Red Dirt Research Articles

Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

:Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine

:<i>Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine</i>

Centring Anangu voices on work: A contextualised response to red dirt thinking

Nyangatjatjara College is an independent Aboriginal school distributed across three campuses in the southern region of the Northern Territory. Since 2011, the College has conducted student and community surveys to obtain feedback regarding students’ educational experiences and their future aspirations. In 2016 Nyangatjatjara College funded a research project, Centring Anangu voices in Anangu education, to look more closely at Anangu educational aspirations to inform the development of a five-year strategic plan. Among other activities, interviewers conducted surveys by listening carefully to Anangu school students and community through sharing first-language narratives. This paper focuses on the most commonly discussed aspiration of students, their families and communities, namely, that school should enable young people to get a job. This finding parallels other research findings (Guenther et al., 2015) and the philosophical underpinnings of “red dirt thinking” on aspiration and success (Osborne &amp; Guenther, 2013). Our examination of the data suggests that the theme of “work” is intertwined with aspects of the local community context. The paper concludes with an analysis of existing school-to-work transitions and opportunities, with suggestions for strengthening local participation in employment initiatives across the tri-state region at the intersection of the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.

Red Dirt Country: Field Notes and Essays on Nature by John Gifford

Red Dirt Country: Field Notes and Essays on Nature by John Gifford

Iconicities of Immersion After Voices of the Rainforest

Noise-cancelling headphones dampen my kids’ garden-play yells and fade the rev of motorbikes on the red dirt track across the road. I tune out the final sibilant spinning of the clothes washer and ...

Red Dirt Thinking on first language and culturally responsive pedagogies in Anangu schools

ABSTRACT Recent research relating specifically to Anangu (Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara) schools in South Australia and the Northern Territory assert that Aboriginal people living in remote central Australian communities viewed first languages and cultures as central to a good education for their children. The South Australian ten-year Aboriginal Education Strategy (2019–2029) commits to culturally responsive pedagogies (CRP) and bilingual instruction in Anangu schools by 2029. This translation from research to policy has important implications for practice which the authors, five experienced practitioner-researchers in Anangu education contexts, reflect on through a “practice architectures” lens using a narrative methodology. The article explores the complex space that practitioner researchers negotiate and highlights the shifts required in moving from research-oriented arguments to working collaboratively to enacting research findings in practice. The article concludes with reflections on privileging community voices and demands throughout the research-policy-practice continuum.

You can't outrun your shadow

E.M. Reapy was born in 1984 and raised in Claremorris, Co. Mayo, Ireland. She was educated at NUI-Galway, University College Cork, and Queen’s University Belfast where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing. In addition to other non-writing jobs, Elizabeth spent eighty-eight days working on an orange farm in the Australian Outback in order to secure a two-year visa to live and work in Australia – experiences that resulted in Red Dirt, her highly-acclaimed first novel. For Red Dirt, Reapy received the prestigious 2017 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, an award for a body of work by a young Irish writer showing exceptional promise. Skin, her second novel, also shares an Australian setting, among others.I met E.M. Reapy for the first time when we read together for the ‘Over the Edge’ Reading Series at the Galway City Library in 2018. On that occasion, Elizabeth read two beautiful short prose fiction pieces. Of course I had heard of her acclaimed first novel Red Dirt but had not yet read it. The next day I went into Charlie Byrne’s and bought a copy of the novel. A primary focus of my research through the decades has been on the literature of the Irish diaspora and I was excited to read Reapy’s exploration of the lives of the young Irish who had left home and moved to Australia, most on short-term visas, in the wake of the 2008 recession that caused the collapse of the Irish economy and, for all intents and purposes, bankrupted Ireland. I found Red Dirt to be terrific in every respect: beautifully realized, terrifying in places, always absorbing, and moving. Reapy’s second novel, Skin, while quite different from Red Dirt, is equally important in its intense exploration of how difficult it can be for a person to live in her skin. After Dr. Gillian Dooley has heard me deliver a paper on E.M. Reapy’s work at the Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand (ISAANZ), she asked me to interview Elizabeth for Writers in Conversation. The interview was conducted by email (January-April 2020).

