Bulpadok 2015

Page 1

\ 2015



B U L PA D O K Art Journal VOLUME XXIII

A Sense of Place 2015

Trinity College UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE


THE TRINITY COLLEGE ART JOURNAL EDITORIAL BOARD Nick Fabbri

Matthew Watts

THE TRINITY COLLEGE COUNCIL PRESIDENT The Most Revd Philip Freier, Archbishop of Melbourne Ms Kathleen Bailey-Lord, Current Parent Mr Campbell Bairstow, Provost of Trinity College Mr Andrew Beyer, Resident Student Representative Dr Graeme Blackman, Diocese of Melbourne Ms Denise Bush, Dean of the Pathways School Associate Professor Tony Buzzard, Fellow of the College The Revd Christopher Carolane, Joint College Chaplain Ms Vivian Chan, TCFS Alumnus Mr Scott Charles, Nominee of the Trinity College Foundation Ms Melissa Clark, Theological Student Representative Mr Robert Clemente, Fellow of the College Mr David Collis, Staff Representative Mr Bill Cowan, Current Parent Mr Jim Craig, Chairman of the Board The Rt Revd Andrew Curnow AM, Diocese of Bendigo Mr Jack Dawson, Senior Student of the College Ms Tanika D’Souza, Resident Student representative

The Venerable Dr John Davis, Diocese of Wangaratta Dr Katherine Firth, President of the Senior Common Room

Bishop Kay Goldsworthy, Diocese of Gippsland Ms Louise Gourlay, Fellow of the College Professor Kenneth Hinchcliff, Warden of Trinity College Ms Liz Kelly, Alumna Mr Philip Kent, University of Melbourne Professor John King, President of the Union of the Fleur-de-Lys Ms Alice Knight, Diocese of Ballarat The Revd Canon Professor Dorothy Lee, Dean of the Theological School Mr Mark Leslie, Nominee of the Trinity College Foundation Associate Professor Michelle Livett, Univer sity of Melbourne Ms Alison Menzies, Senior Staff Ms Kate Reid, Alumna Mr Donald Speagle, Alumnus Dr Benjamin Thomas, Staff Representative Mr Patrik Valsinger, Senior Staff

WARDEN OF TRINITY COLLEGE Professor Kenneth Hinchcliff


THE FELLOWS 2014 2010 2014 2009 1997 2002 2001 2010 1997 1997 2014 2004 2012

Ms Rowena Armstrong, AO, QC The Hon. Austin Asche, AC, KStJ, QC Dr Graeme Blackman, OAM Mr David Brownbill, AM Associate Professor Anthony Buzzard Mr W B ‘Barry’ Capp, AM The Most Revd Dr Peter Carnley, AC Mr Robert Champion de Crespigny, AC Mr Robert Clemente Mr Bill Cowan, AM The Rt Revd Andrew Curnow, AM Professor Derek Denton, AC Professor C. Ian Donaldson

2009 2014 2009 2012 1997 2005 2005 2012 2012 2005 2012 2002 2009

Mrs Louise Gourlay, OAM Associate Professor Alison Inglis Dr Michael ‘Taffy’ Jones, AM, PSM Professor Marcia Langton, AM Professor Richard Larkins, AO Dr Susan Lim Ms Fay Marles, AM Dr N. Bruce Munro Dr Roger Riordan, AM Professor Richard Smallwood, AO Mr Clive Smith Ms Diana Smith Dr Denis White

SENIOR FELLOWS 2011 Sir Roderick Carnegie, AC (elected Fellow 1980) 2012 Mr Robert Cripps, AM (elected Fellow

2012 Mr Brian Loton, AC (elected Fellow 1990) 2010 Professor John Poynter, AO, OBE (elect

1984) 2011 Mr Alan Cuthbertson (elected Fellow 1980) 2010 The Rt Revd James Grant, AM (elected

ed Fellow 1965) 2012 The Hon. Clive Tadgell, AO, QC (elect ed Fellow 1993)

Fellow 1975) 2015 The Rt Revd Dr Peter Hollingworth, AC, OBE (elected Fellow 1997)

2015 Dr Mechai Viravaidya, AO (elected Fellow 1997) 2015 Mr Richard Woolcott, AC (elected Fellow 1996)

PROVOST Mr Campbell Bairstow

DIRECTOR OF ADVANCEMENT Mr Scott Charles

ASSOCIATE DEAN, TRINITY COLLEGE Dr Gayle Allan

CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Mr Patrik Valsinger

DEAN, THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL The Revd Canon Professor Dorothy Lee

DIRECTOR OF HUMAN RESOURCES Ms Alison Menzies

DEAN, PATHWAYS SCHOOL

DIRECTOR OF MAJOR PROJECTS

Ms Denise Bush

Mr Gary Norman


Bulpadok is published by its Editors for, and on behalf of; TRINITY COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE for presentation to HIS GRACE THE PRESIDENT IN THE COUNCIL, THE FELLOWS & THE MEMBERS OF TRINITY COLLEGE CO-EDITORS Mr Nick Fabbri Mr Matthew Watts SUBCOMMITEE Ms Ella Heathcote-Morris Ms Hannah Pakula Mr Nick Senior SPECIAL THANKS Dr Gayle Allan Dr Katherine Firth Dr Benjamin Thomas Mr Angus Cameron DESIGN & PRINTING Typeset by Hana Nihill Cover Art, Universally Isolated by Ms Millie Larsen Set in Adobe Garamond Pro & Didot Printed and bound by Eastern Press 300gsm cover, 100gsm content CATALOGUE-IN-PUBLICATION Bulpadok, 2015 1. Australian Literature – Periodicals 2. Trinity College, The University of Melbourne A820.5 ISSN 1320-8500

Copyright © Trinity College and others named, 2015 The moral right of the authors has been asserted All rights reserved Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced to a retrieval system, transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this journal. The Editors, Subcommittee, and Trinity College are not responsible for, nor do they necessarily agree with, the views of the contributors expressed herein. trinity.unimelb.edu.au A limited number of back copies of this journal are available at the Leeper Library, Trinity College, Royal Parade, Parkville, Victoria


FOUNDERS INTENT The first Bulpadok published in 1987 offered this statement as a mark of the journal’s purpose and place within Trinity: The Bulpadok offers a new outlet for the creative life of Trinity College. Along with our dramas, musicals, debates, art shows, and musical concerts, this publication expresses the vitality of the Trinity community. The name “The Bulpadok” emphasises the source of this literary collection – by Trinity students, of Trinity College, for everyone. The editors would like to thank Trinity College Council, Trinity College Associated Clubs, and our warden, Dr Evan Burge, for their support of this inaugural issue. The secretary of the Dialectic Society welcomes submissions of literary work from any genre for the 1988 edition. The Editors today reiterate the founding Editors’ wish to recognise and encourage the creative life of the College. No longer The Bulpadok - having lost its definite article - we envision the new Bulpadok as a place in which all Trinitarians’ articles, whether creative, artistic or academic, may find a home. As an important mark of the College’s achievements, we welcome its return and hope the journal may continue to find a strong following in the years to come.

· ······ ····· u ....... . We formally dedicate this edition of Bulpadok to the outgoing Dean of Trinity College Dr Sally Dalton-Brown This edition of Bulpadok could not have been realised without the support of many Trinitarians, both students and staff. We thank the contributors and the editorial subcommittee for their efforts and dedication. In particular we would like to thank Professor Ken Hinchcliff and Mr Campbell Bairstow for their continued support of the publication. Thank you to Dr Gayle Allan, whose unwavering efforts and inexhaustible knowledge of our College has been invaluable. Thank you to Dr Katherine Firth for her sage advice and endless support. Thanks go to Dr Ben Thomas, whose mastery of all things historical has steered a clear course in resurrecting this publication in the manner of past Bulpadoks. Lastly thank you to Mr Angus Cameron whose guidance has been a constant source of insight and reassurance.


Contents Forewords A Special Place and a Sense of Place

Professor Ken Hinchcliff

iv

Campbell Bairstow

vi

Enlivening a Sense of Place

Matthew Watts

vii

Curlew

Luke Patterson

1

Bulpadok

Professor J.R. Poynter

3

Melancholic Musings

Evelyn Parsonage

7

Dear E.E. Cummings

Rachel Koh

15

Tyson Holloway-Clarke

17

Australia’s ‘National Identity’

Hugh Edwards

21

J-Pow

Isabelle Napier

32

The Bulpadok, A Foreward

Gavin the Fighter

Everlasting

33

Last Sunset of 2011

34

The Phoenix and the Dragon Madness and Civilisation Gallipoli What Was He Thinking? Backa Bourke Muslim Philosophers Fire 1

Kai Lin Choo

35

Sarah Abell

39

Bori Ahn

45

Amelia Curran

51

Marika Duczynski

53

Max Collin

63

Senhao Huang

73 74

Fire 2

75

Fire 3 Scratch My Name Into the Feet of Statues Moutaineering as Reality and Metaphor Cultural Capital

Angus Cameron

76

Nick Fabbri

77

Rona Glynn-Mcdonald

87

-i-


A Series John Martin Analysis of Olivers Creek by Mitch Gobel Dr Benjamin Thomas

91 93

Native Title Jack Marozzi

97

Self-Explanatory Sara Dee Rusdiah

109

Grotta Azzurra Evie Sloan Nocturne Paul Daniels The Relentless Blue Nic Lawler The Glass Ceiling is Frustratingly Opaque Sorcha Buchan 181 Anonymous Evensong Kate Kirby Oh the Places You’ll Go Nicholas Senior

110 111 113 121 131 133 136

Stravinsky Shae Stabryla

137

Tulip Ella Faragher

151 152

Droplets The Divine Image Christopher McElhinney The Ticket Inspector Liv Whitaker Language and Numerical Competence Sara Dee Rusdiah

153 159 165

Untitled Jon Htin

173

Reconciliations Luke Patterson

174

House of Horrors Evelyn Parsonage

175

Athenian Self Identity Nick Senior

179

Untitled Jon Htin

189

Untitled

190

Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov

191

The Life of Tymon of Athens William Shakespeare

- ii -

192


Forewords Dr Ken Hinchcliff Mr Campbell Bairstow Mr Matthew Watts


A Special Place and a Sense of --~. Place

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A community is composed of members who share a common - r.a special sense of place, that particular sensation when one feels

attachment and affection for a unique geographic location. A sense of place could be taken to imply that it is the geographic

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location to which one is attached, but this is not true. It is a combination of factors, including location, that make a place

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special to us. It is as much about our experience in that place,

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the folklore and local knowledge that we acquire while there, as

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ronment. A “sense of place” is about our authentic attachment ,f

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to a community, a group, or an institution, about a feeling of

fulfilment, contentment and belonging. It grows from our self

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identification as belonging in this place. As J.B. Jackson writes

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graphical sense, that gives us our identity.”

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Trinity is such a distinctive place, a special place to many of us. . ' ..

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Trinity provides us with that sense of place, that enduring feeling of belonging to a special long after we have left '! •.. ·.:;.~ ~community

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its grounds. Our sense of place at Trinity is not defined solely i.,

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by the evening walk across the Bulpadock to dinner in Hall, or a game of snooker in the billiards room, or Juttodie, or singing in the choir, or acting in the annual play or joining in a tutorial. It is defined by all these things, and more, which add up to a feeling that our community is a special place, distinct from anywhere else. We belong because we see value in our community, because we contribute to our community, and because it is “our” community – we own it, we shape it, we are members of it. Contributing to our sense of Trinity as a distinctive place are the writings, art work and photography in this edition of Bulpadok. The contributions to our literary journal by members of our community are a clear illustration of the diversity and vibrancy of life in Trinity. I congratulate the editorial committee and the contributors for creation of this marvellous edition of Bulpadok, a publication that both demonstrates and enhances our sense of place at Trinity.

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Bulpadok

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What a joy it is to celebrate the cultural and creative riches of Trinity College. Bulpadok is an important annual expression of the talents of our writers, researchers, poets, dreamers, artists ,_

and stirrers. In the best traditions of university thinking, writing and drawing, it ranges from the ‘laugh out loud’- through to r. deep intellectual nourishment, beautiful illustrations and even occasional puzzlement. It is a splendid concentration of our

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gifts.

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We have recently farewelled one of the most powerful and

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impressive minds and leaders of our academy for the past dozen

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. edition of the years or so, Dr Sally Dalton-Brown. Perhaps-~ this

Bulpadok is offered in her honour...

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Sally Dalton-Brown Muse, mentor and marvel

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Polymath, painter and protagonist Sally Dalton-Brown

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1922 Jubilee Perspective

Enlivening A Sense of Place “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane� Pale Fire (1962) Vladimir Nabokov


Foundering on the far side of the Bulpadock, its twin peaked roofs like the wrecked hulls of an upturned fleet, Cowan challenges its rival in Jeopardy whose modernist sweep cuts across the barren west of the greensward. Nearby the Chapel’s red glow soars skyward, as though it wishes to escape the mediocrity of its neighbours. The polychrome brick of Bishops’ and Clarke’s recalls another age in which the certainties of ‘Pro Ecclesia, Pro Patria’ might have meant more. A bold statement in sandstone, Behan seems lost; the lone accomplishment of the aspirations of the 1922 Jubilee Master Plan. As the only building to survive the sweeping changes envisioned by the Jubliee Plan, Leeper continues to stand triumphant. In 2022 the College will mark another momentous anniversary, 150 years. Much as the 50-year Jubilee was an important moment in the College’s history, the upcoming sesquicentennial will be a time to reflect on what it means to be a Trinitarian; why did our predecessors want to be a part of this community, and what did they envision for our future in such a grand scheme? As our home, these buildings create and constrain us. The college experience is one informed by its bounded nature: an artificial environment where one might experience the support of a community and simultaneously glimpse the freedom of the outside world, and with it the possibilities of a future self. Encircled by these buildings and framed by the community that surrounds us, we are all Nabokov’s waxwing - a bird whose field of view is determined by its own enclosed - viii -


experience, an entrapment that determines its lust for more. The waxwing yearns to experience the great azure of the open sky, whilst the comforts of College have the potential to leave one complacent. One may find oneself entwined in the social structures of College, and thus deeply imbued with the certainties entailed by such an entrenched sense of place. This loss of perspective can leave one looking inward, rather than up and out. Nabokov’s false azure becomes product of the limitary of collegial living. It must be kept at bay and the space reinvigorated by social heterogeneity and an understanding of our personal trajectory: a need to strive. Trinitarians of the past have striven and achieved great things, and it is to us that this legacy falls. Changing the limits that contain us as a community will re-shape the way we engage with our own paths. The Trinity of the future will be different, should be different, and will be determined by us today. What will you do for it so that it might do more for you? As we draw closer to 150 years of Trinity we ought to consider where we wish to be, and what we wish for our community. Be the waxwing, rail against your cage, undo what went before, and leave it better than you found it. Matthew Watts Co-Editor

- ix -


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2022 TRINTY MASTER PLAN VISION KEY 1. Lillian Alexander Centenary Tower

15. Rec-Hall

• Basement: Underground car park

• Gym, JCR Kitchen, Theatre Room

• Upper Ground (in line with Behan Ground):

16. Scholar’s Wing G-L2 (Res-Team Residence/Visiting

Reception, Post Room, Property and Facilities,

Scholars, 12)

Porter’s Lodge, Pedestrian access to Cloisters

17. Markwell Building G-L1

• L1, 2, 3: Offices for Administration, Director

a. Markwell Cloister • Ground: Junior Gate

of Music, Careers & Further Studies, Finance,

• L1: Orchestra Room Terrace

Marketing & Communications, & HR • L4: Art Studio

b. Markwell Main Block

• L5: Carillion Bell Chamber

• Ground: Tutorial Rooms • L1: Orchestra Room, Soundproof Music Practice

2. Behan Building (UG, 48) 3. New Dining Hall

Rooms

4. Service Wing

18. New Evan Burge Building

• Basement: Loading dock, Property and Facilities

• Basement: 500 seat Theatre Auditorium • Ground: FS Study Hall and tutorial rooms

Services Workshop, Substation • Ground: Kitchen, Catering Offices, Servery

• L1, 2, 3: Resident Student Library

5. New Senior Common Room

19. Gateway Academic Centre

6. The Clarke Buildings (UG, 50)

20. New Memorial Building (Jeopardy) G-L2 (UG, 48)

a. Clarke’s West Extension

21. Hinchcliff Building G-L4 (UG, 80)

• Ground: Dining Hall foyer

22. New Cowan Building G-L2 (UG 48)

• L1: Upper Clarkes’ Bathrooms

23. Horsfall Chapel

b. Lower Clarke’s Bathroom extension

24. McGowan Buildings

c. Clarke’s East

a. North McGowan wing

• Ground: Junior Common Room

• Ground: Theological School, Reception, Dean,

• L1: Billiards Room

Admin, Classrooms • L1, 2, 3: Foundation Studies, Reception, Path-

7. New Moorhouse Building G-L4 (PG, 90) 8. Cripps Wing G-L1 (PG amenities)

ways Dean, Admin, Classrooms

a. Cripps Cloister

b. South McGowan wing

• Ground: Middle Gate

• Ground: Theological School Lecture Halls,

• L1: MCR Terrace

Foundation Studies Entrance Stair • L1, 2, 3: Foundation Studies Lecture Halls

b. Cripps East • Ground: MCR Reading Room

25. Deanery

• L1: New Middle Common Room

26. New Vatican

c. Cripps West

27. Foundation Studies Gate

• Ground: MCR Tutorial rooms • L1: MCR Kitchen

A. Sharwood Court

9. The Sharwood Room

B. Warden’s Garden

10. The Summer House

C. Silent Quad

11. New Gourlay Building G-L2 (Senior PGs, 25)

D. Foundations Lawn

12. Bishops’ Buildings (UG, 26)

E. Vatican Court

a. Bishops’ South

F. Chapel Forecourt

• Ground: College Museum and Archives Office • L1: JCR Reading Room

PG = Postgraduate (115)

13. Junior Common Hall (JHall)

UG = Undergraduate (300)

• Café/Buttery

L = Level

14. Leeper Building • Offices for the Warden, Provost, Res-Team,

Materials: Concrete Insulated Forms, clad in a skin of

Chaplain, Nurse, Major Projects and Advance-

Polychrome brick or Sandstone

ment.

- xi -


ROYAL

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PARADE

Trinity of the Present

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ROYA L PARADE 2022: Trinity of the Future?

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Matthew Watts 2015

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Philip Sargeant Poetry Prize

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Established in honour of Mr Philip Harold Sargeant (1932-2008) A member of Trinity College (TC 1952) an architect, a poet and an artist, whose designs for the 1955 College play are held in the College archives.

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Open to all residential students at Trinity College, and awarded for a poetic work of significance, with the first prize being $400, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden, and publication in Bulpadok. The winner for 2014 is

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Nocturnal. We are

in timbre. We play the wailing

biology under light of moon

infant. The mourning mother.

and summoner of storms.

Our chorus raised on sex.

We prefer to walk.

We are massacre

Cryptic.

by the river. Hisses. Clicks.

Our appearance alludes.

Croons. A coda

We are fallen timber.

of shuddering plume.

We are grass.

Bringers

We are the chromatic leaf litter.

of grave news. Unfettered.

Thick-kneed. Stilt-legs.

We. Dream. Appearing.

Large head. Yellow eyes.

Unsettling.

Our song is fear

Avian. Luke Patterson Alumnus (TC 2014)


The Bulpadok, A Foreword

(Reprint from 1994 edition) Professor J. R. Poynter Senior Fellow of the College


Academic Essay

BULPADOK is evidently a youthful and post-everything journal; but if its editors ask for a preface from an historian on the point of retirement – moreover one working on the history of the University and a biography of the first Warden of Trinity – they must expect a backward glance for a foreword.

In they days when the Dialectic Society met in the

Melbourne Town Hall, and its proceedings were reported in full in ‘The Argus’, the Bulpadock – the acres, not the journal – was a genuine paddock, though never a particularly fertile one, due to the large quantity of miscellaneous cable tram parts dumped in it for filling. In its first decades it was not even a single paddock; the College Drive swept across it in a long curve from a point near Tin Alley, now the entrance to the Warden’s garage. I do not know whether the cows grazed on one side or both; only that the name, like so many names, did not signify whatever a fact may be. The paddock was, for the most part and for longest, a cow paddock, perhaps too unmanly a name for the college Trinity so long was. The bull, when there was one, was relegated to the small area where the kindergarten now stands, where he spent most of the year looking morosely into Tin Alley. (We once tried to stir him to interrupt a post-war parade of the University Regiment outside the Chapel, but either he lacked the Spanish passion or we lacked the Spanish spirit to goad him sufficiently, and he stood his ground, gloomy as ever. The cows had been herded out of the Regiment’s way though they had left some pats behind, difficult to avoid, it proved, when marching in a column of three.)

The last years of the Bulpadock in its genuinely bucol-

ic use saw it succumb by stages to a rationalism we would now call economic. It was nice to have the closest permanent herd of cows to the GPO, but it was difficult to maintain, and certainly expensive to keep a bull for such part-time employment. The bull -4-


Academic Essay

went first, replaced by a white-coated expert in artificial insemination, who once a year called to ensure the College was supplied with milk. Unfortunately, the cows also supplied calves, and when they were removed rent many a night with hideous wails. The College wanted milk, not calves, so it disposed of the permanent herd and began to buy each February cows in milk from the Dandenong Market, selling them again in November – usually at a loss, though on one glorious occasion the herd tested positive for pleuro in late October – mysteriously enough, since they had no known contact with other cows for many months – and the College was compensated for their destruction by much more than their purchase price.

The actual process of milking proved difficult to ra-

tionalise; the herd was too small to justify a milking, and competent cowmen were (and are) in short supply in the employment pages of The Age. When one could be found, it usually transpired that his long proximity to milk had given him an insatiable appetite for alcohol, and since the cows were unwilling to wait until he awakened from his drunken stupor, volunteers were drafted. Technology did intrude when the Director of the Public Health Laboratory in the Microbiology Department, then a tutor in College, began to test the milk, which the College consumed more or less straight from the bucket, and discovered rather too many unauthorised additives. The end came with the decision to build the Memorial Building, more aptly named Jeopardy – it certainly jeopardised the cows. All that remains in their memory is the ineptly male chauvinist name of their paddock.

Bulpadok the journal thus has something to live up to

and to live down. Let it be fertile and virile, and neither too technologically advanced nor rational. And certainly not chauvinist. But the world needs a bit more of the bucolic. -5-


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Jess Grills, Chaos in the Bubble


The C.L.H. Pullar Prize Established by Ms Clare Pullar (1951- ) and revived in her honour. Director of Development, Trinity College 1997-2007. Open to all residential students at Trinity College, and awarded for the best literary contribution to Bulpadok, with the first prize being $150 and publication in Bulpadok.

