Regionalism, Well-Being, and Domestic Violence in Tony Birch’s “The Red House”

The experiences of regional Australia are unique. This issue of M/C Journal solidifies some of the understandings of the experiences of living, working, creating, researching or thinking in, or through, regional Australia. Our work explores regional cultural constructions of these places, spaces, and identities, as well as of the communities that breathe life into these landscapes, whilst also bringing into question relations between the regional, the local, and the global. The contributions to this issue have all worked to investigate sites of collaboration and innovation, to tell stories about diverse communities, and cultural centres in addition to sites of hardship, innovation, and resilience.Moreover, regional Australia has often been marginalised and routinely activated as a symbol of what it means to live in the Great South Land, thus these places are often situated in the shadows of major metropolitan areas. This issue seeks to be a small redress of such acts of marginalisation and activation. Indeed, one of the central purposes of this collection of articles is to privilege regional voices. To this end, the editors have maintained the authorial voices within each piece. Revealed here is a diversity of point of view, of writing styles, and, most importantly, a diversity of scholarly approaches to what we know (and what we might come to know) of ‘regional’ in Australia. The feature article, from Karen Hall and Patrick Sutczak, takes up ideas of regional Australia through an examination of three site-based creative arts projects in the Tasmanian Midlands, arguing for an understanding of regionality as an accretion of environmental and cultural histories. Steven Pace has written on how a high-bandwidth data network project identified a special challenge for the Mackay region which had traditionally prospered from industries such as coal, sugar, and tourism; two decades later, how does the reality compare with the original vision? Alison Sheridan, Jane O’Sullivan, Josie Fisher, Kerry Dunne, and Wendy Beck have argued, looking at television media, that there is greater cultural diversity and complexity in regional towns and cities than portrayed in popular programming that often focus on landscapes and resilient communities, or on the lifestyle benefits of living in a regional area. Damien Webb and Rachel Franks have explored the institutional collecting of stories vital to the culture and knowledge of Aboriginal Australians and how such stories, generated by colonists, can be shared—across metropolitan and regional locations—with Indigenous communities through meaningful collaboration. Robin Ryan, with Uncle Ossie Cruse, has discussed Koori culture in New South Wales and the value of bringing together emerging regional artists, national headline performers of music, dance, and poetry, complemented by art, craft, culinary, language, and performing arts demonstrations. Terry Eyssens has also looked carefully at Indigenous issues and argues that the Australian colonial project has been to convert the entire continent into a region of Europe, in the process he has challenged readers to see the spaces they inhabit in a new way.In highlighting a collaboration between the Bonegilla Migrant Experience site, the Albury LibraryMuseum, and Charles Sturt University, Jessie Lymn has considered the role of regional libraries and museums in collecting, preserving, and making accessible the history of migrant communities. Alison Wishart has also looked at the cultural sector through the lens of the important issue of training and ways to connect the staff and volunteers of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums in regional areas to low-cost professional development and networking opportunities. Ellen Forsyth has investigated how local studies collections in public libraries can help people navigate the various experiences of regional Australia, paying particular attention to how this discovery work can be done onsite and online.Patrick West has examined how the concept of the regional is tied to ideas of well-being through the lens of domestic violence in Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House”. Creativity is central to Susie Elliott’s article which draws on her work on the social, economic, and local conditions that can support art practices, this research highlights alternative ways to live well while entering into the shared space of cultural production. We bookend this issue with another piece of scholarship from Tasmania. The notion of regional has been expanded here by Hanne Nielsen, Chloe Lucas, and Elizabeth Leane with their investigation into Antarctica and how this polar cap has been conceptualised as a region and what that might mean for people in this southern-most state of Australia. AcknowledgementsOur sincere thanks to the members of the Advisory Board of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (ACHRC) for encouraging us in this project. The ACHRC supports two Member Initiatives: Humanities in the Regions; and Humanities in Cultural Institutions. The Humanities in the Regions Member Initiative, established in 2014, seeks to promote Humanities-based research in regional areas across Australia. We thank our enthusiastic contributors, those who gave their expertise and time in the blind peer review process, and Axel Bruns.

