Journal articles: 'Land use – Texas – Wise County' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

Abstract The northern bobwhite Colinus virginianus has experienced range-wide declines over the past several decades, primarily due to habitat loss and habitat fragmentation. As northern bobwhite populations continue to decline, there is a need for studies that address the impact of habitat changes on population persistence at multiple spatial scales. Our goal was to assess changes in habitat and land use related to northern bobwhite declines across multiple spatial scales in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. We determined northern bobwhite trends for 1972–2012 using Breeding Bird Survey data. At the regional scale, we compared northern bobwhite population trends with road density (2000, 2012), human population (1970–2010), and land use (1974–2012). At the county and local scales, we compared class-level landscape metrics between counties with stable and declining northern bobwhite abundances using Student's t-tests. Northern bobwhite populations decreased from 45.95 ± 1.01 birds/route in 1970 to 11.55 ± 0.64 birds/route in 2012. Road density and human population increased by 3,331.32 ± 66.28 m/km2 and 42,873 ± 8,687 people/county, respectively. Percent pasture and rangeland was relatively stable, as was percent woodland. Alternatively, the percentage of other land (houses, roads, wasteland) increased. At the county scale, Texas and Oklahoma counties with declining northern bobwhite populations had higher road densities, larger patches of pasture, smaller patches of woodland, and larger patches of cropland compared with stable populations. At the local scale, Texas and Oklahoma counties with declining northern bobwhite populations had less woody cover in smaller patches, and fewer but larger patches of herbaceous and bare ground, compared with populations with stable abundance. Therefore, managers can provide woody cover and reduce cropland effects at the local scale to support stable quail populations; however, the large-scale drivers of northern bobwhite decline, which are human population growth and resulting habitat loss, will be an important aspect of northern bobwhite conservation and management in the future.

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The loss of green spaces in urbanized areas has triggered a potential thermal risk in the urban environment. While the existing literature has investigated the direct relationship between urban temperatures and health risks, little is known about causal relationships among key components of urban sustainability and health risks, through a pathway involving urban temperature. This study examined the multiple connections between urbanized land use, urban greenery, urban temperatures and health risks in Harris County, Texas. The census tract-level health data from the 500 Cities Project (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is used for analysis. Structural equation model analyses showed that the urban temperature played a mediating role in associations between urbanized land use, urban greenery and health risk. Urban vegetation is associated with a decrease in health risks, while urban land use has associations with an increase in health risks. Findings suggest that proactive policies tailored to provide rich urban greenery in a neighborhood can alleviate urban land use effects on health risks.

Abstract:

Surveys conducted during three years (2014-2017) provide the most extensive documentation to date for the possible presence of the Texas kangaroo rat (Dipodomys elator), a Tier II species considered to be of greatest conservation need, in seven counties in southwestern Oklahoma. The project encompassed 15 surveys on 93 nights; 266 localities were surveyed for a total of 9,094 trap nights and more than 32,428 km of paved and unpaved roads were surveyed for potential habitat and activity. No Texas kangaroo rats were captured or observed. However, 2,178 individuals of 17 mammal species were captured and individuals of 12 additional mammal species were collected and/or observed. New locality and natural history information for mammal species was obtained and six county records were recorded based on specimens and/or observations. Project results and historical information suggest that the Texas kangaroo rat (D. elator) is likely extirpated from the state of Oklahoma.

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This paper introduces port authority transportation reinvestment zones (TRZs), a funding tool created by the Texas Legislature to help fund long-term economic development port projects. TRZs were first introduced in Texas in 2007 as a tool to allow county and municipal governments to raise funds to help pay for transportation improvements using the property tax mechanism. Since then, the legislation has been amended to include other transportation modes, such as transit, rail, and parking facilities. Amendments passed in 2013 introduced the concept of port authority TRZ, which expanded authorized use of the tool to the state’s port authorities and navigation districts. Most of the existing funding tools available to Texas ports focus on the development of infrastructure within port property. Port authority TRZs complement existing funding sources by providing a funding tool flexible enough to fund port projects both inside and outside port property. Port authorities can take advantage of the TRZ concept to join forces with neighboring local governments and the Texas Department of Transportation to fund landside transportation enhancements that improve port accessibility and the regional economy. Currently, there are four active port authority TRZs in the following locations: Port of Beaumont, Port of Port Arthur, Port of Brownsville, and Sabine-Neches Navigation District. This paper summarizes the legal framework of port authority TRZs, describes the role that these TRZs play in port funding and finance, and presents highlights of the port authority TRZs that have already been established throughout the state.

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Introduction: The past decade in the United States has been marked by an unprecedented expansion of unconventional oil and gas drilling, including hydraulic fracturing (i.e., fracking). Concerns have arisen regarding potential health and environmental risks associated with the use of the fracking process. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine community perceptions, concerns, and knowledge of environmental health issues related to fracking in three Texas counties near one of the most active shale plays in South Texas, the Eagle Ford Shale.Methods: A convenience sample of 153 adults over the age of 18 years in three rural South Texas counties completed a 46-question survey. Demographic information, perceptions of environmental health risks, and knowledge of potential environmental health effects related to fracking were obtained. A validated health literacy measure was also used to assess participants’ health literacy.Results: Participants were predominantly female (61%), white (75%), and Hispanic (62%). A majority owned land (53.6%) and had lived in their respective county for over 21 years (54%). Only 32% percent of participants had marginal or inadequate health literacy though a larger percentage of participants had limited knowledge of potential environmental health risks related to fracking.Conclusions: Approximately one third of participants had less than adequate health literacy as measured by the BRIEF. A high percentage of the population demonstrated limited knowledge regarding the potential environmental health impacts of fracking, suggesting limited environmental health literacy. Findings point to the need for environmental health specific assessments and focused environmental health promotion strategies.

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Woody plant encroachment in North American rangelands has led to calls for greater use of prescribed fire to reduce fuel loads and restore grazing productivity and grassland biodiversity. However, the use of prescribed fire during periods when woody plant mortality is maximized has often been limited by temporary restrictions on outdoor burning enacted by regional or local governmental entities. This study reports the results of a survey assessing the familiarity with and attitudes toward prescribed fire in Texas and Oklahoma, USA, of officials tasked with implementing restrictions on outdoor burning and how these attitudes influence their decisions. Most responding officials considered prescribed fire to be a safe and beneficial land management tool that should be used more frequently. Self-reported familiarity with prescribed fire was the most significant explanatory variable for this attitude. Further, familiarity with prescribed fire was influenced by respondent participation in or being invited to participate in a prescribed fire. Such invitations came mostly from private landowners. Landowners wishing to use prescribed fire may benefit from building trust with local officials by demonstrating they are qualified to conduct such fires safely. This could help reduce the frequency of burn restrictions and may increase the likelihood that officials will grant burn ban exemptions to qualified burn managers. Additionally, because officials’ primary sources of prescribed fire information were reported to be local fire departments and emergency services, educating those entities about the benefits of prescribed fire for reducing wildfire risks could help reduce pressure on officials to enact or maintain burning restrictions. These findings highlight opportunities for reducing the frequency of burning restrictions, increasing opportunities for land managers to effectively halt or reverse woody plant encroachment.

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The United States has a geographically mature and stable land use and land cover system including land used as irrigated cropland; however, changes in irrigation land use frequently occur related to various drivers. We applied a consistent methodology at a 250 m spatial resolution across the lower 48 states to map and estimate irrigation dynamics for four map eras (2002, 2007, 2012, and 2017) and over four 5-year mapping intervals. The resulting geospatial maps (called the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Irrigated Agriculture Dataset or MIrAD-US) involved inputs from county-level irrigated statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, agricultural land cover from the U.S. Geological Survey National Land Cover Database, and an annual peak vegetation index derived from expedited MODIS satellite imagery. This study investigated regional and periodic patterns in the amount of change in irrigated agriculture and linked gains and losses to proximal causes and consequences. While there was a 7% overall increase in irrigated area from 2002 to 2017, we found surprising variability by region and by 5-year map interval. Irrigation land use dynamics affect the environment, water use, and crop yields. Regionally, we found that the watersheds with the largest irrigation gains (based on percent of area) included the Missouri, Upper Mississippi, and Lower Mississippi watersheds. Conversely, the California and the Texas–Gulf watersheds experienced fairly consistent irrigation losses during these mapping intervals. Various drivers for irrigation dynamics included regional climate fluctuations and drought events, demand for certain crops, government land or water policies, and economic incentives like crop pricing and land values. The MIrAD-US (Version 4) was assessed for accuracy using a variety of existing regionally based reference data. Accuracy ranged between 70% and 95%, depending on the region.

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Mobile homes provide the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the United States. However, in mobile home parks residents live at risk of eviction because they rent the land on which their homes are located. This study formulates a methodology to examine the residential turnover and displacement that result from the closure of these parks. I investigate the spatial distribution of closing mobile home parks through ArcGIS modeling of land–use data for all 1.2 million parcels in the case study region of Houston/Harris County, Texas, from 2002 to 2011. Findings demonstrate that the spatial distribution of closing mobile home parks is clustered along Houston's expanding city limit in areas where affordable housing development is taking place. Beyond providing spatial documentation of the process through which this important source of affordable housing is lost, this study highlights how low–income housing pressures and urban redevelopment intersect to shape affordable housing in contemporary metropolitan areas.