Red Dirt Education Leaders ‘Caught in the Middle’: Priorities for Local and Nonlocal Leaders in Remote Schools

Schooling for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in remote or ‘Red Dirt’ communities has been cast as ‘problematic’, and ‘failing’. The solutions to deficit understandings of remote schooling are often presented as simple. But for those who work in Red Dirt schools, the solutions are not simple, and for education leaders positioned between the local Red Dirt school and upward accountability to departments of education, they are complex. Between 2011 and 2016, the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation's (CRC-REP) Remote Education Systems project explored how education could better meet the needs of those living in remote communities. More than 1000 people with interests in remote education contributed to the research. Education leaders were identified as one stakeholder group. These leaders included school-based leaders, bureaucrats, community-based leaders and teacher educators preparing university graduates for Red Dirt schools. This paper focusses on what Red Dirt education leaders think is important for schooling. The findings show school leaders as ‘caught in the middle’ (Gonzalez &amp; Firestone, 2013) between expectations from communities, and of system stakeholders who drive policy, funding and accountability measures. The paper concludes with some implications for policy and practice that follow on from the findings.

After the Apocalypse

Ama Codjoe | 137 1. After the apocalypse, I yearned to be reckless. To smash a glass brought first to my lips. To privilege lust over tomorrow. To walk naked down the middle of a two-­ lane road. But, too late, without my bidding, life cracked open, rushed, openmouthed, like a panting dog whose name I did not call—my lips shut like a purse. The last man I kissed was different than the last man I fucked. We were so desperate then, the two of us, undone by longing, drawing night from the cracks inside us, drawing the night out, as long as we could, until dawn broke like a beat egg and our heartbeats quieted in private fatigue. I’d be lying if I said I don’t recall his name. The end of the world has ended, and desire is still all I crave. Oh, to be a stone, sexless and impenetrable. Over half of me is water, a river spilling into restless limbs, the rest of me is a scalding heat like the asphalt under my feet. 2. After the apocalypse, I mothered my mother, became grandmother to myself, distant and tender, temples turning gray. The whole world cascaded past my shoulders, like the hair self-­ hatred taught me to crave—though all my Barbie dolls were black. And the Cabbage Patch Kid my grandmother placed under the artificial Christmas tree, sprinkled with tinsel, in Memphis, Tennessee, the city where my mother waited for her first pair of glasses in the Colored Only waiting room. She said the world changed from black-­ and-­ white to Technicolor that day. My mother watches TV as I roll her hair. She sits poetry After the Apocalypse Ama Codjoe 138 | Ama Codjoe between my legs. I’ve never birthed a child. I have fondled the crown of a lover’s head, my thighs framing his dark brown eyes. I entered the world excised from my mother’s womb. Her scar is a mark the color of time. I am my mother’s weeping wound. On my last birthday, I cried into bathwater. I hid my tears from my mother because that’s what mothers do. 3. After the apocalypse, I had the urge to dance on the president’s grave. The dispossessed threw me a belated quinceañera. My godmother wore a necklace of the dictator’s teeth. She sliced an upside-­ down cake, licked her forefinger, and said, “You have mastered sadness, querida, may your rage be sticky and sweet.” My father offered his hand—this time I took it. We glided like ballroom dancers across the red dirt floor. He wore a grave expression. I embraced him tightly so as to cloak my face. Instead of a toast, he handed me a handkerchief, wet with tears. My father circled the guests silently, dabbing gently each of their cheeks. This too was a dance unfolding. I folded the handkerchief into a fist and raised my fist like a glass of champagne. The pain in my father’s eyes sparkled like the sequins on my tattered gown. If it hadn’t been so ugly it would’ve been beautiful. The party ended just as the world had: with the sound of rain beating against the earth and each of us on our hands and knees peering into pools of mud and thirst. 4. After the apocalypse, time turned like a mood ring. My mood changed like a thunderstruck sky. The sky changed like a breast, engorged, staining the front of a white silk blouse. I got laid off. I went thirteen days without wearing a bra. I changed my mind about the fiction of money. Money changed hands. I washed my hands religiously. Religion changed into sunlight— something allowed to touch my face. My face changed into my mother’s. No, into a mask of my mother’s face. Traces of heartache changed into a pain in my right hip. The stock market Ama Codjoe | 139 dipped. The S & P fell freely. I did not fall to my knees promising to change my life. The price of paper towels changed and the price of toilet paper and the price of white bread...