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The winner for 2015 is

Melancholic Musings An Elegy on the Female Experience Evelyn Parsonage Arts II


Academic Essay

The “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth, 295) that characterizes Romantic poetry as an immersive and imaginative mode becomes apparent in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1786). Although her mournful verse provides a means of vocalizing personal tumult, its containment within the strict sonnet form parallels the social restriction placed on female subjects. In response to such social repression, Smith immerses the lamenting speaker in a natural space where total creative expression can be achieved. Such a space facilitates the paradoxical notion of melancholy pleasure, wherein beauty is found in deep sorrow. Contrary to male Romantic poetic tradition, Smith suggests the experience of melancholic pleasure is distinctly female, stimulating feelings of both emancipation and entrapment in nature. Nature is dually represented as both a liberating space where the female poetic mind participates in imaginative experience and a realm of withdrawal and self-effacement. Thus, an association with the rational melancholia of the poet-genius valorises the experience of the 18th Century female subject. In doing so, patriarchal conceptualizations of sensibility are both challenged and affirmed. It becomes clear that a melancholic immersion in the natural world with the potential for either liberation or self-effacement reflects the trials of the female sex. The subversion of the poet-genius figure establishes the female subject as a legitimate source of creativity. Just as Keats and other male Romantics achieve creative transcendence through rational melancholy, Smith’s speaker finds artistic power that departs from the “irremediable misfortunes” (Smith, 8) of reality. However, she appropriates this mascu-8-


Academic Essay

line poetic tradition and uses it to “validate woman’s right to self-reflection” (Kennedy, 44). This is evident in Sonnet XV, as the speaker inhabits the character of Petrarch, ultimately disempowering the masculine voice. An immersion in nature facilitates artistic reflection. The sibilance of “liquid lapse, the lucid stream”(3) emphasizes the vitality of nature as a moving body. The voice of Petrarch occupies this natural scene in pensive mood and his melancholic reflection on the death of his lover reveals her “angel form” (7). This masculine space is disrupted by direct speech in line 8, signalling a dramatic transition into the feminine voice. Laura, traditionally the object of desire in Petrarch’s sonnet (Myers, 248), acquires agency in Smith’s and likens the male figure to a “blighted flower” that fades from his “manly prime”(11). This diminutive description is emasculating, reversing the typically gendered relationship in the Petrarchan mode between the speaker and the admired. As a result, the female poet commands a rational melancholy that stimulates the artistic faculties in nature. The speaker in Sonnet XXXII also expresses a rational melancholy attributed to the poet genius. The muted and grey riverbank becomes a vehicle for creative reflection where the speaker harnesses the “magic power” (12) of her melancholy. The subversion of male artistic authority is realized in the feminized personification of Autumn, placing a female power at the centre of natural order. Within the seemingly bleak landscape, the speaker witnesses a life force in the breathing gale and the “hollow sighs” (3) of the wood. This emphasis on aural imagery as the poet hears “strange sounds” and “mournful melodies” (7) suggests that the river and its surrounds are unearthly and -9-


Academic Essay

enchanting. Such mystical imagery reflects an imaginative passage above the mortal plane. The poet creates an imaginative vision of the playwright Thomas Otway whose work was categorized by its effective portrayal of sensibility. She allows his vision to haunt the natural space as she conveys a desire to embody a traditionally masculine and rational “culture of sensibility” (Pratt, 564). Although the male artist is present, he is merely a phantom. The female voice dominates the space; she exclaims melancholy has the potential to “soothe the pensive visionary mind!” (14). By associating her melancholy with a visionary activity in the mental sphere, she riles against the perception of women as possessing “fascinating graces…in a state of perpetual childhood” (Wollstonecraft, 215). In doing so, Smith disrupts the male poetic tradition and refutes a feminized sensibility. Therefore, she challenges Wordsworth’s gendered discourse on Romantic ways of feeling as he expounds, “the passions of men” are “incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature” (295). Her poetical participation in natural splendour riles against male Romantic tradition. The speaker exhibits a rational sensibility that departs from “medical definitions of women’s nervous illnesses” and “hysteria” (Dolan, 238) that attempted to disempower the female voice. Although pleasurable and melancholic immersion in a natural space can facilitate artistic creation, Smith voices the potential for melancholy to become destructive. The speaker begins to desire an effacement of self upon bearing witness to the sublime force of nature. This desire reflects disenchantment with reality and oppressive patriarchal power. Sonnet XLIV embodies such imaginative withdrawal. The speaker - 10 -


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observes a chaotic scene as the sea overcomes a churchyard. Tidal sequences controlled by a lunar “arbitress” (1) are cyclical, symbolic of a perpetual rhythm of mourning that the speaker is limited by. The fusion of skeletal matter with the natural elements is symbolic of a disintegration of order: civilization is usurped along with its mores. As “their bones whiten in the frequent wave” (10), the speaker envies the dead and their alleviated suffering. They are not afflicted by reason. The use of active verbs “Drives”, “Tears” and “breaks” further accentuates a violent fragmentation within the landscape in which the speaker wishes to take part. The tempest acts as a metaphor for the oppression faced by the female speaker. Just as the natural landscape becomes hostile, capable of weathering the individual, female experience within an 18th century context is characterized by submission to a stronger masculine power.The speaker’s melancholic observation of the moon in Sonnet IV results in a similar desire for departure from her torturous reality. The evening, often associated with melancholy feeling, provides the speaker with a pleasurable peace as “placid light/ Sheds a soft calm upon”(6) her troubled soul. She directly addresses the feminized moon, “Queen of the silver bow!” (1), evoking classical images of the goddess Diana. Although this classical allusion echoes Petrarchan tradition, the speaker sympathetically identifies with a female lunar body and associates it with a natural space of solace. Her immersion in this night scene then leads to a desire to transcend earthly bounds. This is indicated at the volta as she exclaims, “Oh! That I soon may reach thy world serene,/Poor wearied pilgrim—in this toiling scene!” (13-14). The rhyming cou- 11 -


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plet is conclusive, indicating the speaker’s unbridled desire for the resolve of her woe. She longs to escape reality and inhabit the “benignant sphere” (10). Thus, it becomes clear that the speaker’s imaginative immersion in nature results in a destructive desire to escape her worldly melancholy. Similarly, in Sonnet III, the lyric speaker experiences a melancholy pleasure in observation of a nightingale. However such pleasure, leads to a desire for a dissolving of self in order to be at one with nature. The oxymoron of “sweet sorrow” (3) echoes the voice’s own experience of melancholy pleasure as the bird sings. The bird is inherently feminine, a “songstress sad” (13) and traditionally inhabits a state of denial, “being too happy in thine happiness” (Keats, 6). It is subject to an instinctual desire being “released in woodlands wild” (10) as a liberated object. Although its song appears melancholic to the speaker, it does not consciously experience the pain of existence. Furthermore, the volta at line 13 marks the speaker’s overwhelming desire to inhabit the same natural space as the bird. She pines “that such my lot might be, /to sigh and sing at liberty—like thee!”(13-14) An exclamatory tone reflects a passionate desire to become one with the nightingale and “my lot” directly alludes to the female sex. The speaker envies such unawareness of worldly tumults and demonstrates that self-effacement in melancholic reverie provides an escape from the restrictions imposed on women. Hence such a metaphorical loss of self is initially liberating, however, this state further marginalizes the female voice from a patriarchal reality. Furthermore, the poet relies on the sonnet form to present her

melancholic pleasure in a natural space. Although she at- 12 -


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tempts to diverge from Petrarchan tropes, a reliance on strict structures of language parallels the inevitability of her gender informing her artistic work. She utilizes the nightingale, a “popularized image” of the Petrarchan tradition (Myers, 242). As Kennedy expounds, “Reviewers preferred dealing with the wronged gentlewoman rather than the existential poet” (49). The sonnet form becomes symbolic of patriarchal male tradition and such entrapment in convention echoes the female as an “object of persistent melancholia” (Pratt, 565). Elegiac Sonnets presents the reader with a distinctly female voice that elucidates melancholy pleasure in nature. An inherent dualism is apparent in both the natural world and melancholy feeling with total immersion having the capacity to both liberate and restrict the poetic mind. Smith’s sonnets rile against the male Romantic canon as they vocalise female melancholic sentiments with a rational sensibility. Although her own experience of unhappiness gave her authority to speak on behalf of the oppressed female, gendered associations with hysteria and irrational sensibility inevitably tincture her writing. In this way, the sonnets represent the struggles of a feminine voice to find legitimacy in an inherently masculine tradition.

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Academic Essay Works Cited Dolan, Elizabeth A. “British Romantic Melancholia: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, Medical Discourse and the Problem of Sensibility.” Journal of European Studies 33 (2003): 237-53. Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale (1819).” Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Deidre Lynch, and Jack Stillinger. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed. Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. 927-29. Print. Kennedy, Deborah. “Thorns and Roses: The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith.” Women’s Writing 2.1 (1995): 43-53. Myers, Mary Anne. “Unsexing Petrarch: Charlotte Smith’s Lessons in the Sonnet as a Social Medium.” Studies in Romanticism (2014): 239-59. Pratt, Kathryn. “Charlotte Smith’s Melancholia on the Page and Stage.” SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Restoration and Eighteenth Century 41.3 (2001): 563-81. Smith, Charlotte. “Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems.” The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Ed. Stuart Curran. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. 1-79. Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802).” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Deidre Lynch, and Jack Stillinger. Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. 292-304. Wollstonecraft, Mary. “From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Deidre Lynch, and Jack Stillinger. Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. 211-35.

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A shortlisted entrant for the 2014 Philip Sargeant Poetry Prize is

Dear E.E. Cummings If I caught a glimpse of your shadow, dancing the breeze whispering through my window, I would find a way to dive into the enigma that fills your mind.

How do you take a photograph with letters, capturing our essence in such shrill clarity?


Your eyes were always set in the beautiful paradox of the human condition while we blinkered ours – squandering moments in ignorance of their importance to us in the future.

I want to know how you entwined these words, for in their infinite simplicity, they sound a lot like magic.

Rachel Koh Alumna (TC 2014)


The Wigram Allen Essay Prize Established through an endowment to the Dialectic Society in 1883, by Sir George Wigram Allen (1824-1885) Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, Speaker in the Parliament of New South Wales (1875-1883), and father-in-law to Dr Alexander Leeper. Open to all residential students at Trinity College, and awarded for the best reading of an essay up to 1500 words, both substantial and entertaining, with the first prize being $300 and publication in Bulpadok. The winner for 2014 is

{Gavin the Fighter Lessons From My Father Tyson Holloway-Clarke Arts III


Creative Writing

My Father’s name is Gavin Gene Clarke. He was the youngest boy in a family of fluctuating size. Both his parents worked multiple jobs and lost everything they owned when Tracy landed on their doorstep in 1974. My Dad was fourteen. This was the end of his childhood. I have heard many stories about my Father’s childhood. In my Father’s stories he highlights the times spent playing sport and getting up to no good with his brothers. He even told me about the illegal gambling racket his parents were running out of their house and how the Chinamen would always play until they had no more before turning to the Wogs for a loan. He remembered they smoked like chimneys. This I imagine is where he scrounged his first cigarette. His job on gaming nights was to play in the street until a clean or expensive looking car came down. The police were smart enough not to drive patrol cars but they weren’t smart enough to realise that a nice car in that part of town during the 1960’s meant you were definitely white and you were probably a cop. Dad chuckles as he recalls their house being searched and all traces of alcohol, tobacco and money disappearing into thin air when the front door opened and the kids came screaming in. My Uncles tell similar tales. But depending on who’s telling the story, the best lookout position changes from up a palm tree to behind the fence on the corner, or right on the doorstep so you could make it in the house first. This I imagine is where he learnt to distrust the police. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I heard a different part of Dad’s story. Dad, my sisters and I were staying with one of my Aunties and were playing cards after being treated to a big meal. Dad had drunk eight or nine bottles of beer. This was - 18 -


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pretty typical‌ it usually takes two or three for him to sleep. But something my little sister Jordan did frustrated him and he snapped at her. He did not hit her or even threaten to, it was the malice in his voice that scared her. We were all taken aback by the outburst and Jordan went to cry in her room, my older sister Marley following shortly after. Dad then declared he was having a shower and going to bed. I was then left with my Aunty, my Uncle and their Maltese nightmare. Breaking the silence, my Aunt turned to me and asked for my opinion about what had just happened. I said that Jordan and Dad had always had some kind of tension. Ever straight to the point, my Aunt asked another question. Do you think your Father over-reacted or was acting unfair? I mumbled something about alcohol and respect before my Aunt began to swear me to secrecy. Stone faced, my Uncle watched on with one arm across his chest and the other holding his jaw and neck. I learnt that night the trauma my Father had suffered at the hands of other boys, especially those of his brothers and worst of all his own Father. I knew my Dad had seen and been in his fair share of fights. I had seen him with split knuckles and cuts after coming back from a night out and the number of scars he had told me that he had been fighting for decades before I was born. It turns out my Father was a runt of a kid and was constantly bullied by other boys and even by his own brothers. I never knew that the worst beatings he took were when he was young. She said it was damn surprising that my Father had not turned out violent and calloused. In her mind there was no doubt that my Dad needed to drink half a six pack before even thinking about sleeping because of his trials. At that moment my Dad - 19 -


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came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around him and mumbled goodnight before going into his own room. I remember that night well and I think about it often. Getting that piece of the puzzle answered a lot of questions. It helped me understand my Father and where he came from. In a rather odd way, it made me love him more. It made me more appreciative of his efforts. I like to think that if I were in his shoes I would have been able to keep myself together and be the man I deserve to be but I do not know if that is true. For all his faults and his snoring, knowing his story has shaped my outlook on life and my place in our family history. My Father and I will share a legacy. For nearly everyday of his existence he has battled his demons‌ he has refused to bow to the clutches of circumstance or to inflict his children with his burdens. He has had his moments when he is the alpha and omega before us, and more than once I thought I was going to get a hiding. But instead he would storm into his room and remain unseen until dinnertime or the next morning, cooling off and regaining his composure. I will always love my Father for doing his damndest to break the cycle that punished and demeaned him, his Father and his Father’s Father. And this is why I have decided that I will never drink, smoke or take drugs. In the end I will carry his name and stories before writing my own and giving my own kids a future my Father never had.

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Australia’s ‘National Identity’ A Driver of Australian Foreign Policy Hugh Edwards Arts III


Academic Essay

National identity is the sense of belonging to a particular state which may be defined either in terms of shared culture, ethnicity, or race, or alternatively in terms of shared political values1 (Devetak & True 2006: 243). This essay will argue that a hegemonic white European identity is a more accurate characterisation of Australia’s national identity than an identity based upon political values, with reference to the securitization of Australia’s irregular immigration policy since the turn of the century. Irregular immigration is defined as migration which does not occur through legal channels (Pajares 2014: 82). Securitization may be defined as the process whereby a political issue comes to be perceived as a security threat (Williams 2003: 512-3, Pugh 2004: 50). Immigration has been chosen as a case study here because it is currently a critical juncture between state identities and the international foreign policy arena, and because it strikes “at the heart of dilemmas which now confront Australian foreign policy” (Mughan & Paxton 2006: 341, Maley 2003: 188). Firstly, each conception of identity will be critically explained, and it will be argued that a hegemonic white European identity has a stronger theoretical basis than a values-based identity. Secondly, it will be argued that Australia’s irregular immigration policy in this period has become securitized, and that this securitization and its policy manifestations are better accounted for by white European hegemony than by political values. Many attempts have been made to define Australia’s identity by a set of political values (Meaney 2008: 84, Johnson 2007, Devetak & True 2006: 243, Burke 2010: 79-80). Typically these values are located in government discourse, which is taken to be representative of Australia’s wider political values (Johnson 2007: 195-7, Burke 2010: 79-80, Meaney 2008: 79). Values which have - 22 -


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been relatively consistently espoused by 21st century Australian governments, and pertain to the issue of irregular immigration, include compassion for those in need, political freedom, individual dignity, multicultural tolerance, and the importance of human rights (DIBP 2014, DFAT 2003: 113-24, Johnson 2007: 201-2, Tavan 2001: 200, Burke 2010: 79-80). Evidence for the neglect of these specific values in Australian border policy will be raised in the latter half of this essay. Defining national identity with a set of political values has immediate theoretical limitations, in that any set of values can be inaccurate, static, or overly reductive (Johnson 2007). Firstly, the assumption that political rhetoric is a legitimate expression of a nation’s political values is problematic. This is because politicians may be motivated by a number of factors other than a desire to accurately represent the values of the average Australian in their discourse (Curran 2004: 190-243). Therefore, defining values in this way may be unrepresentative. Johnson (2007: 195-7) presents a detailed account of how various governments, in particular the Howard government, have attempted to define an Australian identity with a particular set of values in order to achieve political goals. Thus a defined set of values may provide only a limited conception of identity over time (Burke 2010: 789). For example, whilst ostensibly claimed by recent governments as an Australian value, multiculturalism was certainly not a value promoted by government during the White Australia era (Meaney 2001: 78-89). Finally, it is inherently reductive to attribute the identity of a large and diverse population to a collection of terms such as ‘compassionate’ or ‘tolerant’. Even without the difficulties posed by inaccuracy and rapid obsolescence, the question as to whether a few abstract principles can adequately describe the - 23 -


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myriad of interests of a pluralist modern nation state is open to attack (Burke 2010: 78-9, Johnson 2007: 205). An alternative conception of an Australian identity is one defined by culture, ethnicity, or race. This essay argues that the most accurate description of Australia’s current identity is a hegemonic white European identity (Colic-Peisker 2005: 632, Meaney 2001, Johnson 2007: 197-200, Burke 2010: 78). This conception of Australia’s identity is supported by historical factors, which are integral to understanding a state’s identity (Closa & Vintila 2014: 19, Devetak & True 2006: 242). Meaney (2001: 79-81) presents a significant volume of evidence that a cultural British identity was dominant throughout the first half of the 20th century. Motivated by this identity, the White Australia Policy enjoyed bipartisan support during this period (Tavan 2008: 182-4, Meaney 2001: 86). Since the policy’s abandonment in the 1970s, the ‘normal Australian self ’ became broader, shifting from an Anglo-Celtic core to include wider European white identities (Colic-Peisker 2005: 632). However, the cultural predominance of a white European/Anglo identity has remained “the prop of the process of political and psychological nation building” (Colic-Peisker 2005: 632). For example, John Howard referred to the influence of Australia’s British heritage in 2003 as “immense” (Johnson 2007: 197-8). Furthermore, the perceived need for social cohesion embedded in hegemonic whiteness which typified the White Australia Policy has persisted into the 21st century (Colic-Peisker 2005: 632). Resultantly, the white European identity remains hegemonic despite increases in the population’s ethnic diversity (Johnson 2007: 197, Meaney 2001: 89, CIA 2015).

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The previously articulated theoretical criticisms of a values-based identity are less problematic for an identity defined by culture, ethnicity, or race. This conception of identity is less vulnerable to ‘hijacking’ by governments in rhetoric than a values-based identity, due to its centrality in Australia’s historical narrative, and in the sheer proportion of Australians who are of white European descent (Johnson 2007: 195-8, Colic-Peisker 2005: 632, CIA 2015). In virtue of this, ethnicity, race and culture are far more static over time than values; Australia’s white identity has arguably broadened only from British to European since white settlement (Colic-Peisker 2005: 632, Meaney 2001). However it is precisely the ‘valueless’ nature of this conception of identity which gives it such an advantage in accounting for an inconsistent and unprincipled foreign policy, as compared to a values-based identity (Devetak & True 2006: 243-252). Consequently, it will be argued that white European hegemony has had a greater influence over the recent securitization of irregular immigration in Australia than any set of political values espoused by government. Irregular immigration in Australia has recently become securitized (Devetak & True 2006: 252). This is particularly evident following Australia’s internationally criticised refusal of entry to the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, carrying a predominantly Afghan contingent of asylum seekers in 2001 (McKay et al. 2011: 609, Maley 2003: 187). This marked the beginning of migrants being directly associated with terrorists by high-ranking Australian officials in public discourse (Colic-Peisker 2005: 615-6, McKay et al. 2011: 609). As a close ally to the US, the threat of terrorism was to dominate Australia’s foreign and defence policy agendas in the years after the Twin Tower bombing of 2001 (McDonald 2005). Thus rhetoric associating terrorism and im- 25 -


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migration stoked fears that granting visas to irregular immigrants could endanger Australian security (McKay et al. 2011: 609). As in many European Union member states, the language of security became employed in Australian immigration, such as “the war against smugglers and “unlawful non-citizens” (Lee 2007: 178-9, Carerra & den Hertog 2015: 1-5). The resulting public sentiment contributed to a majority support of the government’s subsequent restrictive asylum and foreign policies, including the opening of third-country detention centres such as in Nauru and Manus Island (Colic-Peisker 2005: 615-6, Manne 2002: 29). Furthermore, the Australian government targeted specific countries associated with terrorism, for example Afghanistan, by temporarily refusing to process Afghan refugee claims (AAP 2010). It is through such processes that irregular immigrants have come to be perceived by many as “existential threats” to national security (Devetak & True 2006: 252). The perception of irregular immigrants as a security threat is consistent with a white European hegemonic identity. The association between irregular immigrants and terrorism has been described by Devetak & True (2006: 252) as “the government… exploiting a persistent racial fear in the Australian psyche”. The perceived terrorist threat of irregular migrants has specifically been associated with Islamophobia (Johnson 2007: 200-2). Furthermore, the discourse of ‘resettlement potential’ has often measured ‘assimilability’ with visual characteristics – that is, privileging white immigrants over others (Colic-Peisker 2005: 632). Here it is evident that the white immigration bias, while far less explicit in the public discourse after the 1970s, continues to resonate with mass public opinion and is implicit in policy (Jupp 1995: 221, Colic-Peisker 2005: 632). This evidence suggests that much of - 26 -


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the sentiment in opposition to irregular immigration has resulted from the perception of Australia’s white European identity being under threat (Pugh 2004: 53, Johnson 2007: 199-200, Devetak & True 2006: 251). Whilst the ‘public threat perception’ aspect of securitization is well explained by a white European identity, a values-based identity is much less successful. Colic-Peisker (2005: 633) characterises the political welcome that refugees receive as the “ultimate test of Australia’s multiculturalism.” Since Australia’s perception of the threat of irregular migrants is largely based upon racial and religious intolerance, it is evident that this sentiment eschews the key ‘Australian value’ of multiculturalism (Johnson 2007: 199-202, Jupp 1995: 221, Devetak & True 2006: 252, Colic-Peisker 2005). The result of this process of securitization has been a foreign policy response which is characteristic of a security threat. Australia’s border control and naval policy in surrounding waters have become significantly militarized (Lee 2007: 178). Policies have included mandatory indefinite detention in high security detention facilities in third countries, the use of military uniforms (sometimes armed, masked commandos) and strategy in border policing at sea, and harsh laws and barriers applying to those seeking asylum (Maley 2003: 197-8, Mckenzie-Murray 2015, Mummery & Rodan 2007: 351-2, 2004: Pugh 60-1, Mountz 2011: 118-21). Such measures may be seen as part of the wider security agenda of US allies post September 11 which tended to group border protection with terrorism, privilege state sovereignty over international norms, and eschew diplomacy for military force (Johnson 2007: 201, Devetak & True 2006: 252, McKay et al. 2011: 609). - 27 -


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Furthermore, this security response has resulted in Australia failing to protect internationally recognised human rights (Devetak & True 2006: 251-2). Firstly, Australia has evaded international refugee distribution obligations by refusing the right to seek asylum and the right to non-refoulement, both cornerstones of international human rights law, in recent border policies, such as the “fast track” legislation of 2014 (Amnesty International 2014: 63, UNHCR 1997, Meaney 2003: 197). Further, the policy of mandatory indefinite detention in third-country facilities could be systematically flouting the right against arbitrary detention and the freedom of movement (Amnesty International 2015: 64, UN GA 1948: Art. 9, Lee 2007: 197-201). Conditions in these detention facilities have put migrants at risk of “torture and other ill treatment” and even death due to inadequate medical treatment, sexual abuse and violence (Amnesty International 2015: 63-4). Finally, it may be argued that Australia has neglected the right to life on a greater scale, by providing inadequate search and rescue operations to prevent the hundreds of deaths which have occurred on the overseas journey to Australia (Pugh 2004: 56-60). This subversion of rights represents a recent tendency to eschew notions of ‘good international citizenship’ in Australia’s wider foreign policy agenda through its truculent responses to international criticism on the basis of human rights (Devetak & True 2006: 244-50). Such securitization measures and their resulting rights abuses are inconsistent with several ‘Australian values’. The preceding paragraph has demonstrated that a respect for human rights has not had a privileged role in Australia’s recent foreign policy agenda with regards to immigration. Secondly, compassion for those in need and individual dignity have arguably been neglected, evident - 28 -


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in the large numbers of often highly vulnerable and traumatised international refugees in protracted offshore incarceration, often exposed to further violence, sexual abuse, and risks of self-harm and suicide (Harris & Zwar 2005: 825-7, Lee 2007: 196, Amnesty International 2015: 63-4). Finally, the indefinite component of detention has infringed upon the political freedom of migrants who are guaranteed by international law to seek asylum (UN GA 1948: Art. 9, Amnesty International 2014: 63). Such securitization measures are more consistent with a white European hegemonic identity. Foremost, such an identity is not defined by a set of ideals, which allows it to better explain the relative inconsistency and lack of principle in Australia’s foreign policy (Devetak & True 2006: 243). This allows public opinion to guide policy in a way which can undermine Australia’s ostensible values, as it places the rights of the majority over the rights of minorities, which are often framed as the ‘special rights’ of ‘special interest groups’ in popular discourse (Johnson 2007: 199). In this way a white European identity can inform policies which dehumanise non-citizens and justify rights abuses (Devetak & True 2006: 252). Of the two different conceptions of Australia’s national identity considered, an identity based upon white European hegemony is more apt. Defining identity by way of race, ethnicity and culture is theoretically a less reductive, inaccurate and static conception than a values-based identity. As such, a white European hegemonic identity better explains the securitization of Australia’s irregular immigration since 2000 and its effects than an identity based upon political values.

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Academic Essay Endnotes 1 Devetak & True’s (2006) conception of the latter includes ‘civic institutions’, however this essay will refer only to political values. Works Cited AAP 2015, Sri Lankan, Afghan asylum visas suspended, SBS News, Melbourne, viewed 2 September 2015, <http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2010/04/09/sri-lankan-afghan-asylum-visas-suspended>. Amnesty International 2015, Amnesty International report 2014/15: The state of the World’s human rights, Amnesty International Ltd., London, viewed 1 September 2015, <https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ pol10/0001/2015/en/>. Burke, A 2010, ‘Questions of community: Australian identity and Asian change’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 75-93. Carrera, S & den Hertog, L 2015: ‘Whose Mare? Rule of law challenges in the field of European border surveillance in the Mediterranean’, Liberty and Security in Europe, no. 79, pp. 1-30. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 2015, The World factbook: Australia, CIA, Washington, DC, <https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/geos/as.html>. Closa, C & intila, CD 2014: ‘European citizenship in times of crisis’, in DL Garrido (ed), The state of the European Union: How European citizens deal with these times of crisis, Fundación Alternativas & Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Madrid. Colic-Peisker, V 2005, ‘At least you’re the right colour: Identity and social inclu sion of Bosnian refugees in Australia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 615-38. Curran, J 2004, The power of speech: Australian prime ministers defining the national image, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) 2003, Advancing the national interest (white paper), Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, <http:// geneva.mission.gov.au/files/gene/2003_whitepaper.pdf>. Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIPB) 2014, Australian values statement for temporary visa applicants, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, <http://www.border.gov.au/Forms/Documents/1282.pdf>. Devetak, R & True, J 2006, ‘Diplomatic divergence in the Antipodes: Globalisa tion, foreign policy and state identity in Australia and New Zealand’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 241-56. Harris, M & Zwar, N 2005, ‘Refugee health’, Australian Family Physician, vol. 34, no. 10, pp. 825-9. Johnson, C 2007, ‘John Howard’s values and Australian identity’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 195-209. Jupp, J 1995, ‘From “white Australia’’ to ‘‘part of Asia’’: recent shifts in Austra lian immigration policy towards the region’, International Migration - 30 -


Academic Essay Review, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 207-29. Lee, M 2007, Human trafficking, Willan Publishing, Devon. Maley, W 2003, ‘Asylum-seekers in Australia’s international relations’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 187-202. Manne, R 2002, ‘Reflections on the Tampa crisis’, Postcolonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 29-36. McDonald, M 2005, ‘Be alarmed? Australia’s anti-terrorism kit and the politics of security’, Global Change, Peace and Security, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 171–89. McKay, FH, Thomas, SL & Warwick Blood, R 2011, ‘Any one of these boat people could be a terrorist for all we know! Media representations and public perceptions of boat people arrivals in Australia’, Journalism, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 607-26. Mckenzie-Murray, M 2015 ‘Inside Border Force’s power’, The Saturday Paper, 5 September. Meaney, N 2001, ‘Britishness and Australian identity: The problem of national ism in Australian history and historiography’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 32, no. 116, pp. 76-90. Mountz, A 2011, ‘The enforcement archipelago: Detention, haunting, and asylum on islands”, Political Geography, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 118-28. Mughan, A & Paxton, P 2006, ‘Anti-immigrant sentiment, policy preferences and populist party voting in Australia’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 341-358. Mummery, J & Rodan, D 2007, ‘Discursive Australia: Refugees, Australianness, and the Australian public sphere’, Continuum, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 347-60. Pajares, M 2014: European immigration and asylum policies, in DL Garrido (ed), The state of the European Union: How European citizens deal with these times of crisis, Fundación Alternativas & Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Madrid. Pugh M 2004, ‘Drowning not waving: Boat people and humanitarianism at sea’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 50-69. Tavan, G 2001, ‘Immigration: Control or colour bar? The immigration reform movement, 1959–1966’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 32, no. 117, pp. 181-200. UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 1997: UNHCR Note on the Principle of Non-Refoulement, UNHCR, Geneva, <http://www.refworld. org/docid/438c6d972.html>. United Nations General Assembly (UN GA) 1948: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UN GA, Paris, viewed 1 September 2015, <http://www. refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3712c.html>. Williams, MC 2003: ‘Words, images, enemies: securitization and international politics’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 4, pp.511-31.

