Flinders Institute for Research in the Humanities Symposia

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Browsing Flinders Institute for Research in the Humanities Symposia by Author "Hosking, Rick"
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    "A projection part of the main": an Elliston palimpsest. [abstract].
    ( 2005) Hosking, Rick
    This paper considers a number of ways of reading a particular cultural land/seascape at Elliston, on South Australia’s west coast. At first glance it may surprise some to hear a clifftop with a clearly defined track described as cultural, because cultural landscapes are usually regarded as places that live in the imaginations of a community, as repositories of shared notions about cultural value. They are usually both sites and sights. Cultural landscapes are usually domesticated in some way, reconstructed by human intervention over considerable periods of time as a consequence of complex human landuse and lived practices, and often representing an agrarian or pastoral ideal that summons up ideas of a golden age. Such landscapes usually reveal evidence of human intervention shaped not only by cultural practice but also by aesthetic judgment, and are often designed to maintain a way of life by conserving specific features of that landscape. How can a cliff in a littoral zone, a ‘projecting part of the main’, reveal evidence of human intervention, where any evidence of occupation is hard to find?
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    "Written extempore" William Anderson Cawthorne's "Literarium Diarium", A Colonial Diary. [abstract].
    ( 2006) Hosking, Rick
    The Adelaide schoolteacher William Anderson Cawthorne began writing his "Literarium Diarium" 22 October 1842, keeping the diary going until the 1860s. It survives in a number of battered volumes in the Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales; one of Cawthorne’s daughters left her father’s papers to the library in the 1920s. The "Literarium Diarium" is a remarkable — if sometimes self indulgent — informal record of life in and around colonial Adelaide in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, in both word and image, in that Cawthorne was not only a writer but also a watercolourist, and many of the pages are illustrated. Its perspective is that of the 'littérateur', of the weekend amateur ethnographer; the diary has been recognised as one of the best records of everyday contact between the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains and the colonists that we have. While the diary is of considerable importance for its representation of the day-to-day minutiae of Adelaide life in the 1840s and 1850s, it is also remarkably revealing of the private thoughts and feelings of a young man on the fringes of lower middle class society in Adelaide.