On 16 September 2005 the Centre for Canadian-Australian Studies hosted a Postgraduate and Honours student seminar entitled ‘Performing Aboriginality in an Age of Globalisation'. The forum featured the work of five University of Wollongong students from the Faculty of Arts who presented their current research and academic findings on issues of Aboriginal identity and cultural expressions.
Aboriginal playwright and PhD student Ernie Blackmore drew from personal experience to explain how Aboriginal voices are silenced by hegemonic cultures, thereby threatening the identity and integrity of Aboriginal cultural expression.
Kimberly McMahon-Coleman analysed Sam Watson's controversial novel The Kadaitcha Sung and spoke of the feelings of displacement that are characteristic of Diaspora groups who unify despite the distance between them. McMahon-Coleman examined the wide body of Diaspora criticism to suggest how Indigenous identity could be understood within a notion of Aboriginal Diaspora — of a people displaced within their own homeland.
Honours student Rebecca Smith examined the writings of First Nations Canadian author Eden Robinson through postcolonial cartographic theory. Smith argued that maps are a dominant geocultural creation and that Robinson's writing works to destabilize the often imposed European maps that frame Native identity by drawing attention to the gaps and silences that these cultural instruments produce, works to destabilise the often imposed European system that frames Native identity.
PhD student Roslyn Weaver examined the prevalence ofapocalyptic narratives in Australia from the time of settlement to Mad Max. However, her focus was on the way Indigenous peoples have been commodified and/or excluded from conventional constructions of Australian apocalypse. Her study focused on the way contemporary Aboriginal writers reverse such exclusions to reimagine a future that rejects white constructions of apocalypse.
Colin Salter presented a comparative study of two Aboriginal land issues—Kuradji/Sandon Point in NSW, Australia and Red Hill Valley in Ontario, Canada. He noted that action groups in the two countries are approaching these issues differently and sought to demonstrate the way cultural imperialism often frames even supportive activity by non-Indigenous peoples. He noted that the differences in the two countries' historical and legal relations with Aboriginal peoples dictated the nature of the support for the respective causes.
The day opened with keynote speaker Professor Sam Carter from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (ECIAD) in Vancouver, British Columbia, who delivered an address about Canadian applied arts. Aunty Barbara Nicholson performed the traditional ‘welcome to country'. The event concluded with a minute of silence in recognition of the loss of local elder Uncle Jim Davis.
The speakers featured in this forum will be travelling to the University of British Columbia, Canada in an initiative supported by a University Internationalisation Grant, the Vice-Principal (Academic) and by the Faculty of Arts, as part of a long term research project initiated by the Centre for Canadian-Australian Studies under the banner "Performing the Nation". The purpose of this initiative is to encourage both higher education research and to promote the University of Wollongong as a destination for higher degree research. The workshop will also provide a unique opportunity for Faculty of Arts Honours and Postgraduate students to present their work in an international context and discuss the way nations negotiate their place in an increasingly globalised world.
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