Making sense of Tasmania

JESSE SHIPWAY, Cultural theory/history/ Tasmaniana: A contribution to making sense of Tasmania. Prefatory to PhD thesis, Scars on the Archive, Vision of Place: Genocide and Modernity in Tasmania

P R E F A T O R Y

How are we to conceive of the [archive], if it corresponds neither to the archive in the strict sense — that is, the storehouse that catalogs the traces of what has been said, to consign them to future memory — nor to the Babelic library that gathers the dust of statements and allows for their resurrection under the historian’s gaze. (Giorgio Agamben, 1999)

This book takes its most basic impetus from the articulation of an equivocally textual object called the Tasmanian archive. The Tasmanian archive is the locus for the storage of utterances that concern Tasmania, but it also plays a part in ushering a discursively mediated Tasmania into being. It is both about, and constitutive of, Tasmania in a social-symbolic sense. In regard to its ontology, a principle of captivity plays the pre-eminent role. A fluid, permeable entity, the Tasmanian archive is a mobile site where the text and talk of everyday discursivity are gathered together. It is where, in Jacques Derrida’s terms, an act of “consignation” takes place.

It has a secondary function, however, that derives from its place in Giorgio Agamben’s discourse on Emile Benveniste’s “The Semiology of Language” as described in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Here, the archive is encoded through the work of Foucault so that it comes to designate “the system of relations between the unsaid and the said”, or “the dark margin encircling and limiting every concrete act of speech.” The archive in this sense does not bring together the content of what has been written or said about Tasmania but, rather, marks the conditions of its “sayability”, the material but non-communicative dimensions that attend every act of enunciation. Because the archive responds to the being of language, as well as to its fecundity of meaning, its location is simultaneously discursive and material. It encloses a language that is anchored to speakers, places and events: phenomena that translate matter into meaning. The Tasmania archive trespasses into the order of things. Its ontology is indifferent to the boundaries of the linguistic plain that Foucault, at least, is uneasy about violating.

What […] we wish to do is to dispense with ‘things’. To ‘depresentify’ them. […] To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance.

By drawing attention to the way the archive encloses the material conditions that make possible a given statement, Agamben prevents the “virtuality” of the discourse itself from entirely eclipsing the objects to which it is wed. This is an important achievement because it neutralises the shibboleth of a cheapened version of Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text”, the disingenuous reductio ad absurdum that many critics of the deconstructive approach rehearse. For Agamben, the archive protects the materiality of things-in-the-world, buttressing them against the mesmeric gravity of linguistic reductionism. In the case of a concrete location like Tasmania, the very physicality of a statement reflected in the archive connects that statement to the place it names. The archive provides us with a way to link language games to specific places even as those places are in part a product of the discourses that they anchor.

This book places a frame around a collection of moments that carry a special resonance within the Tasmanian archive. As a temporalised assemblage of freestanding essays, the threads of continuity that hold it together are the contrapuntal problematics of genocide and modernisation. These two trajectories mirror each other, I contend, in that the first embodies a collective despair and recuperates its emotional charge from the past, while the latter embodies a collective hope and looks forward to the future. Throughout the history of the Tasmanian archive both genocide and modernisation have been made the subject of contested, affectively charged statements, propositions and utterances. But these speech acts are not hopelessly dispersed. Some of them are bound together in contingent assemblage by their collective emergence from a series of shared moments of inauguration. Perhaps we might more precisely describe their operative dimension as multilateral or omni-directional. At any given point in the history of Tasmania, these two trajectories position their moments of enunciation as dialogical nodes connecting the past with the future. Current discussions about the “truth” of the Tasmanian genocide, for instance, are not only played out in remote enclaves as isolated exchanges between vested interests. Rather, they enter the agon in the company of future projections on apparently unrelated matters like the future of old growth logging to produce an ensembled dialogue, an echolalia that rolls the mnemonics of Tasmania’s past into the wall of sound through which the present itself becomes audible. To address the problem of signal to noise presented by this formulation, this book targets the narrow frequency ranges of genocide and modernity, providing a provisional and partial tabulation of their unfolding through the Tasmanian archive.