BackgroundFamily and domestic violence, encompassing diverse behaviours including physical, sexual, emotional and financial abuse, is endemic worldwide and has multiple adverse health and social consequences. Principal drivers include traditional gender values that disempower women. Changing these is a key prevention strategy. In Australia, high-quality national surveys provide data on public perspectives concerning family and domestic violence but may not capture community-level diversity. As part of a project for primary prevention family and domestic violence in outer regional Australia, our aims were to develop and administer a questionnaire-based survey suitable for the local community encompassing knowledge about, attitudes towards, and personal experiences of family and domestic violence, to describe and to investigate the theoretical (factor) structure and local socio-demographic predictors of responses, and to determine the extent to which the survey findings are locally distinctive.MethodsThe online community survey for local residents (≥15 years), comprised items on respondents’ sociodemographic characteristics plus questions abridged from pre-existing national instruments on knowledge about, attitudes towards, and personal experiences of family and domestic violence. Responses were rake-weighted to correct census-ascertained sample imbalance and investigated using exploratory factor analysis, with sociodemographic predictors determined using multiple linear regression and dominance analysis.ResultsAmong 914 respondents, males (27.0%), those from age-group extremes, and less-educated persons were underrepresented. Familiarity with diverse family and domestic violence behaviours was high among all subgroups. Poorer knowledge of the FDV behaviour continuum and attitudes supporting traditional gender roles and FDV were disproportionately evident among males, older respondents and those with lower education levels. Both the factor structure of extracted composite measures reflecting community perspectives and sociodemographic predictors of responses generally aligned with patterns evident in national data.ConclusionsLocal reinforcement of existing nationwide findings on community understanding of and attitudes towards family and domestic violence provides salience for targeted interventions.

Family and domestic violence, encompassing diverse behaviours including physical, sexual, emotional and financial abuse, is endemic worldwide and has multiple adverse health and social consequences. Principal drivers include traditional gender values that disempower women. Changing these is a key prevention strategy. In Australia, high-quality national surveys provide data on public perspectives concerning family and domestic violence but may not capture community-level diversity. As part of a project for primary prevention family and domestic violence in outer regional Australia, our aims were to develop and administer a questionnaire-based survey suitable for the local community encompassing knowledge about, attitudes towards, and personal experiences of family and domestic violence, to describe and to investigate the theoretical (factor) structure and local socio-demographic predictors of responses, and to determine the extent to which the survey findings are locally distinctive. The online community survey for local residents (≥15 years), comprised items on respondents' sociodemographic characteristics plus questions abridged from pre-existing national instruments on knowledge about, attitudes towards, and personal experiences of family and domestic violence. Responses were rake-weighted to correct census-ascertained sample imbalance and investigated using exploratory factor analysis, with sociodemographic predictors determined using multiple linear regression and dominance analysis. Among 914 respondents, males (27.0%), those from age-group extremes, and less-educated persons were underrepresented. Familiarity with diverse family and domestic violence behaviours was high among all subgroups. Poorer knowledge of the FDV behaviour continuum and attitudes supporting traditional gender roles and FDV were disproportionately evident among males, older respondents and those with lower education levels. Both the factor structure of extracted composite measures reflecting community perspectives and sociodemographic predictors of responses generally aligned with patterns evident in national data. Local reinforcement of existing nationwide findings on community understanding of and attitudes towards family and domestic violence provides salience for targeted interventions.