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Bulpadok

{

Isabelle Napier, J-Pow - 32 -


{ Isabelle Napier, Everlasting


Bulpadok

{

Isabelle Napier, Last Sunset of 2011 - 34 -


The Phoenix and the Dragon Madam Chan says Sons grow up to be dragons And daughters Grow up to be phoenixes Ma says Every Chinese girl Grows up to be a phoenix With poise and grace Ma smacks my legs and asks me to close them “Not ladylike” I am a phoenix, five year old me thinks. I am committed to my role So I pretend I don’t notice Ma did not smack my brother’s legs Not even when he started to shake them Or stretch them wide enough for two seats After all, my brother will be a dragon.


Dragons are powerful And strong Dragons breathe fire Madam Chan tells me the Emperors of China were real dragons Sons of heaven I ask her about the Empresses of China She doesn’t know The Emperor had many wives When I was thirteen I got burned Moon cake festival Lanterns grasped between sweaty palms afraid of getting burnt I was given a pink one I struck a match and set it on fire The flames licked at the cheap crepe paper I watched as it dissolved in colourful glowing embers So what if I got burned I’m a phoenix I rise out of ashes That’s what phoenixes do, don’t they?


Pa took the matchbox away from me for the rest of the night. Apparently phoenixes don’t start fires. Nowadays I set up the fireplace every Wednesday night before the evening talks I’ll lug a crate of firewood Set the kindling Light the fire starter And watch as the flames Restless and cackling in pure delight Rise before my eyes Every Wednesday I walk away relieved I didn’t get burned. I am no dragon. This Wednesday I bump into Tyler I’m carrying three logs About to carry out my ritual I’m nervous Afraid to be exposed as the phoenix impersonating the dragon


Tyler smiles “Do you need any help, Kai?” I don’t. Tyler insists. He wrestles the logs from my arms and laughs “This should have been a man’s job anyway.” I struggle to smile back. Later on, Tyler inspects my fire. “Next time, you should ask one of the guys to set it up instead.” The image of the charred remains Of the pink lantern From years ago Flashes An unwelcome memory I want to tell Tyler, “Next time, I’ll be the dragon.” Kai Lin Choo Arts II


The Wigram Allen Essay Prize Established through an endowment to the Dialectic Society in 1883, by Sir George Wigram Allen (1824-1885) Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, Speaker in the Parliament of New South Wales (1875-1883), and father-in-law to Dr Alexander Leeper. Open to all residential students at Trinity College, and awarded for the best reading of an essay up to 1500 words, both substantial and entertaining, with the first prize being $300 and publication in Bulpadok.

{

The winner for 2015 is

Madness and Civilisation

An existential crisis en route to Redmond Barry from The Spot Sarah Abell Arts I


Creative Writing

Michel Foucault, friend and foe of the arts student, once said that “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” On a cold, grey Monday morning at 9am, I find this very pertinent. I am making the sprint from The Spot to Redmond Barry. I consider my average time of seven minutes a university record, although still not enough to arrive on time, unflustered, without having to walk quickly past an already ranting lecturer. Despite what Lost on Campus would have you believe, in its routes that pass through walls, traverse car parks and have you swim through water features, the journey from the shiny, new world of commerce to the grey, run down yet loveable abyss of the arts degree is not an easy one, and one fraught with dangers to the mind, body and soul. A group of students moves slowly out of The Spot, clearly not ready for the rough and tumble world of Goldman Sachs, clearly not ready to walk to the beat of expensive dress shoes and the sound of success and the smell of burning money. I try to find the Wolves of Grattan Street. They do not appear. The line separating those who see themselves at university for work and those who see themselves at university for fun becomes clearer as I near the South Lawn. There are less Ralph collared shirts, more black t-shirts. Less RM Williams boots, more Doc Martens. Less North Face puffer jackets, more dusty parkas. - 40 -


Creative Writing

There is a similar fashion transition when leaving the college crescent. Nonetheless, I struggle to reconcile myself with these individuals and absorb myself in the true arts student way of life by having an existential crisis. I am sweating in too many layers of clothing for such a walk. I weave quickly in and out of students not keen to go anywhere, perhaps not keen to go anywhere in life, and start a monologue of white, middle class, privileged grievances, to use some vocabulary I learnt in my arts tutorials, in my mind. Why does my services and amenities fee only appear to go towards free sausage sizzles on the South Lawn and free lunchtime concerts in the North Court? Why must I walk through the pouring rain to go to lectures where the lecturer has an ideological aversion to lecture recording as though it were a disastrous form of fascist change designed to render us all unable to resist the government? Why can’t I use card to pay for my coffee, that is what pay pass is for, it is the 21st century and we do not live in a Greek Cash economy. What is the purpose of having both the LMS and my.unimelb? As a model Arts student, I answer Foucault. I am a mere halfway through my journey, and my mind has spiralled into a sense of disempowerment. I feel I am at the whim of an oppressive society that wants to control me, a Carte that wants to control me by only allowing me to pay cash for a Nutella crepe, a lecturer that wants to capitalise on the panopticon of the lecture theatre. But, I think to myself, for sure I am a radical arts student. I am not conditioned to society. But have I just been conditioned to think this? While I am thinking - 41 -


Creative Writing

about all of this I recall all the heavy Foucault readings I have “forgotten” to do. When I think of all the other readings I have “forgotten” to do I am distracted and almost run into a cyclist. I am angry about bike lanes. I pass more coffee and am tempted to, in my time of need yet without cash, attempt to barter with pieces of jewellery and subject notes. I try to calculate how much of the all important “what will we do this lecture” slide I will miss of the coming lecture, and decide all in all a bartered coffee to miss my introduction to knowledge pursued will ultimately be emotionally futile. I pass the Marxists. I take a flyer and put it in the nearby bin. I do not have time to have my political views radically changed by a prophet from the far left, who will finally prove to me that capitalism is nothing but a means by which we continue to oppress creativity and our true potential as a society. I pass a group of four individuals all with dyed hair and Doc Martens and artistic notes and I wonder where these people come from, who all attempt to be individuals but end up being versions of each other, a homogenous norm of supposedly unique people. I see too many running leggings and Nikes, too many girls that overestimated their ability to survive a day at university in heeled boots, too many boys who underestimated how cold it would really be outside. I return to Foucault but suppress him, as I conclude that nobody can ever explain the enigma that is the University of Melbourne Arts student. - 42 -


Creative Writing

I am closer to the lecture theatre and am faced with a barrage of crises. I am late, I will have to walk in and find a seat with everyone looking at me, not knowing I have come from another class, thinking I am a lazy arts student who arrives late to lectures daily. To their credit, this would be true on any other day. Do I have friends in this class? Will they be upset if I don’t sit with them? Will they think I don’t like them? Will they understand I had to come a very long way from The Spot and “it was raining and I just had to run and I didn’t know where I was going, I am only a first year you know.” Surely I do not have friends in this class. Maybe they will watch the recording? Maybe I can pretend I wasn’t there. Maybe I can walk in looking at my phone, pretending not to see them as to avoid the awkwardness of trying to sit with a friend in the middle of the row, to have to climb over people already irritated you have dared to whisper to ask to sit near them. I am finally sitting, stripping off layers to adjust to the heating system and the sheer number of bodies in the room, as it is only week 3 and people are still enthusiastic about lectures. I open my laptop and attempt to listen after my great ordeal. But now the epiphany. To what extent can you really explain life? As university students we spend our lives classifying, analysing and theorising about other people, about other habits and other societies. But how can a mental crisis aid in this? The university life is full of contradictions and unexplainable happenings, such as when my.unimelb refuses to load, even - 43 -


Creative Writing

though I have four bars of Wi-Fi. I can be obsessed with the homogenous norm, the transitions and the panopticon, but ultimately, how far in life will this take me? Does it take me to areas of knowledge not necessarily understood by the average person? Does it give me some great insight into how to live a perfect life? What is the perfect life? I feel myself verging on another existential crisis, however I stop myself. Ultimately the key to happiness does not come from analytical discussion and trying to apply Foucault to my current situation, from attempting to make myself a victim of an unforgiving society. I consider that it comes, instead, from the adrenaline rush that results from condensing a normally fifteen minute walk into seven minutes.

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The Franc Carse Essay Prize Established by Mr John Carse in memory of his brother, Captain Franc Samuel Carse (1885-1917) A member of Trinity College (TC 1908) who was killed in the First World War at the First Battle of Bullecourt, on the 2nd of May 1917. Open to all residential students at Trinity College, and awarded for an essay on a topic of international importance, with the first prize being $1000 and publication in Bulpadok. The topic for 2015 being: “Gallipoli has been described as a founding myth of Australia. What might it mean for contemporary Australians to have such a myth? Does it seem more, or less likely to you to help create the kind of Australia you would like to live in?� The winner for 2015 is

{ Gallipoli Bori Ahn Biomedicine II


Academic Essay

The tale of Gallipoli has such potent symbolic value that it resonates even today. We have two contrasting images. The first is that of noble, heroic deeds and the boyish charm of innocent youth. The second is tragedy – rows and columns of Australians barely into adulthood subject to the whims of old, out-of-touch men. As a relatively young nation, Australia has so few true watershed moments to claim as her own. Gallipoli therefore becomes an even more significant part of Australian history. It represents one of the first times Australia’s identity was cemented on an international stage – that of a fledgling and playful, yet ultimately brave and conceivably strong country. This is an identity that continues to have ramifications today. As young Australians, we have a duty to deliver on the sacrifice of our forefathers. What a mistake it is to then choose not to live in memory of them! We frequently pander phrases like “laying down their lives for us” but we only pause annually at best to reflect on this. Days like ANZAC Day are created, but the way Gallipoli has actually come to shape Australia today is a lot more indirect and in some ways intangible in today’s society. By calling it a myth, however, we run the risk of treating the sacrifice as some mere fable, operating in our poetry loving minds, and not ringing true in our hearts. As a Korean immigrant, I am a contemporary Australian in every sense of the word, a product of its multiculturalism. For me, the meaning of this myth is layered. Wars have only affected me personally through my maternal grandfather – he grew up in abject poverty only to be conscripted and robbed of his - 46 -


Academic Essay

youth during the Korean War. He was a soldier who marched to Pyongyang, was taken to Japan and is fluent in the language to this day, and has cooked for and been invited to the United States by American generals. It seems to have been an eclectic, thought-provoking and tough experience. What kind of legacy does this leave me? As someone who grew up in Australia, I studied largely American and Australian war stories in History class. I read about the Korean War in my own time. I think there are universal lessons to be learnt. How do I ensure this dual heritage doesn’t go to waste? National consciousness may have first been ignited through the loss on the Gallipoli peninsula, but Australia still has a long way to go. I feel that the best way to address this is to confront the problems that still plague our society. There are so many that the one commonality is our approach towards solving them. In honouring the national identity created by soldiers landing in Anzac Cove, we should have a stronger desire to improve it. Recently, Australia has had a reputation for close-mindedness. In particular, Australians need to be made more aware of the institutionally and culturally ingrained casual racism pervading our culture. The current media frenzy surrounding Adam Goodes has proved this utter lack of mindfulness. It angers, fascinates, and shocks me every time I am in conversation about my familiarity with racism that WASPy males – descendants of those very same freshfaced boys we commemorate for giving Australia an identity to be proud of - dismiss its severity. They “think that Australia is not as bad as other countries”, and that “in their experience, the people around them were not - 47 -


Academic Essay

blatantly racist,” and that “I shouldn’t blame the person that was racist towards me,” because they did it “unintentionally,” or that “society is to blame for their ignorance.” We’re not arguing about a particular policy towards counteracting racism. We’re not talking about the language surrounding the debate - on the merits of the word ‘opportunity’ instead of ‘inequality’, or ‘bad choices’ versus ‘environment’ when talking about the Indigenous cycle of poverty. Instead, somehow, we are disputing whether or not a big enough problem exists. Moreover, this is a tête-à-têtes operating within the paradigm of personal experience – in essence, we are just talking about just me. Questioning this would mean discounting my story’s validity and therefore my integrity, something that their entitlement certainly allows them to flippantly do. It’s as clear to me as black and white, and the irony is not lost upon me that for once in their lives, people can see the grey. Casual racism is made nastier by its subtlety. Each act is relatively innocuous on its own, but collectively it is a lifetime of feeling inferior and being unable to pinpoint a key instant as to why. It’s the categorical stripping of my childhood potential to dream of any and all possibilities. They can’t expect my self-esteem to have grown healthily when the girls at my private grammar school did not expect me to be anything less than timid and studious, bowing my head, subservient. I got teased whenever I tried to fit in: “are you wearing makeup?” I admit I cultivated an enormous chip on my shoulder – the drive to prove I was as good as them burnt bright. I topped English frequently throughout high school. My mother often - 48 -


Academic Essay

thought I was better at English than Maths – I was not - but her perception was skewed. She was so proud of me for beating the “white natives” that it didn’t matter. She didn’t understand that she was doing what I was trying to fight against. I suppose she never fully saw the huge effort it took in junior school: that I cried every lunchtime in Year 3 when my name wasn’t on the board because I hadn’t gotten perfect on the spelling test, that in Year 4 I made little spelling songs I sung in my head as we drove to school (“A, double C, O, double M, O, D, A, T, I, O, N!”), that in Year 5 my class snickered when I pronounced ‘salmon’ incorrectly because I associated the word with Korean-speaking mealtimes with my family, that in Year 6 my teacher laughed because I blinked in my school photo so my eyes looked smaller, and that in Year 7 I read twenty books a week, getting glasses in the same year. The day after I’d gotten the Prize for English at awards night in Year 10, I took a bus. The bus driver spoke to me slower, using small words, and had that look in his eye. I felt something clench my heart and pins and needles rushed across my skin. It didn’t matter that I spoke English better than he could ever hope to, that I knew most of the words on Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day, that my goddamn short story got read to the class the day of submission because there was nothing to fault – when a stranger looked at me, all they saw was Asian, and that would always mean I was inferior. Circumventing the social hierarchy is a delicate game. Not only must I act Westernised, I must also downplay any personal achievements as being an innate ability of my race. It doesn’t - 49 -


Academic Essay

matter if I’ve lived in Australia since I was two years old, it’s not an accomplishment to speak Korean. It doesn’t matter if I practiced the cello until my finger pads bled, popped, and bled again, because Asians are good at playing musical instruments. It also crushes me that I become a reflection on where I was born. As an unwilling ambassador for Korea, a friend told me that my wide nose made me look Korean. Do people have any idea how their remarks make me feel? What am I meant to do about how my skin and fat happen to form around my cartilage, anyway? I already have a twisted sense of guilt when judgments on an entire nation are made based on my actions: my personal favourite, “are all families in Korea like yours?” as my mother cooked a five course meal for my friends, scuttling back to the kitchen to whisper to my sister and using cutlery I’ve never seen before. When I think of Gallipoli, I think of sacrifice, heroism, camaraderie, bravery, life and death, the Simpson donkey – grand, sweeping notions in line with the blessings this lucky country has received, and at odds with how Australians have made “those who’ve come across the seas” to share in their “boundless plains” feel. What did those soldiers fight for? Are we living to that standard today? Australia is still far from the kind of country I’d like to live in. The waste of its true potential is only emphasised by the martyrdom of Australians of only a few generations ago.

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What was he thinking? What was he thinking when he got into his white car that sunny afternoon? When he put her in the front seat, and him in the back. No seatbelts. What was he thinking as he pulled up to the STOP sign? Stopped, didn’t stop enough, kept on going, didn’t stop enough! The truck on the road wasn’t going fast. How could it, up The Hill? Saw the white car stopped… Not stopped? What’s the point in stopping if you don’t stop enough? Swerve, breathe, it’s fine not fine!


It takes forever to fall, 3 seconds at most. If time can stop, why didn’t he? Two kids in the car, what was he thinking? Was he thinking at all? Thud. Pain. A grinding noise beside her ear. Moment of stillness. Even the birds are too shocked to sing. Truck on its side, white car across the road, nothing moving. What was he thinking? Amelia Curran Arts II


The Nakata Brophy Prize Established in honour of Dr Sana Naktata (1983- ) and Dr Lilly Brown (nĂŠe Brophy) (1983- ) Members of Trinity College (TC 2001-04) who were the first Indigenous students to attend the Residential College. Open to all Indigenous writers in Australia under 30, and awarded for a short story of 3000 words or fewer, with the first prize being $5000, the position of Writer in Residence at Trinity the following year, and publication in Overland and Bulpadok.

{

The winner for 2015 is

Backa Bourke Marika Duczynski


Creative Writing

We were fourteen kilometres out of Wilcannia when the rain pulled us up. A long gash of water had formed across the dirt highway, and we sat on our bikes, on the wrong side, swearing at it. A cop at the servo had told us that if we made the first fifteen, we’d have no worries. You’ll gun the rest of it, he had said. He’d nodded at Mick’s battered Yamaha, still sturdy as anything, like he knew all the places it’d been. As if he could size it up just from the colours of the dust that had caked in its tyre tread. I don’t think the cop had looked over at me, or my bike, during that exchange. He would have seen me filling up the tank of the Guzzi and he probably would have laughed. ‘That’d be right,’ Mick said, swinging a leg over the frame of the Yamaha. He hopped off lightly into the mud. He was agile for a big fella: knew his way around a bike. When we were young, he always had some new stunt to show us. Jumps, burnouts, wheel stands. We’d called him ‘The Gymnast’ after we’d watched the ’84 Olympics on TV at Aunt Karen’s and saw the men’s pommel horse event for the first time. He hadn’t liked it. I saw him shove Curt against the brick wall of the garage before I had bolted, still laughing. Mick followed the perimeter of the water, which was swelling in the rain. He stopped to kick the foaming edge with his boot. ‘The mud’s too thick to go around. And then there’s this shit,’ he said, pointing to the wiry scrubland. It stretched out over the wet earth, impenetrable all the way to the horizon. A blue Kingswood sat in the middle of the water. It was bogged to its axles. The shell of it was old and rusted so it looked as if it had been abandoned ages ago, but the bonnet was steaming. The smell of the car hit me then – petrol and rubber and clay - 54 -


Creative Writing

dug up by the tyres. Mick noticed it too. ‘The driver’s nearby,’ he said, eyeballing the country. We walked the bikes straight down the belt of the road, engines off. The mud under water was a lot denser. It sucked at the soles of our feet, willing us forward and holding us back. The Guzzi’s pipes became submerged and the bike didn’t roll alongside me anymore, so I wrangled with the handlebars, trying to pull it forward. I grunted with the effort but it didn’t move, it just stood there lopsided in the rain, like a ruin. Mick laughed from behind me, a deep laugh that seemed to have rattled its way up a mineshaft and hit the air above with awful clarity. He left his own bike in the shallows and took hold of mine from the other side. ‘Stubborn as a fuckin’ sow,’ he said to the Guzzi as he gripped it tight. In a few goes we yanked the bike clear. The Yamaha was heavier but it came up out of the mud without a fuss. Mick muttered that they’re made for this, these sorts of conditions, the mud and all that. He looked at me and wiped his face, slick with sweat and rain, with an even wetter forearm. Marta was a Swedish nurse from White Cliffs. She was heading home on foot when we saw her on the road ahead of us. As we came round the bend on our bikes she was flapping a black scarf from side to side, waving us down. It clipped at her ears like a magpie. She told us that she’d been to Wilcannia to treat a Barkindji woman whose bad heart was playing up again. Yes, that was her car in the bog, and no, she did not want a lift to White Cliffs, but she would appreciate it if we sent someone to tow her car. - 55 -


Creative Writing

‘Yeah, darlin,’ Mick said. ‘We’ll send someone for ya.’ He grinned and his eyes flashed bluer. ‘Are you sure you’re right? Out here?’ I looked up and down the length of the dirt road. There was nothing around except a few kangaroos sprawled lankily in the shade of a Mulga bush. Noone seemed to hear me. The sun had come out and stirred up the sodden soil, bringing it right up out of the ground. I could smell it everywhere. The air was earthen and thick and suffused with expectation. ‘Where are you going? You’re not from here.’ Marta looked over at my city bike resting at the side of the road. ‘Back home, to Bourke,’ Mick said. ‘For a funeral.’ My heart thudded hard and I turned to squint at the roos. I tried to make out their faces in the distance so I didn’t see Curt’s. I didn’t want to try to be a part of the conversation anymore. I didn’t want to pretend that Curt was just our neighbour or our bud. My bud. ‘You’re going the wrong way to get to Bourke. This is White Cliffs Road,’ Marta said. ‘That’s where the road will take you,’ she added, shifting her weight from one hip to the other. ‘We came this way lookin’ for you. Just seeing if you were alright. We saw the opal sticker on your boot, so. Thought you might have been from there,’ Mick said. Marta nodded. She was the tiniest woman I had ever seen. She hunched a bit, as if she’d pulled a bush rabbit from a trap and swung it over her shoulders. It made her look older than she probably was.

