Speculative Histories and the More-Than-Human: Weirding Colonialism and Climate Change in Contemporary Australian Fiction

"We Will Show the Country": Bringing History to Life

When Mark Salber Phillip’s suggested that history could be written as a type of combinational genre, with traditional empirical elements and fictional, literary elements working together to create temporal distance between the reader and the events, he saw this as a way of forcing us to look more broadly at the meanings of history, rather than focusing on a singular event. Using his claim that history cannot be understood as a singular form, but rather as "a cluster of overlapping and competing genres" that press the reader to a new degree of involvement in a story, it can be argued that an understanding of Australian history and its people, is enhanced by the experience of reading Australian speculative histories (Phillips 2003 218). Two valuable examples of these speculative histories are Clare G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius (2017) and Terry Pratchett’s The Last Continent (1998). Both are atypical engagements with Australian history that examine influences on Australian cultural behaviour and evolution through re-imagined interactions with the nation’s history, environment and mythologies.

Fairy Tale Transformation: The Pied Piper Theme in Australian Fiction

The study of whiteness as a racial category emerged roughly at the same time as historians became interested in postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, and forged what became known as "the new imperial history." Yet the two areas had different scholarly roots. Whiteness studies grew from labor history, sociology, cultural studies, and feminist theory, among other fields. Here I consider some connections between whiteness studies and the new imperial history as they have evolved, and a few of their implications for each other. Recent work has emphasized the global circulation of racial thinking, and historians of empire have located whiteness as a racial category in diverse colonial sites. Arguably, since the seventeenth century, if not before, the white settler colonies have been key sites. Relevant questions, I think, include: Has white settler colonialism been the breeding ground of specific forms of whiteness? How has the whiteness created by white settler colonialism been connected to the whiteness constructed by slavery and post-slavery societies—or that of societies shaped by both slavery and settler colonialism? How has Australian history, in particular, contributed to broader understanding of changing historical constructions of whiteness? And how might analyses of whiteness contribute to future work in Australian history? All of which, arguably, begs the question: How can we analyze and subvert whiteness without reifying it—through our seemingly inescapable shorthand of speaking of white people? Perhaps we should speak of "whitened" people?KeywordsRacial CategoryCritical Race TheoryColonial HistoryHistorical ConstructionRacial HierarchyThese 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.

Testing Citizenship, Regulating History: The Fatal Impact

Three Responses to ‘Can There Be Genocide Without the Intent to Commit Genocide?’

"Australian history generates great fervour in inte llectual and political circles in present-day Australia, and Ireland’s contributio n to the making of the continent is a hotly debated issue. This essay deals with Irishness in c ontemporary Australian fiction with a 19 th century setting. The representations I will be expl oring concern the Convict, the Bush- ranger, and the Catholic. I have put these three fi gures in ascending order, according to the degree of Irishness that they tend to carry with th em in contemporary Australian fiction. If we are dealing with a convict; then the character m ay or may not be Irish; if a bush-ranger, then he is more likely than not to be Irish; if the character is Catholic, then he is certainly Irish."

It is now widely acknowledged in the scholarship that Israel maintains a settler colonial regime, which has resulted in pervasive human rights abuses. However, the relation between ecology and settler colonialism in Palestine-Israel has only recently been subject to significant scholarly theorisation, despite the growing field of environmental colonialism and the present ecological crisis. This article adds to the limited field of eco-social and ecological settler colonial study of Palestine-Israel through the case study of Al-Walaja, a village in the illegally occupied West Bank, bordering the suburbs of East Jerusalem. Al-Walaja, a village known for its natural beauty and rich agricultural heritage, particularly its ancient terraced agriculture, has been transformed by Israeli settler colonial dispossession, which has claimed 89 per cent of the village’s land since 1947. This paper explores how settler colonialism and ecology intersect in Al-Walaja. First, by arguing that Al-Walaja is an example of the greenwashing and green grabbing practices that Israel uses to normalise the dispossession of Palestinians and obscure colonisation and environmental harms. Second, it examines how environmental harms, in particular restrictions on building in the village, cause the perpetuation of a settler colonial declensionist narrative and settler-native binary. Lastly, the decline of agriculture in Al-Walaja is contextualised in terms of the normalisation and erasure inherent to settler colonial projects.

