Flinders Institute for Research in the Humanities Symposia

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    The Adelaide Hills Face Zone as a Cultural Landscape. [abstract].
    ( 2005) Smith, Pamela Alethea ; Piddock, Susan ; Pate, Frank Donald
    Landscape archaeology is a recent approach employed in historical and indigenous archaeology that addresses the interaction of cultural and environmental variables associated with human landscape use (Yamin and Bescherer 1996; David and Lourandos 1999). This theoretical paradigm was derived from earlier systems-based approaches to human landscape use developed in relation to settlement pattern and human ecology studies (Clark 1952; Willey 1953, 1956; Steward 1955). Whereas many earlier approaches to human landscape use emphasised the natural environment as a prime mover, landscape archaeology focuses on the strong interactions between culture (i.e. learned behaviour, norms) and natural environments. In relation to historical archaeology, the cultural “baggage” that colonists bring with them has a major impact on how they view, interpret, and use new territories. After three years of archaeological and historical studies it is argued that Adelaide’s Hills Face Zone is one of the best preserved relict landscapes representing the era of European/English expansion and colonisation during the eighteen and nineteenth centuries.
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    Adopting and adapting: Italian settlement in South Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. [abstract].
    ( 2006) O'Connor, Desmond John
    The biggest influx of Italians to Australia, including South Australia, occurred during the 1950s and 1960s as a result of the Australian government’s post-war immigration programme, which attempted to meet the perceived need to populate Australia and to supply labour for the nation’s expanding industries. In the two decades 1950-1970 over a quarter of a million Italians migrated to Australia, 30,000 of whom (12%) settled in South Australia. This paper considers some social and cultural implications of the settlement of Italians in South Australia during these two decades. Extensive use is made of the life experiences of a number of SA Italians who have been interviewed during the last ten years.
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    "All we see and all we seem..." - Australian Cinema and National Landscape. [abstract].
    ( 2005) Prescott, Nicholas Adrian
    In this paper I will argue that Australian feature filmmakers’ uses and depictions of “the Australian landscape” in their cinema have undergone a striking and important transformation since the 1970s, and that this transformation, while reflecting a developing and modulating sense of Australian cultural identity, has also been crucially linked with changes and developments in the Australian film industry itself, changes which relate to Government investment initiatives, increasingly complex production and co-production strategies, and, more recently, off-shore production by major Hollywood studios.
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    The Australian Memory Project: Postcards from the Edge of South Australia. [abstract].
    ( 2008) Barnett, Tully Sarah ; Cavanagh, Katie Eve ; Douglas, Kate
    This paper will establish the purpose, reasoning, research context, and initial findings of the Australian Memory Project’s “Postcards in South Australia” digital archive and exhibition. Placing our project in the framework of similar “memory” projects, and describing some of the theoretical underpinnings and outcomes of such projects, goes some way towards building a picture of memory work in the Australian context and the place of our project within that broader framework.
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    Authenticity of product: Italian heritage and branding in the Australian wine industry. [abstract].
    ( 2006) King, Sara
    This paper will discuss the use of cultural markers in branding and marketing techniques of Italian Australian winemakers. A survey of these brands carried out by the author found that Italian wine makers in Australia almost invariably refer to their Italian heritage in their marketing material. The use of this reference, and often their immigrant ‘rags to riches’ stories are utilised in an attempt to add authenticity to their product, to make them stand out from the others in an increasingly competitive and overcrowded market. But does it work? What do we think we are buying when we buy an ‘Italian’ product? What cultural associations do we make as Australian consumers? The commodification of culture is an area of study that would be well adapted to Italians in the wine industry in Australia, and is the focus of this paper.
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    Autobiographical Mirrors: Old English elegies as narrative "un-memoirs". [abstract].
    ( 2006) Bennett, Lisa Lynn
    In this paper, Lisa Bennett analyses two Old English elegies - "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer" – and suggests that they are medieval examples of dramatic ‘non-biographies’, or narrative ‘un-memoirs’. While these poems contain elements that are uncannily similar to conventions of autobiography, this paper discusses the notion that such similarities are not necessarily relevant to Anglo-Saxon culture, but instead are potentially revelatory in regards to Australian cultural reading and writing practices.
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    An Autobiography of Everyone? Intentions and Definitions in Doris Lessing’s “Memoirs of a Survivor”. [abstract].