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Creative Writing

I sat on the Guzzi and revved it up. Mick was telling Marta that we’d stay in White Cliffs for the night, that we’d send someone to help her out. He must have spotted the small plastic container that she carried in the crook of her arm, and because he can’t help himself, he asked her what was in it. With the gravelly engine going, Marta’s voice sounded like a faraway song. I think she said that it was full of red cordial. We pulled into White Cliffs just over two hours later, coughing up the dust in our throats. We’d had to stop when I’d noticed that the Guzzi’s rear rim had a buckle in it, and again when I’d spotted a hairline crack in the front rim. A couple of shearers passing through from Wanaaring had helped me patch it up in exchange for my flashy bike gloves they said they’d sell at a garage sale. Mick and I had only been to White Cliffs once, when we were kids. Mum had needed to get tests done on her lungs that day, so dad had driven into town to pick us up. I was excited because I’d seen a postcard of the place: an aerial shot of a pockmarked landscape that looked like a strange, red moon. Like someplace I’d been in a dream, running away from Wile E Coyote. I don’t know if I had really thought it looked like a moonscape. Maybe I’d just read that word in the description of the town’s opal fields on the back of the card. Dad had told us that almost everyone in White Cliffs lived underground in dugouts because it was much cooler below the earth’s surface. The spaces were chipped out of a sixty-million-year-old seabed, he had said, before pausing, turning over the information in his mind. That’s even older than Murri culture, he told us, eyebrows raised. - 57 -


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Even then, we knew he’d been reading off the plaques in the museum and pretending to know it all by heart. Neither of us had minded though. A moonscape was the best sort of place for yarning up big, drunk on sherry. He’d leaned over my shoulder to point out an opalised plesiosaur named Eric, and I’d smelt it on his breath, familiar and sickly sweet. At the White Cliffs Hotel, the only pub in town, I asked the barman about what had happened to the plesiosaur. ‘Our mate Eric! Well, they carted him off to Sydney, didn’t they! Don’t know where. Reckon he’s not coming back either.’ ‘I think I heard about that,’ I said. I turned to Mick, who was four Foster’s deep and leaning on his elbows at the bar. ‘Do you remember seeing it at the museum that time?’ ‘I dunno what you’re talking about. What’s it called? Sounds like pelican.’ ‘Plesiosaur,’ the barman said. ‘It’s a shallow-water marine dinosaur. Flippers and everything. They say that some of the species could grow to the size of a whale.’ ‘Not Eric, but. He was no more than two metres long, surely,’ I said. ‘Nah. Not him. He was a little bugger. Even so, an American collector offered to pay one million for him.’ The barman walked the length of the L-shaped bar, mopping up schooner spillages. He was an old whitefella who still Brylcreemed his hair - 58 -


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back into place. It was the only part of him that was polished. The rest of him was rough and leathery, as if he’d already done a thousand wild things in his lifetime but if you asked him, he’d still be up for pig hunting tomorrow. ‘Amazing to think that this was all underwater, though.’ He cast his eyes around the place as he said it, for effect probably. I think he’d spun the yarn a few times. Eric the Plesiosaur had been the talk of the town. Even as a kid in Bourke, I’d heard about him being dug up out of the ground. I had imagined a fully formed dinosaur skeleton with a frightening, hollowed skull and a long arching spine. But on TV, his chalk stick bones looked small, and there was a lot of him missing. ‘They had him on the news, you know. That brought a lot of people to town, not just miners,’ the barman said, on cue. ‘Of course, we’ve had a few film crews come through, haven’t we? The ANU – that’s a university in Canberra – designed the solar power station out here. You’ve probably seen photos. It was the first one of its kind, the first one to supply electricity to an entire town in Australia, or thereabouts. We had all the major news stations in here at some point for a drink and a feed.’ The barman jabbed his meaty index finger on a coaster, confirming that it’d happened right there. ‘Is that right?’ I said, listening harder. ‘Yeah. I fed ’em all kangaroo steaks for a laugh. They told me it was the best mutton they’d ever tasted.’ - 59 -


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Mick snorted into the last of his beer froth as it slinked up his glass and into his mouth. ‘Silly bastards,’ the barman said, grinning madly. ‘But a good bunch.’ He reached for the tap absentmindedly and poured another Foster’s for Mick. ‘So where are you fellas from, then? Bourke? I heard you came across Marta, bogged outside of Wilcannia.’ Mick shifted in his seat, interested now. ‘From Bourke, yeah.’ ‘You been riding motos for long?’ ‘Since we were kids, I spose.’ ‘How’d you find the floodway out on White Cliffs Road?’ Mick shrugged. ‘Easy for the Yamaha. She came up good. Can’t say the same for Jacky’s Italian bike.’ My skin prickled and suddenly I could feel the sweat all over me, where it clung and dripped. ‘What type of bike is it?’ ‘A Guzzi,’ Mick said, and it was all I heard. I’d tuned out by then, let the blood throb in my ears, let the laughter wash over me. I sat tensely on the edge of the barstool and I wanted so much to lean over and flog him, but the memory of last time kept me where I was. My busted-up face pressed in the dirt, aching knuckles, deliriousness. Mick standing over me, wild-eyed under the street lamplight, like someone I’d never met before. - 60 -


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I had to get out. I stood on the pub’s wraparound porch and thought about other things, like whether it was hotter inside with those idiots, or out there on the cement as the sun dipped, scorching everything under the corrugated awning. The sun would take its time to go down, especially now that the clouds had gone. It would burn across the plains for ages because there’s no mountain anywhere to blanket the heat. Aunt Karen would be sitting down to watch Wheel of Fortune before the news. There was a payphone bolted into the cement, so I dug into my pocket for some coins and dialled her number. It only rang a couple of times before she answered. ‘Aunt, it’s Jacky.’ ‘Oh, how are you bub?’ Her voice was soft, and she unravelled each syllable slowly with a heavy tongue. It felt good to hear it again. ‘I’m alright, thanks. Just here at White Cliffs.’ ‘What are you doing over that way? I thought you and Mick were coming up.’ ‘Yeah, we were on our way, but we had to help out a nurse whose car got caught in a floodway near Wilcannia.’ ‘Ah, poxy weather! Mucks everyone up.’ She cleared her throat and then fell silent. I could tell she was trying to ask me something. ‘Your Uncle wants to know if you can do Curt’s eulogy.’ - 61 -


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It was what I had thought. I didn’t say anything. ‘I know it’s short notice but you speak so nicely, bub. And you knew him better than anyone.’ That night, I lay in bed thinking about what I might say. Curt had been a gun javelin thrower. A moto lover. A teller of filthy jokes. I could say any of those things because they were as known and familiar to everybody as a handshake. I wouldn’t mention the things I remembered most: that we’d smoked every afternoon, after school, so we could be around each other and not have to talk. That Mick had caught us together behind the Olympic-pool shed. That Curt was stuck in a place of in-between, in the middle of a highway, in a swamp. That I had loved him anyway. I set off for Bourke alone, just before dawn. On the long, dry stretch of road, the Guzzi felt powerful. I watched the sun roll its first light over the prickles of shallow scrubland.

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Muslim Philosophers and the Contradictions Between ex nihilo nihil fit and ex nihilo Maxwell Collins Commerce I


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Thought and argument has always been a crucial way of

pushing social boundaries, evoking change and persuading non-believers. Great Islamic thinkers, both theologians and philosophers have tasked themselves with solving the contradictions that surround the original creation, the act of bringing the world into pure existence. This dilemma has caused immense divide between thinkers. Fierce debate on this topic revolves around three central themes, the eternity of time, the role of God and what, if anything, existed prior to the original creation. Islamic thinkers such as Avicenna, Al-Ghazali, Averroes and Al-Razi all have different opinions and arguments surrounding the theory of creation, yet they all share a logical argument which acts to rid the dilemma of any sort of contradictions. Before the philosophical dilemma can be observed through the words of Islamic theologians and philosophers, certain aspects must first be understood. There are three major ways in which Islamic thinkers view the creation of the universe. Creation ex nihilo describes the universe being brought into existence from nothing, whilst others believe that because ex nihilo nihil fit (from nothing, nothing comes) the universe must be eternal. Alternatively some thinkers believe that the world was created out of previously existent principles, most notably Al-Razi’s belief of the five basic principles. These three conflicting theories have characterised Islamic thought for centuries, as differing opinions on the subject have had far reaching consequences. Certain views towards the original creation run counter to that which is outlined in scripture, once again creating controversy. However it must be noted that when comparing philosophical and theological - 64 -


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arguments, differing opinions about the meaning of specific terms, such as ex nihilo may mean that arguments cannot accurately oppose one another (Leamen, 2002). One’s belief towards the eternity of time will also factor into their beliefs about the creation of the universe. Aristotle argued that since time is the measure movement, if one can prove that time is eternal, than it must follow that movement or a moving being (the world) must also be eternal (leamen, 2002). Finally, it must be noted that certain views on the creation of the world and God’s role in it were taken as heresy, and as such people may have been influenced or threatened to write what they truly thought. With these factors in mind, one is able to more adequately understand the conflicting ideas. The differing views of theologians and philosophers towards the creation of the universe is pivotal in this debate. Islamic theologians usually fall into either the Ash’arites or the Mut’tazilites. The former believe that God did not only freely create the world ex nihilo, but is the omnipotent and direct cause of everything, as such nothing could exist without him. The latter, an extinct theological school that birthed the Ash’arites, believed in creation ex nihilo and the importance of scripture (Groff, 2007). Philosophers on the other hand, garnered great influence from Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato. For instance Hellenistic philosophers believe that the universe is co-eternal with God, rather than being created ex nihilo. The basic conflict between these two groups of Islamic thinkers epitomises the dissension between tradition and rational thinking.

- 65 -


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These thinkers all have different arguments surrounding the mode of creation, the eternity of time and the role that God played. The major contradiction between ex nihilo and ex nihilo nihil fit is that if the world didn’t come from nothing than what came before? Was there even a before? It is questions like these that Islamic thinkers have acted to solve, to rid any sort of doubt. However one cannot irrefutably prove anything about God, because it is impossible to attach human knowledge to such an omniscient being. As such the thinkers below act solely to logically ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ certain beliefs surrounding creation, time and God. One of the most influential and pivotal Islamic philosophers was Ibn Sina, or Avicenna. Avicenna believed in creation through emanation, that everything has flowed down in a ‘cascade of causality’ from the divine One (Groff, 2007). He argued that human beings are merely possible or contingent, but are in no way necessary. In other words, mankind’s existence was just as possible as mankind’s ‘dis-existence’. Furthermore, Avicenna contends that all contingent things can only possibly exist because they are brought into existence by something else (Leamen, 2002). For example it is plausible to think of one’s coat without comprehending or even thinking about how that coat came to be, or what preceded it. However it is impossible to think that this coat has no connection to what preceded it. This process of contingent things being brought into existence by another contingent thing creates an infinite regression. The only plausible beginning that Avicenna sees is something which is necessary in it of itself, something - 66 -


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that doesn’t require a push into existence but simply is. For Avicenna this something is the Necessary Existent, whose existence is not merely contingent on anything but itself (Winter, 2008). This Necessary Existent is Ibn Sina’s idea of God. Avicenna’s ideas on the relation between God and the world allowed to skirt the middle ground between the falasifa’s (Greek inspired philosophers) who believed in an eternal universe and the theologians with their ideas on a temporal world created out of pure nothingness (Groff, 2007). Avicenna’s idea of God has far reaching consequences on the creation of the world. His argument follows that the universe is both eternal and contingent, that the creation of the world was not an act of God’s free and creative will but a by-product of God’s self-knowledge. This ties back to Avicenna’s basic premise of creation through emanation. Avicenna contended that a ‘First Effect’ or a pure intelligence came from God’s self-reflection. This first effect sparks a process which culminated in 10 successive intellects, each reflecting a different aspect of the universe (Leamen, 2002). Avicenna’s thoughts and contentions played a crucial role in the dilemma revolving around creation in the Islamic world. One of Avicenna’s greatest opponents in regard to his views of creation and the role of God was Al-Ghazali, whose most notable work ‘The Incoherence of Philosophers’ acts to disprove the ‘proofs’ outlined by differing philosophical thinkers. It is hard to put Al-Ghazali into any class or school of thought, as such it is easier to understand him as a man who regarded his religion and the sanctity of God in the highest degree, a belief which underpins his very being. As an Islamic thinker, Al-Ghazali believed that God is remote - 67 -


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from the world, yet he argues that the world was created by God ex nihilo in a finite period of time (Leamen, 2002). This central belief put Al-Ghazali in direct opposition with Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic philosophers. His ideas about creation continued to include the notion that matter and the form of the world were brought into existence by God through the original act of creation. One of the critical issues that philosophers have with theologians is their belief in a temporal world, a universe that exists in a finite time. As such philosophers find it hard to believe that God would create the world at a future date, as in the space previous to the creation, nothing existed except for God. If this is true then what would motivate God to create the world at all. One of Al-Ghazali’s central contentions revolves around this idea of God’s will. Initially Al- Ghazali argues that God could have easily wished the world into existence at a post date, due to the fact that God only has to say “be, and it is” (Qur’an, 2:117). He further states that God’s knowledge is so distinctly different and separate to any and all human intellect, that it would not be absurd to assume that his divine will would be completely different to human will. As such his reasoning and motivations for creating the entire world could be far more complex than anything that mankind could comprehend. An eternal world would mean that God did not create the world completely out of nothingness, for Al-Ghazali this would be a denial of the divine attribute of will (Al-Ghazali and Marmura, 1997). This desire to prove the temporal nature of the world manifests itself in his claim that the first moment of time existed when God first set the world in motion, before this point there was nothing - 68 -


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but God. Furthermore he argues that if one tries to imagine God’s existence at a point before the creation of the world then one will irrefutably attach temporal terms to describe a complex non-temporal period, a persuasion rooted in one’s imagination. Al-Ghazali’s clinical and logical destruction of key fundamental philosophical arguments show him to be a man of great importance in the dilemma revolving around the creation of the world and the role that God played in its existence. Ibn Rushd or Averroes was another pivotal Islamic thinker, with his major work The Incoherence of Incoherence acting to refute the claims made previously by Al-Ghazali, as Averroes believed in the destructive overreaching of theologians. Averroes differed from past Islamic thinkers, he rejected Avicenna’s idea of creation through emanation. Averroes’ main argument for an eternal world stipulates that the world was always worth creating, and if God could always create the world then why would he wait. He argued that because God is perfect and eternal he had always had the ability to create the world, which follows that the world must then also be co-eternal with God. To further argue this point Averroes asserted that the creative action of an eternal agent cannot possibly have a beginning in time, as such the world (as a created being) must also be eternal. However Averroes also believed that due to the complex design and structure of the world, along with its ability to sustain mankind, that it must have been created by a willing, able and intending agent rather than by chance (Averroes and Najjar, 2001). He categorically concluded that - 69 -


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the world must have been created. His stance on creation ex nihilo and ex nihilo nihil fit is where his beliefs differ from classical theologians and Neoplatonic philosophers. Averroes never in fact abandons the notion of an eternal universe, yet he is still willing to entertain the key Islamic concept of a created world (Averroes and Najjar, 2001). He did however see it necessary to distinguish between continuous and discontinuous creation, where the former is deeply connected to God. He argues it is inconceivable that an interval would occur between God’s will and God’s action, which is unlike finite agents, where this interval would be observed. Averroes also believed that the Qur’an asks philosophical question that have to be answered by those capable of adequately solving them. He argued that verses such as 11:7 “And it is He who created the heavens and the earth in six days - and His Throne had been upon water” and 4:11 “Then He directed Himself to the heaven while it was smoke and said to it and to the earth, “Come [into being], willingly or by compulsion.”, imply that His throne, water and time (as he created the world in six days) all existed before the creation, whilst also implying the heaven was not created out of pure nothingness but out of smoke, out of something that already existed. Averroes debated that scripture resorts to a form of ‘sensuous representation’ to instruct the common people, who are incapable of understanding creation out of nothing and in no time. Averroes’ theories and arguments act to highlight the sheer complexity that is associated with creation and actively try to solve certain issues surrounding the dilemma. - 70 -


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Another crucial Islamic thinker was Al-Razi, a defender of a formatio mundi and who played a crucial role in the debate over creation (Goodman, 1999). Al-Razi’s most notable belief was that of five eternal principles. These principles were, Space, Soul, Time, Matter and God (Groff, 2007). He argued that the creation of the world was initiated by the Soul, whose impulsive desire to be embodied called for the overall creation of a temporal sphere (the world) to inhabit. Al-Razi is a defender of creation, however it is believed that even he thought that creation ex nihilo was too unlikely and not defensible. This belief stems from his interpretation, or perhaps differing understanding of specific Qur’an text. AlRazi believed that certain words could be observed in multiple ways, for instance ’Khaliq’ appears to mean both ‘Maquaddit’ (Who determines) and ‘Mujid’ (Who brings into existence) in the Qur’an (Leamen, 2002). This difference has huge implications in regards to the conflicting views towards creation ex nihilo and ex nihilo nihil fit, for if ‘Khaliq’ means ‘who determines’ then it must be assumed that God did not create the world from complete nothingness, but was merely working with previously existent material. Al-Razi’s view towards creation upholds both a logical and systematic dissection of the Qur’an, whilst creating a different view towards the Original act. Islamic thinkers have never been able to concretely agree on all aspects of creation. Some believe that the world is a temporal place created by God out of nothing, whilst others believe in an eternal world which co-exists completely with God. The questions posed by thinkers about time, mat- 71 -


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ter, God and existence will never truly be solved, yet it is through logical and rational reasoning that we may begin to garner a greater understanding of not only the world, but whatever, if anything, existing outside of our sphere of existence.

Works Cited Al-Ghazali, and Marmura, M. (1997). The incoherence of the philosophers. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press. Averroes, and Najjar, I. (2001). Faith and reason in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld. Goodman, L. (1999). Jewish and Islamic philosophy. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Groff, P. (2007). Islamic philosophy A-Z. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Leaman, O. (2002). An introduction to classical Islamic philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Winter, T. (2008). The Cambridge companion to classical Islamic theology. Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press. - 72 -


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Scratch My Name Into the Feet of Statues Scratch my name into the feet of statues Around the world; write me into being; On the spotless walls of the avenues Re-scrawl my name with love everlasting. Don’t turn me into marble, bronze or gold, Don’t portrait me to then hang on the wall, Or, worse still, to collect dust and grow old Lying silently, forgotten to all. Write, write, write and then rewrite me once more! For when you revive me I will live on And on – it’s impossible to ignore What’s immortalized in a lexicon. Time is long and so difficult to best: I need your help, reader, to stand this test. Angus Cameron Alumnus (TC 2011) Resident Tutor 2015


A shortlisted entrant for The Wigram Allen Essay Prize 2015 is

Mountaineering as Reality and Metaphor Reflections on Wade Davis’s Into the Silence Nick Fabbri Arts IV (Honours)


Creative Writing

Writing to his friend, the Cambridge political scientist Goldie Lowes Dickinson, in 1913, Bertrand Russell confessed to a feeling that a great many of what we students must often feel: We here in Cambridge all keep each other going by the unquestioned assumption that what we do is important, but I often wonder if it really is. What is important, I wonder? Scott and his companions dying in the blizzard seem to me impervious to doubt – and his record of it has a really great simplicity. But intellect, except at white heat, is very apt to be trivial. That one of the leading intellectuals of his time should long to be ‘impervious to doubt,’ at least as regards the importance of what he was doing, is food for thought. That he should have admired the heroic exploits of explorers, on the other hand, seems completely understandable. I will argue that the greatest intellectual work is precisely that which is pervious to doubt, which challenges itself again and again. The worst kind of intellectual work is that which is impervious to doubt. But I will explore this idea and its implications for leadership and innovation against the background of mountaineering and, in particular, the heroic and unsuccessful efforts by Russell’s contemporaries, in the early 1920s, to scale Mount Everest for the first time. Let me explain at once what I mean when I say that the greatest intellectual work is precisely that which is pervious to doubt. We speak rather often of the need for people to have the courage of their convictions, but serious thinking actually requires the opposite. It demands that we be capable of critically cross-examining our - 78 -


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convictions and those of others to probe for flaws, illusions, biases and errors. The greater the stakes and the more entrenched a conventional belief or common assumption is, the more courage this requires. We should not be reduced to hopeless confusion by chronic doubt. That is not at all what I am saying. Rather, we are first rate thinkers just to the extent that we can see in a complex and important field the grounds for our existing beliefs or those of some major strategic commitment on behalf of our company, our client, our government, or public opinion and then see our way through to pinpointing errors and pointing the way to a new framing of the problem and a better grounded assessment of the reality. It is curious, in a way that Bertrand Russell, of all people, should have envied Scott or other explorers exposed to mortal hazards. After all, in the course of a long life, he sought to challenge many orthodoxies and to use his acute reasoning powers to point to what he regarded as better approaches to government, education, religion, arms control and so forth. Did he not regard these forays as being important? Did he not believe that sound approaches to reasoning in public policy were actually more important than hazardous expeditions to remote places? He once remarked that many people would rather die than change their minds and in fact they do. Yet he declared himself in awe of those impervious to doubt about their commitments even in the face of death in a blizzard. I think we would do well to reframe his way of looking at this matter. I want to suggest that the reason we may well admire explorers of the natural world, right up to astronauts walking on the Moon, is not that they are (if they are) - 79 -


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impervious to doubt, but precisely because they embody the tenacious will to overcome challenges in the face of doubt and to deepen our collective understanding of both what is so and what is possible. This is where the matter of mountaineering becomes interesting as a metaphor and where we can learn a little by unpacking the instinctive respect we tend to have for those who actually do climb serious mountains. I have never climbed a mountain of any consequence, much less put life or limb at risk in doing so. I have, however, read an extraordinary book by the explorer and prolific author Wade Davis. It was called Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest. If you have neither heard of it nor read it, or have heard of it but not read it, I urge you to get yourself a copy and read it slowly, digesting its endless richness. Of course I will only be touching on a little of what is in the book and from a particular angle. My own point of entry for reading the book had nothing to do with mountaineering and everything to do with the scaling of Everest as a metaphor for striving to reach the summit of one’s aspirations. Your own context as students of Trinity College is different, whatever your personal situations. Most of you are fresh out of high school and working through your first degrees. I suspect at this very moment you have very little sense of how your life might unfold, or what goals or milestones you might aspire to. And that’s okay. This, I take it, is the bizarre place from which you might listen to talk about mountaineering and, in particular, about one of the most famous as well as, let it be said, ill-fated, mountaineering teams of all: the British teams around George Mallory who attempted in 1921, 1922 and again in 1924 to climb Mount Everest for the first time. - 80 -


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They failed each time, while getting a little closer to the summit on each occasion. On the final attempt, Mallory lost his life, leaving behind a beloved wife and three young children. In elite sport these days, athletes often undertake training or adventure routines designed to test their endurance. Those who attempted to climb Everest with Mallory had already been through endurance tests of the most extraordinary nature. In particular, they had endured the First World War. Of the twenty-six climbers who participated in one or more of the three expeditions, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly killed by disease at the front, one hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three, as army surgeons, dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers killed in action. All had endured the unprecedented mass killing, the extraordinary artillery barrages, the mounds of decaying bodies in the mud, the bones and the decaying faces of the dead. Let me give you a little sense of who they were by sketching a few of their Homeric profiles for you. Take Arthur Wakefield, for example. A devout Anglican and churchgoer – before the Great War – he was, as described by Davis, ‘ferociously strong, a champion boxer and rower at university, with brilliant blue eyes and a penchant for adventure that led him, in 1900, to suspend his medical studies and sign up as a cavalry trooper and sharpshooter’ in the Boer War. After the war he completed his medical training in Edinburgh and Heidelberg, then went to work as a missionary doctor in Newfoundland and Labrador from 1908. For the following six years, he ‘lived a life of considerable hardship: intense cold in winter, clouds of mosquitoes in summer, a diet of little but flour and grease, molasses, tea, caribou meat and salted fish.’ - 81 -


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‘Dedicated to God and King, impervious to physical suffering, possessed of medical skills that seemed wizardly to the scores of people he saved’, Wakefield, when the balloon went up, in August 1914, raised the first five hundred of the Newfoundland Regiment. He knew them all as if they had been his foster sons and swelled with pride as they clutched their rifles, fixed with bayonets, marched to their ship with cheering crowds and broke into a rousing rendition of Auld Lang Syne. Two years later, by happenstance, he was manning the casualty clearing station at the very sector of the front on the Somme where the regiment was stationed on the eve of Haig’s gigantic offensive. Yet it was weeks after the notorious opening day of the Somme before he learned their fate. They had been slaughtered by German machine guns on the parapet of their own trenches. Of 810 who went over the top, only sixty eight survived the day unscathed. Then there was Charles Kenneth Howard-Bury: a brilliant writer, a fine photographer (when it was still a challenging art), a keen and accomplished naturalist, fluent in 27 Asian and European languages, a man who travelled widely in Siberia, Central Asia, China, India and Tibet at his own initiative, heir to a vast estate in Ireland whose main house had originally been built as a hunting lodge in 1740. When the war broke out, in August 1914, he immediately took a commission in the army. He became one of the most decorated officers in the war, winning every citation for valour except the Victoria Cross. He fought throughout the war and that he survived was statistically a miracle, given the massive attrition rate of the unit he led fearlessly and constantly. He was to become the team leader of the first assault on Everest, in 1921. Now, let’s take stock of these remarkable individuals. You see, the salient thing here is that all the impressive accomplishments I have - 82 -


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listed had been completed before any of these men attempted to climb Mount Everest. From almost any reasonable point of view, none of them had anything to prove. They certainly did not need to risk their lives more than they had already done or demonstrate that they had exceptional powers of endurance or commitment. Yet this, in 1921, again in 1922 and yet again in 1924, is what they did. They did it, as Davis makes clear, for many of the same reasons that test pilots in the 1960s became astronauts in the race to put a man in space and then on the Moon. They did it because the British Empire, or visionary people at the pinnacle of it, like John F. Kennedy in 1961, had issued a challenge. Davis describes, as he puts it, the literal measurement of India, in the Survey of India, begun in 1806 and still proceeding in the first decade of the 20th century, as ‘the greatest scientific undertaking of the nineteenth century.’ It was the work of the surveyors of India that discovered Mount Everest to be the highest mountain in the world. The Himalayas as a mountain range fired the imaginations of the British surveyors: more than a thousand mountains each soaring above 20,000 feet, rising out of the heat and dust of the north Indian plain and the jungles of Burma. It was only in 1846, however, that the exploration of them pinpointed to ‘a rugged knot of mountains some 140 miles west of Kanchenjunga, then considered the highest point on Earth.’ Here I pick up Davis’s account. As you listen to it, bear in mind everything I began by saying about being pervious to doubt and about thinking, instrumentation and revision of opinion: Compared with the stunningly beautiful massif of Kangchenjunga,

which dominates the sky beyond Darjeeling, these distant summits were - 83 -


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unassuming, mere fragments of white on a dark horizon. [The leader of the 1846 party, John] Armstrong designated the highest simply Peak B. During subsequent seasons it remained hidden in cloud and it was not until November 1849 that another officer of the survey, James Nicolson, was able to make a series of observations from six different stations, the closest being some 108 miles from the mountain, by then known as Peak XV. Only in 1854, at the headquarters of the Survey of India in Dehra Dun and in Calcutta, did work begin on Nicolson’s computations. Andrew Waugh, Surveyor General of India, assigned the task to a brilliant Indian, Radanath Sikhdar. Given the distance of the sightings and the problem of atmospheric refraction, the challenge was enormous. It took two years for Sikhdar to determine that this unknown summit was, at 29,002 feet, fully a thousand feet higher than any other known mountain on Earth. It was a most impressive feat of computation. The actual elevation of the mountain, measured today by satellite technology, is 29,035 feet. Once this was established, that sharp spire of a white peak, fully a thousand feet higher than any other mountain in the world, became an object of aspiration and, for years before the Great War wrought catastrophic havoc on the world of European empires, the geographers, explorers and imperial propagandists of the British Empire found themselves yearning to mount an expedition to scale it. If my objective was to acquaint you with how that was done, I would be well into it by now. But of course my intention is rather different. It is to tantalize you with the very idea of that expedition or what became several expeditions; with the idea of the diverse and accomplished people who came together to form the team that - 84 -


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made those attempts on the summit. I cannot, as I remarked early on, too highly recommend the book, but especially as a wonderful source of metaphors that you might individually and collectively draw upon in the next few years as you mount your own expeditions - both as a College with a new Warden and as students - and build your own team. But I mention all that chiefly to emphasize the matter of metaphors of aspiration. The aspiration I have advanced this evening has been climbing Mount Everest. Doing so is still a serious challenge to this day and people still die or lose body parts in the effort. But doing it the first time, back in the early 1920s, that was crazy brave. You are, I posit, at that point in your endeavours. So the question is: What is your Peak B, or Peak XV? In other words, what is the shimmering peak off in the distance, far from your tea plantations in Darjeeling, that might lure you onto greater heights, quite literally? What observations have you made of it? From how many points? How have you set about computing its height relative to where you are? Who is your Radanath Sikhdar, who with pencil and paper will get the measurements right for you? What will it take to first measure, then reconnoitre and then scale that peak? Perhaps, more important than all these questions, is the spiritual one: what spirit, what approach to life itself will you bring, as individuals and as a team, to this endeavour? At the end of his marvellous book, having taken us in fascinating detail through the terrain and human drama of the three expeditions, climaxing in the deaths of George Mallory and his sole climbing companion at 28,000 feet, - 85 -


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Sandy Irvine, Wade Davis concludes with the following reflection: Mallory and Irvine may not have reached the summit of Mount Everest, but they did, on that fateful day, climb higher than any human being before them, reaching heights that would not be attained again for nearly thirty years. Mallory held nothing back, he writes: Because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but a frail barrier that men crossed smiling and gallant, every day. They had seen so much of death that life mattered less than the moments of being alive. I do not, of course, suggest that you work yourselves to death in working towards your goals. I simply pose the existential question: for you as individuals and as a College what ultimately matters? The answers you find to that question will shape how you work together, what goals you set for yourselves and how you go about achieving them. The questions I would leave you with are simply these five: What is your project? Where is your base camp right now? Who are the people in your team? Why are you in the team? How will your team reach the summit? Let me suggest that in answering each and every one of these questions, you need to remain in all humility pervious to doubt. That is where exploration occurs. That is where you find your true answers and the sources of your inspiration.