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ABSTRACT On 7 January 1992, rupture of an underground oil transfer pipeline spilled 2,950 barrels of South Texas light crude oil (API gravity 37) into a high salt-marsh environment along Chiltipin Creek near Bayside, San Patricio County, Texas. The designated state On-Scene Coordinator, the Texas General Land Office (TGLO), after coordination with other resource agencies, authorized in situ burning as the primary cleanup technique. Plant frequencies, plant biomass, and hydrocarbon levels in impacted and control areas were monitored between October 1992 and January 1998. Despite severe initial damage, most of the impacted area was revegetated within the first two growing seasons. However, significant differences in vegetation patterns between the two areas continued to exist in January 1998. Linear regression of plant frequency data gives a predicted recovery in the year 2007 (14–15 years post-burn). Plant biomass in the impacted area approximated levels in the control area after only 2 years. Hydrocarbon concentrations in the impacted area remained high after 3 years, but a strong correlation to vegetation patterns over time was not apparent. Results of this study supports the hypothesis that use of in situ burning as a response tool has distinct advantages over other countermeasures.

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Abstract A standardized remote sensing methodology was evaluated for its use in quantifying the forested resources of the state of Texas in a timely and cost-effective manner. Landsat data from 2002 were used to create a land cover base map encompassing a four-county study area in East Texas. Site-specific and non-site-specific accuracy assessments of the classified map indicate that overall the 2002 base map accuracy of 72.78% was within acceptable remote sensing standards for Landsat data and that forest cover types derived from 2002, 1987, and 1980 Landsat data were within 4.4, 0.5, and 7.4% agreement with Forest Inventory and Analysis Program data collected in 1988, 1988, and 1980 respectively. A classified image representing five age class distributions for all forest cover types, derived through a Boolean manipulation of forest cover type maps from 2002, 1997, 1992, 1987, 1984, 1980, and 1974, indicates that overall map accuracy for age class distributions based on 30-m Landsat data from 1974 through 2002 was 58.69%. Overall, results indicate that remote sensing in conjunction with ground truthing can accurately quantify forest composition and age distributions using standardized and readily available data.

Abstract:

The forests of Costa Rica are rich in a wide variety of pollinator types and a very diverse flora that supports them. Our research group from the University of California, Berkeley and Texas A & M University, College Station has been researching the ecology of one pollinator group, the bees, in the northwest Guanacaste dry forest region since 1969. Much natural forest existed in this area when we first began the work. But, many land use changes have occurred over the years to present day to the point that it is difficult to find tracts of undisturbed forest suitable for field research, especially those not affected by wildfires, which are now common. Further, urban areas in the region continue to grow with increasing numbers of people populating the region. In this paper we provide an overview of our past bee-flower work for a historical perspective, and then weave in people that have now become an obvious ecological component of current bee-flower relationships. We also explore new questions that have become relevant through time, especially those related to researchers and potential conservation opportunities to share their stories with audiences that may extend their knowledge for practical use. Finally, we propose that researchers plan to devote some of their precious time establishing relationships with people in conserving what is left of bee-flower relationships in urban environments in Guanacaste and beyond in the country. Avenues for extending this knowledge are explored in this paper.

Abstract:

As cities continue to grow, their urban form continues to evolve. As a consequence of urban growth, the demand for infrastructure increases to meet the needs of a growing population. Understanding this evolution and its subsequent impingement on resources allows for planners, engineers, and decision-makers to plan for a sustainable community. Patterns and rate of urban expansion have been studied extensively in various cities throughout the United States (U.S.), utilizing remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS). However, minimal research has been conducted to understand urban growth rates and patterns for cities that possess borders, geological attributes, and/or protected areas that confine and direct the cities’ urban growth, such as El Paso, Texas. This study utilizes El Paso, Texas, as a case study to provide a basis for examining growth patterns and their possible impact on the electricity consumption resource, which lies on the U.S./Mexico and New Mexico borders, contains the largest urban park in the nation (Franklin Mountains State Park), and Ft. Bliss military base. This study conducted a change analysis for El Paso County to analyze specific areas of concentrated growth within the past 15-years (2001–2016). The results indicate that county growth has primarily occurred within the city of El Paso, in particular, Districts 5 (east side), 1 (west side), and 4 (northeast), with District 5 experiencing substantial growth. As the districts expanded, fragmentation and shape irregularity of developed areas decreased. Utilizing past growth trends, the counties’ 2031 land-use was predicted employing the Cellular Automata (CA)-Markov method. The counties’ projected growth was evenly distributed within El Paso city and outside city limits. Future growth within the city continues to be directed within the same districts that experienced past growth, Districts 1, 4, and 5. Whereas projected growth occurring outside the city limits, primarily focused within potential city annexation areas in accordance with the cities’ comprehensive plan, Plan El Paso. Panel data analysis was performed to investigate the relationship between urban dynamic growth patterns and electricity consumption. The findings suggest that, as urban areas expanded and fragmentation decreased, electricity consumption increased. Further investigation to include an expansion of urban pattern metrics, an extension of the time period studied, and their influence on electricity consumption is recommended. The results of this study provided a basis for decision-makers and planners with an understanding of El Paso’s concentrated areas of past and projected urban growth patterns and their influence on electricity consumption to mitigate possible fragmentation growth through informed decisions and policies to provide a sustainable environment for the community.

Abstract:

Summary The north Texas Barnett shale illustrates the successful commercialization of an unconventional reservoir. However, it took 17 years to evolve from pumping crosslinked gel (XLG) carrying more than 1 million lbm of proppant per job to sand waterfracs (SWFs) consisting of large volumes of water with friction reducer and small quantities of sand. This transition to SWF stimulation opened the door for widespread development that has advanced the Newark East (Barnett shale) to the largest producing gas field in Texas. This paper investigates Barnett completion strategy from 1993 to 2002. The 393-well data set includes completion, reservoir, and production data. Unique data-evaluation tools and techniques were used to investigate various completion and reservoir parameters to determine their effects on production (Shelley and Stephenson 2000; Zangl and Hannerer 2003). We found that production results show a broad scattering when crossplotted with various completion and reservoir inputs. This result is not uncommon when analyzing field data. However, general trends were identified through comparisons of large numbers of wells. These trends were confirmed through the use of more-advanced data-mining techniques, which included self-organizing mapping (SOM) of data. The results show that SWF-type stimulation of the Barnett outperformed to varying degrees XLG treatments for the five reservoir types used in this evaluation. Geology The Barnett is a Mississippian marine shelf deposit. The Barnett shale ranges in thickness from 200 ft in the southwest region to 1,000 ft in the northeast near the Munster arch. The formation is described as a black, organic-rich (total organic content 4.5%) shale composed of fine-grained, nonsiliciclastic rocks with extremely low permeability (0.00007 to 0.005 md). The organic matter in the shale was first reported to contain 60 scf/ton but could be as high as 200 scf/ton (Montgomery et al. 2005). The Barnett is described as a "spent oil-prone source rock with porosity and permeability developed with thermal transformation of its organic matter from liquid to gas with resulting maturation-induced microfractures" (Jarvie et al. 2004). While the Barnett is classified as shale, it is complex and not hom*ogeneous. In the core area (Denton and Wise counties), the Barnett is composed of two producing intervals notated as the upper and lower Barnett. These intervals are separated by the Forestburg lime, which varies in thickness from 20 ft to more than 150 ft. When production from the lower and upper Barnett is commingled, the lower Barnett contribution is 75-80% of the total. This value has been verified from production logs and from measuring production when isolating the intervals and producing them individually. The lower boundary (Viola/Simpson) pinches out west of the core area. The Ellenberger is a known water source, so stimulation of the lower Barnett without the Viola/Simpson can lead to high water production. Another potential for water production is the Viola, which in some areas has high water-production potential. Historical Completion Practices The first stimulation completion of the Barnett used nitrogen gas as the injection fluid. In early Barnett development, a concern about the high clay content in the shale led to precautions when using water-based fluids. An average mineral analysis from samples collected in Wise County, Texas, is given in Table 1. Early completion fluids tended to be foamed or gas-assisted. Our data set begins approximately 4 years before the first SWF was attempted. Reasons for this transition were predominately driven by economics. SWFs provided the operator with a substantial savings in stimulation costs; however, the ability to place high concentrations of proppant was eliminated. SWF began in 1997-98, and the assumption was that the Barnett would respond to a sand concentration of less than a monolayer and yield commercial production (Grieser et al. 2003). The lower Barnett was the only interval completed during the early development of the Barnett field using XLG-type treatments. The upper Barnett interval was added to the completion when the SWF era began. The addition of upper and lower net pay in the wells treated with SWF is the reason for the extra thickness. The cost savings that were realized with the evolution to the SWF enabled the additional expenditure for completing the upper Barnett. Stimulation treatment averages and production outcome are given in Table 2 for XLG fracs and SWF.

