Magic, Manufacturing and Memorialising

Welcome to the first issue of the Journal of Australian Studies for 2024. This fresh new collection offers diverting scholarship to bring in the new year—from articles considering narratorial perspective and the reception of literary publications in the United States all the way through to Australian wool and 20th-century art.

The cover artwork by Vincent Namatjira, with special thanks to Vincent and the Iwantja Arts centre, gestures towards “The Magic of Captain Cook”, a unique essay by Max Brierty and Stephen Muecke that opens this issue. As the authors tell us, “Lately the two of us have been on the hunt for whitefella dreamings, although they are not hard to find. They are not the kind of Dreaming that Aboriginal people hold for Country, but something else: dreams whitefellas conjure up to make mischief, to claim power and mastery.”

Brierty and Muecke’s collaborative work traces Modern Australia back through colonial dreams—ones that were enlivened by the magic of Captain Cook and the tricks he pulled to claim possession over a third of the Australian continent for Britain’s King. Their article looks at where Cook’s spirit might be hiding today, drawing on several instances of powerful mimetic surplus as counter-dreamings that break the spell of unknowing in the past and present. The authors search for the magic beneath the magic of Cook’s claim of possession and offer a counter-dreaming to reveal the continuation of that magic here in the present day.

Inge Kral and Darren Jorgensen consider the artist James Wigley, who has been historicised by Australian art scholars as a social realist. However, the focus of his work through the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s differed from others who were a part of this art movement. As Kral and Jorgensen reveal, Wigley returned again and again to join the “strike mob” who had walked off pastoral stations in the Pilbara in 1946 and become independent by mining and purchasing their own pastoral properties. Kral and Jorgensen's article argues that his substantial body of work places Wigley alongside other Australian artists who spent time in remote Aboriginal communities, and whose experiences shaped their art.

Lucy Neave’s article examines how Australian literary fiction by women is received in the US: how, and to what extent, books are positioned by publishers, reviewers and authors as relevant to an American audience and to what extent Australian literary fiction’s appeal is borne out in reviews and in an online forum, Goodreads. Neave examines the reception of three diverse literary novels by women in the US: Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2016), Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend (2020) and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2013). Neave argues that recent Australian literary fiction by women makes an appeal to US readers through a combination of “transnational orientation”—or ideas, characters and settings that a novel evokes to address a global readership—which is leveraged by publishers in book design and endorsements, as well as “authorial disambiguation” in the form of essays and websites written by authors and addressed to local and global readers. She concludes that efforts to draw attention to a novel’s currency for a US audience are unevenly evident in reviews in broadsheets and trade publications, and on Goodreads.

Lorinda Cramer’s article zooms in on the local, beginning with the Melbourne manufacturer and department store Foy & Gibson, which began to produce mail order catalogues for country customers in the late 19th century, recognising the potential to sell clothing made of Australian wool. Cramer explores how Foy & Gibson influenced consumer attitudes towards the natural fibre by encouraging buyers to feel wool as a next-to-the-skin experience. By focusing on underwear and swimsuits in the catalogues across the first three decades of the 20th century, the article offers a historical counterpoint to promotional activities that continue into the present, urging consumers to understand the benefits of wearing wool.

Thomas Revel Johnson was a pioneering Australian sports journalist in the mid-19th century who also conducted a professional career as a surgeon. Caron Dann examines Johnson’s achievements in the emergence of Australian sports reporting as an emerging genre before it was taken seriously by the mainstream press. The article focuses on Johnson’s place in a watershed libel case that cast him as a scapegoat and resulted in an unduly harsh two-year jail sentence. Dann situates Johnson as part of a pre-Federation commercial media that attempted to establish a distinctly “Australian” voice, championing the underdog and working to undermine imported societal hierarchies.

Remarking on the continuation of the past into the present, Vanessa Whittington observes that memorialisation in settler-colonial nations such as Australia is intensely political. In particular, these sites and practices create public symbols of people and events that those in authority consider important and worthy of remembrance. Counter-narratives of various marginalised others are silenced, through processes of collective forgetting. Whittington notes that truth-speaking is now recognised by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians as an integral part of the reconciliation process. However, the truths spoken as part of the shared memorialisation of Aboriginal massacre sites by the Australian reconciliation movement are only partial, and may serve to perpetuate rather than interrupt what has historically been a resounding silence about colonial dispossession and violence.

Peter Mathews looks at the novelist Daniel Davis Wood and his evolving ethics of literary voice. Davis Wood’s initial step in Blood and Bone is to subvert the third-person omniscient voice by drastically expanding the imaginative abilities of the first-person narrator, thus showing how the narrator must always speak through a subjective position. The second step involves examining the extent to which the narrator’s desire is not their own: the narrator of Unspeakable is portrayed as the victim of toxic narcissism and media manipulation, for instance, while the protagonist of At the Edge of the Solid World is so alienated from his own emotions that he relives the calamities of others to process his own tragedy. Despite possessing the quasi-omniscient powers of Blood and Bone, these two narrators, far from being godlike, are shown to be puppets of desires that are not their own. The outcome is the dissolution of the subjective “I” in In Ruins, where the narrator comes to understand the Otherness that permeates human subjectivity. Moral failures are dissolved by the inability to say “I”, Mathews argues, making the new ethical task bearing witness to the desire of the Other.

Lurong Liu does a deep dive into Anson Cameron’s novel The Last Pulse, which features a “monkeywrenching” protagonist who blasts a dam in Queensland, rides on the resulting flood southwards and circulates his solastalgia. From water disputes overseas to those between the eastern Australian states, and from the character’s drought-stricken hometown in South Australia to the Murray–Darling Basin, Liu shows that the novel allows readers to experience solastalgia as a multiscalar affect capable of mobilising environmental activism, as well as mooring in and playing with the “arts of flow” informed by Indigenous water ethics. Liu contends that the scale and distance-conscious method of “proximate reading” can be applied to read the dynamic of the affect in such an expanded and sentient water ecology.

Finally, Dan Tout offers a critical engagement with Billy Griffiths’s award-winning book Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia as a departure point towards uncovering and examining a significant tradition of Australian cultural reflection and interpretation he terms “indigenising settler nationalism”. Tracing the genealogy of the indigenising settler-nationalist tendencies that shape Deep Time Dreaming, and to which the text itself contributes, the article situates Griffiths’s contribution as a recent and notable exemplar of a longstanding historiographical tradition that responds to the continuing crisis of settler-national belonging and legitimacy by attempting to incorporate the historical depth of Indigenous occupation into its own national, nationalising narrative, and so to indigenise the settler nation itself.

We write this editorial at a time when a continuing investment in the kind of attentive, wide-ranging scholarship that the journal strives to publish has become more crucial than ever: research and commentary that probes the past, challenges the ways we see the present, and looks ahead to a future where curiosity, critical inquiry and a commitment to foregrounding a multitude of voices remain central to a vibrant Australian studies community. As always, the authors whose work is contained in this issue offer us a glimpse into the many approaches, perspectives and stories that contribute so much depth and breadth to the discipline. We hope that you enjoy reading this issue as much as we liked producing it—and we wish you a safe and fulfilling 2024.