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Cultural Capital and the United Nations Development Agenda Rona Glynn-Mcdonald Arts II


Academic Essay

This year marks a new global era of sustainable development with the launch of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September. As the world looks towards the post-15 Development agenda encompassing 17 sustainable development goals and 169 associated targets, it is evident that significant gaps exist in the UN’s highly ambitious and potentially transformational vision. Despite calls for the inclusion of Indigenous people from the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, there is no mention of Indigenous peoples or the importance of culture in sustainable development. The process of arriving at the post 2015 development agenda was predominantly Member State-led with broad participation from Major Groups and other civil society stakeholders. Although the agenda represents a commitment to achieving sustainable development in its three dimensions — economic, social and environmental; this historic decision fails to recognise the entrenched structural factors that perpetuate various forms of inequalities faced by minority populations. The UN’s SDG’s aspire to ‘leave no one behind’, yet there is no reference to Indigenous peoples or the significance of culture in a post-15 outcome document. This near invisibility of indigenous peoples poses a serious risk of perpetuating the injustices and inequalities experienced by minority populations, particularly in areas such as remote Australia. The latest report of the State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples notes that ‘Indigenous peoples face systematic exclusion from political and economic power…and [are] deprived of their resources for survival, both physical and cultural.’ Culturally blind implementation of the Millennium Development Goals resulted in inappropriate development programmes for Indigenous peoples, and if the world community aspires to leave no one behind, it is critical these gaps are recognised.

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In Australia, the strength of Indigenous culture could provide a foundation for sustainable development in remote areas. Policy makers have too often framed Indigenous communities as beyond the market, in localities of limited commercial opportunities and inadequately sized labour markets, and fail to recognise that a significant cultural economy remains under-utilised. The unique cultural aspects of remote Indigenous Australia can provide localised opportunities for economic development, that ensure the Australian economy sustains Indigenous culture and country in contemporary ways. Remote Australia is emerging as a powerhouse for sustainability innovations, led by Indigenous peoples’ unique approaches to sustainability, and catalysed by the cultural and natural significance of the region. If specific projects are locally based and foster the deeply valued cultural aspects of Aboriginal society, they are inherently more successful. This is evident in the pronounced success of local conservation management programs in the Northern Territory, which encompass traditional land management practices and cultural knowledge. Increased importance must be given to cultural variables, as questions of economic and human development must involve a more comprehensive theory in developing regions. This approach is reflected in development policy created by organisations such as the World Bank, where culture is considered important in catalysing local developments, generating revenue from existing assets, and diversifying strategies for human development. Indigenous Australia is multifaceted, with varying degrees of cultural strength. The rigid processes of neoclassical models have little explanatory power in the policy arena of In- 89 -


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digenous affairs. In light of this, no single economic model can be counted upon, and a multidisciplinary approach would prove to be more successful in analysing the economy and implementing programs that propel movement towards socio economic equity. We must harness the growing economic opportunities that build on the strength of Indigenous knowledge and culture. Without investing in the cultural strengths of Indigenous Australia and recognising cultural capital as a mechanism for re-energising self-confidence and empowerment of Indigenous communities, there is little hope of meeting the 17 goals outlined in the UN’s upcoming sustainable development agenda. If we fail to sustain the cultural values that accentuate Indigenous identity, and not undertake the investment needed to utilise the strength of this capital, economic output in remote areas will remain stagnant. Through the inclusion of cultural capital as a significant economic agent in the sustainable development agenda, and investment into programs that encompass the strengths of Indigenous knowledge, the challenges of remoteness and economic exclusion may be overcome.

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A Series Passion Singing colours fall on deaf eyes as the glasses pile up in the sink. Strings rust and snap off the rotten neck of an old guitar, cowering in its case. Contemplating the finer philosophical points of the flameless fire, I sit with pen and bottle and lidless orbs and watch the rain graze the windowless glass by my bedside. At the bottom of the bottle is a face. Dripping from the tip of the pen; a voice. But the more I try to find that face, the more I try to pull that voice from the depths of the ink, the more I find only my own slow breathing and sleepless nights.


Untitled There is something ephemeral about any love, but there was something especially vacant, fleeting even, about ours. I am not wholly certain that it was altogether there. Or perhaps it existed in some lost wormhole, a dream in the depths of a drunken slumber. Would it matter if it did? If it didn’t? Sitting here, drinking thick soup as it goes cold against my tongue, all I taste is your half-kiss. John Martin Arts II


Mitch Gobel’s Olivers Creek Dr Benjamin Thomas Rusden Curator, Cultural Collections


Academic Essay

After a quarter of a century the story behind the ER White Collection and the endowment that supports it are broadly known to most students, but it is worth repeating in summary. In 1958, in memory of her late father Edward ‘Teddy’ Rowden White, Mrs Moran and her husband purchased a painting by a young artist, John Brack, and gifted it to the College. The Breakfast Table is a bold work, contemporary and striking with its flattened perspective and harsh shadows set against the brilliant yellow glow of morning sunlight on a set table. But perhaps it was, for its time, a little too challenging for Trinity. In 1989, with the support of the family, the work was sold at auction on the condition that the proceeds were used to establish a fund that would enable residential students to build a collection of contemporary art works of their own; the ER White Collection. Mitch Gobel’s Olivers Creek is the latest acquisition to that extraordinary collection, a collection that is almost certainly unique amongst national tertiary institutions. While guided loosely by the curatorial role, the ER White Society is autonomous and their decision-making is their own. This year’s purchase admirably reflects the strengths of that process. Gobels is a young self-taught artist whose fusion of colour and resin produce works that are striking in their richness and depth. Strongly engaged with environmental issues, it is not difficult to see in Gobel’s work the Australian landscape from an aerial vantage point. In Olivers Creek, the sinewy blue ribbons of the creek bed cut across the topography of the surrounding country, drawn out in vibrant reds, pinks and ochres of dry summer grass

and bushlands. - 94 -


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This is Gobel’s country, the area around Mornington Peninsula where he grew up as a boy and continues to live. The family’s property backs on to the Olivers Creek Bush Land Reserve, and in childhood he recalls countless hours spent ‘as a kid mucking around at the creek, building forts to protect my brothers and I from what I now realize were imaginary monsters that we had created. This is Olivers Creek in respect for the beautiful home we grew up in. Such is the palette of his colours in Olivers Creek, it is tempting to see in Gobel’s work a deeper understanding of the sense of place and respect for country reflected elsewhere in the College’s art collections, in the Indigenous works from north-east Arnhem Land, and no doubt this comparison will made once the work is unveiled. This year’s ER White purchase, like so many in years past, is a significant addition to the collection and one that I have no doubt will be much admired by the College’s community in the years ahead.

Olivers Creek has been the inspiration and source for the decorative themes within this year’s eddition of Bulpadok. - 95 -


Bulpadok

{

Mitch Gobel, Olivers Creek - 96 -


Native Title

Dismantling the Doctrine of Terra Nullius Jack Marozzi Arts II


Academic Essay

The doctrine of terra nullius has been long considered the legal justification for the denial of Aboriginal land rights. This paper begins by explaining the ambiguous doctrine of terra nullius. A doctrine is defined as ‘that which is taught’ (OED, 2014) highlighting that the doctrine of terra nullius is not just a legal one but also a political, philosophical and social doctrine. It then discusses the justifications for applying terra nullius in Australia via the savage construction of Indigenous people. It then explains the relationship between terra nullius and Native title before arguing that Native Title has been largely ineffective in dismantling the doctrine of symbolically and practically. Terra Nullius, ‘land belonging to no one’ is a concept of international law (Feinäugle, 2007). Originally, it denoted physically vacant land that could thus be claimed by effective occupation (Hepburn 11).1 Its application in Australia that was inhabited is incongruous with the original definition. Justifications for Applying Terra Nullius in Australia The notion of terra nullius expanded throughout the 18th century, which required a complex combination of racial, religious scientific and philosophical justifications. Terra Nullius extended to apply to some inhabited lands where the inhabitants ‘having advanced beyond the state of nature only so far as to have developed language and the community of the family, but no further’ (Frost, 177). James Cook (1002) employed this extended notion of terra nullius to take sovereignty over Australia. He states : ‘The native Australians are without doubt among the lowest of mankind. There are no chiefs, and the land is divided into sections, occupied by families… Cannibalism confirmed…their treachery [is] - 98 -


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an outcome of their savage ideas. In their untutored state… both sexes are absolutely nude, and lead a wandering life, with no fixed abode, subsisting on roots, fruits, and such living things as they can catch.’ As highlighted by Cook’s above journal entry, Aboriginal people were constructed as savages able only to inhabit land but not own it. Australia was considered ‘legally uninhabited’ (Secher 20). Representing indigenous people as deficient, savage, animalistic and without law and order painted them as incapable of ownership. ‘A people incapable of ownership cannot be party to a contractual transfer or negotiation; to take possession of the country was not theft, but acquisition of available goods.’ (Dodson 34 -35) Ritter (29) has identified this representation of Aboriginal people as the ‘discourse of terra nullius.’ The legal rationalisation behind Australia being terra nullius is a result of western conceptions of race and ownership informed initially by western philosophy and then by scientific thought of the 18th century. Western notions of ownership are highly influential in establishing the discourse of terra nullius. Philosopher John Locke (151) proposed that private property is the result of applying one’s labour to the land; his reasoning is grounded in divine commandments to ‘subdue the earth… [and] improve it for the benefit of life’ (Locke 113). Other philosophers such as Emer De Vattel also saw western agricultural practices was as a marker of civility and a precursor to ownership. Despite quite complex agricultural management practices including firestick farming (Gummage 2-4), the majority of western colonisers portrayed indigenous people as hunter-gathers (Pascoe 19) and thus incapable of owning land by European

standards. - 99 -


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White racial superiority was another factor contributing to the expansion terra nullius. Europeans were portrayed as the apex of the racial hierarchy whereas ‘savages serve as a zero in the thermometer of civilisation’ (Bucan & Hath 5). The above diary entry by Cook highlights that Aboriginals were represented as being ‘without a social order, law or system of ownership’ (Madison 34-35) despite complex kinship relations ‘being a source of law and the cornerstone of traditional Aboriginal social organisation’ (Sutton 11). Ultimately European society was portrayed as the benchmark of perfection and civilisation, whereas Indigenous people were painted by anthropologists as living examples of ‘early humankind’ (Attwood, 6) because they did not meet Eurocentric criteria. Their culture was not considered different, but backward and inferior. Western notions of society and civility are one of the influences that acted to expand terra nullius as indigenous people were conceived as the antithesis of ‘society’; those not in a society were considered incapable of owning according to the aforementioned Western philosophical conceptions of ownership. Scientific racism aimed to vindicate this civilisation discourse and is therefore another part of the complex justification for expanding notions of terra nullius. Pseudoscience such as ‘phrenology and craniometry’ were initially used to ’prove’ that Indigenous people were mentally degenerate due to inherent biological differences that manifested in different bone structure2 (Kailin, 30). Indigenous people were ‘categorised like animal species’ in terms of blood purity3 (Dodson 26). Full-bloods were deemed the most genetically inferior and doomed to definite extinction( Maddison 34). Biological determinism was driven by scholars such as biologist Baldwin Spencer who believed - 100 -


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Indigenous people ‘represented the most backward race extant and reveal us to the early ancestors of the human race’ (Anderson 191). Thus the language of science was applied to legitimate supposed racial inferiority that painted Indigenous people as subhuman and ‘close to the state of nature’ (Jonas; Synott 208). Scientific representations of Indigenous people were employed to prove an inability to own land. The Relationship Between Terra Nulius and Native Title Strictly speaking, the doctrine of terra nullius was irrelevant to the establishment of native title (Ritter 5). The international law concept of occupation ‘is broadly analogous’ (Ritter 7) to the common law concept of settlement. For a territory to be settled it must be considered ‘desert and uncultivated’ (Blackstone 2). Originally ‘desert’ referred to uninhabited land and ‘uncultivated’ to the absence of agricultre4 (Borch 226). Therefore terra nullius legitimised the acquisition of sovereignty in Australia under international law and the ‘desert and uncultivated’ doctrine ‘served the purpose of ascertaining the law which is to govern a territory on colonisation at common law’ (Secher 3). Acquisition of sovereignty does not inherently confer full ownership of the land to the sovereign (Secher 3). Thus both doctrines classify land as legally vacant (Secher 3) but property rights, which pertain to native title, are classified under common law and not international law. In an Australian context, the discourse of terra nullius has become pertinent to land rights in a broader social context. The term was not introduced to Australian jurisprudence until 1979 in the Coe v Commonwealth case and was popularised by Henry Reynolds in his book The Law of the Land (Ritter, 2007). The - 101 -


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aforementioned similarities between terra nullius and ‘desert and uncultivated’ have meant that ‘[Terra nullius] is often equated with its common law analogue; and has been subject to sloganisation and careless misinterpretation’ (Ritter 7). Justice Brennan of the Mabo case said that terra nullius has had ‘a legitimate and important influence on the development of the common law’ (Ritter 31) Explaining Native Title Native title is a communal grant right under common law for Aboriginal and Torres-Strait Islander people based on the traditional laws and customs of a particular tribe or clan (Wensing & Macmillan 225). ‘Rights may include: Conduct ceremonies or carry out cultural activities Exercise ownership off intellectual property Own and protect cultural heritage Prevent desecration of religious areas Transmit traditional law and custom from one generation to another’ (Wensing & Macmillian 226) Native title can be extinguished if land has been legally taken away by government, for example if the government conferred rights onto a third party through a title or a lease or if a public-service building is constructed on the land. Finally, a group may voluntarily cede native title to commercially exploit the land (Horrigan 19). The Effectiveness of Native Title in Dismantling Terra Nullius

native title has been largely ineffective in dismantling the doctrine of terra nullius. If terra nullius had truly been dismantled, the entire foundation of British sovereignty in Australia would have to be determined illegitimate and illegal (Ritter 30) and Indigenous - 102 -


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sovereignty would be recognised. For the purposes of this paper sovereignty will be defined broadly as the right to self-determination. Any discussion of the overturning of terra nullius needs to be grounded in a discussion of sovereignty. There has been minor symbolic and practical steps towards dismantling terra nullius. Symbolically, the Mabo Case overturned the ‘discourse of terra nullius’ (Ritter 31). The Court recognised that the aforementioned savage construction was racist and incorrect. It recognised that Indigenous people had legitimate social forms and laws and were the official landowners before 1788. Practically, as of 2013, approximately 82% of native title cases5 have been successful, indicating real prospects of gaining native title and having some control over traditionally owned lands. It is practically impossible for native title to dismantle the doctrine of terra nullius. The Native Title Act (1993) is statutory law, spawned from a judgement in the High Court common law. Statutory and common law in Australia derive their legitimacy from Anglo-Australian Sovereignty. Given that terra nullius was the legal basis for Australian sovereignty, neither municipal courts nor statutory legislation are able to question Australian sovereignty as it would undermine its own authority and subsequently make its own ruling obsolete (Ritter 31) It is thus paradoxical for anglo-Australian law to overturn terra nullius. Native title cannot overturn terra nullius as it only deals with land

rights. Indigenous sovereignty encompasses a much broader set of rights and practices. For example Indigenous customary law is not recognised under common law and native title prevents the creation of customary law parallel to anglo-Australian criminal - 103 -


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law (Korosy 85). Moreover, the current system of native title offers insufficient protection for cultural knowledge, which is often communal in nature6 and are grounded in intangible aspects of land such as knowledge and stories (Korosy 85). This highly limited notion of sovereignty fragments notions of Indigenous sovereignty by allowing some aspects of culture and law to continue and not others. This is dangerous as different elements of culture such as land rights, customary law and cultural knowledge are interdependent and inextricably linked (Sutton 4-5). Thus native title only deals with land ownership - a small segment of the multi-faceted concept of sovereignty. Native title rights, when granted and sustained, are not reflective of legitimate ownership over the land. Land that is successfully claimed under native title is still ultimately owned by the Crown under radical title (Hepburn 67). John Howard’s 10 point plan (1998) allowed governments to legislate for land grants and the construction of buildings giving a public service native title areas that would subsequently extinguish native title. Such extinguishments legitimises the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous people by implying that the foundations of Australian sovereignty were legitimate and thus the consequent land rights granted are superior to native title. As Chamrette stated ‘what had been stolen had been stolen fair and square’ (168). Furthermore Indigenous people are given the ‘Right To Negotiate’ without any veto rights over the land. Watson (285) argues that the odds are stacked against Indigenous people in native title claims as legal-aid is given to stakeholders with even a tenuous link to the land. These factors highlight the fragility of native title and its position at ‘the bottom of the hierarchy of Australian property rights’ (Watson 285). Watson (285) argues - 104 -


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that Indigenous claims to native title only occur when ‘interests converge’ between the top (the Crown) and bottom (Indigenous communities) of the property rights hierarchy. Fragility of native title is symbolic of the inferior status of indigenous sovereignty compared to non-indigenous sovereignty. Native title reinforces the dominance of Commonwealth sovereignty by normalising white knowledge as superior. The onus of proving a continuity of tradition law and culture is on Indigenous people. Cultural knowledge and traditional has to be translated into a consumable format for western common law in order for native title to be recognised.(Korosy 84-85); this reinforces the anglo-Australian court systems as the sovereign who has the legitimacy to determine what constitutes ‘traditional customs and laws’ and an ‘unbroken connection to country.’ The common law conceptualisation of ‘connection’ consists of a physical connection, which is inconsistent with some Indigenous conceptualisations of ‘connection.’ Indigenous connections to their country are inherent as they ‘carry the land through their bodies’ (Moreton-Robinson, 3). Thus a connection to country can never be broken. White epistemology is normalised and dominates, whereas Indigenous epistemologies are subordinated exemplifying the ‘possessive logic of white patriarchal sovereignty’. Furthermore native title claims are contingent on the ‘courts narrow understanding of how an Aboriginal Community should behave’ (Korosy 86). For example not allowing for economic exploitation of traditional lands ignores that the British imposed western economic systems on Indigenous people. It fixes Indigenous people as a ‘backward remnant of the prehistory of European man’ (Dodson 34); incompatible with modernity. It - 105 -


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does not allow legal conceptions of Indigenous identity to change and adapt to the western frameworks forced upon it. Ultimately indigenous custom and law is incorporated into the Anglo-Australian legal system thereby continuing the process of colonisation. It diminishes Aboriginal people’s power to define their aspirations (Watson, 296). Removing self-determination renders notions of Indigenous sovereignty subordinate to Commonwealth sovereignty. Ultimately terra nullius was justified through a savage construction of Indigenous people. Native title has done very little to practically extinguish terra nullius and recognise the sovereignty of Indigenous people. Symbolically it has overturned the ‘discourse of terra nullius. However, as Paul Coe remarked native title ‘threw away the name [terra nullius] but retained the substance’ (qtd. in Ritter 34). Native title has undermined Indigenous claims to sovereignty by reaffirming Crown dominance ultimately reinforcing the practical effects of terra nullius.

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Academic Essay Endnotes 1

Effective occupation is a method of acquiring sovereignty over a land that is considered Terra Nullius. It is important to distinguish this from annexation, which is the ‘forcible acquisition of territory by one state at the expense of another state’ (Hoffman). This distinction is pertinent as occupation implies no one owned the claimed land previously whereas annexation implies that there were inhabitants who owned the land.

2

For example, the ‘cetaphilic index’ which included ‘skull shape, brain size and the protusions of the jaw and brow’(Kailin 31) were seen as indicative of intelligence.

3

This included full-blood, half-caste, quadroon and octoon.

4

Agriculture was defined in terms of typical western agriculture.

5

Native title has been recognised in 181 cases and in 48 cases has been found not to

6

The Copyright Act 1968 only protects individual claims or commercial claims to

exists (Lee) intellectual property. Works Cited Anderson, Warwick. The Cultivation Of Whiteness. 1st ed. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Print. Attwood, Bain. ‘Introduction’. Journal Of Australian Studies Special Edn. Bain Atwood and John Arnold. 1st ed. Melbourne: LaTrobe University Press, 2014. i-xiv. Print. Blackstone, William. Commentaries On The Laws Of England. 1st ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Print. Borch, Merete. ‘Rethinking The Origins Of Terra Nullius’. Australian Historical Studies 32.117 (2001): 222--239. Print. Buchan, Bruce, and Mary Heath. ‘Savagery And Civilization: From Terra Nullius To The’tide Of History’’. Ethnicities 6.1 (2006): 5--26. Print. Chamarette, Christabel. ‘Terra Nullius Then And Now: Mabo, Native Title, And Reconciliation In 2000’. Australian Psychologist 35.2 (2000): 167--172. Print. Coe V Commonwealth. 1993. Print. Cook, James. ‘Captain Cook’S Journal’. Adelaide University. N.p., 2014. Web. 2 Oct. 2014. ‘Doctrine, N’. Oxford English Dictionary Online 2014. Web. 2 Oct. 2014. Dodson, Mick. ‘The End In The Beginning: Re(De)Fining Aboriginality.”’. Black lines: Contemporary Critical Writing By Indigenous Australians. Michele Grossman. 1st ed. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003. 25-42. Print. Feinäugle, Clemens. ‘Western Sahara Advisory Opinion’. Oxford Public Interna tional Law. N.p., 2007. Web. 2 Oct. 2014. Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate On Earth. 1st ed. Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2011. Print. Hepburn, Samantha. ‘Disinterested Truth: Legitimation Of The Doctrine Of - 107 -


Academic Essay Tenure Post-Mabo’. Melb. UL Rev. 29 (2005): 1. Print. Hoffman, Rainer. ‘Annexation’. Oxford Public International Law: Max Planck Ency clopedia of International Law. N.p., 2013. Web. 2 Oct. 2014. Horrigan, Bryan. ‘Australian Native Title Law, Policy and Practice - A Report Card’. Economic Papers: A journal of applied economics and policy 22.4 (2003): 16--27. Print. Jonas, William. ‘Native Title And The Treaty Dialogue’. Humanrights.gov.au. N.p., 2014. Web. 3 Oct. 2014. Kailin, Julie. Antiracist Education. 1st ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002. Print. Kerruish, Valerie, and Jeannine Purdy. ‘He Look Honest-Big White Thief ’. Law Text Culture 4 (1998): 146. Print. Korosy, Zsofia. ‘Native Title, Sovereignty And The Fragmented Recognition Of Indigenous Law And Custom’. Austl. Indigenous L. Rev. 12 (2008): 81. Print. Lee, Jane. ‘Mabo’s Native Title Victory Squandered, Says Judge’. The Sydney Morn ing Herald. N.p., 2014. Web. 5 Oct. 2014. Locke, John, and Peter Laslett. Two Treatises Of Government. 1st ed. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Print. Mabo V Queensland. Vol 2. 1992. Print. Maddison, Sarah. Beyond White Guilt. 1st ed. Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2011. Print. Maddison, Sarah. Black Politics. 1st ed. Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2009. Print. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen M. ‘The Possessive Logic Of Patriarchal White Sover eignty: The High Court And The Yorta Yorta Decision’. Borderlands e-journal 3.2 (2004): n. pag. Print. Pascoe, Bruce. ‘Agriculture’. Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Black Seeds: Agriculture Or Accident. Bruce Pascoe. 1st ed. Broome: Magabala Books Aboriginal Incorporated, 2014. 19- 52. Print. Reynolds, Henry. The Law Of The Land. 1st ed. Ringwood, Vic., Australia: Penguin Books, 1987. Print. Ritter, David. ‘Myths, Truths And Arguments: Some Recent Writings On Aborigi nal History’.Australian Journal of Politics & History 53.1 (2007): 138--148. Print. Ritter, David. ‘Rejection Of Terra Nullius In Mabo: A Critical Analysis, The’. Syd ney L. Rev. 18 (1996): 5. Print. Sutton, Peter. Native Title And The Descent Of Rights. 1st ed. Perth: National Native Title Tribunal, 1998. Print. Synott, John. ‘Discourse Resistance And Negotiation By Indigenous Austra lians’. Peace & Change 28.2 (2003): 202--220. Print. Wensing, Ed, and Lucy Macmillan. Working With Native Title. 1st ed. Deakin, A.C.T.: Australian Local Government Association, 1999. Print. Western Australia V Ward. 2002. Print. Western Sahara (Advisory Opinion). Vol 1. 1975. Print. - 108 -


{ Evie Sloan, Grotta Azzurra


{

Sara Dee Rusdiah, Self-Explanatory


Master of Arts (Theology)


This nocturne was composed by Paul Daniels in 2015. An audio rendition played on a Steinway Model D Concert Grand is available at https://goo.gl/ kptp45. The piece is encouraged to be played freely and with the impromptu judgement of the musician.