Red Dirt Country: Field Notes and Essays on Nature by John Gifford

Reviewed by: Red Dirt Country: Field Notes and Essays on Nature by John Gifford Rodney Rice John Gifford, Red Dirt Country: Field Notes and Essays on Nature. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2019. 200 pp. Paper, $19.95. Writer and photographer John Gifford has authored a number of books and published widely in journals, magazines, and newspapers, including Southwest Review, The Atlantic, U.S. News and World Report, and The Christian Science Monitor. His latest book, Red Dirt Country, is a collection of field notes and essays on the landscape surrounding his urban Oklahoma home. Inspired by Henry Thoreau, Gilbert White, Aldo Leopold, and other naturalists, Gifford combines research with personal experience to produce what he calls "creative nonfiction for general and literary readers" (8). In doing so he succeeds in conveying accessible observations of plants, animals, and natural phenomena and in illuminating his impressions clearly. Scientific and technical expertise are not required to understand Gifford's descriptions of the inspiring value of natural phenomena such as the riparian corridors that concentrate rural and suburban wildlife across the southern Great Plains. "In a [End Page 204] developed area … where natural habitat is often compromised," he writes in his introduction, "riparian spaces are even more important, for they become vital areas of microhabitat and legitimate urban forests, which benefit not only native fauna but also human lives" (8–9). Gifford's field notes chronicle his observations through a yearly cycle in his suburban neighborhood and trace the behavior patterns of everything from the eerie yipping of local coyotes and cheerful songs of cardinals and mockingbirds in early spring through the hard rains of May and on to the grassland melodies of field sparrows and diving, midair acrobatics of Mississippi kites frolicking in the summer skies. Come August, the daily hum of cicadas provides a buzzing soundtrack for the daily adventures of creatures such as the omnivorous, lightning-quick roadrunner. By September and October the kites and other migratory birds begin their exodus, the post oaks and pecan trees drop their nutty bounty, cotton fields ripen, and riparian trees assume their respective yellow, brown, and red autumnal cloaks. Finally, November and December herald the winter season with late afternoon assemblies of chickadees, deer, wrens, mourning doves, blue jays, and woodpeckers near the backyard feeder. Collectively, these field notes and essays overturn stereotypical perceptions of the Great Plains as unpopulated, treeless, monotonous, and geographically and biologically austere. For Gifford, if one looks closely, one discovers that this region has remarkable environmental diversity that is irreplaceable. For that reason he argues that ecosystems such as the riparian zones must be protected from ongoing practices such as fire suppression, which disrupts a natural element of the bionetwork, impedes nutrient and water cycling, encourages the spread of invasive species, and increases the flammable biomass, in turn creating more intense and destructive wildfires. Gifford also identifies the troubling effects of overdevelopment and urban sprawl. Elsewhere, he laments the loss of large swaths of first growth forests such as the "Cross Timbers," an enormous, ancient woodland of low-growing post oaks and blackjacks that once extended through eastern Kansas and Oklahoma into Texas. [End Page 205] Even though Red Dirt Country sounds several environmental alarms, Gifford is careful not to turn this book into an apocalyptic lament. At one point he asserts, "Despite society's ongoing assault on the natural world … I'm inclined to believe we can mitigate, and in some cases even reverse, the ecological damage human activity has caused over the past century" (132). As evidence, he cites how banning DDT and chlorofluorocarbons helped save bird populations and reduce the ozone hole, how legislation such as the Sustainable Fisheries Act ended overfishing of valuable marine species, and how the preservation of urban forests and green areas in urban spaces like those found in the heart of Oklahoma City add "beauty and joy and meaning to our lives" (199). Without doubt, the challenges are formidable, but Gifford joins ranks with biologists such as Edward O. Wilson and others who assert that if humans reconsider their anthropocentric self-image as a species, they can avert environmental disaster with sustainable practices. Given the present din emerging from popular...

