Editor: Elizabeth McMahon
Essay
Anne Brewster’s essay “Writing whiteness: the personal turn” considers the current autobiographical approach taken in whiteness studies as part of a growing interest in experience and memory evident in Australian humanities and social sciences.
Reviews
In “Australasian Interactions: Contested Geographies of ‘White Australia’” Adrian Carton reviews Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan by Daniel Oakman and Navigating Boundaries: The Asian Diaspora in Torres Strait, edited by Anna Shnukal, Guy Ramsay and Yuriko Nagata.
In ‘Genocide and Colonialism, III‘: Lorenzo Veracini reviews Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History edited by A. Dirk Moses.
Fiona Probyn reviews Whitening Race edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson.
Elizabeth Webby welcomes a comparative literary analysis of two former British colonies in her review of Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction by Sue Kossew.
Chris Danta reviews Andrew Benjamin’s Disclosing Spaces: On Painting.
Ecological Humanities
Gregory Bateson and Ecological Aesthetics
The essays offered in this issue of the Ecological Humanities Corner honour one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century: Gregory Bateson. Peter Harries-Jones, Bateson’s foremost intellectual biographer, offers an introduction to Bateson’s thought on ecological aesthetics, and at the same time introduces the two main essays. As he explains, the essays were originally presented in a symposium, organised by Katja Neves-Graça, that was part of the Bateson’s centenary celebrations in Berkeley California (November 2004). They bring Bateson’s aesthetics into ethnographic analysis, seeking both textual and epistemological expressions of the ‘patterns that connect’. Finally, we include Mary Catherine Bateson’s reflections on Deborah Bird Rose and Katja Neves-Graca engagements with her father’s work.
“Introduction” by Peter Harries-Jones
“Chasing Whales with Bateson and Daniel” by Katja Neves-Graça
“Pattern, Connection, Desire: In honour of Gregory Bateson” by Deborah Bird Rose
“Comments on Deborah Rose and Katja Neves-Graca” from Mary Catherine Bateson.