The Relentless Blue Nic Lawler Doctor of Medicine I


Creative Writing

It was one of those perfect mornings. The kind that makes you remember. And the kind that made me want to forget. I sat in the car watching the sun creep up. Listening to the sound of the waves softly rolling onto the shore. I loved this time of day. I loved the way the timid sun peeked over the horizon, gradually erupting into a kaleidoscope of colours washing over the water. I loved the way it reminded me that the simple pleasures in life are always the best. I loved the way the water moved like one undulating mass of liquid glass, in perfect synchrony, as if it were some sort of ethereal being. Timeless. I thought about mindfulness. That’s the thing that would make me better, they said. A solitary shag circled beyond the break. I watched mesmerized as it suddenly dove straight down into the rhythmic blue, and emerged with its prize. Its first catch of the day. The shag has no concept of time, of schedules. Of all the things that we use to complicate our lives. That’s the essence of mindfulness. Completely living in the now. Forgetting the past. Not even forgetting. For the shag the past simply doesn’t exist. With hands shaking I took the keys from the ignition and begin the arduous process of forcing myself out of the car. I’d promised my girlfriend that I wouldn’t surf at this time. And certainly not alone. Not after everything that happened. I tried to convince myself that Andy wouldn’t want this. He wouldn’t want me sitting in the car too scared shitless to move. He wouldn’t want me to fight this battle every time that I went out. He was always the fearless one. Always the one to push me to try a new reef break, or to go out on the bigger days, and I was always just along for the ride. I opened the door a crack and felt the frigid air rushing in. It was definitely August. - 114 -


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I used to love surfing in August. The cold water drove all the tourists away and we’d have the breaks to ourselves. Particularly if we went early. Tourists made my blood boil. The way they clogged up the point over summer. Sitting on their longboards, squeezing into musty moth-eaten wetsuits that hadn’t seen the sun all winter, and that were the right size a decade ago. Most of the time they didn’t even attempt to catch a wave. The simple effort of paddling out on a board and sitting at the take-off point was enough to be able to tell their friends later that evening that they’d been out ‘surfing’. No doubt they would regale them with fanciful stories of their surfing prowess over a few glasses of wine as they sat on their balconies. What I wouldn’t give for a few tourists to be sitting out there now. Safety in numbers. Funny how things change. I forced myself to get out of the car, switching into automatic mode. I found I was less likely to chicken out if I stuck to a routine. Focusing only on the next step instead of the ultimate goal of getting into the water. I put my key on the front seat and started the ungraceful dance of putting on my wetsuit. Mindfulness. I thought of my wetsuit, of the way it felt against my skin. It was a four-three Flashbomb steamer with that new pink lining. Even on the coldest days it felt like wearing a bath, as long as the seams were intact. This one’s seams were fresh. I’d been getting a new wetsuit every year ever since J started working at Rip Curl, and it was days like today that I really appreciated it. The grass was frosted underneath my feet. It hurt at first but I welcomed the sensation. They’d be numb soon anyway. I slowly pulled the cover off the tray of my ute, unpicking each of the ties carefully and deliberately. At one point in my life I’d - 115 -


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just about rip my nails off trying to get the cover off as quickly as possible so I could get out into the blue. Now the whole process was little more than a delaying tactic. The cover off, I pulled my board out of its quiver. Today I was riding my six-one fish. My favourite board. And I’d got it for a song. One thing the silver spooners are useful for is buying their teenage kids brand new boards for Christmas, only for them to realise after one session that surfing isn’t as easy as Kelly makes it look. Most of them don’t stick it out, and their board ends up becoming nothing more than the perfect adornment for a beach house that has all the trimmings, everything from Foxtel to polished timber flooring. Completely charmless of course, but who cares about that anymore? Eventually one of the punk kids would realise that they could make a few hundred bucks by on-selling their seldom-used board on Gumtree. I’d got this one for six hundred dollars, about half what it was worth. And basically new. My board didn’t need waxing but I did it anyway. Another delaying tactic. Mindfulness. I focused on the smell of the Mrs Palmers wax. Sickly sweet. It reminded me of better times. No, now was a good time, I made myself think. It reminded me of now. Really it reminded me of Andy, of the last time we surfed together. With my board tucked under my arm I slowly walked to the shoreline, the frosted sand crunching underneath my feet. I focused on the sand. I focused on Andy. My feet hit the frigid water. I tried to focus on the cold but it was no use. I focused more on Andy. It was the eyes that got me. Always the eyes. No - 116 -


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matter what I did I couldn’t forget the eyes. That’s the last thing I remember, the look of sheer terror, then complete emptiness. I choked back tears. Andy wouldn’t want this, they tell me. Maybe he would. Maybe he is sitting up there screaming at me to stay out of the blue. I’d had a lot of time for Andy. He was one of those mates that made you feel really pumped up to be alive. Always into everything. First into the water, and last to leave. Never taking life too seriously. But he was also the sort of bloke you could have a real chat to, about real things. So few of my mates are like that. Happy to roll on with the good times but as soon as there is a cloud on the horizon everyone freezes up and doesn’t know what to say. It’s not that they’re bad people or they don’t care, and its not that they aren’t good mates. I don’t know what it is. I guess people just don’t like talking about sad things. Not Andy though. The tears were streaming down my face now. There was not point trying to stop it. Better to let it come and just ride it out. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that Andy was gone, and I was still here. It wasn’t fair that I made it back to shore that day, with what was left of Andy in tow. The guilt washed over me. It wasn’t my fault, they said. There was nothing I could’ve done. But they weren’t there. They didn’t know what it was like. It’s one thing for me to tell myself that it wasn’t my fault, but to actually believe it is totally another. I’d never told anyone about Andy’s last moments. I never would. Not the real story anyway. People don’t want to know the real story. Not the people that matter. Of course the press wanted - 117 -


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to hear the gory detail of simply the latest in a string of shark attacks around the country. Nothing sells papers like fear. His family, on the other hand, wanted to hear that it was quick. That he never saw it coming. That he died doing the thing he loved, and shouldn’t we all be so lucky. So that’s what I gave them. I looked his fiancé in the eye and told her it was painless. That there was nothing I could’ve done. I lied. And I hated myself for it. The crash of a bigger set coming in brought me back to the moment. The now. That’s where they told me I needed to be. Not ruminating about things that I couldn’t change. Focus. It really was pumping out there. I plucked up all my courage and took another step towards my goal, struggling to overcome my fearful lethargy. Then I took another, until once again I became an automaton. I waded forward until the icy water was up to my waist, and then mounted my board. After a few short strokes the white water was bearing down, and it was time to duck dive. The first plunge is always the hardest. At this time of year the water is so cold that it feels as if your skull is cracking. I had tried wearing a hood once but I found it too restrictive. I missed the feeling of the air rushing through my hair. Andy used to wear a hood. Focus. I thrust my board under the white morass and my body followed. The shock was breathtaking, as was emerging from the water on the other side. Like being reborn. Totally cleansed. I had timed it well. I only had to duck one more wave and I was beyond the break. Just me and the ocean. And of course the shag continuing its slow loops above, reminding me that things can - 118 -


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get better. I wasn’t afraid anymore. The fear usually left me once I was this far out. I didn’t care enough to be afraid anymore. Part of me wished that the same Noah that had taken Andy from me would come back and finish the job. It would save me from doing it. I didn’t want to be this way. Little more than a fleshy bag of regrets, crying every time I tried to do the only thing I had ever loved. On the land, the real world, I felt like a zombie. My meager existence was totally devoid of colour, everything grey and lifeless. Sometimes it felt like I was watching my life from a distance. Watching myself going through the motions, and turning into a shell of the person I used to want to be. Mil was hanging around for the moment, but she wouldn’t much longer. We both knew that. Not that I could say that I blamed her, and not that I wanted her to stay anyway. The stark reality is that you can’t love someone when you hate yourself. I didn’t want to be this way, but there’s no escape from your own skin. Mindfulness. I forced myself back to the present. I focused on the water around me. The relentless blue, stretching off to horizon that was filled with so much promise, but out of reach. Enticing, but somehow sinister. It surrounds me, nurtures me. I am at its mercy. I love the ocean. It makes me remember how insignificant this all really is. That nothing that happens in this life really matters beyond the moment. Another set of four-foot peelers rolled through. I realised I had a bit of work to do to get to the take off. I paddled hard, letting the first two pass under me. The third wave was perfect. After a few more strokes the wave caught me. I felt the board shooting - 119 -


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forward. In a flash I was up. I still wasn’t used to the quad fin set up. So much faster at the drop than my old thruster. I surged forwards, cutting back to keep up my speed. Exhilarating. I couldn’t help it. I felt a smile cracking across my face. For the briefest moment I was at peace. Memories dissolved, replaced by a heightened awareness of the now. Is this what it was like to be a shag? I could feel the salty wind rushing through my hair. I could sense the movement of the water beneath my feet. Like a tamed beast. All too soon the ride was over, the blue water ahead of me closed out and I jumped over the top. I retrieved my board and started the slow paddle out the back. I had a broken heart and a broken mind, but there was at least one more wave in me before it was time to leave.

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The Glass Ceiling is Frustratingly Opaque Sorcha Buchan Arts II


Academic Essay

The perpetuation of general patterns of inequality for specific groups within society across time makes evident that social inequality in work and organisations is ultimately a consequence of structural problems. In the words of Donne, “no man is an island; entire of itself,” to posit that individual life narratives (achievement status) explains the unequal position of entire groups in society and assumes racial or biological deterministic views that these groups hold the same values and goals in life. An examination of gender inequality (that is for women versus men) in the workplace demonstrates that, although individual choice (henceforth ‘achievement status,’ or one’s position made from personal achievement) does play a role in the circumstance of women in work, structural impediments are the main reason for patterns of inequality, and structural problems are oft in themselves accountable for achievement status in complex, compounding ways. An examination of how individual achievement status factors, as explored through the pay gap, industrial and occupational gender-segregation, and differing career schedules and breaks are inextricably linked to the ascribed status of one’s gender, makes apparent that women are disadvantaged because of power inequalities between women and men that are built into the social structure. An examination of previous studies clearly identifies this environment of gender inequality towards women in the workforce. The gender pay gap is currently 17.5% and despite small fluctuations, this figure has remained “virtually unchanged in almost 20 years” (WGEA, 2014). In fact, the ABS (2012) identified that in 1994 the gap was smaller at 15.9%. Similarly, although female participation has risen in many previously male-dominated occupations and industries, it still remains a fact of working - 122 -


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life that there is serious disparity in the workforce, and the highest positions amongst many organisations have an over-representation of men and extreme under-representation of women. For example, in politics, as of January 2014, globally only 17% of government ministers were women, with the majority over-seeing areas deemed ‘feminine,’ the social sectors, such as education and the family (UN Women, March 2014). Furthermore only 21.8% of national parliamentarians were female as of the 1st July 2015, a slow increase from 11.3% in 1995 (UN Women, July 2014). There is also a serious gender based disproportion of what industries and occupations women are involved in. Employment is a key-determining factor of wage level and the concentration of women in certain fields contributes to the pay gap. This is because industries with an overrepresentation of women, such as social welfare or retail, are undervalued in terms of social resources and monetary benefit. For example, while 57% of workers in retail, the lowest paying industry, are women, only 14.5% in the highest paying industry, mining, are women(ABS, 2012). This is despite the fact that in a post-industrial world the competencies for such roles are not gender related, but have merely been socially gendered. Women also more commonly interact with work differently throughout life, taking time off for maternal care and taking part-time work instead of full time employment. Baker (2011) found that not only does taking career breaks or working part time reduce income at the time, but this also has long-lasting effects on a women’s earning prospects. After a year of return wages generally fall around 5% but after three years this can double to over 10%.

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The self isn’t a private experience but very much a public one - and has its origins in social experience. Expectation and impressions others have towards one’s ascribed status often produce the realities that correspond to these societal biases as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fine’s (2010) chapter ‘We think, therefore you are’ explores this through social psychological research. She presents empirical studies that reveal that the ubiquitous nature of discrimination against women can significantly prime an individual’s capabilities. Researchers asked American university students to rate their mathematical and verbal abilities, but beforehand some students had to note down gender whilst others noted their ethnicity. This simple process of box ticking affected the results, European American women felt more confident with their verbal skills (related to a belief in ‘feminine’ emotional and communication skills) when gender was salient and rated mathematical/logical ability (belief in the domain of ‘masculine’ logic and reason) they scored themselves much lower. Even imperceptible stimuli can socially prime what individuals feel their competencies or interests should be, and this is thus socially based and structurally reinforced. An observation of the seemingly individual choices (achievement status) mentioned previously reveals how these choices are actually a reflection of structural, rather than wholly personal, processes on women. Firstly, in relation to the gender pay gap a study by NATSEM estimates that 60% of the pay gap is due to either gender discrimination or any other factor related to being female. Similarly, Watson (2010) found 70-80% of this gap could not be explained by factors unrelated to being female. This research suggests that employment structures still support, either actively or subconsciously, a monetary disadvantage for - 124 -


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women. This may in turn not only make it inherently harder for women to achieve, but also lessen motivation, personal value, and goal-orientation within the self-fulfilling structural prophecy. Similarly the pay gap can be explained through the devaluation of female-dominated fields, with gender-based work segregation and homo-social bonding as the main source of promotion. Through homo-social bonding practice men favour workers that are similar to them and can be involved in male-bonding systems. These factors are themselves also tied to gender discrimination - women are found in industries and occupations traditionally associated with ‘feminine’ qualities (caring, maternal, communicative). These structural discriminations also relate to inherent ideas many Western capitalist societies hold about family structure; the industrialist concept that men are the breadwinners for the family and women should pursue maternal and familial responsibilities, or at least similar characteristics. Shelley (2007) found for example, that not only in studies where identical resumes are presented will women be rejected or asked to provide further information more than men, but mothers were also rated significantly less promotable or recommendable for higher positions than non-parent men and women alike. While participants recommended 84% of female non-mothers for hire, they recommended a lower 47% of mothers. Whilst mothers are penalised on a host of measures including competence and recommended salary rate, men are not, or often benefit from having children (fathers actually rate more in commitment ratings than non-fathers by about 5%, whilst women becoming mothers decrease by 6.4%). Men gain an advantage from being a father because it relates to these traditional industrial values of man as supporting his family, the stable ‘ideal worker’ package. - 125 -


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In addition to these concepts of the ‘glass ceiling’ and the ‘mothers penalty,’ if an employer feels a female worker may get pregnant and take maternal leave they may be less likely to employ them. Despite the fact it is illegal to discriminate on such features as being female, a mother, or a woman who has children; legislatively it is very hard to prove and enforce such discrimination. Given the statistics provided earlier in relation to female gender under-representation within politics, and the under-representation of women in higher places of power, women also have less representation in legislative and organisational action towards gender inequality issues. The dominant group in these areas where change is possible remains predominantly male. This research supports the existence of a ‘glass ceiling’ for women, a concept Maume (1999) explored when examining the effect of gender composition on movement to a managerial position (promotion). Results found that for men, the percentage of women in the workplace increased their chances of moving up the corporate ladder, whereas higher proportions of women significantly decreased a woman’s chances of attaining higher managerial positions. Each 10% increase in the percentage of females in an occupation slows the rate of entry into management by 6%. Additionally, once placed in female typed-jobs women are less likely to receive the training, social resources and job-assignments that enhance career mobility (Baron and Newman 1990). Thus women being over-represented in certain areas of work, along with the ‘glass ceiling,’ and ‘mother’s penalty’ structurally contributes to the self-perpetuating cycle of gender inequality in the workplace. This also perpetuates gender myths that these circumstances are achievement status related, biologically reductive norms that women have - 126 -


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chosen this, and have pre-disposed competencies in only certain fields of work. In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf advances the thesis that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Although speaking specifically of female writers, in general terms this thesis argues that the presence of tradition (those who have gone before) is important in aspiring. It also posits that in order for women to take up positions historically excluded to them, a woman will need both money to alleviate the financial discrepancy that limited women and perpetuated gender myths of women as less capable and a “room of one’s own” (a metaphor for basic necessities women do not have access to unlike men: personal and financial independence, the right to safety, private space etc.)(Humm, 2010). In Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Marx argued that the measure of the development of a society is women’s position within it. This can be theoretically elaborated on, as it infers that, for society to progress, new structural and social relations would have to be created in which individuals are measured on personal value rather than ascribed features such as gender (Brown, 2013). There is a large body of research that highlights how encouraging women into paid work, going for personal instead of subscribed roles, as well as closing the gender pay gap would contribute dramatically to economies. This makes logical sense in that the talent pool would expand dramatically within the work force. Given the multitude of complex ways in which gender plays a role in one’s achievement status, much study has been undertaken to find ways in which inequalities can be reduced. The difference in pay between men and women is significantly less for employees whose pay - 127 -


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was set by accolade only ($748.40 for men and $760.90 for women). This suggests that one way to reduce gender inequality is through merit-based wages, as there is a more equal distribution of pay between women and men when pay is set by industrial authorities rather than when it is set by agreements made collectively between employees and their employer, or by an individual agreement with the employer (pay gap 20.2%) (WGEA, 2014). This also reduces the ability of an employer’s homo-social biases whether sub-conscious or intended. Alongside gendered biases, sexual harassment and violence issues within workplaces and organisations should be prevented and denaturalised (for example, casual sexism), as this culturally conditions others and subordinates women’s capabilities. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Gender Equality Blueprint (2010) identified women in leadership as a key priority area in achieving gender equality (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2010). This is essential in that not only does it give the female gender more representation in higher-order authority, but creates role models for other women, thus facilitating psychological and social aspiration according to Woolf (Humm, 2010). In the Australian context, the Grattan Institute has argued that removing disincentives for women to enter the workforce should be an economic reform priority. It has found that increasing female workforce participation by 6 per-cent has the potential to add $25 billion each year to the Australian economy (WGEA, 2014 and ABS, 2014). In conclusion, it can be seen that the gender pay gap, gender-segregation, and different temporal work structures reveals how structural problems to do with the ascribed status of being a woman (in contrast to achieved status) perpetuate the historical reproduction of inequality between the genders. Examining the ascribed status - 128 -


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of gender sociologically through empirical studies reveals the social and cultural dimensions of a gendered set of norms often defined as biologically determined and dichotomous. Gender is not biologically fixed, nor does it have a relation to modern day workplace competencies, but rather is culturally situated, learned, and malleable as a concept. The cultural and wholly socialised origins of the ascribed status of being female creates many challenges for the pursuit of gender equality in workplaces, and reflects Marx’s theory that inherent power structures perpetuate inequalities in society. Ways in which structural impediments can be alleviated include encouraging women into more fields of work and making the workplace goal and merit-oriented rather than based on homo-social bonding. Lastly, alleviating the undervaluation of women’s skills will involve recognising the patriarchal and out-dated industrialist perception of gender roles and capabilities within the workforce as inherently flawed.

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Academic Essay Works Cited Australian Bureau of Statistic (ABS) 2012, Australian Government, viewed 27 October 2014 <www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@nsf/DetailsPage/6302.OMay%202012?OpenDocument> Australian Human Rights Commission 2010, Gender Equality Blueprint, viewed 4 November 2014, <www.humanrights.gov.au/Publications/gender-equality-blueprint-2010> Baker, D 2011, ‘The wage-penalty effect. The hidden cost of maternity leave’, The Australian Institute, pp.13. Baron, N, Davis, Blake, A 1990, ‘For what its worth: Organisations, occupations and the value of work done by women and non-whites’, American Sociological Reviews, vol.55, pp.155-175. Cassells R, Vidyattama, Y, Miranti, R & McNamara, J 2009, ‘The Impact of a sustained gender wage gap on the Australian economy, Department of Social Services. Fine, C 2010, Delusions of Gender, Icon books, London. Humm, M 2010, The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Inter-Parliamentary Union March 2014, Progress for women in politics, but glass ceiling remains firm, viewed 1st November 2014, <www.unwomen.org/ en/what-we-do/leadership-and-political-particupation/facts-and-figures#notes> Maume, DJ 1999, ‘Glass Ceilings and Glass Escalators: Occupational Segrega tion and Race and Sex Differences in Managerial Promotions’, Sage Publications, vol.26, pp.483. Shelly, C, Stephen, B & Paik, I 2007, ‘Getting a Job: Is there are Motherhood Penalty?’, American Journal of Sociology, vol.112, No.5, pp.1297-1339. Brown, H 2013, Marx on Gender and the Family, Haymarket Books, Massachu setts. Watson, I 2010, ‘Decomposing the Gender Pay Gap in the Australian Man agerial Labour Market’, Australian Journal of Labour Economics, vol.13, no.1, pp.49-79. Workplace Gender Equality Agency 2014, Australian Government, viewed 28 October 2014, <www.wgea.gov.au>. `

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181 silver balloons kiss the sky walk briskly, bow your head, the whistle of whispers is following you a white box led the surge a jag in the road marks the spot, where whispers fade, and wind dies grey ash graces the mantle there will be no stone, plant a wooden cross by a yellow sign Elly


red dirt scatters the ground was it you, or fate, that deprived her of a half inch? black nights hide fast cars young men feel old, and tired glance up, look down, try not to cry blue lights disturb the dark the cafe was closed but the waitress heard the scream of late sirens silver balloons litter the ground Anonymous


Evensong Kate Kirby Arts I


Creative Writing

Beneath spires and idle donations of stone and iron soars a melody, continuing the custom from which a culture was born. Cold air drifts leisurely along the smooth stone tiles, winding up the soft carpentry to sulk in a copper dish. Mixing with hot wax, it steams, as torrents fall away from the rich beeswax candle. A flame struggling in frozen air, it flutters, lighting the map and keeping mistakes at bay. The golden glow pulls tight across the young faces, barely more than children, daring to succeed. Caged in the comfort of wooden stalls, the preservation of tradition has started. Despite the bitter taste of frost in the air, with gentle breath and watchful eye, the service there begins. Wrapped in soft cotton of virgin white and royal scarlet, these custodians of a melodic institution are scrutinised by those for whom it was made. People, pulled through time to evensong. Here rises a timeless ritual, not from inky dots on old paper, but from hearts beating deep beneath shivering cassocks. It bursts from its anxious chains, wrestling with the passionate heat of expectation. Through light clouds of breath comes the song of a history; stolen, returned, condemned and worshipped, whilst listeners prowl in the dark. With seraphic grace canticles dance into the air, human birdsong, barely bruised by the kissing of teeth, with lips forming words. Spreading its hammering wings the song lulls high against dutifully dilapidated masonry, matching all that has gone before. Byrd, Bairstow, Brahms and Bruckner seeping through cracks in the walls. In sincerest flattery, - 134 -


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incense follows this upward trajectory, its scent as piercing as the music is sweet. Not a perfect reflection. Instead failing, fainting, falling, to rest upon windows, themselves colourless in shadow. The perfume of conifers and blossom drips from cold bricks in invisible pools, resting to mingle with candlelight. Song’s nymph-like fingers clutch at the arching ceiling, the music pulls its way through to the dark on the other side. Flying beyond the ears of singer and listener, not to spurn its creator, not an offering to a god, or saints or sinners. Truly this is a gift to song itself. Swimming through the wintry void and chasing icicle stars. Trapped in a curtain of night.

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Nick Senior, Oh The Places You’ll Go


Stravinsky before World War I The Influence of French composers in the 20th Century Shae Stabryla Music IV (Honours)


Academic Essay

Stravinsky was a Russian composer who was influenced musically by many diverse composers, poets and artists over the years. During Stravinsky’s life he composed many famous works including ballets, concertos and operas. His compositions can be divided into three distinct periods: the Russian period, the neo-classical period and the serialism period. Throughout the Russian period, prior to World War I, French composers heavily affected the way Stravinsky composed his music. The main composers of this period that had the greatest significance for him were Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Maurice Ravel and Paul Dukas. They all inspired Stravinsky in many different ways and had an impact on his success as a young composer of the time. The main influences upon Stravinsky that I will discuss are the use of repetition, contrast and functionality, along with the use of sonorities and simplification of musical ideas. I will also consider the effect of Stravinsky’s greatest inspiration, Debussy, and how together they shaped each other’s compositional foundation. Stravinsky’s relationship with French composers began after his introduction to Debussy on the opening night of his first Ballets Russes production – The Firebird. After this encounter they began to collaborate on ideas, as they shared many of the same beliefs. They both favoured the notion of substituting the idea of tonality – major/minor, for sonority, disregarding all that they had learnt about traditional harmony from their teachers Ernest Guiraud, Emile Durand and Rimsky-Korsakov. Debussy believed that this arrangement of harmony had a ‘severe disadvantage of standardizing composition to such a degree that every composer, except for a few, harmonizes in the same way.’ He believed this due to the fact that at the turn of the twenty-century, music became prudently harmonized with the characters and - 138 -


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staging of the Ballets Russes. Now composers such as Stravinsky and Debussy were required to construct a new, more progressively strict musical direction, in order to fit with the characters’ personalities and observation of time. Through working with the ballet they discovered that not only the melody, but also other elements such as sonorities were capable of forming new ideas. These ideas could then translate into the feelings and actions of characters with more accuracy than the melody alone could carry. Debussy and Stravinsky preferred to work with sonorities for two reasons. Firstly, a sonority is not restricted to being a certain pitch or chord but can be a collaboration of pitches, intervals, an uncatalogued harmony, or a mass of sound. Any of these can form a motif; even an entire section of the music may play this role. Secondly, a sonority is a random set of notes – it does not establish how it will be used, what sonority may follow or be merged. Accordingly, the sonority is unbiased raw melody and the composer may create this wherever they wish. A sonority such as this is evident in Stravinsky’s Petrushka where Stravinsky uses a series of chords as motifs alternating between C and F sharp, depicting the individuality of Petrushka’s character [see example one].