Abstract:

In our study we are concerned with the issue of the judicial organization and trial procedure, as well as the relation between common law and written law in Moldavia during the second half of the 18th century especially during the last quarter. During this period the legal system continued to be renewed in terms of criminal preoccupations. Both the princes of Moldavia and of Walachia focused on the reformation of justice. The fact that the princes succeeded each other on the throne in the Phanariot 18th century meant, from this standpoint, a great advantage, as different measures regarding the judicial organization and the procedure were promoted, by means of acts with similar content in Iași and in Bucharest. In this context, the prince preserves the prerogative of supreme judge of the country, as well as his place in relation to the boyars-judges. The preservation of legal attributions by the prince in his capacity of supreme instance is underlined in the new form of judicial organisation by the issuing of the definitive sentence, after having read the report including the boyars-judges’ proposition to punish the perpetrators. The motivation of the penalty also invoked extenuating or aggravating circ*mstance, which diminished or, on the contrary, increased the content of the penalty. The legal documents in Moldavia, dating from the second half of the 18th century, prove the presence of the Byzantine pravila in the legal theory and practice of that time. The Pravila [Law] meant therefore, as we could see in the contemporaries’ testimonies, the Byzantine written law, law guides made according to the Vasilika or the “Imperial law”, those legal texts in 60 volumes made in the 9th century at the demand of Leo VI (also called the Wise, 886-912), which represented an adaptation in Greek of the Roman Law, codified under the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (527-565). The foreign travellers in late 18th century Moldavia remind of the use of the Law of Harmenopoulos in trying criminal issues. Constantine Harmenopoulos was a judge in Thessaloniki, and his work’s title was Hexabiblos, in accordance with the six books it consisted of. This was made in 1345, summarising the Byzantine legislation included in the Vasilika and in the normative acts that had modified them by then, under the form of a guide. It was estimated that this work, and another legal guide, a nomocanon translated in Slavonic and used in the Romanian area starting with the 14th century, i.e. the Syntagma of Matthew Blastares of 1335, were created to replace the Vasilika, as they were “more concise and briefer for the needs of the trying courts”. It was considered that the Byzantine legal literature was very present in the judicial practice during the Phanariot rules, including in the form of those Vasilika (Fabrotus edition of 1647), as well as in other significant laws. But other such collections of nomocanons circulated in Moldavia as well. Particularly far-spread was Vaktiria ton Archiereôn (Bishop’s Staff), a work written by the monk Jacob of Ioannina, at the request of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Parthenius, and printed in 1645. It is also worth mentioning that – in the documentary sources preserved and researched thus far – the impact of sources where the Byzantine law texts constituted the legal grounds concerns mainly civil cases and, to a lesser extent, criminal cases. Border-related litigations – due to violating the protimisis right or to conflicts regarding the inheritance of lands or wealth in general – were solved in courts by consulting the Byzantine juridical standards. Most of the times, it is generically called the “holy code of law”. Hence, trial by “law code” became a reality from the second half of the 18th century, as proven by the documentary sources made available thus far.

Abstract:

<p>Rendering of foreign proper nouns as spelling of proper nouns of any language in a different language according to grammatical system and spelling rules of that language is an issue, which one has to deal with, when referring to foreign geographic objects in various publications. Theoretical approaches and their practical implementation differs in each country. In Lithuania there is a rule that foreign proper nouns in fiction, popular publications and publications addressed to children have to be spelled according to the pronunciation, but in other texts, such as scientific literature, advertising, information and special text in the language of origin. It must be said though, that these requirements are not always precisely met in practice, so there is a large variety of foreign proper names. This often leads to frustration and occasionally in the community rather sharp debate is breaking out on these issues. While the view on rendering of the Latvian language proper names in Lithuania is different: they are written in Lithuanian according to pronunciation resp. Lithuanized. However, difficulties arise in practice, when theoretical approaches have to be implemented. In addition, it should be stated that original spelling of proper names is increasingly encountered.</p><p>Article addresses Lithuanian use of place-names for one of the Latvian regions – Latgale. Purpose of the study – to find out what are trends in use of the Latgale place-names. Analysis is performed, what place names of Balvi, Daugavpils, Krāslava, Ludza, Preiļi and Rēzekne are included in editions of bilingual dictionaries: Latvian-Lithuanian, 1977 and 2003, and Lithuanian-Latvian, 1964 and 1995, and how these have to be used in travel guides and newsletters about the region, as well as in the Lithuanian press. Mainly newspapers in Siauliai district and city, some republican newspapers and magazines, as well as tourist guides are analyzed. From these editions attempts have been made to get as much as different information as possible resp. not taking into account the frequency of use of the place-names. The research was carried out by the descriptive and item methods, but data from dictionaries are not computed.</p><p>Latvian place-names usually are reproduced in Lithuanian in two ways: 1) those Lithuanian forms are given, which are used by local Lithuanians and 2) transcribed Latvian forms – when there are no Lithuanian forms or if they are not sufficiently tested, are infrequent. One part of the Lithuanized names are those known and used by the majority of Lithuanians, for example, Daugpilis (in Latvian Daugavpils). Unlike other Latvian place names, there are more names in Latgale that have to be used in Lithuanized forms because of its historical development path, which has been different from the rest of Latvia. This can be explained by the historically developed community with Lithuania, therefore also in their rendering traditional forms are common, an opportunity exists to select from several parallel forms.</p><p>Analysis of materials of the Latvian-Lithuanian and the Lithuanian-Latvian dictionaries are indicative of names from various semantic groups of Latgale place-names – towns and settlements, rivers and lakes and mountains - included in all four dictionaries. But apparently the size of section of the names of geographical objects has been of considerable significance. In Latvian-Lithuanian dictionaries these parts are larger, therefore there are more Latvian place- names in them: respectively, 562 Latvian place-names and 98 are from Latgale (LLKŽ 1977) and 231, of which 41 are from Latgale (LLKŽ 2003). A factor of no less importance, which could affect the number of place-names – language for translation wherefrom the dictionary is intended resp. there are more Latvian place-names is dictionary to translate from Latvian. While in the Lithuanian-Latvian dictionary in total there are 39 Latvian place-names, and only 4 from Latgale (LLV 1964), but in the latest edition 98 Latvian and 24 of them are place-names from Latgale (LLV 1995). It is also noted that this dictionary is not always exactly pointing to the object designated by the specific place-name - sometimes restricted to a single indication.</p><p>Name of the region in Lithuanian may be reproduced in two ways, but more popular is the traditional form of Latgala. Only in certain press publications form Latgalė is found, but in the symbolic names Latvian form Latgale is used.</p><p>Names of Latgale towns and settlements are recorded in dictionaries both in traditional and reproduced forms (often referred to more than one), but their practical use still tends to be inaccurate, since obviously theoretical approaches are insufficiently taken into consideration, as well as dictionaries are used. In the press we have to come into contact with declension problem of incorrectly reproduced (or even non-Lithuanized) place-names, as well as incorrect rendering of individual letters. There are comparatively many distortions of place-names in travel guides.</p><p>There are very few semantic groups of the river and lake names in the place-name dictionaries (only in the 1977 Latvian-Lithuanian dictionary there were 35 of them). While in the press and travel guides their numbers are much higher, especially wide spectrum is for the names of lakes (apparently attempts are made to show that Latgale is really the land of lakes).</p><p>Mountain names, although there are not many of them, are reproduced in a particularly creative way: both translation and original form reproduced side by side. Various forms of the same name are found, but not all of them meet the theoretical rendering rules. It could also be affected by the existence of versions in Latvian.</p>

Abstract:

1. Introduction This Special Issue (Part 2) expands upon the theme “Building Local Capacity for Long-term Disaster Resilience” presented in Special Issue Part 1 (JDR Volume 5, Number 2, April 2010) by examining the evolving concept of disaster resilience and providing additional reflections upon various aspects of its meaning. Part 1 provided a mixed set of examples of resiliency efforts, ranging from administrative challenges of integrating resilience into recovery to the analysis of hazard mitigation plans directed toward guiding local capability for developing resiliency. Resilience was broadly defined in the opening editorial of Special Issue Part 1 as “the capacity of a community to: 1) survive a major disaster, 2) retain essential structure and functions, and 3) adapt to post-disaster opportunities for transforming community structure and functions to meet new challenges.” In this editorial essay we first explore in Section 2 the history of resilience and then locate it within current academic and policy debates. Section 3 presents summaries of the papers in this issue. 2. Why is Resilience a Contemporary Theme? There is growing scholarly and policy interest in disaster resilience. In recent years, engineers [1], sociologists [2], geographers [3], economists [4], public policy analysts [5, 6], urban planners [7], hazards researchers [8], governments [9], and international organizations [10] have all contributed to the literature about this concept. Some authors view resilience as a mechanism for mitigating disaster impacts, with framework objectives such as resistance, absorption, and restoration [5]. Others, who focus on resiliency indicators, see it as an early warning system to assess community resiliency status [3, 8]. Recently, it has emerged as a component of social risk management that seeks to minimize social welfare loss from catastrophic disasters [6]. Manyena [11] traces scholarly exploration of resilience as an operational concept back at least five decades. Interest in resilience began in the 1940s with studies of children and trauma in the family and in the 1970s in the ecology literature as a useful framework to examine and measure the impact of assault or trauma on a defined eco-system component [12]. This led to modeling resilience measures for a variety of components within a defined ecosystem, leading to the realization that the systems approach to resiliency is attractive as a cross-disciplinary construct. The ecosystem analogy however, has limits when applied to disaster studies in that, historically, all catastrophic events have changed the place in which they occurred and a “return to normalcy” does not occur. This is true for modern urban societies as well as traditional agrarian societies. The adoption of “The Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015” (also known as The Hyogo Declaration) provides a global linkage and follows the United Nations 1990s International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction effort. The 2005 Hyogo Declaration’s definition of resilience is: “The capacity of a system, community or society potentially exposed to hazards to adapt by resisting or changing in order to reach and maintain an acceptable level of functioning and structure.” The proposed measurement of resilience in the Hyogo Declaration is determined by “the degree to which the social system is capable of organizing itself to increase this capacity for learning from past disasters for better future protection and to improve risk reduction measures.” While very broad, this definition contains two key concepts: 1) adaptation, and 2) maintaining acceptable levels of functioning and structure. While adaptation requires certain capacities, maintaining acceptable levels of functioning and structure requires resources, forethought, and normative action. Some of these attributes are now reflected in the 2010 National Disaster Recovery Framework published by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) [13]. With the emergence of this new thinking on resilience related to disasters, it is now a good time to reflect on the concept and assess what has recently been said in the literature. Bruneau et al. [1] offer an engineering sciences definition for community seismic resilience: “The ability of social units (e.g., organizations, communities) to mitigate hazards, contain the effects of disasters when they occur, and carry out recovery activities in ways that minimize social disruption and mitigate the effects of future earthquakes.” Rose [4] writes that resiliency is the ability of a system to recover from a severe shock. He distinguishes two types of resilience: (1) inherent – ability under normal circ*mstances and (2) adaptive – ability in crisis situations due to ingenuity or extra effort. By opening up resilience to categorization he provides a pathway to establish multi-disciplinary approaches, something that is presently lacking in practice. Rose is most concerned with business disruption which can take extensive periods of time to correct. In order to make resource decisions that lower overall societal costs (economic, social, governmental and physical), Rose calls for the establishment of measurements that function as resource decision allocation guides. This has been done in part through risk transfer tools such as private insurance. However, it has not been well-adopted by governments in deciding how to allocate mitigation resources. We need to ask why the interest in resilience has grown? Manyena [11] argues that the concept of resilience has gained currency without obtaining clarity of understanding, definition, substance, philosophical dimensions, or applicability to disaster management and sustainable development theory and practice. It is evident that the “emergency management model” does not itself provide sufficient guidance for policymakers since it is too command-and-control-oriented and does not adequately address mitigation and recovery. Also, large disasters are increasingly viewed as major disruptions of the economic and social conditions of a country, state/province, or city. Lowering post-disaster costs (human life, property loss, economic advancement and government disruption) is being taken more seriously by government and civil society. The lessening of costs is not something the traditional “preparedness” stage of emergency management has concerned itself with; this is an existing void in meeting the expanding interests of government and civil society. The concept of resilience helps further clarify the relationship between risk and vulnerability. If risk is defined as “the probability of an event or condition occurring [14]#8221; then it can be reduced through physical, social, governmental, or economic means, thereby reducing the likelihood of damage and loss. Nothing can be done to stop an earthquake, volcanic eruption, cyclone, hurricane, or other natural event, but the probability of damage and loss from natural and technological hazards can be addressed through structural and non-structural strategies. Vulnerability is the absence of capacity to resist or absorb a disaster impact. Changes in vulnerability can then be achieved by changes in these capacities. In this regard, Franco and Siembieda describe in this issue how coastal cities in Chile had low resilience and high vulnerability to the tsunami generated by the February 2010 earthquake, whereas modern buildings had high resilience and, therefore, were much less vulnerable to the powerful earthquake. We also see how the framework for policy development can change through differing perspectives. Eisner discusses in this issue how local non-governmental social service agencies are building their resilience capabilities to serve target populations after a disaster occurs, becoming self-renewing social organizations and demonstrating what Leonard and Howett [6] term “social resilience.” All of the contributions to this issue illustrate the lowering of disaster impacts and strengthening of capacity (at the household, community or governmental level) for what Alesch [15] terms “post-event viability” – a term reflecting how well a person, business, community, or government functions after a disaster in addition to what they might do prior to a disaster to lessen its impact. Viability might become the definition of recovery if it can be measured or agreed upon. 3. Contents of This Issue The insights provided by the papers in this issue contribute greater clarity to an understanding of resilience, together with its applicability to disaster management. In these papers we find tools and methods, process strategies, and planning approaches. There are five papers focused on local experiences, three on state (prefecture) experiences, and two on national experiences. The papers in this issue reinforce the concept of resilience as a process, not a product, because it is the sum of many actions. The resiliency outcome is the result of multiple inputs from the level of the individual and, at times, continuing up to the national or international organizational level. Through this exploration we see that the “resiliency” concept accepts that people will come into conflict with natural or anthropogenic hazards. The policy question then becomes how to lower the impact(s) of the conflict through “hard or soft” measures (see the Special Issue Part 1 editorial for a discussion of “hard” vs. “soft” resilience). Local level Go Urakawa and Haruo Hayashi illustrate how post-disaster operations for public utilities can be problematic because many practitioners have no direct experience in such operations, noting that the formats and methods normally used in recovery depend on personal skills and effort. They describe how these problems are addressed by creating manuals on measures for effectively implementing post-disaster operations. They develop a method to extract priority operations using business impact analysis (BIA) and project management based business flow diagrams (BFD). Their article effectively illustrates the practical aspects of strengthening the resiliency of public organizations. Richard Eisner presents the framework used to initiate the development and implementation of a process to create disaster resilience in faith-based and community-based organizations that provide services to vulnerable populations in San Francisco, California. A major project outcome is the Disaster Resilience Standard for Community- and Faith-Based Service Providers. This “standard” has general applicability for use by social service agencies in the public and non-profit sectors. Alejandro Linayo addresses the growing issue of technological risk in cities. He argues for the need to understand an inherent conflict between how we occupy urban space and the technological risks created by hazardous chemicals, radiation, oil and gas, and other hazardous materials storage and movement. The paper points out that information and procedural gaps exist in terms of citizen knowledge (the right to know) and local administrative knowledge (missing expertise). Advances and experience accumulated by the Venezuela Disaster Risk Management Research Center in identifying and integrating technological risk treatment for the city of Merida, Venezuela, are highlighted as a way to move forward. L. Teresa Guevara-Perez presents the case that certain urban zoning requirements in contemporary cities encourage and, in some cases, enforce the use of building configurations that have been long recognized by earthquake engineering as seismically vulnerable. Using Western Europe and the Modernist architectural movement, she develops the historical case for understanding discrepancies between urban zoning regulations and seismic codes that have led to vulnerable modern building configurations, and traces the international dissemination of architectural and urban planning concepts that have generated vulnerability in contemporary cities around the world. Jung Eun Kang, Walter Gillis Peaco*ck, and Rahmawati Husein discuss an assessment protocol for Hazard Mitigation Plans applied to 12 coastal hazard zone plans in the state of Texas in the U.S. The components of these plans are systematically examined in order to highlight their respective strengths and weaknesses. The authors describe an assessment tool, the plan quality score (PQS), composed of seven primary components (vision statement, planning process, fact basis, goals and objectives, inter-organizational coordination, policies & actions, and implementation), as well as a component quality score (CQS). State (Prefecture) level Charles Real presents the Natural Hazard Zonation Policies for Land Use Planning and Development in California in the U.S. California has established state-level policies that utilize knowledge of where natural hazards are more likely to occur to enhance the effectiveness of land use planning as a tool for risk mitigation. Experience in California demonstrates that a combination of education, outreach, and mutually supporting policies that are linked to state-designated natural hazard zones can form an effective framework for enhancing the role of land use planning in reducing future losses from natural disasters. Norio Maki, Keiko Tamura, and Haruo Hayashi present a method for local government stakeholders involved in pre-disaster plan making to describe performance measures through the formulation of desired outcomes. Through a case study approach, Nara and Kyoto Prefectures’ separate experiences demonstrate how to conduct Strategic Earthquake Disaster Reduction Plans and Action Plans that have deep stakeholder buy-in and outcome measurability. Nara’s plan was prepared from 2,015 stakeholder ideas and Kyoto’s plan was prepared from 1,613 stakeholder ideas. Having a quantitative target for individual objectives ensures the measurability of plan progress. Both jurisdictions have undertaken evaluations of plan outcomes. Sandy Meyer, Eugene Henry, Roy E. Wright and Cynthia A. Palmer present the State of Florida in the U.S. and its experience with pre-disaster planning for post-disaster redevelopment. Drawing upon the lessons learned from the impacts of the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, local governments and state leaders in Florida sought to find a way to encourage behavior that would create greater community resiliency in 2006. The paper presents initial efforts to develop a post-disaster redevelopment plan (PDRP), including the experience of a pilot county. National level Bo-Yao Lee provides a national perspective: New Zealand’s approach to emergency management, where all hazard risks are addressed through devolved accountability. This contemporary approach advocates collaboration and coordination, aiming to address all hazard risks through the “4Rs” – reduction, readiness, response, and recovery. Lee presents the impact of the Resource Management Act (1991), the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act (2002), and the Building Act (2004) that comprise the key legislation influencing and promoting integrated management for environment and hazard risk management. Guillermo Franco and William Siembieda provide a field assessment of the February 27, 2010, M8.8 earthquake and tsunami event in Chile. The papers present an initial damage and life-loss review and assessment of seismic building resiliency and the country’s rapid updating of building codes that have undergone continuous improvement over the past 60 years. The country’s land use planning system and its emergency management system are also described. The role of insurance coverage reveals problems in seismic coverage for homeowners. The unique role of the Catholic Church in providing temporary shelter and the central government’s five-point housing recovery plan are presented. A weakness in the government’s emergency management system’s early tsunami response system is noted. Acknowledgements The Editorial Committee extends its sincere appreciation to both the contributors and the JDR staff for their patience and determination in making Part 2 of this special issue possible. Thanks also to the reviewers for their insightful analytic comments and suggestions. Finally, the Committee wishes to again thank Bayete Henderson for his keen and thorough editorial assistance and copy editing support.