The contrapuntal method as I envisage it, should not be confused with the dialogic method that Mikhail Bakhtin distinguished in his work on Dostoevesky’s poetics. This thesis is an attempt at a poetics of culture cast in terms that draw on Stephen Greenblatt’s framing of the project. In “Towards a Poetics of Culture”, Greenblatt seems intent on cordoning off a space for subjectivity that is problematically social. He criticizes Fredric Jameson fairly openly for demonizing the private as a capitalist illusion:

For the Political Unconscious any demarcation of the aesthetic must be aligned with the private which is in turn aligned with the psychological, the poetic, and the individual, as distinct from the public, the social, and the political. All of these interlocking distinctions […] are then laid at the door of capitalism with its power to “maim” and “paralyze” us as individual subjects.”
For Bakhtin, the dialogic mode resides firmly in the stylistics of the novel. The novel is social, the author of the novel thinks socially. Poetics on the other hand, and I think this is Greenblatt’s point, can best be thought as a private, but not reactionary, attempt to order the world through language. The contrapuntal method, as I develop it in this thesis then, is a private, a personal, and, hopefully, a poetic approach. As Bakhtin writes:

Herein lies the profound distinction between prose style and poetic style […] For the prose artist the world is full of other people’s words, among which he must orient himself and whose speech characteristics he must be able to perceive with a very keen ear. He must introduce them into the plane of his own discourse, but in such a way that this plane is not destroyed.
There is no possibility in this thesis that the plane of my discourse will be destroyed. Unless, of course, this falling apart takes place in the ear of the reader. If destruction is set in train, it is surely a creative destruction. Rereading Tasmanian history through the categories of genocide and modernity is, above all else, a productive enterprise.

There is a caveat that needs to be added to my delineation of the concept of the archive. At various points in this book, I have recourse to a conception of Tasmania that is predominantly discursive. At others, I re-read episodes of Tasmanian history as if they refer to a concrete referent, a social totality or substantive extra-linguistic place. One of the goals of this book is to theorise the means by which non-linguistic experience of a given location becomes, under the influence of archival energy, a communicable matrix for the construction of place. Neither place nor discourse are collapsed into one another in this equation. Rather, their mutually constitutive arising subtends an antinomy of place and language. The two contrapuntal trajectories of genocide and modernity carry this suspension over into the pragmatic unfolding of place identity in Tasmania. My account of the story of how Tasmania came to be a place of genocide and a place of modernity is split between the two registers under examination. The story of modernity in Tasmania mobilises a socio-political entity anterior to discourse, while the story of genocide as a meta-historical debate maps the surface of a field that is primarily rhetorical. An analysis of the troping of genocide and modernity in the Tasmanian archive, however, does not just reveal important “truths” about the particular place to which they refer. To this end, this book also looks at how large-scale, abstracted socio-cultural logics play themselves out on a local stage. How, it asks, is the universal language of modernity given a regional inflection in Tasmania? What, it inquires, does a non-metropolitan modernity look like up-close? When, it poses, will it be possible to read a genocidal logic into a historical trajectory without invoking the Jewish Holocaust?

Through an engagement with these and other questions, this book challenges the established ways of thinking about the island that I call home. To the reader well-versed in Tasmaniana, it proposes a re-inscription and a reassessment. To the uninitiated, it serves as a general introduction. In both cases, it is interested in problematising common-sense understandings of place, culture and identity through an interrogation of the layerings of meaning that accrete around a localised history that is always unfinished.

This book was completed at a unique moment in the history of the History of Australia. Keith Windschuttle’s much publicised challenge to “orthodox” accounts of civilisational interaction on the Australian frontier, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1847 (2003), had just been published and a lively, multiform and oftentimes downright nasty debate was only just hitting its stride. At face value, the national significance of Windschuttle’s book would appear to lie in its bold contention that respected, high-profile historians like Lyndall Ryan and Henry Reynolds had deliberately doctored empirical data so as to underline emphatically their argument that the Australian colonial frontier was, in the first instance, a site of carnage and, in the second, of organised, guerilla resistance. At stake here was the official vision of the human landscape and race-relations of early European Australia. Would Windschuttle’s livid, lucid, revisionist prose finally give us just cause to remove the “black armbands”, the hair shirts of postcolonial shame, that we have worn since becoming cognizant that the processes of land acquisition and pastoral development in this country were anything but a peaceable affair? I say face-value because there is another, more obscured because epistemological, dimension along which the Windschuttle intervention spins the resources of history into its novel web. To my knowledge, the explosion of debate blasted into the public sphere by Windschuttle’s book, is the first and only instance of “official” Tasmanian history being used to re-write an “official” Australian history. Volume One of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is dedicated solely to an examination of the landmark events of the Tasmanian genocide — the Risdon Massacre, the Cape Grim Massacre and so on — but it is also clearly looking outward: to the other editions in the trilogy that are to follow, and to the field of Australian Aboriginal history and politics more generally. Windschuttle writes:

Although the series starts in Tasmania, it will eventually cover the whole of the continental mainland. The colony of Van Diemen’s Land, as it was originally known, comes first because it has long been regarded as the worst-case scenario. Those historians now upheld as the most reputable on the subject assure us that the Tasmanian Aborigines were subject to a ‘conscious policy of genocide’. International writers routinely compare the actions of the British in Tasmania with the Spaniards in Mexico, the Belgians in the Congo, the Turks in Armenia and Pol Pot in Cambodia.

Here, the telling of a national story, a story with national consequences, takes as its initial subject matter a set of localised events. In a classically metonymic movement, the part comes to substitute for the whole, and Tasmania is made the first port of call in what we are led to believe will be an all-bases-covered pursuit of historical truth. This kind of substitution is nothing new in its own right, other parts of Australia have long been invoked as worthy settings for the telling of national narratives: the Victorian goldfields of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, the innercity Sydney slums of Bobbin Up or the Melbourne bohemia of Monkeygrip. What is unique here, and it needs to be noted that we are talking historical rather than fictional discourse, is that Tasmania now becomes the exemplary locus for the staging of an historiographical performance that seeks to reorder an entire sub-disciplinary terrain that is itself the setting for a variety of important debates about nationhood, racism and cultural identity. This tranche of developments is serendipitous in the context of this book because it brings home the fact that “minor” places can attain a “major” significance if they are looked at in an expedient light. The optic through which we examine a place and its symbolic economies needs to be well chosen if we intend to succeed in this task.

When I began researching this book, I was not aware of the work Windschuttle was preparing for The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, but I was to run into his scholarship in the early stages of my own deliberations. Initially, the entire thrust of my project was directed toward a reversal of the notion that Tasmania had been left behind by modernity. The discovery of Zygmunt Bauman’s influential work Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) seemed to take this path in an intriguing direction so I followed it, first, to Henry Reynolds’ An Indelible Stain: The Question of Genocide in Australian History (2001), then to Bill Thorpe and Raymond Evans’ thoroughgoing demolition of Windschuttle’s Quadrant pieces from the mid-1990s, “Indigenocide and the Massacre of Aboriginal History” (2001). The modernity thread that runs through this book was thus, almost from the outset, intimately bound up with the genocide thread. The act of displacement that Windschuttle completes in Fabrication was also always a goal I had in mind when I began to think about the way that modernity’s developmental trajectories have been played out here in Tasmania. The dialectical movements that allow our thoughts to travel from the local to the general, from the one to the many, from the part to the whole, from the regional to the national to the global, form the machinery for damming the archival flows set in motion by and around this “thing” we call Tasmania.

This book consists of an extended introductory component followed by three sections that chart an uneven course through historical time from the invasion of Tasmania in 1803 to the present. The opening comments seek to familiarise the reader with a defamiliarised Tasmania framed through the optics of genocide and modernity. In this section, I test the use-value of modernity and genocide as ways of seeing the archival enunciations that we have traditionally filed away under the heading of Tasmanian culture. The form of this interrogation is dialectical. On the one hand, genocide and modernity are thematic clusters with historical form: objects of knowledge that are contained within the Tasmanian archive. On the other, they provide the conceptual frameworks through which we read the archive. In regard to the latter sense, a brief survey is conducted into the state of play currently prevailing in the fields of Modernity and Genocide Studies. In the case of Modernity Studies, the objective is to situate my reading of a non-metropolitan, peripheral modernity in the context of the increasingly large body of work interested in de-centring modernity from its traditional homelands in Europe and North America. In the case of genocide, I seek to locate my own analysis in a less specific sense by presenting a survey and typology of the terms in which the Tasmanian genocide has appeared across a range of literatures.