Irrational Economics and Regional Cultural Life

Conurban

In April 1905 Edith Nesbit wrote disconsolately to J.B. Pinker, her literary agent, ‘I wish you could get me an order for a serial for grown-up people — something like the Red House. I don’t think it is good for my style to write nothing but children’s books’.1 Her remarks expose not merely her personal frustration with the genre of which she was a supremely talented exponent but also her sense of relegation to the ranks of second-class literary citizenship, a danger to which she was keenly alive. Wary of being permanently classified as a literary lightweight, Nesbit constantly tried to diversify her output, continuing to produce adult novels, short stories and poems which failed to match either the financial rewards or the popularity of her juvenile fiction. By 1905 she had published some of the most successful children’s novels of her day, including The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), The Wouldbegoods (1901), Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), the last of which had inspired H.G. Wells to write to her prophetically, ‘You go on every Xmas, with a book like this, and you will become a British Institution in six years from now. Nothing can stop it.’2KeywordsSibling RelationshipAbsent FatherWoman WriterRailway TunnelFemale PowerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Sharing this article, the act of writing and then having it read, legitimises the point of it – that is, we (and we speak on behalf of each other here) managed to negotiate western academic expectations and norms from a just-as-legitimate-but-not-always-heard female Buginese perspective written in Standard Australian English (not my first choice-of-language and I speak on behalf of myself). At times we transgressed roles, guiding and following each other through different academic, cultural, social, and linguistic domains until we stumbled upon ways of legitimating our entanglement of experiences, when we heard the similar, faint, drum beat across boundaries and journeys.This article is one storying of the results of this four year relationship between a Buginese PhD candidate and an Indigenous Australian supervisor – both in the writing of the article and the processes that we are writing about. This is our process of knowing and validating knowledge through sharing, collaboration and cultural exchange. Neither the successful PhD thesis nor this article draw from authoethnography but they are outcomes of a lived, research standpoint that fiercely fought to centre a Muslim-Buginese perspective as much as possible, due to the nature of a postgraduate program. In the effort to find a way to not privilege Western ways of knowing to the detriment of my standpoint and position, we had to find a way to at times privilege my way of knowing the world alongside a Western one. There had to be a beat that transgressed cultural and linguistic differences and that allowed for a legitimised dialogic, intersubjective dance.The PhD research focused on potential dialogue between Australian culture and Buginese culture in terms of feminism and its resulting cultural hybridity where some Australian feminist thoughts are applicable to Buginese culture but some are not. Therefore, the PhD study centred a Buginese standpoint while moving back and forth amongst Australian feminist discourses and the dominant expectations of a western academic process. The PhD research was part of a greater Indonesian tertiary movement to include, study, challenge and extend feminist literary programs and how this could be respectfully and culturally appropriately achieved. This article is written by both of us but the core knowledge comes from a Buginese standpoint, that is, the principal supervisor learned from the PhD candidate and then applied her understanding of Indigenous standpoint theory, Tuhiwahi Smith’s decolonising methodologies and Spivakian self-reflexivity to aid the candidate’s development of her dancing methodology. For this reason, the rest of this article is written from the first-person perspective of Dr Abbas.The PhD study was a literary analysis on five stories from Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers (1985). My work translated these five stories from English into Indonesian and discussed some challenges that occurred in the process of translation. By using Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading and Robert Warrior’s metaphor of the subaltern dancing, I, the embodied learner and the cultural translator, moved back and forth between Buginese culture and Australian culture to consider how Australian women and men are represented and how mainstream Australian society engages with, or challenges, discourses of patriarchy and power. This movement back and forth was theorised as ‘dancing’. Ultimately, another dance was performed at the end of the thesis waltz between the work which centred my Buginese standpoint and academia as a Western tertiary institution.I have been dancing with Australian feminism for over four years. My use of the word ‘dancing’ signified my challenge to articulate and engage with Australian culture, literature, and feminism by viewing it from a Buginese perspective as opposed to a ‘Non-Western’ perspective. As a Buginese woman and scholar, I centred my specific cultural standpoints instead of accepting them generally and therefore dismissed the altering label of ‘Non-Western’. Juxtaposing Australian feminism with Buginese culture was not easy. However, as my research progressed I saw interesting cultural differences between Australian and Buginese cultures that could result in a hybridized way of