Abstract:

Horizon Environmental Services, Inc. (Horizon) was selected by the City of Dripping Springs to conduct an intensive cultural resources inventory survey and assessment of the proposed Dripping Springs Wastewater System Improvements Project (EID 1) in Dripping Springs, Hays County, Texas (USACE Project No. SWF-2020-00075). This survey represents the first phase of a larger project involving the proposed construction of wastewater system improvements in Dripping Springs. The current phase of the project would involve three separate components—the West Interceptor segment, which extends approximately 3.7 kilometers (2.3 miles) in length along Onion Creek west of Farm-to-Market Road (FM) 12; the Reclaimed Water Line segment, which extends approximately 1.3 kilometers (0.8 mile) in length between Needham Road and the intersection of FM 12 and FM 150; an approximately 2.3-hectare (5.7-acre) effluent pond located south of an existing water reclamation facility south of FM 150; and the proposed expansion of the existing water reclamation facility adjacent to the proposed effluent pond, which together cover 3.3 hectares (8.0 acres). The linear rights-of-way (ROW) of proposed pipeline segments would measure a maximum of 30.5 meters (100.0 feet) in width, and the proposed project components would cover a combined area of approximately 18.5 hectares (45.6 acres). The proposed undertaking would be sponsored by the City of Dripping Springs, a public subdivision of the state of Texas. As a political subdivision of the state of Texas, the project would fall under the jurisdiction of the Antiquities Code of Texas (Natural Resources Code, Title 9, Chapter 191). In addition, the project would utilize funding provided by the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF) program, which is a federal-state partnership between the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) and the state of Texas. As the US EPA is a federal agency, the project would also fall under the jurisdiction of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966, as amended. As the proposed project represents a publicly sponsored undertaking, the project sponsor is required to provide the Texas Historical Commission (THC), which serves as the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) for the state of Texas, with an opportunity to review and comment on the project’s potential to adversely affect historic properties listed on or considered eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) under the NHPA and for designation as State Antiquities Landmarks (SAL) under the Antiquities Code of Texas. From October 1 to 3, on November 4, and on November 22, 2019, Horizon archeologists Jesse Dalton, McKinzie Froese, Amy Goldstein, Elizabeth Sefton, and Jared Wiersema conducted an intensive cultural resources survey of the project area, including pedestrian walkover with shovel testing and backhoe trenching. The survey was performed under the supervision of Jeffrey D. Owens, who served as Principal Investigator, under Texas Antiquities Permit No. 9114. The purpose of the survey was to locate any significant cultural resources that potentially would be impacted by the proposed undertaking. Horizon’s archeologists traversed the project area on foot and thoroughly inspected the modern ground surface for aboriginal and historic-age cultural resources. Overall, vegetation across the entire project area generally consisted of short- to medium-length grasses interspersed with mature live oak and cedar trees, which afforded fair to good ground surface visibility (30 to 60%). Within the riparian zone of Onion Creek, vegetation consisted of tall, dense grass and mature honey mesquite, cedar, live oak, and hackberry trees, which provided poor ground surface visibility (<30%). The West Interceptor segment runs along the gravelly terraces of Onion Creek. Topographically, this segment of the project area consists of steep limestone steps and rocky outcrops that give way to flat, open fields. The proposed interceptor crosses Onion Creek at three locations, and the lower stream terraces of the creek have extensive gravel bars and debris associated with high-energy flooding. Soil profiles typically consist of a shallow A horizon of hard, calcareous clay loam underlain by dense gravelly deposits; however, in the southeastern portion of the West Interceptor, deeper clayey loam alluvium underlain by limestone bedrock was encountered. The Reclaimed Water Line segment traverses the west-facing hillslopes of upland ridges east of Onion Creek. Approximately the southeastern half of this segment of the project area would be constructed within the existing ROW of FM 12 west of the roadway, and construction, use, and ongoing maintenance of the roadway and associated facilities has resulted in extensive prior disturbances. Evidence of ground disturbance resulting from land clearing for housing developments and a transmission line were also noted within the northwestern portion of the proposed Reclaimed Water Line segment. The far northwestern end of the proposed Reclaimed Water Line segment skims the edge of the floodplain associated with a tributary of Onion Creek. Sediments on the terraces of this stream channel consist of calcareous loamy alluvial deposits, while soils across the upland portions of the segment consist of shallow deposits of gravelly clay and clay loam underlain by naturally degrading limestone bedrock. The water reclamation facility expansion and effluent pond segment are located on the upper terraces northeast of Onion Creek. The water reclamation facility is an existing industrial facility surrounded by septic fields, and prior disturbances from construction, use, and ongoing maintenance of the facility are extensive. The proposed expansion area to the north of the existing facility is currently utilized as a septic field. Sediments within this segment of the project area consist of shallow, gravelly, calcareous loamy to clayey loam alluvium underlain by naturally degrading limestone bedrock. In addition to a pedestrian walkover, the Texas State Minimum Archeological Survey Standards (TSMASS) require a minimum of 16 subsurface shovel tests per 1.6 kilometers (1.0 mile) for each 30.5-meter- (100.0-foot-) wide transect (or fraction thereof) for linear surveys unless field conditions warrant more shovel tests (e.g., in cultural high-probability areas) or fewer shovel tests (e.g., on steep slopes, in areas with excellent ground surface visibility). For block-area surveys, the TSMASS require two shovel tests per 0.4 hectare (1.0 acre) for project areas between 1.2 and 4.0 hectares (3.0 and 10.0 acres) in size. As such, a minimum of 37 shovel tests would be required within the West Interceptor segment, 13 shovel tests would be required within the Reclaimed Water Line segment, and 16 shovel tests would be required within the proposed water reclamation facility expansion and effluent pond area, for a total of 66 shovel tests for the project area as a whole. Horizon excavated a total of 106 shovel tests during the survey, including 82 shovel tests within the West Interceptor segment, 13 shovel tests within the Reclaimed Water Line segment, and 11 shovel tests within the facility expansion and effluent pond area. The shovel tests within the proposed facility expansion and effluent pond area were not all excavated directly within the final proposed construction footprint as the boundaries of this portion of the project area had not been firmly determined at the time of the survey, and no shovel tests were excavated within the existing water reclamation facility due to the extent of observable prior disturbances within this area. Overall, Horizon exceeded the minimum number of shovel tests required for the project area as a whole, and it is Horizon’s opinion that shovel testing was capable of fully penetrating sediments with the potential to contain subsurface archeological deposits (with the exception noted below where backhoe trenches were excavated along a portion of the West Interceptor segment). In addition to shovel testing, Horizon excavated four backhoe trenches within the southeastern portion of the proposed West Interceptor segment. The trenches were excavated at roughly 100.0-meter (328.0-foot) intervals along the proposed centerline to depths ranging from 105.0 to 350.0 centimeters (41.3 to 137.8 inches) below surface. Sediments observed within trench profiles typically consisted of moderately deep deposits of grayish-brown fine clay loam over yellowish-brown fine sandy loam. Dense deposits of river cobbles and/or naturally degrading limestone bedrock were observed at the base of three of the four trenches, and it is Horizon’s opinion that backhoe trenching was capable of fully penetrating sediments with the potential to contain archeological deposits. One chert flake was recorded in a shovel test (ST AG30) at a depth of 0.0 to 30.0 centimeters (0.0 to 11.8 inches) below surface at the far northwestern end of the West Interceptor project segment. Supplemental delineation shovel tests excavated around this initial discovery failed to produce any additional evidence of prehistoric cultural activity at this location, so the chert flake was recorded as an isolated artifact occurrence but was not documented as an archeological site. No other cultural resources of prehistoric or historic age were recorded within the project area during the pedestrian survey, shovel testing, or backhoe trenching. Based on the results of the survey-level investigations documented in this report, no cultural resources would be affected by the proposed undertaking. In accordance with 36 CFR 800.4, Horizon has made a reasonable and good-faith effort to identify historic properties within the project area. No cultural resources were identified within the project area that meet the criteria for designation as SALs according to 13 TAC 26 or for inclusion in the NRHP according to 36 CFR 60.4. Horizon recommends a finding of “no historic properties affected,” and no further archeological work is recommended in connection with the proposed undertaking. However, human burials, both prehistoric and historic, are protected under the Texas Health and Safety Code. In the event that any human remains or burial objects are inadvertently discovered at any point during construction, use, or ongoing maintenance in the project area, even in previously surveyed areas, all work should cease immediately in the vicinity of the inadvertent discovery, and the THC should be notified immediately. Following completion of the project, all project records will be prepared for permanent curation at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL).

Abstract:

Several historic rainfall and flooding events associated with Atlantic Basin tropical cyclones have occurred in recent years within the conterminous United States: Hurricane Joaquin (2015) in early October over South Carolina; Hurricane Harvey (2017) in late August over southeastern Texas; Hurricane Florence (2018) in September over North Carolina; and Tropical Storm Imelda (2019) in September, again over southeastern Texas. A common attribute of these events includes a dramatic transition from dry soils to exceptional flooding in a very short time. We use an observations-driven land surface model to measure the response of modeled soil moisture to these tropical cyclone rainfall events and quantify the soil moisture anomalies relative to a daily, county-based model climatology spanning 1981 to 2013. Modeled soil moisture evolution is highlighted, including a comparison of the total column (0-2 m) soil moisture percentiles (derived from analysis values) to the 1981-2013 climatological database. The South Carolina event associated with Hurricane Joaquin resulted in a sudden transition from severe drought to significant flooding in the span of a few days, due to locally 700+ mm of rainfall. The prolonged heavy rainfall associated with Hurricane Harvey resulted in record soil moisture values well in excess of the tail of the climatological distribution. The soil moisture west of the Houston, Texas, metropolitan area was anomalously dry prior to Harvey, but quickly transitioned to near saturation in the top 1 m, while east of the Houston area antecedent soil moisture values were more moist prior to the local 1200+ mm of rainfall and catastrophic flooding in the Beaumont/Port Arthur area. Hurricane Florence led to widespread 500-700+ mm of rainfall in North Carolina, and another dramatic transition from anomalously dry conditions to record wetness. Once again, with Tropical Storm Imelda, portions of southeastern Texas experienced extreme rainfall amounts up to 1000+ mm, resulting in another sharp transition from drought conditions to extreme flooding in <3 days. An experimental forecast soil moisture percentile is presented for the Imelda event, showing the potential to increase situational awareness for upcoming flooding episodes, along with a discussion of how an ensemble-based approach could be explored to address forecast model error and uncertainty.

