Glen, yes, an URL would be nice.
I am slowly working on some writings on landscape and poesis but I
didn't come across this with my first lit search, so thanks for the
post. (I perhaps need to log into my university server for this topic,
which I hate doing because of the bloody 12 digit password!)
Some of the more interesting and useful stuff I find seems to come out
of Aust cultural studies and I am more interested in that then the flood
of formalist studies which celebrate the high cultural appropriation of
the Australian landscape. Very little in terms of any queer studies, I
also noticed, especially given the homophobic epistemology that
underwrites so much of this celebration of landscape.
Alison, I can't help you much but you are familiar with the trope of the
land as a feminine body which in has a misogynist history, I would
assume which I would argue still operates today alongside a homophobic
underpinning of cultural representations of landscape in Australia.
I can at least quote this from Jon Stratton, "Brett Whiteley: the last
Australian Romantic" (quoting Anne-Marie Willis.)
"Whether we are talking about coffee-table art books, films, literature
or informed scholarship, landscape is the most pervasive theme in
Australian high culture". She argues that a preoccupation with the
colonialists' relationship to the land is typical of settler colonies
and that national identity is sought in the dynamic of the relation.
(Stratton quoting from: Anne-Marie Willis _Illusions of Identity: the
Art of Nation_.)
I can send the opening two (draft) pars of what I am writing, but out of
context they may not make much sense, since I intend to continue this
using Silvan Tomkins affect theory, which has a transformation of shame
into the positive affect of interest-excitement and some conceptual
machinary from D&G on apparatus of capture, that is, the way the state
captures this shame cybernetically transformed into interest-excitement
for its own purposes. Anyway, maybe another angle, as follows:
To write about the Australian landscape is to write of a landscape which
is sullied and shameful. All Australian poetry, all fiction, all visual
arts produced in Australia since the establishment of the colonial
settler state known as Australia must in different ways carry with it,
confront or resist this shame. Even when we speak of the landscape with
pride it is from shame that we speak this pride.
It is a shame of which we may not always be conscious and too often an
unconscious shame which is celebrated, which is to compound shame with
more shame with this celebration. A shameful celebration, such as the
Centenary of Federation celebrations or The Sydney Olympics with an
opening ceremony resonating with the Nuremberg Rally of Nazi Germany.
Anyways, up to my neck with work, right now, so must go.
Chris Jones.
On Wed, 2003-02-05 at 14:18, Glen Phillips wrote:
> Hi there
> Maybe you know that John Kinsella, Andrew Taylor and I set up the
> International Centre for Landscape and Language some three years ago? It
> has gone from strength to strength with publications, field study trips
> for landscape writers, a Visiting Fellows program for poets interested
> in the Australian landscape and will be holding its first international
> convention in February next year (the theme is On the Beach). We have a
> website and e-journal and operate out of the Edith Cowan University. We
> are always interested in creative work and essays for the e-jounal
> "Landscapes". We are all three Salt published of course.
> Glen Phillips
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