engaging feminist issues. At times, my cultural standpoint took the lead in directing the research or the point, at other times a Western beat was more prominent, for example, using the English language to voice my work.The Buginese, also known as the Bugis, along with the Makassar, the Mandar, and the Toraja, are one of the four main ethnic groups of the province of South Sulawesi in Indonesia. The population of the Buginese in South Sulawesi spreads into major states (Bone, Wajo, Soppeng, and Sidenreng) and some minor states (Pare-Pare, Suppa, and Sinjai). Like other ethnic groups living in other islands of Indonesia such as the Javanese, the Sundanese, the Minang, the Batak, the Balinese, and the Ambonese, the Buginese have their own culture and traditions. The Buginese, especially those who live in the villages, are still bounded strictly by ade’ (custom) or pangadereng (customary law). This concept of ade’ provides living guidelines for Buginese and consists of five components including ade’, bicara, rapang, wari’, and sara’. Pelras clarifies that pangadereng is ‘adat-hood’, a corpus of interlinked ruling principles which, besides ade’ (custom), includes also bicara (jurisprudence), rapang (models of good behaviour which ensure the proper functioning of society), wari’ (rules of descent and hierarchy) and sara’ (Islamic law and institution, derived from the Arabic shari’a) (190). So, pangadereng is an overall norm which includes advice on how Buginese should behave towards fellow human beings and social institutions on a reciprocal basis. In addition, the Buginese together with Makassarese, mind what is called siri’ (honour and shame), that is the sense of honour and shame. In the life of the Buginese-Makassar people, the most basic element is siri’. For them, no other value merits to be more detected and preserved. Siri’ is their life, their self-respect and their dignity. This is why, in order to uphold and to defend it when it has been stained or they consider it has been stained by somebody, the Bugis-Makassar people are ready to sacrifice everything, including their most precious life, for the sake of its restoration. So goes the saying.... ‘When one’s honour is at stake, without any afterthought one fights’ (Pelras 206).Buginese is one of Indonesia’s ethnic groups where men and women are intended to perform equal roles in society, especially those who live in the Buginese states of South Sulawesi where they are still bound strictly by ade’ (custom) or pangadereng (customary law). These two basic concepts are guidelines for daily life, both in the family and the work place. Buginese also praise what is called siri’, a sense of honour and shame. It is because of this sense of honour and shame that we have a saying, siri’ emmi ri onroang ri lino (people live only for siri’) which means one lives only for honour and prestige. Siri’ had to remain a guiding principle in my theoretical and methodological approach to my PhD research. It is also a guiding principle in the resulting pedagogical praxis that this work has established for my course in Australian culture and literature at Hasanuddin University. I was not prepared to compromise my own ethical and cultural identity and position yet will admit, at times, I felt pressured to do so if I was going to be seen to be performing legitimate scholarly work. Novera argues that:Little research has focused specifically on the adjustment of Indonesian students in Australia. Hasanah (1997) and Philips (1994) note that Indonesian students encounter difficulties in fulfilling certain Western academic requirements, particularly in relation to critical thinking. These studies do not explore the broad range of academic and social problems. Yet this is a fruitful area for research, not just because of the importance of Indonesian students to Australia, and the importance of the Australia-Indonesia relationship to both neighbouring nations, but also because adjustment problems are magnified by cultural differences. There are clear differences between Indonesian and Australian cultures, so that a study of Indonesian students in Australia might also be of broader academic interest […]Studies of international student adjustment discuss a range of problems, including the pressures created by new role and behavioural expectations, language difficulties, financial problems, social difficulties, homesickness, difficulties in dealing with university and other authorities, academic difficulties, and lack of assertiveness inside and outside the classroom. (467)While both my supervisor and I would agree that I faced all of these obstacles during my PhD candidature, this article is focusing solely on the battle to present my methodology, a dialogic encounter between Buginese feminism and mainstream Australian culture using Helen Garner’s short stories, to a Western process and have it be “legitimised”. Endang writes that short stories are becoming more popular in the industrial era in Indonesia and they have become vehicles for writers to articulate the realities of social life such as poverty, marginalization, and unfairness (141-144). In addition, Noor states that the short story has become a new literary form particularly effective for assisting writers in their goal to help the marginalized because its shortness can function as a weapon to directly “scoop up” the targeted issues and “knock them out at a blow” (Endang 144-145). Indeed, Helen Garner uses short stories in a way similar to that described by Endang: as a defiant act towards the government and current circumstances (145). My study of Helen Garner’s short stories explored the way her stories engage with and res