Abstract:

Several historic rainfall and flooding events associated with Atlantic Basin tropical cyclones have occurred in recent years within the conterminous United States: Hurricane Joaquin (2015) in early October over South Carolina; Hurricane Harvey (2017) in late August over southeastern Texas; Hurricane Florence (2018) in September over North Carolina; and Tropical Storm Imelda (2019) in September, again over southeastern Texas. A common attribute of these events includes a dramatic transition from dry soils to exceptional flooding in a very short time. We use an observations-driven land surface model to measure the response of modeled soil moisture to these tropical cyclone rainfall events and quantify the soil moisture anomalies relative to a daily, county-based model climatology spanning 1981 to 2013. Modeled soil moisture evolution is highlighted, including a comparison of the total column (0-2 m) soil moisture percentiles (derived from analysis values) to the 1981-2013 climatological database. The South Carolina event associated with Hurricane Joaquin resulted in a sudden transition from severe drought to significant flooding in the span of a few days, due to locally 700+ mm of rainfall. The prolonged heavy rainfall associated with Hurricane Harvey resulted in record soil moisture values well in excess of the tail of the climatological distribution. The soil moisture west of the Houston, Texas, metropolitan area was anomalously dry prior to Harvey, but quickly transitioned to near saturation in the top 1 m, while east of the Houston area antecedent soil moisture values were more moist prior to the local 1200+ mm of rainfall and catastrophic flooding in the Beaumont/Port Arthur area. Hurricane Florence led to widespread 500-700+ mm of rainfall in North Carolina, and another dramatic transition from anomalously dry conditions to record wetness. Once again, with Tropical Storm Imelda, portions of southeastern Texas experienced extreme rainfall amounts up to 1000+ mm, resulting in another sharp transition from drought conditions to extreme flooding in <3 days. An experimental forecast soil moisture percentile is presented for the Imelda event, showing the potential to increase situational awareness for upcoming flooding episodes, along with a discussion of how an ensemble-based approach could be explored to address forecast model error and uncertainty.

Abstract:

Traditionally, the country way of life, the country worldview -- the country culture -- has been understood differently to the city way of life. Notions of rural have been represented in terms such as 'Eden', 'Arcadia', 'Golden Age', and associated with beauty, fertility, moral uprightness and authenticity. In contrast, notions of urban have been characterised by pollution, sterility, degeneration and artificiality. In Australia, the culture of the first white settlers developed out of this tradition, but with its own distinctive characteristics. The harshness and indomitability of the landscape became the means by which unique character, unifying myths of belonging and societal significance were constructed and asserted. In contrast to the communities of the country's original inhabitants, which were perceived as passive, unproductive and disconnected, the new culture was characterised by notions of 'land', 'masculinity', 'white', 'productive', 'hom*ogenous' and 'nationalistic' (Moore 54; Turner 6; Ward; White 16ff.). Defining the country worldview in contemporary Australia, however, is problematic. Question marks hang over the continued significance, even existence, of a specifically country culture. Post-war Australia has witnessed enormous economic and social changes, wrought by improved transport and communication networks, a shrinking rural population, and the decreasing importance of the agricultural industries. The steady decline in grass roots support for the National Party of Australia, traditional defender of the country way of life, suggests that the voting population no longer views the upholding of specifically pro-country policies as necessary to the well-being of the nation. Australia is now recognised as the most urbanised, sub-urbanised and multi-cultural of the western industrialised nations. Globalisation of the mass communications media has blurred the boundaries between rural, urban, state and national. Consequently, many argue that the differences between the country and city are now insignificant (for example, Aitkin 34-41). Yet notions of country that are distinct, even definitive, continue to be represented in various urban-based communications industries, cultural policies, and the discourses of environmental politics and nationalism. Examples include John Laws's very popular Across Australia radio talk-back programme which celebrates the outback, the farmer and 'battler', and the 'True Blue' music of country artist John Williamson; the push by the Green movement to separate and protect wilderness areas of 'natural' bushland from the corrupting influences of human cultivation; and the continued significance of the 'bush' and 'bushman' in divers constructions of national cultural identity. Share and Lawrence argue that such representations are a state of mind rather than a state of being, "in the imagination of the cosmopolis" only (Share & Lawrence 101). Imagined or otherwise, however, the evidence suggests that they are representations which are nevertheless there -- albeit constructed in varying ways, with varying emphases, and in a variety of settings. Tamworth: Country at Heart Jacka argues that it is the 'local', constructed by a specific set of forces and circ*mstances and operating within a particular time frame and place, that provides the best or most 'authentic' means of analysing notions of the 'country' (qtd. in Share & Lawrence 102). Tamworth, situated in North Western New South Wales, approximately four hundred kilometres from Sydney, is one such 'authentic' locality. The city of Tamworth and its surrounding hinterland is populated by some 55,000 people. Timber and farmland constitute 95% of its land use. Agricultural production generates the bulk of its net income. The Tamworth electoral district has been designated 'country' by the State Electoral Office. Promotional billboards erected by the Tamworth City Council and situated on all major highways into the city describe Tamworth as 'the heart of country'. Tamworth is renowned as 'the Country Music Capital of Australasia' and celebrates 'country' values annually through a highly successful Country Music Festival. Clearly, notions of country are significant in the shaping of how Tamworth is perceived as a community locally and nationally. These notions are an important component of the process of meaning generation, circulation and exchange inTamworth -- indeed, they are an important component of the essential fabric that constitutes the Tamworth culture. Analysis The Tamworth worldview was studied through an analysis of the coverage of the local NSW state election campaigns of 1995 and 1999 by Tamworth's only regional daily newspaper, the Northern Daily Leader. Regional daily newspapers are a useful means of analysing the major preoccupations of a culture. They contribute significantly to the construction and representation of the communities they serve: they are moulded by the specific needs of their communities; they are prominent influences of the norms, values and processes of these communities; they are the product of a community that is connected by common and local interests and knowledge, written with and by the people of this community (Mules et al. 242). The coverage of the 1995 and 1999 election campaigns represented a discrete sample of texts with a common focus. An important aspect of this focus was Mr Tony Windsor, Independent State Member for Tamworth. Windsor's Independent status was significant to the study. Firstly, it suggests that he was elected to office on his own merits or on the merits of his policies, as against any particular party affiliation. Papadakis and Bean argue that a vote for an Independent most often represents a protest vote against the dominant players in the political system rather than any systemic approval of the policy positions or other qualities of the recipient (109). This may well have been the case for Windsor's initial victory in 1991. However, in the 1995 election he won an unprecedented 83% of the primary vote, representing voters from right across the political spectrum. He further increased his majority in the 1999 election. Windsor's extraordinary popularity suggests that his appeal cut across the political boundaries into the social and cultural realms. As such, Windsor embodies a singular means of analysing the socio-politico-cultural preoccupations of those he represents. The study tracked story frequency and space, and analysed pictorial, headline and lead texts in terms of story focus, personal and thematic associations, and candidate agency. It was found that the Leader markedly privileged Windsor over his opponents in regards to story frequency and space. The pictorial and key word analyses identified Windsor's public persona as more active and more person-oriented than those of his opponents, and as associated more often with exterior settings, particularly those in or connected with 'bush' locations. This stood in contrast to the representations of his major ALP opponents. In both elections they were female, associated more with interior settings, and represented as speaking more than doing, passive more than active, and concerned more with their emotions and states of being than was Windsor. Overall, the Leader's representation of Windsor was found to comprise the six notions noted above as being characteristic of the traditional country worldview. Windsor's connections with and concerns for the land and country issues were significant. The construction of male and female gender roles was masculinist in nature. The absence of any signifiers associated with notions of 'Aboriginality', 'ethnicity', even 'diversity', indicated the existence of naturalised discourses of 'white' and 'hom*ogeneity'. Notions of productivity were evident through Windsor's preoccupation with the business and industry. Nationalism was implied through Windsor's association with characteristics that epitomise traditional understandings of what it is to be an Australian. Two additional characteristics were also identified. The first of these was named 'Independent', as indicated through the significance placed upon Windsor's politically Independent status. It was defined by the traditional understandings of the country worldview and ideas of integrity, 'a fair go' for the country, and of giving power back to the people. In contrast, the major political parties, ALP and National Party, were associated with the city, corruption, interference, lack of democracy, the undermining of country values by city values, and a subordination of the country to the city. The second characteristic was named 'community'. It was indicated through ideas of belonging and like-mindedness, andWindsor's representation as friendly, person-oriented and concerned with the active provision of services for the people. Implications The Tamworth culture is characterised by the notions of 'land', 'masculinity', 'white', 'productive', 'hom*ogenous', 'nationalistic', 'Independent' and 'community'. This very characterisation, however, is one that gives rise to a number of questions. What drove the Leader to construct and represent the Tamworth culture in this way? How did and does this particular characterisation serve the needs of the Tamworth people? How and why are these needs different to the needs of city people -- or even people in other rural communities? Perhaps the best answer lies with the demonstrated longevity of the essential nature of the Tamworth worldview. Traditional notions of country have remained distinctive, even definitive, despite Australia's urbanisation, suburbanisation, multiculturalism; despite the enormous economic and social changes that have been wrought by globalisation; despite the consequent blurring of boundaries between rural, urban, state and national. This traditional nature, it seems, is resistant to change. Yet there is also evidence that a blurring of boundaries, even change, has occurred in Tamworth. Examples include the fact that the combined income generated by secondary and tertiary industries in the Tamworth district is now greater than that generated by agriculture; Windsor, with whom the Leader so closely associates the land and other notions traditionally associated with the country, also holds a university degree in economics; the annual Country Music Festival is celebrated largely from within the confines of the city of Tamworth itself; Tamworth City Council and Country Music Festival both have sites on the World Wide Web, thereby connecting them with the very globalisation that the Leader would have them resisting. Although this may suggest that the country has actually appropriated, even assimilated many of the notions that are most often associated with change in today's society, it also seems that this assimilation is one that is on the country's terms only. Notions of the city are subordinated to notions of the country. Change is appropriated, but in a way that maintains the status quo -- that perpetuates the essential country worldview, both locally and nationally. Such evidence of change may also suggest that the Leader's representation of Windsor, of Tamworth, is perhaps a state of mind rather than a state of being. It is a representation that taps into the imagination of the people rather than their everyday existence. In so doing, it worked to position over 85% of the population into voting a particular way in the 1995 and 1999 NSW State elections. It may also work to draw the many people from around Australia who bring their tourist dollars into Tamworth each year to celebrate country values through the Country Music Festival. The Tamworth culture may well uphold a construction of Australian identity that is outside the direct experience of those who live on the coastal fringes, yet it provides an attractive, even desirable holiday destination for many. Perhaps this is because people, country and city alike, continue to see the country as a place that offers them a simple solution to tensions and conflicts that are otherwise unresolvable. Change produces anxiety -- especially a postmodern change in which all semblances of certainty have been removed. On the other hand, the study suggests that the country worldview represents that which does not change. Its definitive nature stands in contrast and provides an alternative to the relativism of the city. Notions of country represent a surety in a world that is otherwise uncertain. References Aitkin, D. "Countrymindedness: The Spread of an Idea." Australian Cultural History 4 (1985): 34-41. Moore, A. "The Old Guard and 'Countrymindedness' during the Great Depression." Journal of Australian Studies 27 (1990): 54. Mules, W., T. Shirato, and B. Wigman. "Rural Identity within the Symbolic Order: Media Representations of the Drought." Communication and Culture in Rural Areas. Ed. P. Share. Wagga Wagga: Charles Sturt UP, 1995. 242. 6. Papadakis, E., and C. Bean. "Independents and the Minor Parties: The Electoral System." Australian Journal of Political Science 30 (1995): 109. Share, P., G. Lawrence. "Fear and Loathing in Wagga Wagga: Cultural Representations of the Rural and Possible Policy Implications." Communication and Culture in Rural Areas. Ed. P. Share. Wagga Wagga: Charles Sturt UP, 1995. Turner, G. Making It National. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Ward, R. The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1958. White, R. Inventing Australia. Sydney:Allen & Unwin, 1981. 16ff. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Catherine Richardson. "The Politics of a Country Culture: State of Mind or State of Being?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php>. Chicago style: Catherine Richardson, "The Politics of a Country Culture: State of Mind or State of Being?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Catherine Richardson. (2000) The politics of a country culture: state of mind or state of being?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

