Wellsprings of Belonging: Water and Community Regeneration in Queensland

ABSTRACT This article considers how local communities in South Queensland make use of the cultural meanings encoded in water to articulate social connections and notions of belonging. Drawing on recent ethnographic research, it compares the activities of a community catchment group in Brisbane, and participants in a water festival in Maroochydore, exploring how each group engages creatively with local water sources to materialise particular beliefs and values about identity and belonging. Their creative efforts range from conventional attempts to strengthen local community ties through inclusion in catchment management, to more subversive visions, which resist inclusion in the mainstream and promulgate ‘alternative’ social and environmental values.     

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF WHITEHORSE: 1898–1945

In the spring of 1975 Canada supplied one chapter in the Vietnam “Babylift.” Canadians disagreed about the Babylift's meaning for themselves and their nation. For some, it offered the opportunity to rescue child casualties of war and to confirm a multicultural country; for others, it constituted kidnapping and evidence of Western imperialism. This dual response is explored in four parts in this article. First, there is a brief history of Canadian adoption, which grew gradually more inclusive after World War II to include youngsters of Asian origin. Second, it describes public, especially newspaper, responses to the US war in Vietnam and the place of children in this. Third, it introduces adults engaged in the Babylift and their approach to international adoption more generally. And finally, it profiles the children involved and examines what rescue or kidnapping might have entailed for them.     

Of Human Bondage: The Breaking In of Stockmen in Northern Australia

This article examines the cultural forms through which the young European‐Australian stockmen who work on the cattle stations of north Queensland are socialised. Exploring their interactions with a social and physical landscape and their rites of passage, as manifested in everyday actions, performance and material culture, it reveals how – and why – they are given little choice in acquiring values which are intensely adversarial to the land and to the indigenous people of Australia. It also explores the relationship between the transmission of particular values to these young men and the wider political and hegemonic role of the pastoral sub‐culture in defining Australian national identity. 1 1 It has take me a while to lasso and subdue this ethnographic beast, and in the course of the struggle I have benefited greatly from the advice of colleagues at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Oxford, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the University of Wales, Lampeter and fellow Australianists at the Centre for Australian Studies in Wales and at the Menzies Centre in London. I am also most grateful to Neil Maclean and his anonymous referees for their many helpful suggestions and comments. I would like to pay an affectionate tribute to the young stockmen on the cattle properties of Cape York's western coast: at Rutland Plains, Koolatah, Highbury, Drumduff, Sefton and the other stations where I was invited to ‘sling my swag’. Behind the sabre‐rattling that I have quoted, most of these young men were good folk: they were largely tolerant of have a female (and a bloody pom too!) in their midst, generously sharing stories, explaining their lives, making hat‐catchers and belts for me, and showing me how to break horses and the occasional bone. I have had a little feminist fun in considering their performances of Masculinity, but I haven't forgotten that what they do often requires real courage and determination. Though I have tried here to point to the political hegemony of their role and its potentially bleak consequences, I hope that an understanding of their sub‐culture and its pressures will assist the resolution of some of the conflicts in which they find themselves entangled.
     

PUTTING THE WORLD INTO A BOX: A GEOGRAPHY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY 'TRAVELLING LANDSCAPES'

Materiality, performance and mobility have recently attracted increasing interdisciplinary interest and called for new approaches to landscape. In most cases, however, these remain limited to the first meaning of landscape, as a complex of material/ visual forms in a given geographic area. By contrast, the second meaning of landscape, as a representation on different media, has remained out of such a debate. This article proposes a reconcep‐tualization of landscape representations as travelling objects at once visual and material. It does so through the example of nineteenth‐century panoramas. Part of a broader history of performative representation, these are approached on the one hand as optical devices participating in the construction of a ‘new kind of observer’, and on the other as material objects travelling across space and time, through different cultural contexts and changing accordingly. In their various manifestations, panoramas and other optical devices paralleled and complemented formal geographical education, but they also constituted terminals in the nineteenth‐century geographical web of perception comparable to the TV, the internet or video cell‐phones in our contemporary world.     

Play for Protest,Protest for Play: Artisan and Vendors' Resistance to Displacement in Mexico City

Play, laughter and theatrical forms of activism have been recently documented by scholars interested in the politics and spatiality of resistance. This article focuses on the playful techniques of resistance deployed by street vendors and artisans in Mexico City as a result of the displacement generated by a recently implemented policy popularly called Plazas Limpias (clean plazas). Through a case study Coyoacan, a tourist‐oriented neighbourhood known for its historical richness and aesthetic qualities, I show how street vendors and artisans who were removed from plazas in the area engaged in a number of playful resistance strategies which drew on the symbolic and material importance of place. I argue the street vendors and artisans deployed playful techniques of resistance for two reasons. First, play helped develop emotions that were crucial for the sustainability of the movement. Second, playful strategies of resistance were practiced because of the symbolic importance of Coyoacan as a place of creativity, play, performance, and art.     

Anselm Kiefer: a study of his artistic materials

The style of the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer is highly innovative and unconventional and is characterized by the use of diverse materials that he selects and combines according to the emotions that they stir in him. The conservation and preservation of works by Kiefer are particularly difficult tasks because of the heterogeneity and, in some cases, the incompatibility of the materials used; therefore, a thorough characterization is crucial before any intervention is considered. In this paper, we report the results of an investigation on a fragment from a multimaterial work and on samples from the paintings Bohemia Lies by the Sea and Die Größe Fracht. The large fragment was cut by the artist himself from a work in progress and is considered destitute of any artistic value; therefore, it was possible to sample it extensively. This fragment and the samples from the Die Größe Fracht and Bohemia Lies by the Sea paintings were analyzed by ultraviolet (UV) fluorescence imaging, fiber optic reflectance spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, and pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. This multitechnique approach allowed us to fully characterize and identify pigments, dyes, and organic components that reflect the diversity of the materials typically chosen by the artist. The results are evaluated in the context of the interview that Antonio Rava had with the Anselm Kiefer in 2000.