Editor: Elizabeth McMahon
This issue contains essays of critical re-evaluation and self-reflection: some sombre, all pressing.
Target essay
“UnAustralia: Strangeness and Value” by John Frow was given on 8 December 2006 as the annual Don Aitkin lecture at the University of Canberra, in conjunction with the annual conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, this year entitled UnAustralia.
Three essays on affect, ethics and modernity
Robert Reynold’s contemplates “The Demise of Sadness: Melancholia, Depression and Narcissism in Late Modernity”
In “Post-Colonial Boredom: The Myth Of Australian Sameness” John Milfull considers Bauldelaire’s assertion that “boredom is pain spread out over time” in relation to constructions of Australian homogeneity.
In “‘No one but I will know’: Hal Porter’s Honesty” Noel Rowe’s analyses secrecy and sexual self-disclosure in Porter’s ‘writing of corruption’.
Two essays on Music
In his essay “Of Jogis and mediators, musicologists and administrators: an elaborated field note” John Napier maps the many residues of colonial ethnography in his study of Jogi caste of singers in Alwar.
Kate Livett’s essay “Thieves and Fascists: the Politics of Abjection in Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief (The Gloaming)” traces the ways Radiohead’s most recent album critiques the West’s fascism of coherence.
Review
Tamara Popowski reviews Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body by Elizabeth Wilson
The Eco Humanities Corner
Introduction to Eco-Humanities: Back home to Ecology by Libby Robin
In this Ecological Humanities corner we have gathered together some new writing on old questions. Andrea Gaynor writes of how suburban home gardening can build ‘independence’; Rebecca Lucas looks at how home cooking can sustain the soul as well as the body; Ulla Rahbeck returns to a classic children’s story, Dot and the Kangaroo (1899), and considers the question of ‘finding’ home; Ian Campbell explores the role of his grandfather, Archibald J.Campbell in promoting wattle as a national emblem, and in the final piece, Libby Robin returns to home on a national scale, in ‘Home and away: Australian sense of place’.