On Home Ground: Settling Land and Domesticating Difference in the ‘Non-Settler’ Colonies of Burma and Cambodia Penny Edwards¹ The term ‘settler colony’ or ‘settler colonialism’ is generally now understood to embrace Algeria, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and North America and to exclude British India, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies . In this essay I want to rupture the binary of ‘settler colonies’ versus ‘non-settler’ colonies by looking at the gendered rhetoric of mobility and stability that straddled various colonized domains. Specifically, I focus on the French Protectorate of Cambodge (1863–1954) and British Burma (1885–1947). I will first explore the conflicting mobilities of colonial rhetoric, and then examine the gendered space of the colonial home as a site not for walling out and fencing off indigenous influences, but as an arena for opening up to indigenous aesthetics and living practices, albeit in a limited sense. In so doing, I aim to privilege the home not as an iron fortress of British or French domesticity — a theme that has coloured earlier of my writings on the subject of gender and colonialism — but as an arena for the interiorization of indigenous landscapes and life-forms. The current bifurcation between ‘settler’ colonialism and its hypothetical antithesis — the presumed conundrum of a colonialism without settlers - is a legacy of colonial mapping which still structures much contemporary thinking, both within and without academe. Despite the divergent histories and cultures of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, for example, these countries are still commonly conceptualized as bitmaps of a colonial ‘whole’ — Indochina, which, like the ‘Dutch East Indies’, and ‘British India’, is generally studied in isolation. In the past decade, a number of scholars have begun to subvert this colonial cartography, establishing ideological and other linkages across these ‘French’, ‘Dutch’ and ‘British’ borders. 2 But comparisons of colonialism across the ‘settler’ and ‘non-settler’ divides are still rare. In my own research, I have begun to compare gender ideology, racial mythology and the cultural politics of child removal in colonial Burma, Cambodia and Western Australia from colonialism’s ‘high tide’ in the late 1880s to the 1940s. My rationale for choosing Western Australia as opposed to other Australian colonies was that its status within the greater colonial map was similar to that of Burma and Cambodia with respect to British India and French Indochina: both, like Western Australia, were regarded as economic backwaters and, in the case of Burma and Western Australia, initial ‘official’ occupation occurred at a similar juncture, in the 1820s. These three culturally and geographically distinct colonized domains featured striking parallels in the dissemination and enactment of anti-miscegenation ideologies and policies, and in the establishment of philanthropic and government-supported societies and institutions for the removal of mixed-race children from their indigenous mothers and milieu. Threading together this connective tissue of colonial ideology were a number of judgements about the sexual morals and appetites of those women and girls pejoratively termed ‘Half-Castes’ in British India and Australia, and Métisses in French Indochina. 3 Vocabularies of Colonial Settlement The similarities in gender ideology and racially-framed policies straddling British India, French Indochina and the various colonies of Australia, are often disguised in a discordant series of euphemisms in vernacular, local and metropolitan discourses of colonialism. The nearest French equivalent of ‘settler’ is ‘ colon’, a term used for those engaged in agricultural and plantation work, and which was applied in the ‘non-settler’ colonies of Indochina just as it was in the ‘settler’ colony of Algeria . In Indochina, the term colon acquired a certain flexibility, and was sometimes used to embrace another colonial category, that of ‘ entrepreneurs’. Local terms for settlers which emerged in colonial patois included pieds noirs in Algeria, and petits blancs in Indochina, compounds which denoted long term residents, generally of the lower classes. These groups, who tended to settle permanently in the colony, differed markedly in their mobility to those at the apogee of colonial political power — the colonials, or government officials, who rotated in and out of office, journeying back and forth between the Métropole and the colonies to which they were posted. Yet surprisingly, even this latter category often opted to spend...