Sections two through four comprise the detailed reading of the Tasmanian archive. Each of these three parts is given a temporal heading that performs an uneven periodisation: uneven, because this is not the kind of reconstructive thesis that purports to tell a story stretched out along a linear chronology. The past survives for my purposes as a loose collection of fragments that need not always be shaped by a strong narrative trajectory. By subtending my interventions into the Tasmanian archive with a net of historicised time, moments of archival articulation can be gathered together for practical purposes. The idea of naming a time — Van Diemonian, Tasmanian, Global — emerges out of a combination of fact and feeling that orientated my investigations. The heuristic division of Tasmania’s cultural temporality into three parts reflects the phenomenal “truth” that the people of this island worked and lived in a social cosmos that was always on the way toward becoming something other than what it was. The hypostatisation of a fluid, lived temporality thus enacted is as essential as it is ultimately inadequate. To pay due notice to this fact, a certain suppleness is built into the categories in question. The second section, which covers the period from colonisation in 1803 to Trukanini’s death in 1876, for instance, includes a chapter that focuses on Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (2002). That the diegesis of Flanagan’s novel is set within the temporal parameters of the section is not the main issue here because other material that clearly falls outside its range allows the chapter to function. The same principle is at work in sections three and four, where material crosses over time-lines on a number of occasions. Part three, encloses an interval of one hundred and two years, from the death of the “last Tasmanian” Trukanini to the screening of Tom Haydon’s documentary The Last Tasmanian: A Story of Genocide (1978). It also reaches back, however, to draw on primary material from the field diaries of George Augustus Robinson that is then re-situated in a contemporary context. Again, in part four, the portion of the book that appears to gesture forward to what Gayatri Spivak calls the “vanishing present”, the chapter entitled “Metaphorics of an Extermination” touches in some depth on the Jewish Holocaust. A disclaimer that needs to be added here is that my point of focus is the agglomeration of contemporary language games that invoke the Shoah, rather than the Shoah itself.

In spite of this permeability, these divisions have their usefulness. By historicising the archival articulations that are the primary objects of my investigations, I mimic the forms of language that carry them “officially” from the past into the present. This mimicry, it needs be said, is more akin to tribute than to parody, incorporating the linearity of the hegemonic historical forms without necessarily honoring their content. The temporal ordering of these essays runs a string through them as if they were beads on a necklace. Cut the string and they fall, disordered, to the floor.
The temporalisation of the book is the first order of its organisation, but there is a second order that is equally important. Each of the three sections that make up the body of the text includes an essay written in accordance with the tonal oppositions of the two contrapuntal trajectories of genocide and modernity. The first essay in each section engages with the variegated problematics of genocide in Tasmania, while the second focuses on modernity. Again, these rules are not absolute, so that in the second part, “Van Diemonian Time”, the genocide essay becomes the locus of an intermingled discussion of the way certain thematics we associate with modernity and modernisation form a nexus with the baleful logic of genocide when the forces of colonisation clash with an indigenous civilisation. The subtitling of each division describes its own arc through historical time, tracing out the developmental trajectories taken by modernity and genocide in their capacity as generators of archival articulations.

My point here is that through time the enfolding of language, opinion and fact performed by the archive takes different forms. In its mediating capacity, the archive operates in an open-ended present, giving inflection to future orientations and retrospective reconstructions. The archive both records and enables different relations to the past, present and future that can be mapped. But these cartographies are always partial, it needs to be remembered, for the same reason that periodisation always presents as an affront to the organic streams of lived temporality.

The genocide thread moves from the moment of European “settlement” in Tasmania to the “extinction” of the Aborigines after Trukanini’s death. It then charts a course through the forced forgetting of the Palawa people through the 20th century to the late-1970s when the screening of Tom Haydon’s influential documentary incited angry responses from a newly vocal Aboriginal community still coming to terms with the pragmatic implications of a restored identity. This rediscovery of identity is an instructive example of the way an archive can bear witness to a transformation in the rules governing what can and can’t be said about a given place. From the time of Trukanini’s death until the modern Aboriginal rights movement found its feet, the archive carried the place of Aboriginality as a present absence imprinted in fading ink on its corpus. While there were always members of a low-profile Aboriginal community identifying as indigenous Tasmanians, the publication of books like Clive Turnbull’s Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines (1948) and Robert Travers’ The Tasmanians: The Story of a Doomed Race (1968) demonstrate that the most pervasive, and perhaps most “legitimate”, archival posture was one that eulogised the demise of the civilisation. The point here is a simple one. From the time of Trukanini’s death in 1876, an examination of the archive as record, as mediating framework and as the unspoken in what is said, revealed, in its hegemonic testimony, the non-existence of an Aboriginal population in Tasmania. After the screening of Haydon’s film, however, the archive changed irrevocably to accommodate a retrospectively reconstructed continuity of existence and a present tense being-in-the-world. The last chapter of this thesis is filed under the rubric of restoration, a decision prompted by the recognition that the texts with which it engages are of an extended historical moment defined by full presence, and the awareness that the question of genocide in Tasmanian history has only been taken up properly in the wake of this re-materialisation.