“People live here, they die here so they must leave traces.” (Read 140) “Whatever colonialism was and is, it has made this place unsettling and unsettled.” (Gibson, Badland 2) Introduction What does it mean for [a] country to be haunted? In much theoretical work in film and Cultural Studies since the 1990s, the Australian continent, more often than not, bears traces of long suppressed traumas which inevitably resurface to haunt the present (Gelder and Jacobs; Gibson; Read; Collins and Davis). Felicity Collins and Therese Davis illuminate the ways Australian cinema acts as a public sphere, or “vernacular modernity,” for rethinking settler/indigenous relations. Their term “backtracking” serves as a mode of “collective mourning” in numerous films of the last decade which render unspoken colonial violence meaningful in contemporary Australia, and account for the “aftershocks” of the Mabo decision that overturned the founding fiction of terra nullius (7). Ray Lawrence’s 2006 film Jindabyne is another after-Mabo film in this sense; its focus on conflict within settler/indigenous relations in a small local town in the alpine region explores a traumatised ecology and drowned country. More than this, in our paper’s investigation of country and its attendant politics, Jindabyne country is the space of excessive haunting and resurfacing - engaging in the hard work of what Gibson (Transformations) has termed “historical backfill”, imaginative speculations “that make manifest an urge to account for the disconnected fragments” of country. Based on an adaptation by Beatrix Christian of the Raymond Carver story, So Much Water, So Close to Home, Jindabyne centres on the ethical dilemma produced when a group of fishermen find the floating, murdered body of a beautiful indigenous woman on a weekend trip, but decide to stay on and continue fishing. In Jindabyne, “'country' […] is made to do much discursive work” (Gorman-Murray). In this paper, we use the word as a metonym for the nation, where macro-political issues are played out and fought over. But we also use ‘country’ to signal the ‘wilderness’ alpine areas that appear in Jindabyne, where country is “a notion encompassing nature and human obligation that white Australia has learned slowly from indigenous Australia” (Gibson, Badland 178). This meaning enables a slippage between ‘land’ and ‘country’. Our discussion of country draws heavily on concepts from Ross Gibson’s theorisation of badlands. Gibson claims that originally, ‘badland’ was a term used by Europeans in North America when they came across “a tract of country that would not succumb to colonial ambition” (Badland 14). Using Collins and Davis’s “vernacular modernity” as a starting point, a film such as Jindabyne invites us to work through the productive possibilities of postcolonial haunting; to move from backtracking (going over old ground) to imaginative backfill (where holes and gaps in the ground are refilled in unconventional and creative returns to the past). Jindabyne (as place and filmic space) signifies “the special place that the Australian Alps occupy for so many Australians”, and the film engages in the discursive work of promoting “shared understanding” and the possibility of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal being “in country” (Baird, Egloff and Lebehan 35). We argue specifically that Jindabyne is a product of “aftermath culture” (Gibson Transformations); a culture living within the ongoing effects of the past, where various levels of filmic haunting make manifest multiple levels of habitation, in turn the product of numerous historical and physical aftermaths. Colonial history, environmental change, expanding wire towers and overflowing dams all lend meaning in the film to personal dilemmas, communal conflict and horrific recent crimes. The discovery of a murdered indigenous woman in water high in the mountains lays bare the fragility of a relocated community founded in the drowning of the town of old Jindabyne which created Lake Jindabyne. Beatrix Christian (in Trbic 61), the film’s writer, explains “everybody in the story is haunted by something. […] There is this group of haunted people, and then you have the serial killer who emerges in his season to create havoc.” “What’s in this compulsion to know the negative space?” asks Gibson (Badland 14). It’s the desire to better know and more deeply understand where we live. And haunting gives us cause to investigate further. Drowned, Murderous Country Jindabyne rewrites “the iconic wilderness of Australia’s High Country” (McHugh online) and replaces it with “a vast, historical crime scene” (Gibson, Badland 2). Along with nearby Adaminaby, the township of Old Jindabyne was drowned and its inhabitants relocated to the new town in the 1960s as part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. When Jindabyne was made in 2006 the scheme no longer represented an uncontested example of Western technological progress ‘taming’ the vast mountainous country. Early on in the film a teacher shows a short documentary about the town’s history in which Old Jindabyne locals lament the houses that will soon be sacrificed to the Snowy River’s torrents. These sentiments sit in opposition to Manning Clark’s grand vision of the scheme as “an inspiration to all who dream dreams about Australia” (McHugh online). With a 100,000-strong workforce, mostly migrated from war-ravaged Europe, the post-war Snowy project took 25 years and was completed in 1974. Such was this engineering feat that 121 workmen “died for the dream, of turning the rivers back through the mountains, to irrigate the dry inland” (McHugh online). Jindabyne re-presents this romantic narrative of progress as nothing less than an environmental crime. The high-tension wires scar the ‘pristine’ high country and the lake haunts every aspect of the characters’ interactions, hinting at the high country’s intractability that will “not succumb to colonial ambition” (Gibson, Badland 14). Describing his critical excavation of places haunted, out-of-balance or simply badlands, Gibson explains: Rummaging in Australia's aftermath cultures, I try to re-dress the disintegration in our story-systems, in our traditional knowledge caches, our landscapes and ecologies […] recuperate scenes and collections […] torn by landgrabbing, let's say, or by accidents, or exploitation that ignores rituals of preservation and restoration (Transformations). Tourism is now the predominant focus of Lake Jindabyne and the surrounding areas but in the film, as in history, the area does not “succumb to the temptations of pictorialism” (McFarlane 10), that is, it cannot be framed solely by the picture postcard qualities that resort towns often engender and promote. Jindabyne’s sense of menace signals the transformation of the landscape that has taken place – from ‘untouched’ to country town, and from drowned old town to the relocated, damned and electrified new one. Soon after the opening of the film, a moment of fishing offers a reminder that a town once existed beneath the waters of the eerily still Lake Jindabyne. Hooking a rusty old alarm clock out of the lake, Stuart explains to Tom, his suitably puzzled young son: underneath the water is the town where all the old men sit in rocking chairs and there’s houses and shops. […] There was a night […] I heard this noise — boing, boing, boing. And it was a bell coming from under the water. ‘Cause the old church is still down there and sometimes when the water’s really low, you can see the tip of the spire. Jindabyne’s lake thus functions as “a revelation of horrors past” (Gibson Badland 2). It’s not the first time this man-made lake is filmically positioned as a place where “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson, Badland 13). Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2004) also uses Lake Jindabyne and its surrounds to create a bleak and menacing ambience that heightens young Heidi’s sense of alienation (Simpson, ‘Reconfiguring rusticity’). In Somersault, the male-dominated Jindabyne is far from welcoming for the emotionally vulnerable out-of-towner, who is threatened by her friend’s father beside the Lake, then menaced again by boys she meets at a local pub. These scenes undermine the alpine region’s touristic image, inundated in the summer with tourists coming to fish and water ski, and likewise, with snow skiers in the winter. Even away from the Lake, there is no fleeing its spectre. “The high-tension wires marching down the hillside from the hydro-station” hum to such an extent that in one scene, “reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)”, a member of the fishing party is spooked (Ryan 52). This violence wrought upon the landscape contextualises the murder of the young indigenous woman, Susan, by Greg, an electrician who after murdering Susan, seems to hover in the background of several scenes of the film. Close to the opening of Jindabyne, through binoculars from his rocky ridge, Greg spots Susan’s lone car coursing along the plain; he chases her in his vehicle, and forces her to stop. Before (we are lead to assume) he drags her from the vehicle and murders her, he rants madly through her window, “It all comes down from the power station, the electricity!” That the murder/murderer is connected with the hydro-electric project is emphasised by the location scout in the film’s pre-production: We had one location in the scene where Greg dumps the body in some water and Ray [Lawrence] had his heart set on filming that next to some huge pipelines on a dam near Talbingo but Snowy Hydro didn’t […] like that negative content […] in association with their