It is now commonly understood that much of the worldwide burden of environmental ill health falls disproportionately on poorer peoples [1,2]. There is also substantial evidence that much environmental damage internationally is the result of the actions of richer nations or richer groups within nations—with impacts on poorer nations and poorer groups within nations [1,3,4]. It is becoming clear also that poorer peoples internationally experience multiple environmental harms, and that these may have a cumulative effect. The world is becoming more urbanized, and cities are becoming the locus for many of the local issues of environmental damage and environmental harm [4,5]. But cities are also responsible for substantial international environmental damage: for example, it is increasingly evident that cities are one of the main generators of climate change, and that the actions of people in cities in the rich world are deeply linked to the well-being of the overall ecosystem and of people worldwide. Environmental justice is a concept that links the environmental health science documenting these harms, to debates around rights, justice and equity. It fundamentally deals with the distribution of environmental goods and harms—and looks at who bears those harms and who is responsible for creating those harms, in both a practical sense but also in terms of policy decisions. It is a radical environmental health movement that has evolved from civil society groups, angered at what they perceive as the `unjust' distribution of environmental resources for health and, conversely the `unjust' distribution of environmental harms. The movement now includes a collaboration of non-governmental organizations with environmental scientists, public health professionals, and lawyers, all working on the issue of the distributions of environmental harms and the rights of everyone to a healthy environment.This special issue is both timely and important. Environmental justice is moving conceptually and empirically. It started in the US as a movement of local civil society groups against local environmental injustice and distribution of environmental harms [6]. It is becoming a movement that encompasses international environmental injustices and issues of access to environmental goods—and it discusses environmental justice issues both across countries and also across generations. One such definition was pulled together by academics and NGOs in the UK in 2001:‘that everyone should have the right and be able to live in a healthy environment, with access to enough environmental resources for a healthy life’‘that responsibilities are on this current generation to ensure a healthy environment exists for future generations, and on countries, organisations and individuals in this generation to ensure that development does not create environmental problems or distribute environmental resources in ways which damage other peoples health’ [7].This kind of broad definition of environmental justice has been gaining currency internationally, and language around justice is moving into many topic areas of environmental science—shifting discourse on ‘climate change’ to ‘climate justice’, ‘water pollution’ to ‘rights to clean water’, ‘air pollution’ to ‘rights to healthy air’.Policy is changing too. In Europe the public is gaining more access to information on environmental harms through policy mechanisms such as the Aarhus Convention [8,9] and internationally, civil society groups are becoming aware that there are mechanisms to support them if they challenge environmental pollution. As the public becomes more aware of the issues of environmental justice, and as policy shifts in this direction, environmental scientists have a challenge. We have some of the methodology necessary to measure the distribution of environmental harms and environmental responsibilities. But we also need to develop new methods to deal with the new challenges: for example, how do we measure when an issue of water contamination becomes an issue of environmental injustice? How do we measure the impacts of environmental harm today on future generations? How do we measure the distribution of multiple or cumulative impacts on poorer groups? How do we quantify the responsibility of richer citizens in the world for the environmental harms distributed unequally to the poorer citizens?The papers in this focus issue do not answer all these questions, but we hope that this theme will recur in Environmental Research Letters and that more environmental scientists will begin to frame their analyses around the critical issues of distributions of environmental harms and benefits.

"Fruitful approaches: Queer Theory and Historical Materialism in contemporary Australian fiction" investigates the application of Historical Materialist ontologies to gay-themed, contemporary Australian novels, examining these subjects through the lens of totality and reification.

Australia's history as a settler colony within the British Empire fundamentally shapes its sense of security within the Indo‐Pacific region. Australia has consistently looked outside of its region for security and sought partners on the explicit basis of political, cultural, and ethnic similarity. What role does Australia's history play in shaping its foreign policy? We argue that these choices in foreign policy are inextricable from Australia's history as a settler colony on the farthest reaches of the British Empire. The AUKUS Agreement (AUKUS) is an example of how Australia operates to preserve racial hegemony in the face of non‐white threat — real or perceived. This research utilises critical discourse analysis to interrogate elite‐level discourse around AUKUS to ascertain the dominant narratives that inform its creation, the issues it seeks to address in Australian security policy, how it is structured by historical narratives of security, and how it functions to structure those narratives going forward. This article seeks to participate in the growing push to decolonise International Relations by illuminating the way Australia is ontologically and epistemologically invested in the preservation of racial hegemony.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, mechanics institutes proliferated across the Australian colonies at such a rate that, by 1900, they were more widespread, proportional to population, than in Britain. This article examines the first 30 years of their development in colonial Victoria to offer a new interpretation of their deep entanglement with settler colonial liberalism. As in Britain, the Victoria mechanics institutes largely failed to deliver technical education to working-class men. However, the men who propelled their proliferation had much wider hopes for their pedagogic function in the settler colony. This article examines how the twin forces of political liberalism and settler colonialism underwrote and shaped mechanics institutes in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. Examining the ideas of colonial liberals who propelled their proliferation and the activities that took place within them, it becomes clear that these institutes were imagined to cultivate certain kinds of settler Britons, capable of bearing the freedoms of an emerging settler modernity. At the same time, moreover, they both legitimated and implemented a settler colonial project of dispossession and demographic replacement. Mechanics institutes, I argue, were thus agents of both settler colonial destruction and liberal cultivation.