The red dirt stays in your shoes: Reflective practice and both-ways learning

The red dirt stays in your shoes: Reflective practice and both-ways learning

Building the world's biggest telescope

Even in early Winter, the sun is harsh in Western Australia's Murchison shire. In this land of unpaved roads, kangaroo tracks, and low, scrubby vegetation, visitors can and sometimes do get lost. Nevertheless, here I am, a few hundred kilometers from the coast, standing on rusty red dirt, hiding under my sun hat. I am visiting a future site of one of the most ambitious telescopes ever conceived.

Net Loss? Agrochemicals and Insecticide Resistance in the Fight against Malaria.

Net Loss? Agrochemicals and Insecticide Resistance in the Fight against Malaria.

On Listening to My Father Sing, and: Where the Next Poem Is

On Listening to My Father Sing, and: Where the Next Poem Is Morgan Blalock (bio) ON LISTENING TO MY FATHER SING What that song is made of:ethanol, red dirt, throbbingfingers, the biggest porch you ever seen— whose father doesn't knoweach word to every kind ofblues there ever was? Our house got death letter blues, got brokedown engine blues, got downhearted,got travelers' blues: lined up, shot at with the Colt that soredmy shoulder. Son House,Blind Willie, Mississippi John wail around woodstack, Miss Dolly humsJolene's name left of propanetanks, Robert Johnson behind the brick pile. Twenty-some years, must'vebeen a hundred times Fathertold me all I need is a black cat bone [End Page 66] and some mojo; must've beencountless days of backbreakingwork he ran through Muddy's dirty bass. Wiki says a black cat bonepromises good luck, rebirth,success in love, wards off an evil eye. Guess my father lived adifferent life than I made up.To obtain a black cat bone: first catch the cat, boil it alive—midnightonly—and better be sure youpicked it right. Father says you'd hold the bones up front of a mirror, choose darkestreflection. See, he hasn't alwaysbeen here, making sure I know everybody's got to fall at their crossroadin order to pray and get back up, to seek, take aim. [End Page 67] WHERE THE NEXT POEM IS On the barest pantry shelf, where preserves crowdbefore summer jams heavy on us. At the core of the question Mother asks each July:Little girl, when did it get so bad? Inside three years in which I watched your bodymean things outside of speech. Second floor of the once-house where the sweetestblackest wine is stored in jugs near bathtub below half roof, filled up half-clearwith rainwater and ash, with light. Near the (now collapsed) kilns where WilliamBurrell lost both legs in a rockslide and bled fourteen minutes on the road to C&OHospital in Clifton Forge, 1941. At the moment Rodney Jones wrote and this iswhen it's not language; how I remember you standing apart from me acrossthe white yard grown impossible. [End Page 68] Morgan Blalock Morgan Blalock graduated from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, but now lives in South Park, Colorado. You can find her work in CutBank, The Adroit Journal, Collision, and Prairie Margins. Copyright © 2017 Berea College

The Bible in/and Popular Culture: A Creative Encounter ed. by Philip Culbertson and Elaine M. Wainwright

