ARATJARA is the first collection of essays on Australian Aboriginal culture published and edited from Germany. A group of internationally renowned scholars and specialists in their fields have contributed original essays on political and cultural aspects of Aboriginal life today. These various essays treat the struggle of Aboriginal peoples for land rights, their music, and their achievements in theatre, in literature and in the creation of Aboriginal literary discourses, as well as Aboriginal film and television productions and the representation of Australia's indigenous peoples in the white media. Among Aboriginal writers who have contributed to ARATJARA are the politician Neville T. Bonner, the dramatist Bob Maza, the story-teller David Mowaljarlai and the poet Lionel Fogarty, who has been called the most authentic Aboriginal voice among writers using English as their medium of creative expression. The volume is dedicated to Oodgeroo (formerly Kath Walker, 1920-1993), one of the foremost Aboriginal political and cultural personalities, and also contains a number of poems by Lionel Fogarty.

Worlds Apart is concerned with one of the new futures of anthropology, namely the advances in technologies which r eate an imagination of new global and local forms. It also analyses studies of the consumption of these forms and attempts to go beyond the assumptions that consumption either localises or fails to effect global forms and images. Several of the chapters are written by anthropologists who have specialised in material culture studies and who examine the new forms, especially television and mass commodities, as well as some new uses of older forms, such as the body. The book also considers the ways in which people are increasingly not the primary creators of these images but have become secondary consumers.

Double Desire challenges the tendency by critics to perpetuate an aesthetic apartheid between Indigenous and Western art. The double desire explored in this book is that of the divided but also amplified attractions that occur between cultural traditions in places where both indigenous and colonial legacies are strong. The result, it is argued, produces imaginative transcultural practices that resist the assimilation or acculturation of Indigenous perspectives into the dominant Western mod...

This publication brings together existing research as well as new data to show how Arnhem Land bark painting was critical in the making of Indigenous Australian contemporary art and the self-determination agendas of Indigenous Australians. It identifies how, when and what the shifts in the reception of the art were, especially as they occurred within institutional exhibition displays. Despite key studies already being published on the reception of Aboriginal art in this area, the overall process is not well known or always considered, while the focus has tended to be placed on Western Desert acrylic paintings. This text, however represents a refocus, and addresses this more fully by integrating Arnhem Land bark painting into the contemporary history of Aboriginal art. The trajectory moves from its understanding as a form of ethnographic art, to seeing it as conceptual art and appreciating it for its cultural agency and contemporaneity.

These volumes present John Kinsella’s uncollected critical writings and personal reflections from the early 1990s to the present. Included are extended pieces of memoir written in the Western Australian wheatbelt and the Cambridge fens, as well as acute essays and commentaries on the nature and genesis of personal and public poetics. Pivotal are a sense of place and how we write out of it; pastoral’s relevance to contemporary poetry; how we evaluate and critique (post)colonial creativity and intrusion into Indigenous spaces; and engaged analysis of activism and responsibility in poetry and literary discourse. The author is well-known for saying he is preeminently an “anarchist, vegan, pacifist” – not stock epithets, but the raison d’être behind his work. The collection moves from overviews of contemporary Australian poetry to studies of such writers as Randolph Stow, Ouyang Yu, Charmaine Papertalk–Green, Lionel Fogarty, Les Murray, Peter Porter, Dorothy Hewett, Judith Wright, Alamgir Hashmi, Patrick Lane, Robert Sullivan, C.K. Stead, and J.H. Prynne, and on to numerous book reviews of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, originally published in newspapers and journals from around the world. There are also searching reflections on visual artists (Sidney Nolan, Karl Wiebke, Shaun Atkinson) and wide-ranging opinion pieces and editorials. In counterpoint are conversations with other writers (Rosanna Warren, Rod Mengham, Alvin Pang, and Tracy Ryan) and explorations of schooling, being struck by lightning, ‘international regionalism’, hybridity, and experimental poetry. This two-volume argosy has been brought together by scholar and editor Gordon Collier, who has allowed the original versions to speak with their unique informal–formal ductus. Kinsella’s interest is in the ethics of space and how we use it. His considerations of the wheatbelt through Wagner and Dante (and rewritings of these), and, in Thoreauvian vein, his ‘place’ at Jam Tree Gully on the edge of Western Australia’s Avon Valley form a web of affirmation and anxiety: it is space he feels both part of and outside, em¬braced in its every magnitude but felt to be stolen land, whose restitution needs articulating in literature and in real time. Beneath it all is a celebration of the natural world – every plant, animal, rock, sentinel peak, and grain of sand – and a commitment to an ecological poetics.