Violence is a natural condition in a person’s life or society. Everybody, indeed, does not desire violence, however, its occurrence never ends. This article examines violence in short stories selected by Kompas 2010. From the data, there are a number of short stories in the anthology that contains violence, including vigilante violence, medical violence, domestic violence, sexual violence, and cultural violence. “Pengunyah Sirih”, “Ada Cerita di Kedai Tuak Martohap”, “Sunya Ruri”, ”Ordil Jadi Gancan”, “Lebih Kuat dari Mati”, and “Pohon Jejawi” are the short stories contain violence. Text excerpts that contain violence are the data in this research. This research is classified as literature research with a qualitative descriptive framework. The analysis is carried out with an objective literary analysis framework, namely analyzing reality in literary texts autonomously. The results of the study are in the form of conclusions that state that there are variations of violence in the short stories chosen by Kompas 2010, including violence against the law, violence against anarchist demonstrations, domestic violence, sexual violence, medical violence and cultural violence.

Whilst the link between young people's well‐being and the creative arts is strengthening, there is a lack of research which focuses on the roles that artists play to help teachers and parents engage young people in the creative arts. This paper explores the benefits of and barriers to artists working in education in six European countries (England, Iceland, Germany, Greece, Italy and Austria). Using the ‘5A's model of creativity’ and a view of professional development taking place within ‘landscapes of practice’, the data were analysed in order to explain how creativity is operationalised in the different contexts. Our study highlights the need for policy at a national and transnational level to value the creative arts in order to help teachers cross boundaries and utilise the full potential of the creative arts in schools. Our study also highlights that further research is needed into how artists shape teaching and curriculum and how schools engage parents in the creative arts in order to build an evidence‐base relating to young people's positive mental health that can affect policy at these levels.

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

The creation of a Unified National System in the 1980s gave the university sector custody of practice-based creative arts previously conducted in independent art and music schools, and in colleges of advanced education. The relocation created upheaval for many disciplines as these new staff and their universities adjusted to organisational restructure, multi-campus sites and new cultural traditions. For those in creative arts disciplines, whose practice had previously been considered outside their tertiary employment as teachers, the move brought practice into their research obligations as university employees. Despite taking place over twenty years ago, the changes catalysed by this reform continue to resonate in art and music schools and influence the relationship between artistic researchers and their host universities, although as exploration of a recent breakdown in relationship between one university and its art school indicates, subsequent developments play an important role.

This research presents the study of female resistance on domestic violence in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wakefield. In this story, Hawthorne plays the female character who undergoes the form of domestic abuse within the family institution. His voice visible misogynistically, the female-oppressed is not only for keeping an authority, but also due to the failure to manage his marriage. In this study, the textual analysis is employed to explore the forms of domestic abuse by conducting close-reading (in-depth), identifying, grouping, and interpreting the related-words/clues/quotation of domestic violence on female. The results of analysis demonstrate that self-reliance of female character as vividly described by Hawthorne becomes a way of his female to fight against the domestic violence by male. In shorts, through his story, Hawthorne boldly enforces his female character triumphant as a way for resistance toward violence around her life.
 