Reviewed by: White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler colonialism, maternalism, and the removal of Indigenous children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 Anne Keary White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler colonialism, maternalism, and the removal of Indigenous children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 Margaret Jacobs. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Margaret Jacobs’ history of Indigenous child removal in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Australia and the United States is thoroughly researched and broad-ranging. By making the connections between child removal, the takeover of Indigenous lands, the racialist dimensions of modern nation-building, and the maternalist politics of white female reformers, Jacobs places Indigenous child removal firmly at the center of American and Australian settler-colonial history. At the same time, in focusing on the role of women and exploring the histories of child removal from a comparative perspective, Jacobs’ book extends the study of gender and empire and deepens historical understanding of settler-colonial relations in both countries. For readers unaccustomed to thinking of the United States as a settler colonial nation, Jacobs begins by drawing the parallels between American and Australian histories of dispossessing Indigenous peoples and establishing new settler societies on their lands, while noting that Americans, unlike the British in Australia, did enter into treaties with Indigenous peoples. In her second chapter, Jacobs examines the formulation of Indigenous child removal policies, pointing out that in both post-Civil War America and post-federation Australia, officials came to view child removal as a means of solving the “problem” of Indigenous peoples’ continued existence in nations being redefined as modern, unified and white. The crucial difference was that in the United States, reformers framed removal as necessary to the cultural assimilation of Indian children into the American republic, whereas in Australia officials looked to removal as a means of facilitating the racial or biological “absorption” of Aboriginal “half-castes,” particularly girls, into the white Australian population. As a consequence American Indian children were returned from boarding schools to continue the work of tribal “uplift,” whereas in Australia “half-caste” children were removed permanently. In both cases, Jacobs stresses that removal was not a benign alternative to violence and military conquest but a continuation of settler-colonial efforts to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands, this time by breaking Indigenous children’s attachments to their kin and countries. In Chapter 3 Jacobs turns to the work of the white female reformers who played such a crucial role in justifying Indigenous child removal. They did so, paradoxically as Jacobs shows, by representing Indigenous women as unfit mothers and homemakers, even as they used the mantle of white motherhood to argue for a great voice in public policy for themselves. At the cost of Indigenous women’s rights, many of these women advanced their own careers as anthropologists, missionaries or government appointees in fields that had been occupied solely by men. Jacobs notes that American women, supported by stronger organizations and a tradition of evangelical reform, enjoyed more success in this regard than their Australian counterparts who lacked such support and faced stronger hostility from male officials. The greater part of Jacobs’ study examines the experiences of white female reformers and the Indigenous children who suffered removal and institutionalization at their hands. With a wealth of archival material, Jacobs makes excellent use of personal stories to show us how removal worked at the level of intimate human relations. Throughout she tracks the parallels and differences between the two contexts. In her examination of child removal practices in Chapter 4, Jacobs finds that while removal was a traumatic experience for all Indigenous people, in the United States officials did at least raise the issue of parental consent and Indian parents tended to have more leverage. In Australia, by contrast, officials regularly took children without parental consent, often at a much younger age. In Chapter 5, Jacobs shows that in both countries white female reformers tended to engage “in tactical intimate associations with Indigenous families,” befriending and then betraying them in their commitment to the goal of removing and transforming their children. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the institutions to which Indigenous children...

The study of settler colonialism has evolved from a nearly exclusive examination of the interplay of Indigeneity and white settler colonial domination to an engagement that has become attentive to questions of racialized migration. Because British settler colonies violently displaced Indigenous peoples without widespread exploitation of their labor, racialized migrant labor has played an important role in establishing and developing settler colonies, from the exploitation of enslaved and convict labor, to indentured and contract labor, and to contemporary iterations of guest and undocumented labor. The reliance on hyper-exploitable, deportable, or disposable classes of migrants has been an integral logic of settler colonialism in North America, rendering Indigenous communities even more vulnerable to dislocation, dispossession, and environmental harm. Asian North American cultural representation offers a rich site to explore settler colonial logics of land dispossession, resource extraction, relocation, urban redevelopment, and incarceration. In particular, Asian North American cultural production has often recycled settler colonial tropes that both denigrate and romanticize Indigenous cultures in claims for belonging that attempt to challenge the racial logics of civil, social, and political exclusion. In North America, the projection of a heroic “pioneer” identity aims to recover early Asian labor from historical obscurity by demonstrating its vital contributions to developing the settler nation. These expressions reinforce the value of Western civilization and industry over an empty, uncivilized, and unproductive Indigenous world. Asian American invocations of “local” identity in Hawai‘i similarly assert a romanticized identification with Indigenous cultures that obscures Asian Americans’ structural dominance and active role in the dispossession of Native Hawaiians. Alternatively, Asian North American cultural producers have also become strong voices in social and cultural movements to prioritize Indigenous self-determination, ecological protection, and decolonial anti-capitalism. Critical approaches to Asian North American representation have become increasingly attuned to reckoning with colonial complicity, exploring the ethics of responsibility, indebtedness, and solidarity with Indigenous communities.