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From Terra Nullius to Land of Opportunities and Last Frontier, the European dream has constructed and deconstructed Australia to feed its imagination of new societies. At the same time Australia has over the last two centuries forged and re-invented its own liaisons with Europe arguably to carve out its identity. From the arts to social sciences, to society itself, a complex dynamic has grown between the two continents in ways that invite study and discussion.
A transnational research group has begun its collective investigation project of which this first volume is the outcome. The book is a substantial multidisciplinary collection of current research and offers critical perspectives on culture, literature and history around themes at the heart of the Imagined Australia project. The essays instigate reflection, discovery and discussion of how reciprocal imagining between Australia and Europe has articulated itself and ways and dimensions in which a relationship between communities, imagined and not, has unfolded.
List of contents
Contents: Renata Summo-O'Connell: Imagined Australia: A Provocation in Four Stages - Mireille Astore: A Moment of Mourning. On the Threshold of the Pure Gift - Aileen Moreton Robinson: White Possession: The Legacy of Cook's Choice - Joseph Pugliese: Interstitial Australia's Vernacular Violence - Jon Stratton: Dying to Come to Australia: Asylum Seekers, Tourists and Death - Marianne Elisabeth Lien: 'Still Living Like People from Somewhere Else': Natives and Invasives in Tasmanian Landscape Imagery - Christa Knellwolf King: Settler Colonialism and the Formation of Australian National Identity: Praed's 'Bunyip' and Pedley's 'Dot and the Kangaroo' - Roberta Falcone: Australian Landscape as the Language of a New Identity - Roberto H. Esposto: From Finisterrae to Terra Australis Incognita: Bishop Rosendo Salvado's Utopian Imaginings and Designs for New Norcia - Leigh T. I. Penman: The Batavia Legacy: Implications of the Batavia Shipwreck (1629) in History and Imaginary - Antony Taylor: '«Heaven on Earth» was a Hell in Reality': Reflections on William Lane's 'New Australia' in Britain - Ian McLean: Bennelong's Gambit: the Aboriginal Invention of Modernism - Federico Boni: Mamboing Matilda: Surf-lifestyle T-shirts and Representations of Australian Cultural Identity - Roberta Trapè: Italy and the Transformation of the Traveller in Robert Dessaix's Night Letters - Margherita Zanoletti: In Other Images: Brett Whiteley's Image of Europe - Europe's Image of Brett Whiteley - Marilena Parlati: Looking for/at Australia. Roots and Repulsion in Contemporary Australian Women's Writing - Marguerite Nolan: Who's a Weird Mob? Imagining Assimilation in Postwar Australia - Oriana Palusci: The 'Indians' of New Holland and the Naming Process in English in the Age of Captain Cook - C. Bruna Mancini: Images of Australia In Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson - Susan Petrilli/Augusto Ponzio: Migration and Hospitality: Homologies between Europe and Australia - Katherine E. Russo: Contested Grounds: Practices of Re-appropriation in Indigenous Australian Visual Art - Elena Ungari: Perceiving Europe and Australia and Constructing an Imagined Australian Identity in The Aunts' Story by Patrick White - Christine Dauber: Imagining Australia: The Architecture of the National Museum of Australia Asks 'What Community'? - Vanessa Castejon: The Exoticism of the Musée du Quai Branly: a French Perspective on Aboriginal Australia.
About the author
The Editor: Renata Summo-O'Connell has launched the Imagined Australia international research project after having founded the international organization AILAE. Her background in Aesthetics, Sociolinguistics and Gender Studies directs her effort to develop new models of transnational research, which beyond institutional boundaries, may effectively further international debates and engage in creative projects on artistic and cultural levels.