Example One: Petrushka – second tableaux, rehearsal mark 49, three bars rehearsal mark 50, two bars

This can also be seen in Debussy’s Khamma where he has vac- 139 -


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illating perfect triads between C and F sharp, recalling Stravinsky’s Petrushka exactly, illustrating the link between the two [see example two].

Example two, Debussy’s Khamma bars 26 - 29.

Both composers also manipulated certain timbres as the foundation of their musical concepts. In Stravinsky’s Dance of the Firebird he blended similar sounds of different instrumentation together to create the melodic lines of the Dance of the Firebird, the second movement [see example three].

Example three, Stravinsky’s The Firebird ‘Dance of the Firebird’, bars 1 – 4.

The specific timbre of this movement is as impressive as any of the folk melodies used within his ballets. Debussy also uses timbre to create different colours of ideas for various motifs through register changes. He does this with the help of tremolos and trills in Jeux [see example four].

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Example four, Debussy, Jeux, rehearsal mark 8, bars 1 – 3.

Another technique Stravinsky employed throughout his compositions was the use of dissonance based on diatonic and octatonic scales. Stravinsky favoured this because ‘dissonance neither prepares nor anticipates anything…no more…than consonance is a guarantee of security.’ One can see this in Stravinsky’s ‘Dance of the Adolescents’ in The Rite of Spring, where in the first 8 measures the lower strings hold an F-flat major triad with an E-flat dominant seventh chord in first inversion in the upper strings; creating the dissonance of the A-flat harmonic minor scale [see example five].

Example five, Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, ‘Dance of the Adolescents’, bars 1 – 7.

This plays on dissonances performed at the Universal Exhibi- 141 -


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tions of 1889-1900, where Debussy, along with other composers, began trialling unconventional scale modes such as whole tone, octatonic and pentatonic. This was another example of French composers’ effect on the young Stravinsky, leading him away from the conventional forms of harmony in the nineteenth century to the more modern ways of the twentieth. Working in the Ballets Russes, Stravinsky and Debussy soon developed the use of repetition, contrast and functionality of each section. What may be the key motif in one section will be hidden in the accompaniment of another. For example basses and bassoons in measure 72 - 74 of The Rite became the main motif of the clarinets, basses and bassoons in 75 – 77 [see example six (a) and (b)].

Example six (a), Stravinsky’s, The Rite of Spring, rehearsal mark 72, bars 1 – 6.

Example six (b), Stravinsky’s, The Rite of Spring, rehearsal mark 77, bars 1 – 5.

This also happens in the opening of the ‘Ritual of the Two Rival Tribes’ of The Rite of Spring, where the horn tune in the intro- 142 -


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duction is overpowered by the trombones and trumpets and the scales in the wind instruments such that, in most recordings and performances the listener does not hear it. Debussy and Stravinsky’s primary means of expressing transformation across a section is through the use of contrast. This happens when the repeated figure is given to a new set of instruments or transposed, concealing the advancing resemblances to make way for the new and rapid variation of texture. It has been noted that the ‘contrast of sound and rhythmic grouping characterize much of Debussy’s and Stravinsky’s ballet music of the period.’ Even though Debussy heavily influenced Stravinsky, it is clear that Stravinsky himself also changed ‘[Debussy’s] ideas of what music should express’ from 1889 to 1910 until they collaborated together on the Ballets Russes. What is also distinct about the contrast that Stravinsky and Debussy use within their ballets is the abrupt change between sections. This was done to create unprepared transitions that are written to delay understanding of where the music might lead. Therefore this is the main means of conveying change within the composition for Stravinsky and Debussy. One of the most distinct influences that Stravinsky acquired from Debussy was the simplification of musical ideas in order to control practice. This is quite evident in The Rite Of Spring as stated by Robert Craft, Stravinsky’s friend and colleague, ‘The compositional process exposed in these sketches is often akin to Debussy’s in the development of harmonic and intervallic cells from small units to unity, but is also and for the most part quite unlike anyone else’s.’

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These tiny motifs influenced by Debussy constitute the foundations of The Rite of Spring, whether they have been derived from folk tunes or invented by Stravinsky. The motifs of the adolescent girl’s (rehearsal mark ninety-two) and rival villages’ (rehearsal mark fifty - seven) lasts two measures long and the motifs of the ancestors (rehearsal mark 149) and virgin (rehearsal mark 129) lasts only one measure [see example eight (a), (b), (c) and (d)].

Example eight (a), Stravinsky’s, The Rite of Spring, rehearsal mark 92, bar 1 – 2.

Example eight (b), Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, rehearsal mark 57, bar 1 – 2.

Example eight (c), Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, rehearsal mark 149, bar 1.

Example eight (d), Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, rehearsal mark 129, bar 1.

These small patterns are then expanded and developed through the use of repetition and wide-ranging rhythmic accents. Together Debussy and Stravinsky reconstitute the use of notions with more equivocal and even capricious functions. This - 144 -


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alteration of the function was achieved through the changing of harmonics to enharmonic equalities. In The Rite of Spring, this enharmonic ambiguity is achieved in the ‘Augurs of Spring’, where the main chord is overlaid F flat and E flat major with sevenths added. Through the enharmonic changes of this chord it could be considered an inversion of an E flat thirteenth chord. This reveals another way Stravinsky can be analysed, through the dissonance function or the enharmonic function. Another area in which Stravinsky and Debussy manipulate ideas is the tonal structure ‘between major and minor thirds or triads.’ These motives occur in the introduction of The Firebird and in Debussy’s Khamma [see example nine (a) and (b)].

Example nine (a), Stravinsky, The Firebird, first tableaux, bars 1 – 2.

Example nine (b), Debussy, Khamma – bars 1 – 2. Piano reduction.

By manipulating these tonal structures within their works, Stravinsky and Debussy are typically creating harmonics that are functionless, leading to tonal obscurity, and thus creating a complete shift away from classic romantic forms of harmonisation.

Even though Stravinsky was influenced most by Debussy, he also took inspiration from other French composers such - 145 -


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as Erik Satie, Maurice Ravel and Paul Dukas. Satie was a good friend of Debussy from 1891 up until his death, and he also built his music on short lyrical and ostinato motifs that resemble that of other composers of the time. Satie’s Gnossienne (1890) demonstrates the way in which he builds three short musical ideas, two of which are melodic and one that is accompanied. In a statement made to Debussy, Satie specified his new ideas for composing: ‘There is no need for the orchestra to grimace when a character comes on stage…what we have to do is to create a musical scenery… a musical atmosphere in which the characters move and talk’. It is clear from this statement that Satie explained the method he used to invent these new compositional techniques, breaking from the emotion and beauty, believing it could function in much more of a embellished persistence, complementing objects and characters unfamiliar to itself. As Debussy was a great friend of Satie, it is likely that they shared and explored musical ideas together. Even though Stravinsky may never have worked with Satie himself, he was indirectly influenced by his compositional styles through his collaboration with Debussy. Diaghilev also introduced Ravel to Stravinsky on the opening night of The Firebird, where the two became friends. They soon travelled to Switzerland where they showed each other what they were working on. Stravinsky showed Ravel works that he had previously written, including the Three Japanese Lyrics, which then inspired Ravel’s choice of instrumentation for his piece Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé. Even though Stravinsky - 146 -


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and Ravel were friends who collaborated together, they did quarrel in their positions when it came to collective practice. Ravel believed that a major/minor chord could exist only if the minor third was placed above the major third, whereas Stravinsky stated: ‘If this arrangement is possible, I don’t see why the contrary shouldn’t be possible too: and if I will it, I can do it.’ Even though Ravel and Stravinsky shared some common ground when it came to composing, they soon began to ideologically drift apart as Stravinsky slowly moved towards neo-classicism. Another long term friend and composer of Stravinsky was Paul Dukas, who inspired him with some of the main chord structures of The Firebird. Dukas became friends with Stravinsky after his father’s death, when Stravinsky became independent and forged new relationships with composers of the period. The theme that inspired Stravinsky is that of the opening of L’apprenti sorcier; where the main theme of major and minor thirds ornament notes of the diminished seventh chord create atonal harmonies. In The Firebird Stravinsky uses Dukas’ major and minor thirds in a slightly different way. His main emphasis is on complementing tritone relationships that are transposed over the ostinato. Even though there is not much information on the collaboration with Stravinsky, there was indeed a strong influence of Debussy on Dukas, who then indirectly inspired Stravinsky’s compositional styles [see example ten].

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Example ten, Dukas, L’apprenti sorcier, bars 1 – 2.

Ultimately, Stravinsky had many influences as a young composer, which shaped the way in which he wrote and viewed music prior to World War I. The characteristics of this music were formed through the development of repetition, contrast, functionality, sonorities and the simplification of musical ideas. Although Stravinsky himself was not the only composer of this period to use these ideas, Satie, Debussy, Dukas and Ravel also experimented with these ideas; Stravinsky was the principle proponent for the new style and the only one who seemed to utilise all of its aspects in his compositions. One critic went as far to say ‘this composer’s fantasy is boundless… the limits of his imagination are not visible.’ Thus, even though Stravinsky borrowed ideas from folk songs or other composers, he did it in a way that enhanced and embellished the musical ideas that were already forming within his mind and emerging in his compositions.

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Academic Essay Endnotes 1 Jeremy Noble, ‘Debussy and Stravinsky’. Musical Times 108 (1967): 22. 2 Jann Pasler, Debussy, Stravinsky, and the Ballets Russes: the emergence of a new musical logic. (Michigan: UMI Dissertation Services, 1997), 242. 3 Claude A Debussy. Monsieur Croche, the dilettante hater. (The University of California: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1962) 60. Pasler, ‘Debussy, Stravinsky’,295. Pasler, ‘Debussy, Stravinsky’,243. 6 Pasler, ‘Debussy, Stravinsky’, 244. 7 James Pater Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca, In A History of Western Music, 8th edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, c2010), 834. 8 Igor Stravinsky Poetics of music in the form of six lessons. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 44. 9 François Lesure and Roy Howat. “Debussy, Claude.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed June 1, 2013). 10 Pasler, ‘Debussy, Stravinsky’,367. 11 Pasler, ‘Debussy, Stravinsky’,367. 12 Pasler, ‘Debussy, Stravinsky’,370. 13 Robert Craft, ‘The Rite of Spring: Genesis of a Masterpiece.’ Perspectives of New Music 5, 1 (1966): XV. 14 Andre Schaeffner, ‘Stravinsky’ Volume 10 of Maîtres de la musique ancienne et modern, (1938), 41- 43. 15 Andre Schaeffner, ‘Stravinsky’, 44 - 44. 16 Pasler, ‘Debussy, Stravinsky’, 273. 17 Kelly L. Barbara, ‘Ravel, Maurice.’ Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 1 June 2013) 18 Barbara, ‘Ravel, Maurice’. 19 Barbara, ‘Ravel, Maurice’. 20 Manuela Schwartz and G.W. Hopkins. ‘Dukas, Paul.’ Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed June 6, 2013). 21 Manuela Schwartz and G.W. Hopkins. ‘Dukas, Paul’. 22 Pieter Van Den Toorn, The music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven: Yale Uni versity Press, c1983), 11. 23 Malcolm Hamrick Brown, ‘Stravinsky and Prokofiev: Sizing up the Competi tion’. Confronting Stravinsky. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 40. 4 5

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Academic Essay Works Cited Andre Schaeffner, ‘Stravinsky’ Volume 10 of Maîtres de la musique ancienne et modern, (1938), 41- 43. Barbara L. Kelly. “Ravel, Maurice.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed June 1, 2013, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com Brown, M.H. ‘Stravinsky and Prokofiev: Sizing up the Competition’. Confront ing Stravinsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 39–50. Burkholder, J. Peter, Grout, Donald Jay, Palisca, Claude V. In A History of Western Music, ed. Maribeth Payne, 8th ed, 136. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Craft, Robert. ‘The Rite of Spring: Genesis of a Masterpiece.’ Perspectives of New Music 5, 1 (1966): 20-36. Debussy, Claude A. Monsieur Croche, the dilettante hater. The University of California: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1962. François Lesure and Roy Howat. “Debussy, Claude.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed June 1, 2013, http:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com Manuela Schwartz and G.W. Hopkins. ‘Dukas, Paul.’ Grove Music Online. Ox ford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed June 6, 2013, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com Noble, Jeremy. ‘Debussy and Stravinsky’. Musical Times 108 (1967): 22–24. Pasler, Jann. Debussy, Stravinsky, and the Ballets Russes: the emergence of a new musical logic. Michigan: UMI Dissertation Services, 1997. Schaeffner, Andre. ‘Stravinsky’ Volume 10 of Maîtres de la musique ancienne et modern, 1938. Stravinsky, Igor, Poetics of music in the form of six lessons. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. Van Den Toorn, Pieter. The music of Igor Stravinsky. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1983. Scores Debussy, Claude. Jeux. Paris: Durand & Cie., 1913. Debussy, Claude. Khamma. Paris: Durand & Cie., 1912. Dukas, Paul. L’apprenti sorcier. Paris: Durand & Fils, 1897. Stravinsky, Igor. Petrushka. Berlin: Editions Russes de Musique, n.d.(1912). Stravinsky, Igor. The Firebird. Moscow: Muzyka, 1964. Stravinsky, Igor. The Rite of Spring. Moscow: Muzyka, 1965.

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Ella Faragher, Droplets


The Divine Image Christopher McElhinney Graduate Diploma of Theology

The Divine Image is one of the poems in the Songs of Innocence (1789) and later Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) of William Blake (1757-1827). The title of the poem refers to Genesis 1:26: ‘Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…”’ (NRSV). There continues to be much debate on the matter of Blake’s theology, but whatever is made of it, in this poem, (bearing in mind he writes in the language of his time), it is clear that whatever the faith or none of human beings, we are all children of God. God transcending such distinctions as Christian or otherwise and that all that human beings are capable of love, mercy, pity and peace toward each other, is in and from God, and therefore, as Blake has it here: ‘… all must love the human form…there God is dwelling too.’ For today, perhaps it is as Desmond Tutu has it: ‘In God’s family there are no outsiders. All are insiders. Black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, Jew and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Serb and Albanian, Hutu and Tutsi, Muslim and Christian, Buddhist and Hindu, Pakistani and Indian − all belong. …God says, All, all are My children. It is shocking. It is radical.’


Many composers have set Blake’s poetry and other texts, not least Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), who set ten of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, including The Divine Image. His setting of The Divine Image is for solo voice unaccompanied, and is a beautifully ponderous presentation of the text. This accompanied setting is the third in a musical triptych consisting of two other poems from the Songs of Innocence: The Shepherd and The Lamb, both consisting of a surface simplicity yet deeper theological statements. The voice is the dominant instrument in the pieces, and is intended to be lyric tenor or soprano. In this piece, it presents the text/theological statements with the accompaniment complementing and emphasing the text, and setting the mood in preparation for each statement, providing the subtlety, emphasis and at times grandeur as required. Through brief interludes, the accompaniment provides the voice, and the listener, time to consider the previously proclaimed text before leading into the next. The accompaniment introduces a motif

that

is heard throughout the piece by the voice as well as in the accompaniment. The accompaniment contains sonorities of high and clear belllike statements as well as purring, organ-like solemnity, through the use of low indeterminate triads or dyads

(root, fifth, octave, with

omitted third). Consecutive fifths provide a faintly medieval sonority at times as well as clarity and rawness, interspersed with more conventional and romantic chord structures, and simple, flowing melodic waves. Long sustained chords allow the more profound statements in the text to be focused by the voice, and pondered by the listener.






The Ticket Inspector Olivia Whitaker Alumna (TC 2014)


Creative Writing

The stale smell of old cigarettes wafts over me as I stand wedged between two ancient Italian men on the 96 bus. We’re shooting through the streets of Milan at what feels like a million miles an hour. The two men are chatting away in effortless Italian as I concentrate on not falling over every time the bus shudders to a halt. As I cling to the handrail for dear life I find myself engrossed in the vibrant streets of Milan. I’m drawn to a bunch of kids playing in the streets whilst their parents and grandparents watch over them from a nearby café. For the first time in ages I feel a twinge of homesickness. I’ve been travelling for over four months now and despite occasionally missing my parents I’ve generally been having way too much fun to care. The bus takes off again and I’m thrown forward, this time almost incapacitating a local woman with weird drawn-on eyebrows. I hear an eruption of laughter. Mitch and Dom have seen my faux pas and are now in fits. I had met the boys three weeks ago at a hostel in Hamburg and we’d hit it off straight away. They were typical boys-boys, fresh from high school in Scotland and ready to see what Europe had for them as they ‘inter-railed’ around, living on beer and fast food. I enjoyed travelling with them both. Although I had to put up with a lot of banter (and I mean a lot), deep down I knew they were decent guys who would look after me. The other night we had missed our midnight train from Messina (of course they had blamed me), which resulted in an impromptu sleepover at a grotty train station in Southern Italy. The boys had graciously allowed me to sleep in the middle of them so, despite spending the night feeling cold, awkward and slightly scared, I couldn’t shake off the fuzzy feeling that burned through me the entire night… The feeling of being loved. At this current moment, however, I’m not feeling too warm and fuzzy. I apologise to the eyebrow lady in broken Italian (“Scusa, scusa!”) - 160 -


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whilst determinedly ignoring their laughter. I’m not always this standoffish. It has been a rough twenty-four hours. In order to avoid paying those steep hostel fees the boys and I have been catching night trains and sleeping on them instead. Of course we couldn’t afford actual beds on the trains so we are always shunted down to the last carriage where we have to share a compartment with a range of “interesting” characters. I’m talking eye patches, super long beards, questionable scars, the works. After a night of that first class company we arrive in Milan. We finally locate our hostel and I’m just about ready for some pizza and a nap only to have the boys decide that we just HAVE to go and see the San Siro football stadium this minute. So here we are, back on the bus going to the train station to visit an empty stadium to watch two teams I’ve never even heard of play. Lovely. A muffled “Stanzione” comes over the loud speaker and I quickly jump off the bus, eager to gulp in the fresh air. The boys run over to me, still laughing at my awkwardness from before, and we head to the station. You may have already guessed that we weren’t the richest of folks and fare evading on public transport was just one of the many things we did to save a euro. However the Milan stations have those gates that you need a ticket to get through so, defeated, I approach the ticket machine. I stare at the screen in confusion. A complicated mix of Italian and English words stare back at me. I can’t believe I actually miss my Myki. “Just get a standard one,” Dom decides. On the train we sit side by side, pointing out funny-looking people and joking around. I sit back feeling content. The kind of content one feels on a Sunday night, squeezed between mum and dad, watching The Voice on TV, dad complaining about what filth it is but refusing to leave the room or stop watching. I’ve always been close to my - 161 -


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family so leaving them for six months was never going to be easy. Still, sitting here with Dom and Mitch, I couldn’t help feeling that we were a kind of family now. Dysfunctional but loving. I close my eyes as the train speeds on through the underground labyrinth, drifting off to the sound of Scottish laughter and Italian voices mingled into one. “Wake up sleepyhead!” I’m roughly shaken awake and can’t help feeling annoyed. I was literally this close to kissing Ryan Gosling. I open my mouth to share my frustrations when I realise they’re already halfway off the train. I catch up only to discover that they’re back on their favourite topic of conversation: me. Apparently I make “the weirdest noises ever” when I sleep. I laugh along with them secretly hoping that I wasn’t sleep talking, as most of the stuff I said I would like to keep between Ryan and me. I’m so engrossed in our conversation that I’m startled to find myself face to face with a rotund belly. I slowly lift my head to find a short fat neck followed by a red face. Next comes a beaky nose and nasty squinty eyes. This is topped off with a straggly mop of grey hair and disgusting yellow teeth bared into a cruel smirk. The guard starts ranting at us in Italian and I manage to grasp that he’s looking for our tickets. I pull mine out and the boys do the same. I’m already making my way to the exit when I’m stopped again. The ticket inspector is glaring at me as if I’ve taken the last chocolate biscuit. “Thees is not the right ticket,” he informs me. I look at him, bewildered. He carries on in broken English. Apparently, unbeknownst to us, we have left the city of Milan and are now in Rho, and we therefore needed to buy a Rho ticket not a Milan one, and that will be seventy-five euros please. Of course the boys are - 162 -


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having none of this. They start shouting at the guard simultaneously. “What do you mean seventy-five euros?” “We ain’t paying no fine.” “You don’t even speak English mate!” “The ticket machine was in bloody Italian, how were we supposed to know what we were buying?!” “You’re just lucky we bought a ticket at all you wanker!” Their cries echo around the empty train station and I can’t help feeling grateful that the guard can’t really understand English. I feel that calling him a wanker isn’t going to help our case. Next thing I know, the boys are having their IDs confiscated and the reinforcements have arrived. The word “Police” stings my ears and suddenly I feel seriously worried. The boys are now demanding to see someone who speaks English. The three of us are shunted to the side and our red-faced friend walks away leaving a comrade to guard the naughty teenagers. I plead with the boys: why don’t we just pay the fine? They’re adamant though. “Bloody Italians.” “We are not giving into them!” “And to think, AC Milan used to be my second team!” Our trusty guard chooses this wonderful moment to inform us that the police have been called to take us away. I sink to the floor and picture my bleak future. Stuck in a small cell with no phone. Forced to eat gross prison food. Not allowed to watch Gossip Girl. What a nightmare. I’m still pondering my future as the new Schapelle Corby and wondering whether Who magazine will do an article about me when Mitch storms over to our sentry and starts yelling in his face. The guard fires up immediately and I race over to diffuse the situation. Somewhere in the tussle the guard grabs me and pushes me over. I - 163 -


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land painfully on the hard cement floor. Then come the fireworks. “How dare you touch her?!” “Are you ok? You could have really hurt her!” “I’m telling you if there’s a scratch on her body we’re gonna report you for assault!” “You want a fight? Take me! Leave her out of it!” I quickly stand up and attempt to pull the boys back, feeling like a cast member of CSI: Train Stations. I finally manage to tug them away when our initial capturer returns. We’re certainly done for now. I take a deep breath, ready to give my final words, a passionate speech about freedom and justice and the Milan metro system not being clear enough about tickets. “Get back on the train.” What? No handcuffs? No police car? No dirty cell? As it transpires, the guard made a call to the local station only to be brutally shut down for holding three foreign teenagers for having the wrong ticket. All we need to do is get back on the train and return to Milan. I see the other guard arguing furiously to our capturer, but he just shakes his head and shooshes him. Ha! That’s what you get for pushing me over, you tosser! I can’t help beaming as we prepare to board the train. To think we took on the Italian police (sort of ) and won! This is what superheroes must feel like! It’s not only our victory that’s got me smiling. That warm feeling has returned and it doesn’t look like it’s leaving anytime soon. Families fight with each other, tease each other and sometimes downright dislike each other. But they also protect each other. And that’s what the boys did today. Even though I’m halfway around the world I’ve never felt more at home. With Mitch and Dom. My family.