    ( 2006) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    "Memoirs of a Survivor" was first published in 1974, and is the second of what Lessing has described as her “unrealistic stories”. The “real” setting of the novel is an unnamed English city in the near future, when for some unexplained reason civilization is crumbling. The narrator, a single middle-aged woman, is mysteriously put in charge of a young girl, Emily. The wall of her flat occasionally melts to reveal a large house. This is the “impersonal” world; however, shortly after Emily’s arrival, the narrator begins to be subjected, beyond the wall, to a child’s-eye view of an oppressive nursery where “personal” scenes from the childhood of Emily and her baby brother are played out. Meanwhile, in the “real” world, Emily passes with unnatural rapidity through the stages of adolescence, while outside cannibalism and violence become common among the gangs of young people. The narrator and Emily are besieged in the flat until the wall finally reopens and admits them to a new world. "Memoirs" is subtitled, in the early editions, “an attempt at autobiography.” Lessing complains, “curiously, no one noticed it, as if that precision was embarrassing”. This is not strictly true: of a sample of ten contemporary reviews, only half do not mention the autobiographical element.
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    Community and Church: the Italian "problem" in Australia during the inter-war years. [abstract].
    ( 2006) Tolcvay, Monica
    The mass migration of Italians to Anglo-Saxon countries, such as the USA and Australia, caused a great amount of discontent in religious circles, so much so that Italian migrants have been considered a religious “problem”. This paper will examine the Italian “problem” in Australia. It will establish that the “problem” did exist in Australia before the Second World War, a period that has been considered by scholars to be a period of non-activity and has consequently been neglected. Quite often it is believed that, due to small numbers and remote settlement patterns, Italian migrants did not pose a “real challenge” to the Catholic Church in Australia before the Second World War.
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    Constructing the Life of the Medieval Virgin Martyr as Death. [abstract].
    ( 2006) Cadwallader, Robyn
    'Passio' of the virgin martyr were extremely popular in the medieval world, providing a model and inspiration for women. Such Lives are distinguished from the biographies of female saints, which gave detailed accounts of women known to the writer, while virgin martyr Lives were legendary, formed from stories several centuries old, that were often adapted and supplemented according to the circumstances. Some, for example, were written for anchoresses, those committed to a perpetually enclosed life; others were used on saints’ days in church. The result is stories that are highly conventionalised in both structure and imagery, forming a body of literature that reflects attitudes to women and virginity, as well as raising some intriguing and complex questions about the nature of female agency and spirituality. In this paper, Dr Cadwallader firstly explores the highly conventional nature of the stories through a range of medieval passio to establish the qualities of the virgin martyr and the basic elements of her story. This study of the conventions of the virgin martyr Life establishes the base for the discussion which forms the second part of the paper, in which several major issues emerge.
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    Cultural landscapes of a tourism destination: South Australia's Barossa Valley. [abstract].
    ( 2005) Leader-Elliott, Lynette Frances
    Alternative ways in which the cultural landscape of South Australia’s Barossa Valley is represented are examined briefly to demonstrate the difference in cultural landscape representations in recent tourism marketing print materials of the region, and in a large-scale textile artwork completed by a group of thirty nine Barossa women in 1999. The paper will compare cultural landscape elements included in this piece of community art work with the types of images included in recent tourism promotional material for the Barossa region.
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    Cyber-Commemoration: Life Writing, Trauma and Memorialisation. [abstract].
    ( 2006) Douglas, Kate
    In this paper, Kate Douglas explores one of the ways in which life narratives of trauma are circulating in contemporary Australian cultural landscapes: through the internet. Using the example of the Bali bombings, Dr Douglas wants to consider the role internet media have played in traumatic remembering and commemoration. Like many (actual) commemorative sites, these websites foreground life narratives in their representation of the traumatic event: testimonies from first- and second-person witnesses, photographs, poems and letters that assume significance beyond the individual. These narratives function as metonyms for survivors’ experiences.
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    Dir Sir, Honourable Sir and the Karnana letter. [abstract].
    ( 2008) Allen, Margaret
    This paper will consider a series of letters from former residents who had been denied re-entry to Australia in the first years of the policy and who subsequently sought to claim re-entry. Many of these men were illiterate in English and sometimes in their own languages. Their letters show them seeking to legitimate their claims by develop semi-official letter forms – which I term ‘the Karnana letter’.
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    Emotion communication and language socialisation. [abstract].
    ( 2006) Mrowa-Hopkins, Colette Marie ; Strambi, Antonella
    In this paper, we wish to discuss ways in which cross-cultural pragmatics research can contribute to a language socialisation perspective in second language teaching and learning. We provide some background to our research project on the study of self-disclosure and negative emotion communication among three cultural groups, drawing on data collected in Anglo-Australian, French and Italian films. Our project involved the elaboration of a model of the cultural script of anger display in interactions involving male friends, and the observation and analysis of non-verbal responses based on a small corpus.
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    Endogamy and exogamy among post-war Calabria-born women in South Australia. [abstract].