 Keywords: violence, domestic, self-reliance, female, short story

The social impact of a regional community contemporary dance program in rural and remote Western Australia

Problems associated with recognising and reporting domestic and family violence (DFV) have been well established. Challenges around DFV service provision have been addressed by considering particular types of place, typically metropolitan or rural and remote areas. This article examines DFV services from the perspective of service providers in a regional area around 100 kilometres south of Sydney. In this context, DFV service providers reflected on the barriers and challenges of providing services to two target communities: challenges that were representative of nationwide service experiences but exacerbated by specific regional characteristics. Their experiences suggest that competitive, short-term and innovation-focused funding streams have contributed to a siloed service landscape that clients struggle to navigate. Greater attention to service integration would address many of these challenges.

Reviewed by: Domestic Disputes: Examining Discourses of Home and Property in the Former East Germany by Necia Chronister Nicole G. Burgoyne Domestic Disputes: Examining Discourses of Home and Property in the Former East Germany. By Necia Chronister. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021. Pp. x + 223. Cloth $99.99. ISBN 978-3-11-067335-7. In a new monograph entitled Domestic Disputes, Necia Chronister offers a diverse but deep study of property relations in the former East Germany of the 1990s and early 2000s. Her primary sources range from made-for-television and theatrical films to a short story and novels. The overarching theoretical constellations of the monograph are issues of Heimat and materiality; however, her exploration of the legal basis of property conflicts in the early years of reunification, as well as her precision in defining terms such as "neoliberalism" (3), "deterritorialization" (103), and "crises of masculinity" (150) in the context of her primary sources are equally helpful. The intricacies of legal disputes regarding property in East Germany, which Chronister details in her first chapter, introduced competing claims of those expropriated by the Nazis and those whom post-Socialist privatization of East German property put at a disadvantage. The history of Nazi appropriations of property mentioned above does not impact every story discussed in this monograph, yet its centrality to the texts [End Page 197] in chapter 6 of Chronister's work demonstrates that it is not a topic that has faded by the 1990s. Chronister also introduces newspaper narratives depicting the sheer number of competing claims on individual homes in the former East, in addition to the complications of establishing property ownership, such as poor records from the period of Soviet occupation and the GDR, as well as historical idiosyncrasies like changing street names. In this context, she emphasizes the informative aim of the made-for-television films she introduces in chapters 2 and 3. Chronister examines two of six made-for-television films produced by the East German DEFA studio, commissioned by a West German television channel in a gesture towards promoting reunification. In addition to portraying both sides of property disputes between Westerners and Easterners, Chronister writes that the films, which debuted in 1991 and 1992, "imparted key policy information to the German viewing audience of the time" (39). One trope that unites films made by DEFA and those made by others such as Uta Stöckl's The Same Old Song is the narrative argument that working to maintain a property lends its inhabitants credibility. Chronister analyzes this topos with the theory of intra-activity (13). In her analysis of two further films in chapter 3, Chronister makes the most direct argument in the monograph concerning neoliberalism: "Whereas The Brocken concludes with the spread of the market into every facet of life on the island of Rügen while simultaneously positing that personal relationships and a peaceful home life can thrive there, Buck's road comedy [No More Mr. Nice Guy] imagines a rather utopian space at its conclusion that lies outside of capitalism's reach" (97). Chronister emphasizes the uncertainty regarding the scope of neoliberalism that is visible in theoretical discussion of the term and the primary source material she has surveyed. A decisive strength of Chronister's monograph is the persuasive quality of her focus on property relations and the space of a home in all eleven of the fictional stories under consideration. As elaborated above, the films specifically addressed competing claims between Easterners and Westerners on properties with homes. In most of the prose texts covered, similar situations of taking possession of property and the dynamics of home life make contemporary gender roles of central importance. For example, in a chapter contrasting Judith Hermann's short story "Summer House, Later" (1999) with her novel Where Love Begins (2014), Chronister offers important nuance to topoi of the intervening time: "The dissolving binaries of place as thematized in 'Summerhouse, Later' have thus resulted in an unsettling sense of dislocation in Where Love Begins, and the sexual and gender fluidity at stake in 'Summerhouse, Later' has given way in Where Love Begins to heteronormative gender relations and reproductive sex" (101). Chronister utilizes the normativity of the later...