Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Stepping Up

Semester 1 2010 is now over. Once again thanks to our great tutors Naomi Tootell and Scott MacKay who really stepped up. The AIS team were challenged by things outside their control so the ride had its bumpy moments but there were a lot of highs. In delivering our new major the AIS team gave about thirty new lectures. Two of the lectures I gave, which still resonate, were on Dr H.E.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs in our second year course Key Thinkers and Concepts and Deborah Cheetham and her forthcoming opera Pecan Summer, in another second year course Aboriginal Women and Coloniality. I always find it hard to square Coombs’ great achievements and evident wisdom with his impracticable, and sometimes irresponsible, ideas about Aboriginal development. In spite of my own reservations, Dr Coombs’ ideas carried the day with a fair number of the students. Pecan Summer is set to be a sensation when it opens later this year. As well as writing the opera Cheetham has created an Aboriginal opera community from scratch. These developments remind me of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance community developed by Carole Johnson and others in Sydney in the 1980s which eventually led to the establishment of Bangarra Dance Theatre.

Grants. In the last fortnight we’ve submitted two grant applications – done while I’ve been in Europe. It would have been impossible without great support from Fran Edmonds (who has been coordinating applications) and Johanna Simmons.


Turku. I’ve just been at the International Society for Cultural History annual conference in, Turku, Finland. A great conference but occasionally standard history was presented as cultural history. ‘Micro-history’ seems to be the buzz word and will undoubtedly prove a useful rice bowl for historians. A couple of remarks from key note speaker Professor Jacques Revel that stuck in my mind:

‘Why should reasons [explanations] be simple?’

‘Why should we be simple when we can be complex?’


Read. Philip Roth’s The Human Stain 2000. A Jewish professor accused of racism is really an African American who, many years before, passed as white man. The novel suggests that his reasons for passing had more to do with the desire for freedom than opportunism though his sister observes that it was as logical for a light-skinned African American to pass in the1940s as it is to claim every drop of blackness in an age of affirmative action.


Watched. The Baader Meinhof Complex 2008, dr. Uli Edel. The best foreign language film I’ve seen in years. Tough and challenging, and a reminder that a few things were lost on the journey away from the Sixties.


Attended. I made use of 48 hours in London to attend a performance of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and August Wilson’s Joe Turner's Come and Gone. I doubt that I’d see The Crucible performed at a comparable standard in Australia and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone requires an Afro-diasporic cast. The hieratic final scenes of The Crucible were as powerful as theatre ever gets. August Wilson’s play was written in the 1980s – so it’s of the same era as Jack Davis’ No Sugar. It left me wondering if we will ever see Aboriginal theatre re-emerging as a central Indigenous art form.

http://www.openairtheatre.com/pl113reviews.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/jun/15/august-wilson-joe-turners-come-gone

Visited. Yinka Shonibare’s ‘Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle’ at Trafalgar Square. I was glad I took time out from my trip to the airport to check out this artwork. I’d expected it would be one more bleak work critiquing/deconstructing British imperialism. Instead its most salient qualities are lightness, freedom and optimism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/24/shonibare-fourth-plinth-ship-bottle

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/16/yinka-shonibare-fourth-plinth-trafalgar

http://www.london.gov.uk/fourthplinth/plinth/shonibare.jsp