THE BIBLE IN/AND POPULAR CULTURE: A CREATIVE ENCOUNTER Edited by Philip Culbertson and Elaine M. Wainwright. Leiden: Brill, 2011. 210 pp.This collection of essays emerged out of an awareness that biblical scholars have moved beyond exploring the intersection of the Bible and art and film to considerations of a host of other media, including music, literature, graphic novels, comics, and television. The editors note that, despite the growing breadth of scholarship, there is as yet no systematic study of the theoretical engagement of the Bible and popular culture. To that end, the essays in this volume give attention not only to a wide range of media and to a plethora of places (United States, New Zealand, Britain, Jamaica), but also to the ways in which important theorists provide crucial analytical lenses (Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, Judith Butler, and James Scott)-though the book does not attempt to establish a comprehensive theoretical framework for the nexus of the Bible and pop culture.Michael J. Gilmour's opening essay reads in an intertextual mode, drawing on Salman Rushdie's image of all the stories of the world being an ocean or sea of narratives swirling around in countless intersecting currents. He then dips into the waters by examining the way that the figure of Satan changes from Milton's Paradise Lost to Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Mark McEntire draws parallels between the withdrawal of God as a character throughout the Hebrew Bible with the increasingly distant and absent God invoked by Emmylou Harris in her album Red Dirt Girl. Harris helps her audience learn to cope with God's silence and to embrace the loneliness of human existence. Dan W. Clanton explores a litany of depictions of Jesus in a variety of media, from Henry Ward Beecher through Cecil B. DeMille and Mel Gibson to graphic novels and the animated South Park. His reception history analysis concludes that Jesus functions as a malleable mythic figure in American culture, an empty container into which many different meanings can be poured. Philip Culbertson's essay ex- amines the image of Mary Magdalene as a whore across a broad range of song lyrics. Drawing on Freud and Jung, he suggests that students be steered away from dichotomous thinking-Mary as either sinner or saint-and to appreciate her as a complex figure.Jim Perkinson writes in a hip-hop style with a rhythm and beat to his prose that reflects the music he is analyzing. His refracting the Bible and the music into one another ultimately serves to express a revolt against racism and poverty. Likewise, Noel Leo Erskine shows how the biblical story can shape an alternative identity by studying Bob Marley's album Exodus. Rastafarians equate Jamaica with Babylon and Ethiopia with Zion. However, Marley's lyrics reflect the continued subjugation, rather than liberation, of women. Thus, Babylon is not left totally behind.Tex Sample considers the enduring popularity among working-class Americans of two country songs by Kris Kristofferson, Help Make It Through the Night and Me and Bobby McGee. …

