The following works by C

Ethnicity remains an essential theory for understanding societies in the 21st century. This paper focuses on how well Fredrik Barth’s 1969 analyses and insights in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries have ‘stood the test of time’. Barth’s theoretical framework sets out the subtle and sinuous frontiers of ethnic boundaries, the interconnectedness of ethnic identities and the continuity of ethnic groups. The messianic nature of this work will be explored by closely reviewing some of his less well cited assertions, including those regarding stigmatized identities, increasing structural similarities and the political organisation of ethnic groups. Considering the applicability of his theory in current times necessitates reflecting on what Barth may have omitted, oversimplified or exaggerated, such as the potential for multiple ethnic identities; the importance of the content of cultural practices, symbols and ‘traditions’; conflict and power plays within nation-states. ‘Looking back’ at Barth’s work on ethnicity assists in enhancing understandings of current social spheres and reconsidering the world around us. It also contributes to the early stages of the author’s current PhD research which includes a focus on Catalan ethnic identity.

Why we eat? ...and continue eating.

The urge to seize, to claim the past in order to experience the truth of history is a powerful impulse - one full of desire for a time apart from the here and now. Conceiving and sustaining an experience of the past is today very big business. The ongoing development of the heritage, tourism and re-enactment industries inter-link with popular historical perception in ways that raise multiple questions about the relationship between popular and academic accounts of the past and the many other ways of performing history (Dening 1996). This paper takes as its starting point a gold rush theme park, Old Mogo Town in NSW Australia, and in particular, its erasure of all evidence of the Indigenous past. From here, it is my aim to develop a revised performance of that past- one that interrogates the catastrophe of colonialism and the fate of history currently expunged from the gold rush theme park of Old Mogo Town.

Convened under the appealing catchphrase "Looking Back to Look Forwards," the conference was celebrated at the University of Barcelona from 10 to 14 December 2012, and brought together a good number of academics, writers and artists.During five not-so-cold December days we discussed a multiplicity of issues related to time, variously connected to its tricks, its virtues, its warnings, and its inescapable consequences.As on other occasions, the wealth of conversations responded to the resonant interdisciplinarity which characterizes the annual conferences organized by these two committed institutions.We would like to praise here the inexhaustible energy Susan Ballyn and Baden Offord invest in putting together these events, so endearing while remaining rigorously academic.Martin Renes, co-director of the Centre for Australian Studies and co-editor of the present volume, deserves to be mentioned along with them.His craft in juggling with shifting panels and timetable changes due to tricks of the weather, funding surprises or flight scheduling is admirable.Sincere thanks to the three of them.We live in a period when space, and a whole set of cognate or related terms such as place and displacement, location and dislocation, home and exile, travel and movement, territory and deterritorialization, locality and glocality, and the like, seem to have taken hold of our lives.Those who are neither migrants nor diasporic nor exiles nor refugees nor immediate descendants of such peoples are becoming increasingly uncommon.At both experiential and theoretical levels, as Doreen Massey (2005) has emphasized, space is becoming more and more of an arena for research and reflection.Coolabah issue n.11, edited by Bill Lloyd and Ray Norman, and significantly entitled Placescape, Placemaking, Placemarking, Placedness Geography and Cultural Production, testifies to this turn in Cultural Studies, occurring, perhaps, at the expense of the simultaneous axis of time.And this is what makes a conference with a title like "Looking Back to Look Forwards" all the more relevant.Necessary even.Precisely because of the overwhelming importance attached in our days to the spatial, we need to recall the great impact that time has on our lives.Time reveals our destinies: as individuals, as members of small-scale communities such as family or neighbourhood, and as members of Copyright2014

This article seeks to provide an overview and analysis of the 2011 Australian film, Red Dog as a popular cultural product from Western Australia. Set in a working class mining community in the 1970s, I argue that it provides a new outback legend in the form of Red Dog. This article stems from a review of Red Dog as Film of the Year written for the forthcoming Directory of World Cinema: Australian and New Zealand Second Edition from Intellect Books

This paper describes the use of reflective biographical narrative, in postgraduate research supervision, in helping students develop their sense of place – an intellectual place – within the scholarly landscape. The example provided centres on the work of students who have found an intellectual home in cultural geography. Using planned and semi-formal conversation, a device emerging from the authors’ supervisory practices, this activity draws on the emerging tradition of reflective biographical narrative, in which biographical reflection is not merely reflection on knowledge, but a practical methodological approach to working with knowledge. We conclude that our approach provided positive learning outcomes for the students, all of who were better able to frame their research, using reflective biographical narrative, within a conscious sense of scholarly place, and to adopt such reflection as a key analytical tool in their respective research projects.

For quite a long time it has been claimed that cultural production in Tasmania has an inimitable and idiosyncratic place within the scheme of things. Sally Brown, a young Tasmanian designer, maker, artist, is unlikely to make this kind of claim for her work. Nonetheless, there is a particular sensibility evident in her work that it is doubtful that one might find anywhere other than in Tasmania – or made by someone of an older generation. This paper attempts to unpick, through four reflections upon Sally’s work, some of the thinking to do with the placedness, the vernacular social paradigm, the subliminal politics, the ‘crafting’ and the cultural savvy that gives Sally Brown’s work its presence. The questions that hang in the air around a collection of Sally Brown’s work are those to do with the ways local cultural imperatives might shape and make places they are found in, and in what ways might places shape the cultural realities that inhabit them. The following reflections on Sally’s work are distilled from email and blog conversations.

Increased critical consciousness and awareness of interculturality in a global and glocal context at the beginning of the twenty-first century has increasingly used the concept of transculturation when discussing modernities. Politically transculturation can be used to describe processes of negotiation in contemporary society that lead to social awareness and solidarity, as well as ensuring the continuity of societies. The fusing of cultural forms leads to a mismatching of perspectives, hence some critics have preferred to use the terms translation and/or transliteracy to describe this concept. Transculturation is related to the “normal processes of artistic borrowing and influence, by which any culture makes part of its contribution to the conversation of mankind,” as Les Murray maintained, and “it engages multiple lines of difference simultaneously” with overlapping boundaries (Rogers 491). Referring to various authors and linking it to cultural appropriation and border crossings, this article examines how the narrative expression of Both Sides of the Moon, to cite the title of Alan Duff’s book, is a key feature of Pacific writing, in an area where centuries of migration from near and far have exposed different cultures to each other on social, political, linguistic and aesthetic levels. These ‘contact zones’, to use Mary Pratt’s words, provide the reader with constantly moving translated identities, cultural hybridity and a use of language that has a highly local significance in a global context.

The colony of South Australia was unique among the colonies that were set up in Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in that it was established by an English company with significant capital and a unique plan for colonisation which would attract both capitalists and workers and which would attempt to replicate the class structure of England (Pope, p.6). There were no convicts or transport ships, but free settlers, many seeking religious freedom, many with a hunger for land, many furthering the fortunes of large families in England.