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Does Language Determine Numerical Competence? A Brief Review of the Evidence from Australia’s Northern Territory Sara Dee Rusdiah Arts V


Academic Essay

For many years, the relation between language and number has been extensively investigated, and the findings discussed with regard to whether number lexicon shapes the thinking and knowledge of numbers. Whereas proponents of the Whorfian hypothesis contend that precise arithmetical representation and calculation is inconceivable in the absence of counting words that are semantically associated with specific integers (e.g., Gordon, 2004; Pica, Lemer, Izard, & Dehaene, 2004), others have argued that language may not be an absolute prerequisite for exact calculation (Gelman & Butterworth, 2005). A central question that has plagued much empirical research in this field is thus: What will individuals do when they do not have counting words in tasks that require exact calculation? (Butterworth & Reeve, 2008, p. 631). Among those that have studied numerical information processing in societies with limited number vocabularies, of note are some recent endeavours to seek an alternative cognitive mechanism by which problems requiring the comprehension of exact quantities may be solved in such cultures (Butterworth & Reeve, 2008; Butterworth, Reeve, & Reynolds, 2011). Examining the performance of four to seven year-old children from the Warlpiri and Anindilyakwa societies in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT) in tests of numerosity recall and nonverbal addition, these field investigations have demonstrated that “the quantification and computation system may not depend on [counting] words per se� (Butterworth & Reeve, 2008, p. 456). As some background information, the Warlpiri language is spoken in Willowra, a Central Desert community located approximately 300 km from Alice Springs. Meanwhile, the Anindilyak- 166 -


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wa is the main language on Groot Eylandt, off the East Coast of Arnhem Land, where the number system is only taught after an individual has reached adolescence. Both languages are classifier languages that possess specific number terms for numerosities up to three, but only general quantifiers such as few, many, and several to refer to amounts larger than this maximum limit (Butterworth & Reeve, 2008).1 Neither language contains vocabularies for ordinal relations, such as first, second, third, and so forth (Bittner & Hale, 1995; Stokes, 1982). It has also been noted that there is no record of counting or of showing numbers with the aid of fingers or other body parts in either community (Butterworth & Reeve, 2008). This essay aims to review the key evidence put forward in the aforementioned works of Butterworth and colleagues to substantiate this claim; the implications of their research for the development of numerical cognition; the role of environmental influences as a plausible factor involved in the learning of numbers; and suggestions on how to further refine the findings in future investigations. In testing their hypotheses, Butterworth and colleagues (2008, 2011) used action-based number development tasks to analyse the NT children’s ability to reproduce the numerosity of a set display, as well as their comprehension of rudimentary operations of addition by concatenating quantities from sets of different sizes. After collapsing the results between the children of the two NT communities and comparing them to the data obtained from an age-matched, English-speaking indigenous sample from Melbourne on the same tasks, it was discovered that there was no significant difference in performance between the test sites. In other words, despite the lack of availability of specific number vocabularies in the Aboriginal groups, the NT and Melbourne - 167 -


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children fared equally well in these arithmetical measures. Interestingly, while the Melbourne children often resorted to audible enumeration as they attempted to complete the tasks, their NT peers were more likely to arrive at their answer by reconstructing the spatial arrangements of the sets on their mats. Also worth noting is that, in a separate study conducted by Butterworth, Reeve, Reynolds, and Lloyd (2008), the NT children were found to be able to equally partition quantities for sharing purposes, as well as to match quantities expressed as auditory inputs via tapping with those represented visually through placing counters on top of a mat. Overall, the data thus suggested that simple, exact arithmetic operations may be accomplished through engaging with alternative conceptual resources that are within the children’s repertoire, such as the spatial representation technique, if number vocabulary is not directly available. The evidence found by Butterworth et al. (2008, 2011) could immediately be seen to carry wide-ranging implications on the development of numerical cognition. Primarily, without dismissing language as an assisting device for number processing, the findings challenge the Whorfian position that the understanding of cardinalities is wholly contingent upon the availability of linguistic terms that denote precise quantities. This, in turn, informs current epistemological theories on numerical competencies, specifically by serving as empirical support for the principles-before account, which maintains that biological precursors to the cardinal number system exist in humans even before the practice of enumerating through language emerges (Butterworth & Reeve, 2012). Furthermore, the results also indicated that numbers may be thought of not just as a one-dimensional line with a fixed left-to-right orientation. Instead, conceptualising it - 168 -


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as having a two-dimensional relation with space seemed to aid performance depending on the task manipulations, as revealed through the NT childrens’ success in recalling the numerosity of a precise set that had memorable displays (Butterworth et al., 2008, 2011). Importantly, however, these findings also highlight the need to pay attention not just to cognitive but also experiential factors, namely those that may be related to the “developmental niche” (Super & Harkness, 1986), or, more generally, the environment and child-rearing practices relevant to a given community (see also Rogoff, Paradise, Arauz, Correa-Cháves, & Angelillo, 2003), in assessing indices of numerical competence. As Kearins (1986) observed, Aboriginal Australian children learn largely through observation as opposed to verbal instructions, which may contribute to their superior visuospatial memory compared to their White Australian counterparts. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that a spatial reconstruction strategy appeared to act as an effective heuristic tool for the indigenous NT children in the previously discussed tasks, especially for younger NT children. On the other hand, the increasing reliance of NT children in the older age group on the standard enumeration method, which the researchers have proposed to be attributable to the effect of formal schooling (Butterworth & Reeve, 2011, p. 634), seemed to result in more incorrect responses. Incidentally, inspecting the data from a recent work by this research group (Reeve, Reynolds, Paul, & Butterworth, in press) suggests little reason to believe that such difficulty originates from deficiencies in more general cognitive domains, as the NT children were shown to - 169 -


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perform well in classic nonverbal IQ and executive functioning measures, in particular Raven’s coloured matrices and the Porteus maze, respectively. Although future research is needed to clarify whether or how environmental circumstances could possibly interact with genetic and neurological factors in explaining the differences in the development of numerical cognition, these findings nevertheless provide an important insight that probes further discussion on how markers of deficits in number processing may vary across different cultural groups. Based on the evidence to date, several recommendations may be offered to extend the information accumulated from the present findings. Firstly, it may be beneficial to test a comparable Melbourne sample for the six to seven-year old group, since the current data only includes an age-matched sample for the four to five-year old NT group. Secondly, incorporating a few more items in the nonverbal addition test beyond the current maximum of eight may unravel the extent to which spatial heuristics could aid the arithmetic performance of the NT children. Finally, the duration whereby the older NT children were exposed to formal education, as well as the adequacy of teaching quality, could perhaps be more thoroughly described in future articles. The disclosure of such detail would allow for stronger inferences to be made regarding whether the errors produced when using the enumeration method was likely to be rooted in a difficulty to learn and adapt to this strategy. Taken together, cumulative evidence from investigations in the Warlpiri and Anindilyakwa communities in the Northern Territory have enriched the current body of literature on numerical cognition by offering an account on how the understanding of - 170 -


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numerical concepts could be achieved in cultures with minimal counting words. While acknowledging that language remains useful for the representation of quantities, a critical step has been advanced toward a more well-rounded and less ethnocentric perspective in calibrating the role of linguistic referents of number in facilitating simple, exact arithmetical computations. Indeed, through attempting to capture the complex interplay between cognitive and situational or sociocultural elements behind numerical aptitude, the broader contribution of these findings may well lie in their potential to guide future research on the underpinnings behind number processing deficits, such as dyscalculia, as well as on reforming the traditional notions of the teaching and learning of numbers in different cultural groups.

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Academic Essay Endnotes The Anindilyakwan language additionally has specific terms for the numbers 5 (amangbala), 10 (ememberrkwa), 15 (amaburrkwakbala), and 20 (wurrakiriyabulangwa). Works Cited Bittner, M., & Hale, K. (1995). Remarks on definiteness in Warlpiri. In E. Bach (Ed.), Quantification in Natural Languages (pp. 81-107). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer. Butterworth, B., & Reeve, R. (2008). Verbal counting and spatial strategies in numerical tasks: Evidence from indigenous Australia. Philosophical Psychology, 21(4), 443-457. Butterworth, B., & Reeve, R. (2012). Counting words and a principles-after account of the development of number concepts. In M. Siegal & L. Surian (Eds.), Access to Language and Cognitive Development (pp. 160-175). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butterworth, B., Reeve, R., & Reynolds, F. (2011). Using mental representations of space when words are unavailable: Studies of enumeration and arithmetic in indigenous Australia. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42, 630-638. Butterworth, B., Reeve, R., Reynolds, F., & Lloyd, D. (2008). Numerical thought with and without words: Evidence from indigenous Australian children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 105(35), 1317913184. Gelman, R., & Butterworth, B. (2005). Number and language: How are they related? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 6-10. Gordon, P. (2004). Numerical cognition without words: Evidence from Amazonia. Science, 306, 496-499. Kearins, J. (1986). Visual spatial memory of Aboriginal and White Australian chil dren. Australian Journal of Psychology, 38(3), 203-214. Pica, P., Lemer, C., Izard, V., & Dehaene, S. (2004). Exact and approximate cal culation in an Amazonian indigene group with a reduced number lexicon. Science, 306(5695), 499-503. Reeve, R., Reynolds, F., Paul, J. M. & Butterworth, B. (in press). Probing the “spatial nature” of Australian indigenous children’s numerical cognition. Manuscript submitted for publication. Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Arauz, R. M., Correa-Chávez, M., & Angelillo, C. (2003). Firsthand learning through intent participation. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 175-203. Stokes, B. (1982). A description of the mathematical concepts of Groote Eylandt Ab origines. In S. Hargrave (Ed.), Language and Culture, Work Papers of SIL-AAB, Series B (Vol. 8). Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Super, C. M., & Harkness, S. (1986). The developmental niche: A conceptualisation at the interface of child and culture. International Journal of Behavioural Development, 9, 546-569. - 172 -


{ Jon Htin, Untitled


Reconciliations They again visited the Sound. Being on board, I went immediately ashore, There were 6 Canoes, variable light airs, and calms, in the night, the 6 I follow’d alone and unarm’d some distance, small fires had a light breeze from the land, they would not stop until they went further off than muscles roasting on the fires, some oysters I chose to trust myself, and disappeared laying there; We tasted of their Cheer armed in the same manner

and we left them in return as those that came yesterday. Luke Patterson Alumnus (TC 2014)


House of Horrors Evelyn Parsonage Arts II


Creative Writing

The carriages of a Ferris wheel glint in the afternoon sun, rising and falling with a recognisable rhythm. Within the yellow carriage sits a little girl, brown ringlets tied neatly in two bundles and hands shoved deep into the pockets of her denim dress. Kendall Riley would come to the carnival every Saturday at precisely two o’clock. Funnily no-one ever took notice of a seven year old without any supervision. No parents looked on as she rode the carousel or played a game in the midway. No-one cared really. But why exactly does Kendall come to the carnival? She loves the fairy floss, she loves the rollercoasters, but most of all she loves how the screams of joy drown out the screams of another kind. “How was school today Kenny?” Kendall hates that nickname. “It was okay…we painted flowers in art”. Marilyn has already stopped listening. In her simple mind she is thinking about her next hair appointment at the French salon or the pair of shoes she can’t afford. “Mm that’s nice Kenny” Marilyn tweets as she manoeuvres the Mitsubishi Pajero into the Riley garage. Kendall sighs, talking to her mother is a little like looking in a funhouse mirror. It doesn’t matter which angle you look from; the reflection is always false. On entering the small suburban bungalow, Kendall retreats to her room but is challenged in the hallway by the vile monster, Hayden Riley. “KEN-DALL, whatcha doin Kendall? Who’s Harry? You want to marry him don’t you!” Hayden snickers as he reveals a pink notebook from under his stained plaid shirt. His unctuous pimples resemble the undulations of a rollercoaster. He flicks the book open and begins to read.

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“Dear diary, I luuuve Harry Gregory…” At this point she lunges, but is no match for her beast of a brother. He elevates the diary above his meathead, out of reach. Kendall admits defeat and slams the door to her sanctum behind her. Finally at peace, she pulls a fresh leaf of paper from her school book and begins to draw. She draws the carnival, at dark with lots of colourful lights. She imagines the smell of fresh popcorn and roasted chestnuts. She draws a stilt man, a juggler and an acrobat. She draws a clown. There is something about this clown, it makes her feel uneasy. She erases the clown. “He is gone now.” She tells herself. “He can’t find you anymore.” With the image still engraved in her mind, Kendall eventually joins the world of dreams and is asleep before he comes home. The steam from strained pasta clouds up the kitchen window and a pot of tomato sauce boils over on the stove. Marilyn clutches the envelope. Her fierce grip makes the paper quiver and crumple. She does not have the courage to open it. The front door creaks and she jumps to her feet, wiping away the mascara, two black slices down her cheeks. An echo of a workers boot on the stucco pavers and the smell of sweat mixed with grease intoxicate the house. His glare pierces her skin as if a cold dagger is forced into her spine. “I made you dinner…honey”. The final word is thrust from her lips, an anomaly. The figure encircles her in a crushing embrace. She frees herself from him and shows no attempt to hide her distress. “Sweet bird, poor bird…do I frighten you?” He slips a strand of hair behind her ear and smiles showing a misshapen row of rot. “What happened to the girl I met at the carnival, the one who loved me so easy?” He grins. He feeds off her fear. Marilyn feels sick, she - 177 -


Creative Writing

wants to crawl into a hole and die. Instead, she slaps him. He yells. All is black. The door to innocence creaks on its hinges and the small lump under the covers shifts slightly. The figure closes in on its next victim. She wakes suddenly and sees him standing in her doorway, eyes bloodshot and saucer-like. It’s the clown from her drawing, but she knows already he’s not one to make her laugh. “I love you Daddy. I really do. Tell me you love me too.” Kendall’s voice quivers. The clown laughs, his entire body shaking mechanically like a marionette, its strings slowly being untangled. She knows what happens next, but is ready this time. He strikes with lustful power. Her fingers dig straight into his eyes, and he cries out in agony. She runs, anywhere away from there. She runs in the balmy summer night, her feet slapping against the tarmac still warm from the afternoon sun. She runs to the field where the city council sets up the carnival annually. But the field is empty; a lone plastic bag floats across the plot of land, barrelling in the breeze. A sign has been resurrected in the centre of the wasteland. “The carnival has been permanently shut down due to lack of funds. We are sorry for the inconvenience ” Kendall’s eyes glaze over and her breath becomes weak and shallow. She lies down in the dirt and spreads her palms up to the black sky. “Family…what family? I have no family now. Those strangers you saw, I don’t know them.” The little girl who once sat in the yellow carriage of the Ferris wheel closed her eyes. We hope that when she opens them, she’ll be in a better place. - 178 -


Reflections of Athenian Self-Identity? The Parthenon and Great Dionysia Nicholas Senior Biomedicine II


Academic Essay

The sculptural elements of the Parthenon connect strongly to the notion of Athenian self-identity; the Parthenon stands as a monument to the unity, glory and militaristic might of Athens. The Great Dionysia is instead a manifestation of Athens’ societal dynamics and politics; its democratic principles and her desire to be observed externally as a unified, organised, and efficient citizen body. However, the Great Dionysia is also a complete and unabashed display of the wealth, military might, artistic accomplishment, and cultural supremacy that Athens believed it held above all other contemporary Greek city states – it was “an occasion for marking [not only] the structure of [but also] the magnificence of democratic Athens.”1 Many scholars address the notion of Athenian identity, however, there are few surviving primary sources that deal with the topic. Most are in the form of dramas, performed at the Great Dionysia, and so are subject to interpretation, but there also exists the works of the historians Herodotus and Thucydides. Indeed it is in Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War” that the ideal model of the Athenian citizen and civic ideology emerges in Pericles’ funeral oration: “Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses.” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2:37)

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Here Pericles outlines that all citizens are “equal,” it does not matter from which class one comes, but what does matter is one’s ability and skill. Rhetoric was the most important ability an individual could possess, with the power to persuade and sway the minds of not just the assembly on an issue, but also individuals in the course of everyday occurrences. However, the society Pericles so eloquently describes is only an ideal, Athens is in reality a far more complex and comprehensive organism than it first appears. Nevertheless, the equality Pericles speaks of can be seen in the visual unity of the city during the Great Dionysia. The first significant ceremony is the procession of Athenian citizens, the city’s allies, foreign visitors (metics), colonists, women and slaves through the streets of Athens to the temple and theatre of Dionysus, following the arrival of the cult statue. Having all of the respective demographics represented on the streets of Athens at once sends a powerful image of a unified polis (city state). For foreign visitors, individuals representing the respective peoples of Athens’ trade network, the splendour of the city, clad in festive decorations with the Acropolis as a backdrop, must have simply been awe inspiring, and was likely designed to be so. After all, the organisation of the festival fell not to the religious leaders of Athens, but rather to its archon (political leader) as Monoson points out, thereby leaving the impression that the Great Dionysia is also designed as a powerful political statement, and not solely a religious festival.2 Thus, having the city on display demonstrates not only Athens’ awareness of its role as an international power, but exposes these visitors to the magnificence and wealth of the empire, and by extension the harmony of its citizens – thereby sending out a resounding message that - 181 -


Academic Essay

this empire is a worthy ally, and simultaneously a potentially terrifying adversary. Furthermore, the procession’s organisation outlines a value that was key to the Athenian people: order. They “need[ed] to discover an order in, or superimpose an order on, the flux of physical and psychological experience”3 as J. J. Pollitt eloquently puts. The Greeks, and the Athenians in particular, were obsessed with the concept of structuring and trying to control and explain nature. Thus, order in this respect relates to social structure – particularly the hierarchy of Athens represented in the differentiation between those that took part in the procession. Citizens could wear what they wished, whilst metics and women had to wear specified garments, and their participation in the festival was carefully prescribed. Effectively, they were involved only in a very limited capacity; almost solely for the visual image of a unified civilisation. They were acknowledged in their pursuit of honour, but the festival activity marked their removal from the governing body (the demos) as explained by Monoson.5 This separation between the respective demographics arises from the Athenian value placed on autochthony: the belief that the Athenians are the descendants of those literally born of the Attican earth, and so they have an unchallengeable right to the city and land. The autochthonous idea is a two-sided one according to W. R. Connor, in that it fortifies bonds of equality amongst citizens, and makes it increasingly difficult to form such relationships outside of Attica.6 Some argue that it has roots in an aristocratic claim; however, it exalts the polis and never singles out an individual citizen as having a better genealogy than another. Thus it - 182 -


Academic Essay

can be interpreted as strengthening the sense of unity amongst Athenians – though it has a less attractive side in that it does derive some of its appeal from a degree of prejudice against foreign migrants. As Connor concludes, “Athens could never take the grand step of extending citizenship to them, nor of inventing some unit with an identity of its own that might subsume within it individual sovereignties.”8 And so, the Athenian citizens sit at the top of the social hierarchy, a hierarchy imposed upon their empire to bestow upon it a sense of order and organisation. This concept of order is achieved in the Parthenon’s sculptures in two forms: the physical arrangement of the sculptures, and in the metopes that depict conflict between the Greeks and foreign barbaric tribes. Displayed on the metopes are four conflicts in which the Greeks, or the Olympians, embodying the forces of order, battle the forces of chaos (the Amazonians, the giants, the centaurs, and the Trojans). Now this is different to the imposing of order on society, as this is a metaphoric battle for the continued existence of civilisation: the “order emerging from the chaos” mentality.9 The scenes on the metopes can be interpreted as an allusion to the Persian Wars, which saw the Athenians and the rest of Greece victorious over the forces of Persia led by Darius and Xerxes. Hence birthing the idea that Greek civilisation was triumphant over the barbaric nature of the Eastern foreigners, and therefore superior. The physical arrangement of the sculptures refers to their geographical relativity: the pediments are the highest off of the ground, followed by the metopes below them, and finally the frieze on the bottom-most level. Thus they physically represent - 183 -


Academic Essay

a hierarchy with the humans on the lowest tier, mythological figures above them, and the gods overlooking all of their subordinates from above – stressing that sense of social order that is also expressed in the Dionysia. The Athenians know their place; it is below that of the gods. However, by choosing to depict themselves on the frieze in the Panathenaea rather than other mythological figures perhaps suggests that the Athenians thought themselves favourites of the gods. J. J. Pollitt, claims that the presence of Athenians on the frieze is in fact an expression of human idealism.10 This idealism, he argues is the fusion of the reality of Athens with the idealistic qualities and ‘godlike’ nature of Athenian society depicted in Pericles’ funeral oration.11 And as the frieze is the location where the visible and spiritual gap disappears between men and gods, it is the rightful place to set such a vision. However, a more realistic argument is that as the Panathenaea is a religious festival, it serves a similar function to the Great Dionysia. It brings together the whole community, citizens both young and old, women, colonists and foreigners. All accompany the procession and share in the feast that follows, presenting the image of a cohesive and unified society as Ian Jenkins discusses.12 Furthermore, the frieze and pediments are distinguished from the metopes in that they share a stylistic unity in their presentation of humans. This is, perhaps, a democratic tool intended to portray the civic community of Athens as a body of similar-minded individuals.13 But such like-mindedness, though superficially a degree of unification, clashes against the Periclean image of an Athens that values versatility, and in the context of interpreting drama Simon Goldhill claims that “it is an intolerably naïve idea to suppose that an audience of a drama has only - 184 -


Academic Essay

one uniform, homogeneous collective identity or response.”14 For tragedy provides onlookers with the opportunity to separate the argument from the speaker, and by doing so achieve the necessary state of mind to assess each aspect critically, and hence deduce whether it is a reasonable or not. This was a skill that was highly valued amongst the citizenry. Therefore, it is plausible that going to the theatre aided in the development and growth of this mental flexibility and strength (termed “strong mindedness” by Monoson)15 that benefited citizens in the Assembly and courts. Therefore, the Great Dionysia was an incredible tool in that it allowed the self-evaluation of Athens through drama, and in doing so continuously allowed for growth and evolution in thought and debate. Another set of values that were inherently important amongst the Athenian citizenry were actually military in nature. This arises from the fact that it was the citizens that fought in times of war. Such was their pride in being a member of the polis, and fighting for what it stood for, that men like Aeschylus the famed playwright (who fought at Marathon and Salamis) had engraved on his tombstone: “Under this stone lies Aeschylus the Athenian, son of Euophorion . . . the grove at Marathon and the Persians who landed there were witness to his courage” (Pausanius, Description of Greece 1.12.5)16 where he exalts his military service, and not his success at the Great Dionysia. Indeed Pericles celebrates this behaviour: “If they ever failed in an enterprise, they made up their minds that at any rate the city should not find their courage lacking to her, and they gave to her the best contribution that they could.” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2:43). - 185 -


Academic Essay

On the Parthenon there is a clear emphasis placed on victory through military might in the archetypal battle scenes depicted in the metopes. This reminder of Athens’ military strength is ever present within Athenian society - during the Great Dionysia there are a number of events that confirm it. For instance during the procession to the temple and theatre of Dionysus, colonists tow behind them carts with giant erect phalluses – symbols of victory in military conquests which allude to the fact that military victory was part of the process of colonisation.17 To follow this symbol of military might Athens delivers another in the form of the Delian League tribute displayed openly in the orchestra, a reminder of Athens’ imperial nature and its supremacy in the Delian League. What is even more striking a statement in regards to Athens’ pride in its armed forces, is the March of the Orphans; an event where the sons of citizens who have perished in battle parade in front of the theatre in full hoplite armour. The message here is again twofold: one, it is a visual reminder of how central Athens’ military is to the empire, enough that it makes an appearance during a religious festival, and two, it demonstrates the city’s willingness to take care of those who have lost fathers in service to the city.18 This second idea is named reciprocity – and is a key foundation of Athenian society. As the fathers of these boys gave their lives for the city, the city will in turn take care of them. Reciprocity in this benefactor sense is absent on the Parthenon, instead present metaphorically in the style of Herodotus’ “Histories”; where the hubris (‘violent arrogance’) of the Persian Empire ultimately results in their defeat at the hands of the Greek forces.19 - 186 -


Academic Essay

To conclude, the Parthenon stands as a monument to the glory of imperial Athens and emphasises the contributions of military might, unity, and order in achieving this, thereby linking them to the collective cultural identity of Athens. The Great Dionysia also reflects these same elements; however, it differs in the notion of Athenian self-identity, as the festival is contemporary, ever changing, and continuously encourages the development of thought and critical evaluation. Its focus is more on sculpting the individual rather than the collective identity of the demos. Yet, simultaneously it does decadently display the polis’ wealth, thus exalting Athens’ power and reaffirming the city’s place in the eyes of the Athenians as the superior Attican civilisation of its time.

Endnotes 1 Monoson, S. “Citizen as Theatês (Theater-Goer): Performing Unity, Reciproc ity, and Strong-Mindedness in the City Dionysia” in Plato’s Democratic Entanglements – Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy, 88 – 111. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Page 98. Monoson quotes and emphasises the same claim in Winkler, “The Ephebes’ Song”, p.30 2 Monoson, “Citizen as Theatês”, 94 3 J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 3. 4 Monoson, “Citizen as Theatês”, 94 5 Monoson, “Citizen as Theatês”, 94 6 Connor, W. R. “The Ionian Era of Athenian Civic Identity.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137 (1993): 194 – 206, p. 205. 7 Connor, “The Ionian Era of Athenian Civic Identity.”205 rebuts H. Becker’s “Grecian Gens” South West Journal of Anthropology 6 (1950): 336. 8 Connor, “The Ionian Era of Athenian Civic Identity.”206 9 Pollitt, Art and Experience, p.66, p.80 10 Pollitt, Art and Experience, 87. 11 Pollitt, Art and Experience, 87. 12 Ian Jenkins, The Parthenon Frieze (London: British Museum Press, 1994), 24. 13 14

Jenkins, The Parthenon, 19. Goldhill, Simon. “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology.” Journal of Helenic Studies 152 (1987): 69. - 187 -


Academic Essay Monoson, “Citizen as Theatês”, 102 Quote found in Thomas R. Martin’s “Culture and Society in Classical Athens” in Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times, 124 – 146. Yale: Yale University Press, 1996. P. 132 17 Monoson, “Citizen as Theatês”, 94. 18 Monoson, “Citizen as Theatês”, 99. 15 16

19

Martin, “Culture and Society”, 134.

Works Cited Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Aubrey De Séincourt, England: Penguin Group, 2003. Pausanius, Description of Greece, translated by W. H. S. Jones, London: William Heinemann, 1918. (http://ryanfb.github.io/loebolus-data/L093.pdf ) Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner, En gland: Penguin Group, 1972. The Parthenon Sculptures themselves – as seen in: Jenkins, Ian. The Parthenon Frieze. London: British Museum Press, 1994. Nagy, Blaise. “Athenian Officials on the Parthenon Frieze” American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 96, No. 1 (1992): 55-69. Connor, W. R. “The Ionian Era of Athenian Civic Identity.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137 (1993): 194 – 206. Goldhill, Simon. “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology.” Journal of Helenic Studies 152 (1987): 58 – 76. Jenkins, Ian. The Parthenon Frieze. London: British Museum Press, 1994. Martin, Thomas R. “Culture and Society in Classical Athens” Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times, 124 – 146. Yale: Yale University Press, 1996. Monoson, Sarah. “Citizen as Theatês (Theater-Goer): Performing Unity, Reciprocity, and Strong-Mindedness in the City Dionysia” in Plato’s Democratic Entanglements – Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy, 88 – 111. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pollitt, J. J. Art and Experience in Classical Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972

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Jon Htin, Untitled


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Jon Htin, Untitled


Pale Fire (1962) Canto One: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass, And how delightful when a fall of snow Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so As to make chair and bed exactly stand Upon that snow, out in that crystal land! Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque, A dull dark white against the day’s pale white And abstract larches in the neutral light. And then the gradual and dual blue As night unites the viewer and the view, And in the morning, diamonds of frost Vladimir Nabokov


The Life of Tymon of Athens (1623) Act IV, scene 3 “The moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun” William Shakespeare


BULPADOK Art Journal VOLUME XXIII

A Sense of Place 2015

Trinity College UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

Trinity College Royal Parade Parkville Victoria 3052




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