High Times

High Times John Tytell (bio) Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats & Drugs Martin Torgoff Da Capo Press www.dacapopress.com/book/hardcover/bop-apocalypse/9780306824753 393 Pages; Print, $26.00 Bop Apocalypse is a highly coherent, comprehensive and quite compelling account of the fusion of jazz history, the combustible and sometimes compromising influence of drugs, and the emergence of the Beat writers. Even if some of Torgoff’s ground has been previously covered, he weaves his narrative more fluently than some of his predecessors and with more pickle and punch. His book is not a blow-by-blow job, not a numbing parade of fact as much as a gestalt history using a synthesizing lens focusing on a conjunction of revealing events like the detail of a young Jack Kerouac sharing a table at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem with his first wife and Billie Holiday, or the bop musician Charlie Parker downing eight doubles on a dare (what downed Dylan Thomas) before performing at the Hi De Ho Club in Los Angeles in 1946. The scope of the book is large: the beginning of jazz in New Orleans after World War One; its development in Chicago in the 1920’s and Harlem in the 1930’s; the immediate repression by Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics; the impact of jazz and drugs on the Beats at the end of World War Two and their ability to artistically disseminate the news of that impact. Torgoff is a gifted storyteller and he begins with a striking anecdote told to him by the writer Terry Southern. Picking cotton in Texas in 1936, on the way to fishing for bullheads in a pond surrounded by weeping willows and cottonwoods, he saw a cow sprawled on the ground in what seemed contented bliss. The field hand accompanying him noticed an uprooted green plant and explained that the cow had eaten “red dirt,” or loco-weed: i.e. Marijuana. In a time when a national paranoia about this weed had been cultivated by federal agents, Southern began searching for more. By the time he wrote the celebrated campfire scene for Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, Southern had “smoked thousands of joints, sharing them with some of the most interesting cultural figures of his age….” Bop Apocalypse is organized with a series of sharply drawn vignettes: Anslinger, the country’s first drug czar, an inveterate liar and xenophobic racist who declared the drug war; the musician Muzz Mezzrow, the “White Mayor of Harlem,” who began dealing weed and whose 1946 autobiography Really the Blues was read by a student at Columbia University, Allen Ginsberg, “as if it were the Rosetta Stone”; the genial and generous Louis Armstrong who played music that could make people stand on their chairs and shout,” and who understood that the musicians in his band could function on marijuana without suffering the after effects of alcohol. Another key connection was Jack Kerouac who as a student at Columbia frequented a club in Harlem where a new evolution in jazz was created. The edgy, dissonance of Bop was formed in Minton’s cellar by musicians like Lester Young and Charlie Parker. Torgoff offers elegant accounts of Young, known as the Epitome of Cool, and Parker, the Icarus of that cellar. The use of heroin, Torgoff maintains, “spread in direct proportion to the cult of Parker’s admirers and Anslinger soon created a special file on musicians.” It is estimated that 75% of jazz musicians became addicted to heroin in the 1940s and 1950s, and Torgoff compassionately explores the dynamics of this phenomenon. For Jackie McLean, one of the musicians Torgoff interviewed, it was the best way to overcome a perplexing stage fright; for others like Holiday it was compensation for a terrible despair. Paradoxically, for the authorities, it became the most convenient excuse for repression. Part of the richness of Torgoff’s tapestry is his reliance on interviews he conducted over the past quarter century like the one he did with Herbert Huncke in 1992. A catalyst underground figure whose term “beat” became the signifier for a generation, Huncke was living in a basement on...

Building on ‘Red Dirt’ Perspectives: What Counts as Important for Remote Education?

The Remote Education Systems (RES) project within the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC-REP) has, over the last four years, gathered and analysed qualitative data directly from over 230 remote education stakeholders and from more than 700 others through surveys. The research was designed to answer four questions: (1) What is education for in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities?; (2) What defines ‘successful’ educational outcomes from the remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander standpoint?; (3) How does teaching need to change in order to achieve ‘success’ as defined by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander standpoint?; and (4) What would an effective education system in remote Australia look like? Based on this data, the paper reveals how perceptions differ for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from remote communities compared with people who come from elsewhere. The analysis points to the need for some alternative indicators of ‘success’ to match the aspirations of local people living in remote communities. It also points to the need for school and system responses that resonate with community expectations of education, and to develop narratives of aspiration and success alongside community views.

Editorial

This special issue of The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education presents a second volume of papers which specifically address the issue of remote education for Indigenous Australians. ‘Red Dirt Revisited’, edited by John Guenther, presents findings from his team working on the Remote Education Systems (RES) project within the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC-REP). Focusing on a number of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educational sites in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia, the RES project is now in its final stages and the main intention behind this special issue is to share significant findings from this important research. Much of the work presented here is by postgraduate students and AJIE is very pleased to be able to provide a voice and forum to support and ‘grow’ early career researchers in our field.

Editorial

In 2013, the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation's (CRC-REP) Remote Education Systems (RES) project team brought together a collection of papers built around a central theme of ‘red dirt thinking’. This theme reflected a view the authors had, that education and schooling in remote communities should be relevant to the context (that is, the ‘red dirt’) in which it is provided. We proposed this as a conceptual framework in which to challenge conventional wisdom about success, disadvantage and aspiration in remote schools.

Whither the Aborigine

Whither the Aborigine