Spectral Histories and Material Legacies

Abstract

This issue of the Journal of Australian Studies takes us across times, places, knowledges and identities, from Australia’s atomic history to the carceral world of Manus Island, to the profound relationality within Indigenous epistemology, and diverse experiences of cultural marginality and remaking in Australia. Bronwyn Lee’s “Mature Heterosexuality: Catholic Women Religious’ Celibacy in Australia’s Liberation Decades” foregrounds how Catholic women religious understood their sexual identity in a departure from normative framings of celibacy. These women saw themselves as living out a “mature heterosexuality” that was negotiated in relation to the social and institutional changes of the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on a significant oral history archive, Lee offers insight into how these women identified as “ordinary” women through their selfdefined sexuality in the context of the so-called liberation decades, in contrast to how celibacy is frequently positioned as outside of mainstream experience. Moving on to questions of Sino-Australian cultural production, Josh Stenberg’s “ChineseAustralian Culture in a Sinophone History and Geography” considers the dynamic transnationalism of Chinese-culture language through a lens of belonging and identity in Australia. Through a discussion of three textual genres—Chinese-language theatre, Federation-era fiction and 1990s foreign student literature—Stenberg argues that Australia can be understood within a long history of Sinophone cultural networks and that Chinese cultural production is entangled in the ongoing emergence of contemporary Australia. The history of the Scandinavian-Australian newspaper Norden is the subject of Mark Emmerson’s “A Readership of Convenience: Macro-national Cooperation within the Scandinavian-Australian Newspaper”. This expatriate newspaper, which ran between 1896 and 1940, offered a mode of connectivity for migrant Scandinavians across Australasia and back to their homelands. Emmerson argues that this media generated a pan-Scandinavianism that evoked Romantic-era commitments to cultural cohesion and collective care, drawing fragmented and often isolated Danish, Swedish and Norwegian immigrant communities into a unified readership that performed a mode of “macro-national cooperation”. Moving to the later part of the 20th century, Cameron Coventry’s “Sedimentary Layers: Bob Hawke, his World Record and Ocker Chic” focuses on this iconic Australian prime minister and his cultural production: a figure of middle-class masculinity that deployed powerful components of working-class mythology, notably the “larrikin” and the “ocker”. Coventry traces the rise of “ocker chic” from Hawke through subsequent political leaders of the 1980s, the 1990s and beyond, making the case that its mobilisation of particular signifiers of class, race and gender has continued to entrench neoliberal capitalism and the political and social power of a narrow demographic. John Hayward’s “The Hoyleton Institute Stage Door Inscriptions and the Ghosts of Forgotten Travelling Performers” provides an archaeologist’s reflection on forgotten cultural and historical artefacts. Since the early 1920s, performing artists who visited the Hoyleton Institute Hall in the Mid North of South Australia inscribed their names on the inside of the stage doors as a memento of their visit. Towards the end of the 20th century, the old railway town of Hoyleton and its century-old institute became victims of change,