    ( 2006) Ciccone, Giulia
    This paper analyses the results of Giulia Ciccone's study of single Calabria-born women who married after their arrival in South Australia. In order to look at their marriage patterns Ciccone sifted through the marriage registers of four Catholic Parishes in Adelaide covering the period 1961 to 2005 and identified all the marriages in which there was a Calabria-born bride. The parishes of Newton, Salisbury, Seaton and Virginia were chosen for study as they are located in areas where there is a high proportion of Italians. These parishes are frequented by a large number of Italy-born people. By examining the bride’s choice of spouse it was possible to determine whether these Calabria-born brides married endogamously or exogamously and, when the latter, the spouse’s place of origin. Marriages were classified as endogamous when the Calabria-born bride married a man born in either Calabria or in another region of Italy or when she married a man of Italian origin. Marriages were considered exogamous when the Calabria-born bride chose a spouse who was not born in Italy and was not of Italian origin.
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    Epistles to Emails: Letters, self-construction and the virtual age. [abstract].
    ( 2008) Haggis, Jane ; Holmes, Mary
    This paper explores the shift away from letters and towards email and mobile phone messaging as forms of communication. To assist, two different sources are examined. The first is letters of offer that some young Victorian women wrote presenting their credentials to missionary societies. The second source is interviews with contemporary couples in distance relationships, where the couples discuss their use of email and texting.
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    The epistolary economy: exchange and anti/ reciprocity in letters, correspondences & postcards. [abstract].
    ( 2008) Stanley, Liz
    In this keynote address, Professor Liz Stanley sketches out some ideas about how to theorise and use the heuristic of ‘the epistolarium’. She shall explore how, in what ways, and also with what limitations, thinking about the epistolarity in terms of economy and exchange and Mauss’s conceptualisation of ‘the system of the gift’ can throw useful light on different aspects of the epistolary form and its changes across time and also its sub-forms.
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    Foreign Language reading as cultural problem-solving: The intercultural stance of the reader. [abstract].
    ( 2006) Bouvet, Eric James
    The purpose of this project is to continue my investigation of the Foreign Language (FL) reader’s problem-solving behaviour. Having examined the conditions of implementation of reading strategies associated with lexical and syntactical difficulties, I now propose to study how Anglo-Australian university language students deal with unfamiliar cultural events featured in written texts in French. The main objective of the project I propose to undertake in the context of Language and Intercultural Communication research is therefore to gain an understanding of the nature of the strategies implemented by FL readers to identify and attempt to overcome cultural unfamiliarity featured in written texts. A corollary objective is to observe how FL linguistic proficiency may influence the perception and apprehension of cultural difficulties.
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    The Irish in South Australia: names and naming. [abstract].
    ( 2006) Lonergan, Dymphna
    In celebrating its centennial in an Irish way, despite having little Irish background, The Dublin Progress Association chose to exploit what Pierre Bourdieu would call the ‘economic’, ‘cultural’ and ‘social capital’ associated with the name of their town. We can see that an ‘Irish’ place name in South Australia can have meaning and value that extends beyond its role as a geographic indicator and an historic reminder. Recognition of the economic, cultural, and social value of place names reveals new insights and possibilities. This paper explores Bourdieu’s concepts through the naming of, in the main, Irish related places in South Australia.
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    Italo Calvino: Attentive Observer of Life, Experienced or Imagined. [abstract].
    ( 2006) Baker, Margaret Anne
    The Italian writer Italo Calvino, who died in September 1985, is remembered as a fabulist and essayist. His writing spans a range that reflects the diversity of his cultural interests but shows a basic consistency of narrative purpose, as outlined in his essays and responses to his cultural environment. The intellectual curiosity that marked Calvino’s writing from his beginnings in the immediate postwar period of neorealism led him to many areas, the recent political situation as well as fantasy that at surface level seemed disengaged. Even though remaining a fabulist, his approach to his material gradually became concentrated on that close observation of the surrounding reality that we find in his last writing (Eng. titles: "Mr Palomar" of 1983, and "Under the Jaguar Sun", 1986). By making reference to this typical Calvinian mixture of insistence on the observable reality and on the writer’s, and readers’, freedom to float with the imagination, this paper points to the layers of reflection that the author brings to one of the traditional tropes used in his writing.
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    Judith Wright and Barbara Blackman – correspondence 1950-1970. [abstract].
    ( 2008) Sheridan, Susan Margaret
    In 2007 a volume of letters, "Portrait of a Friendship", was published, encompassing many of the letters exchanged between these two writers over the period 1950 to 2000 (the year of Wright’s death). I would like to examine this volume as a correspondence, at least over the period 1950-1970, when both women were bringing up a family as well as pursuing their own ambitions, both as writers and as activists.