Paleolithic Art: A Cultural History

In this article we review the history of the terms and ideas that have been used to conceptualize Paleolithic art since the end of the 19th century. Between 1900 and 1970, prehistoric representations were typically divided into two main groups: parietal art (including rock and cave art) and portable (or mobiliary) art. This classification gave rise to asymmetrical attitudes about Paleolithic images. In particular, many portable and nonfigurative representations were overlooked while a small number of cave paintings were praised for their realism. Although the portable/parietal division has remained a popular divide among archaeologists, in the last 30 years increasing numbers of specialists have crossed the boundaries established by these categories. They have developed new frameworks within which more kinds of images are meaningfully approached and incorporated into the analysis of Paleolithic art and symbolism. The emergence of new approaches to Pleistocene imagery is the result of a number of interrelated processes, including the globalization of Paleolithic art studies, the impact of new discoveries, and the development of new approaches to art, images, and symbolism.     

Caring for Country: History and Alchemy in the Making and Management of Indigenous Australian Land

This paper traces the history of ‘caring for country’ tropes in writing about indigenous Australian land and land management. While ‘caring for country’ initially referred to dynamic land use and ownership practices, it progressively became a less historical, more primordial, conception of indigenous land ownership, use, and management. In reviewing constructions of ‘land’ in scholarly literatures and policy debates, I seek to explain how they interact with local indigenous practices and idioms. Drawing on examples from the cultural and linguistic fields of A?angu, speakers of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, I examine a variety of concurrent uses of ‘country’, ‘caring’, or ‘nurturance’ and ‘caring for country’. A cross‐linguistic perspective on these objectifications – in English, Aboriginal English, and central Australian indigenous languages – shows how they may attend selectively to the historical specificity of indigenous experience. But this, I argue, may be the key to their efficacy in intercultural projects. Coded messages in bilingual documents reflect a kind of agency whereby A?angu choose to leave equivocal histories unstated and thereby reconstitute government projects in terms that work for them. The referential flexibility around idioms of land and nurturance is a kind of alchemy in language and social life that is the condition of the success of actual land management activities. Terms including ‘country’ and ‘caring for country’ elide the socio‐political dynamics that otherwise complicate actual rights and uses of land. That is why they can form the social basis of common activities, the production of ‘congeniality’ both within A?angu social life and at the interface with outsiders, in land management and other fields.     

Indigenous politics in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

This article reviews the slow emergence of writing on Indigenous issues and power in the journal over its first fifty years. It notes that most of this writing is by non Indigenous authors about issues that are thought to effect Indigenous lives. More contributions by Indigenous authors would be useful and will hopefully occur with growing numbers of Indigenous post-graduate students.     

A Brief Exploration of Neurological Art History

The invention of realistic portraiture to reveal "inner life" is attributed by some art historians to Jan van Eyck who worked in Flanders from 1420 onwards. We show, using clinical neurological examination of the gold mask of Agamemnon dating from 1550-1500 BC and of the portraits of Henry III and his son Edward I - important English royals - painted between 1216 and 1307, that realistic portraits were made well before the 15th Century. Thus artists unwittingly used neurology as part of their realistic approach to the presentation of the face. Because neurological diagnosis is often visual, neurology, in turn, has a rich potential to unveil examples of realism in art. We consider the art pieces examined here also pertinent to art historians, as they assess the role of art in documenting history.     

Writing Gender into History and History in Gender: Creating A Nation and Australian Historiography

This paper reflects on the impact of gender in the writing of history by considering the reception of Creating A Nation, the first gendered history of Australia. It argues that while there has emerged an impressive volume of feminist history and with it has come an important acceptance of women's historical experience, the reception of ‘gender’ within the historical profession has paradoxically been ambivalent and ambiguous. This is the case because of an unease about feminist theory and its relevance to history. There also remains a prevailing belief that a gendered neutral historical place exists, to which historians can retreat.     

Rattling on Exactly as They Talk: Romantic Conversations

ABSTRACT

The essay begins by identifying the conversation as a hitherto neglected Romantic genre, and by distinguishing the conversation from the dialogue. It goes on to characterise the conversation as a generic hybrid, ambiguously placed between writing and speech, between the studied and the impromptu, between the ephemeral and the permanent, and between fact and fiction. It points out how closely the conversation is connected with the rise in the second decade of the nineteenth century of the literary magazine, and with the publication in the same period of Byron’s Don Juan, and discusses why this should have been so. It argues that the conversation is a paradoxical literary genre in that it is best defined by its refusal of all conventional generic constraints.     

The Struggle for Australian History

Dixson, Miriam The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia 1788 to the Present Ferres, Kay (ed.) The Time to Write: Australian Women Writers 1890–1930 Grimshaw, Patricia, Lake, Marilyn, McGrath, Ann and Quartly, Marian Creating a Nation 1788–1990 Summers, Anne Damned Whores and God’s Police Robinson, Portia The Women of Botany Bay