The modernity stream of the book charts a course through three different entanglements with modernity and modernisation. Under the heading of Van Diemonian time, I conduct a reading of Richard Flanagan’s recent novel, Gould’s Book of Fish, which takes the author’s representation of the modernisation of the Sarah Island penal colony on Tasmania’s West Coast as a redirection of hope for Tasmanian modernity as a whole. The second essay, “A Plural Line of Sight”, moves forward in time to the age of hydro-electric industry, positioning a micro-history of Tasmanian industrialisation and a précis of the larger story of nature and modernity, between two readings of the phenomenological compression of wilderness and industry at two locations across the state. The intermingling of these dialectical opposites through the visual experience of the perceiving subject metaphorises the ideational splitting that produces the complementary definitions of wilderness and nature in modernity.

The third and final part of the modernity stream focuses on the emotional attachment that the Tasmanian population has formed with its electricity-generating history and infrastructure. Drawing on a theoretical model taken from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Historical Difference and Postcolonial Thought (2000), this chapter proposes a reappraisal of a consummately modern concept — rationalisation — through an examination of the anti-rationalist refusal of privatisation enacted by the Tasmanian electorate in the 1998 state poll. In combination with the purchase of three vessels, aptly titled Spirit of Tasmania I, II and III, for plying the Bass Strait between Tasmania and the Australian mainland, I aim to show here that the collective decision to retain public control of the Hydro-Electric Commission marks a partial re-enchantment of the state. Not only do these developments demonstrate a civic interest in alternative value-rational ends to governance in an age of neo-liberalism, they also suggest the persistence of a political ontology that positions the Tasmanian subject as something other than a purely self-interested rational utility maximiser.

Notes

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).

See Emile Benveniste, “The Semiology of Language,” in Robert E. Innis, ed., Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 226-46.

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone, 1999), pp. 144-45.

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972), p. 48.

Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism, (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 3.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostevsky’s Poetics, translated by Caryl Emerson, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 200-1.

A recent example of the power of the Holocaust as a template for re-reading other genocides was the exchange between local Aboriginal activist Michael Mansell and a spokesperson for the Tasmanian Jewish Community. To Mansell’s claim that Lieutenant John Bowen the commander of the first European fleet to settle in Tasmania was comparable to Hitler, Mrs Pnina Clark, took a classic uniqueness position in denying the grounds for comparison. See Margaretta Pos, “Jews upset by Mansell,” 30 September, 2003. .

See for instance Robert Manne, ed., Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’ Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Melbourne: Black Inc Agenda, 2003). Raymond Gaita, “Bringing Home Some Genocide Truths,” The Australian, (4 August 2003), p. 9. Robert Manne, “The Tragedy is Compounded by the Absurdity,” Sydney Morning Herald, (25 August 2003). 30 September, 2003 . Dirk Moses, “Rendering the Past Less Unpalatable,”. 30 September, 2003 . Keith Windschuttle, “History as Travesty of Truth,”. 30 September, 2003 . Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, eds., History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003).

‘The term “Black Armband” history was coined by Geoffrey Blainey in “Goodbye to All That?,” The Weekend Australian, (1-2 May 1993), p. 16. This was an edited transcript of Blainey’s Latham Memorial Lecture, which he delivered in Sydney during the same week.

Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History Volume 1: Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2003), p. 4.

Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony: Comprising Australia Felix, The Way Home, Ultima Thule (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1954). Dorothy Hewitt, Bobbin Up (London: Virago, 1985). Helen Garner, Monkeygrip (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1977).

See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986). Just as for Deleuze and Guattari, a minor literature is written in the deterritorialised language of the coloniser, a minor place like Tasmania is subject to a process of displacement wherein its distance from imperial centres comes to be inscribed as a lack which must then be renegotiated through the terms provided by the colonising culture. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “the first characteristic of a minor literature is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization.”, p. 16. Furthermore, the position of minor places on the fringes of modernity makes them useful sites for the reading of cultural logics that also define putative centres because of the estrangement effect that achieves a reterritorialisation of those dominant sites. The revolutionary potential of a “minor place” moves outwards from the margins, deterritorializing the “fragile community” of the dominant other. Like a “minor literature”, a minor place has both political and subversive potential: “Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor.” p. 27.

At various points in the development of this book, I felt that I was producing a work of cultural history, of historiography, of biography of place, of psychoanalytically informed social theory, of hybrid literary studies and finally of archival studies. Ultimately, however, I believe it is as an instance of Cultural Studies that this book has its life. In this context, the centrality of place to this project generates a number of tensions with Cultural Studies in its hegemonic manifestations. If the format and contents of recent Cultural Studies anthologies are any indicator of the condition of the discipline they secure and fill out, it seems fair to say that the evolution of the vocabulary of concepts that constitutes its intellectual framework has also been the story of the forgetting of the placed location of this kind of academic work. If this assertion seems too resolute, we might temper it with the qualifier that when location is residually invoked in methodological or applied discussion of Cultural Studies it is invariably couched in terms of nation or nationality. The need to incorporate place into meta-discursive speculations about Cultural Studies takes on a dualistic form. In the immediate setting, the motivation for such speculations turns around the question of the utility of sub-national Cultural Studies. Looking beyond the soft democratic plea of inclusion that Richard Rorty calls “cultural recognition”, what kinds of rationale can we identify for developing strategies for cultural analysis that draw their inspiration from the practices and symbolic economies of located collectivities whose specificity operates below the level of the nation-state? Richard Rorty, “Is Cultural Recognition a Useful Concept for Leftist Politics?,” Critical Horizons 1.1 (2000), p. 7. Is this kind of valorisation of the local a legitimate and positive move unmotivated by ressentiment, or is it merely another instance of what Hardt and Negri describe as “yoking uniqueness into a hegemonic power field”? Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 2. Is such a move symptomatic of a fetishised identity politics that would produce an absolute irreducibility of competing discursive voices were it to be applied to a methodology for Cultural Studies? Or would such a development escape the cul-de-sac of the differend and open up discussion at the micro-cultural level that would surpass the debate around national versions in its detail and sensitivity to difference, thereby engendering new kinds of productive discussions and research synergies? Anthologies that embody the trend toward the nationalisation of place in Cultural Studies include Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes and Jonathan Petropolous, eds., A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); David Palumbo and Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, eds., Toward a Genealogy and Methodology of Italian Cultural Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Jose-David Saldivar, ed., Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); John Waters, ed., South Atlantic Quarterly 95, 1 (1996); Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara and Ruth Lindeborg, eds., Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Laura Benedetti, Julia Hairston and Sylvia Ross, eds., Gendered Contexts: New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); Jill Forbes and Michael Kelly, eds., French Cultural Studies: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); David Forgacs and Robert Lumley, eds., Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, eds., Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction: The Struggle for Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Victoria Best and Peter Collier, eds., Powerful Bodies: Performance in French Cultural Studies (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999); Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan, eds., Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies (London: Arnold, 2000). Recent Cultural Studies anthologies that propose a trans-national locatedness and application include Jeffrey Belnap and Raul Fernandez, eds., Jose Marti’s ‘Our America’: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Henry Schwartz and Richard Dienst, eds., Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies (Boulder: Westview, 1996); David Palumbo and Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, eds., Streams of Cultural Capital: Transnational Cultural Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

Trukanini was long held to be the last Tasmanian Aborigine. The spelling “Trukanini” is favoured by the Palawa people in Tasmania today. Palawa, in turn, is the title that Tasmanian Aboriginals use to describe themselves as a totality. See Greg Lehman, “Will You Take the Next Step?,” Unpublished paper for the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council, n.d. 1995.

Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

See Robert Millikin, “Genocide Film Stirs University Press Race Row,” The National Times (22 July 1978), pp. 23-6; Kay Daniels and Mary Murnane, letter, The National Times, (29 July 1978), p. 9; Bobbi Sykes, “A Re-make: This Time with a Camera,” Filmnews, (January 1979), p. 13; Lisa Horler, “Black Survivors of White History: The Tasmanian Aboriginal Extinction Myth and the Documentary Black Man’s Houses by Steve Thomas,” Metro, 94 (1993), pp. 50-2; Jim Allen, “The Last Tasmanian: A Personal View,” in Atholl Anderson, Ian Lilley and Sue O’Conner, eds., Histories of Old Ages: Essays in Honour of Rhys Jones (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2001), pp. 45-7.

See Jim Everett, “Aboriginality in Tasmania,” 30 September, 2003.

Dr Jesse Shipway