facility and […] said ‘no’ they wouldn’t let us do it.” (Jindabyne DVD extras) “Tales of murder and itinerancy in wild country are as old as the story of Cain in the killing fields of Eden” (Badlands 14). In Jindabyne we never really get to meet Greg but he is a familiar figure in Australian film and culture. Like many before him, he is the lone Road Warrior, a ubiquitous white male presence roaming the de-populated country where the road constantly produces acts of (accidental and intentional) violence (Simpson, ‘Antipodean Automobility’). And after a litany of murders in recent films such as Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and Gone (Ringan Ledwidge, 2007) the “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson Transformations 13) in the isolating landscape. The murderer in Jindabyne, unlike those who have migrated here as adults (the Irish Stuart and his American wife, Claire), is autochthonous in a landscape familiar with a trauma that cannot remain hidden or submerged. Contested High Country The unsinkability of Susan’s body, now an ‘indigenous murdered body’, holds further metaphorical value for resurfacing as a necessary component of aftermath culture. Such movement is not always intelligible within non-indigenous relations to country, though the men’s initial response to the body frames its drifting in terms of ascension: they question whether they have “broken her journey by tying her up”. The film reconfigures terra nullius as the ultimate badland, one that can never truly suppress continuing forms of physical, spiritual, historical and cultural engagement with country, and the alpine areas of Jindabyne and the Snowy River in particular. Lennon (14) points to “the legacy of biased recording and analysis” that “constitutes a threat to the cultural significance of Aboriginal heritage in alpine areas” (15). This significance is central to the film, prompting Lawrence to state that “mountains in any country have a spiritual quality about them […] in Aboriginal culture the highest point in the landscape is the most significant and this is the highest point of our country” (in Cordaiy 40). So whilst the Jindabyne area is contested country, it is the surfacing, upward mobility and unsinkable quality of Aboriginal memory that Brewster argues “is unsettling the past in post-invasion Australia” (in Lambert, Balayi 7). As the agent of backfill, the indigenous body (Susan) unsettles Jindabyne country by offering both evidence of immediate violence and reigniting the memory of it, before the film can find even the smallest possibility of its characters being ‘in country’. Claire illustrates her understanding of this in a conversation with her young son, as she attempts to contact the dead girls’ family. “When a bad thing happens,” she says, “we all have to do a good thing, no matter how small, alright? Otherwise the bad things, they just pile up and up and up.” Her persistent yet clumsy enactment of the cross-cultural go-between illuminates the ways “the small town community move through the terms of recent debate: shame and denial, repressed grief and paternalism” (Ryan 53). It is the movement of backfill within the aftermath: The movement of a foreign non-Aboriginal woman into Aboriginal space intertextually re-animates the processes of ‘settlement’, resolution and environmental assimilation for its still ‘unsettled’ white protagonists. […] Claire attempts an apology to the woman’s family and the Aboriginal community – in an Australia before Kevin Rudd where official apologies for the travesties of Australian/colonial history had not been forthcoming […] her movement towards reconciliation here is reflective of the ‘moral failure’ of a disconnection from Aboriginal history. (Lambert, Diasporas) The shift from dead white girl in Carver’s story to young Aboriginal woman speaks of a political focus on the ‘significance’ of the alpine region at a given moment in time. The corpse functions “as the trigger for crisis and panic in an Australia after native title, the stolen generation and the war-on-terror” (Lambert, Diasporas). The process of reconnecting with country and history must confront its ghosts if the community is to move forward. Gibson (Transformations) argues that “if we continue to close our imaginations to the aberrations and insufficiencies in our historical records. […] It’s likely we won’t dwell in the joy till we get real about the darkness.” In the post-colonial, multicultural but still divided geographies and cultures of Jindabyne, “genocidal displacement” comes face to face with the “irreconciled relation” to land “that refuses to remain half-seen […] a measure of non-indigenous failure to move from being on the land to being in country” (Ryan 52), evidenced by water harvesting in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and the more recent crises in water and land management. Aftermath Country Haunted by historical, cultural and environmental change, Jindabyne constitutes a post-traumatic screen space. In aftermath culture, bodies and landscapes offer the “traces” (Gibson, Transformations) of “the social consequences” of a “heritage of catastrophe” that people “suffer, witness, or even perpetrate” so that “the legacy of trauma is bequeathed” (Walker i). The youth of Jindabyne are charged with traumatic heritage. The young Susan’s body predictably bears the semiotic weight of colonial atrocity and non-indigenous environmental development. Evidence of witnesses, perpetrators and sufferers is still being revealed after the corpse is taken to the town morgue, where Claire (in a culturally improper viewing) is horrified by Susan’s marks from being secured in the water by Stuart and the other men. Other young characters are likewise haunted by a past that is environmental and tragically personal. Claire and Stuart’s young son, Tom (left by his mother for a period in early infancy and the witness of his parents strained marital relations), has an intense fear of drowning. This personal/historical fear is played with by his seven year old friend, Caylin-Calandria, who expresses her own grief from the death of her young mother environmentally - by escaping into the surrounding nature at night, by dabbling in the dark arts and sacrificing small animals. The two characters “have a lot to believe in and a lot of things to express – belief in zombies and ghosts, ritual death, drowning” (Cordaiy 42). As Boris Trbic (64) observes of the film’s characters, “communal and familial harmony is closely related to their intense perceptions of the natural world and their often distorted understanding of the ways their partners, friends and children cope with the grieving process.” Hence the legacy of trauma in Jindabyne is not limited to the young but pervades a community that must deal with unresolved ecologies no longer concealed by watery artifice. Backfilling works through unsettled aspects of country by moving, however unsteadily, toward healing and reconciliation. Within the aftermath of colonialism, 9/11 and the final years of the Howard era, Jindabyne uses race and place to foreground the “fallout” of an indigenous “condemnation to invisibility” and the “long years of neglect by the state” (Ryan 52). Claire’s unrelenting need to apologise to the indigenous family and Stuart’s final admission of impropriety are key gestures in the film’s “microcosm of reconciliation” (53), when “the notion of reconciliation, if it had occupied any substantial space in the public imagination, was largely gone” (Rundell 44). Likewise, the invisibility of Aboriginal significance has specificity in the Jindabyne area – indigeneity is absent from narratives recounting the Snowy Mountains Scheme which “recruited some 60,000 Europeans,” providing “a basis for Australia’s postwar multicultural society” (Lennon 15); both ‘schemes’ evidencing some of the “unrecognised implications” of colonialism for indigenous people (Curthoys 36). The fading of Aboriginal issues from public view and political discourse in the Howard era was serviced by the then governmental focus on “practical reconciliation” (Rundell 44), and post 9/11 by “the broad brushstrokes of western coalition and domestic political compliance” (Lambert, CMC 252), with its renewed focus on border control, and increased suspicion of non-Western, non-Anglo-European difference. Aftermath culture grapples with the country’s complicated multicultural and globalised self-understanding in and beyond Howard’s Australia and Jindabyne is one of a series of texts, along with “refugee plays” and Australian 9/11 novels, “that mobilised themselves against the Howard government” (Rundell 43-44). Although the film may well be seen as a “profoundly embarrassing” display of left-liberal “emotional politics” (44-45), it is precisely these politics that foreground aftermath: local neglect and invisibility, terror without and within, suspect American leadership and shaky Australian-American relations, the return of history through marked bodies and landscapes. Aftermath country is simultaneously local and global – both the disappearance and the ‘problem’ of Aboriginality post-Mabo and post-9/11 are backfilled by the traces and fragments of a hidden country that rises to the surface. Conclusion What can be made of this place now? What can we know about its piecemeal ecology, its choppy geomorphics and scarified townscapes? […] What can we make of the documents that have been generated in response to this country? (Gibson, Transformations). Amidst the apologies and potentialities of settler-indigenous recognition, the murdering electrician Gregory is left to roam the haunted alpine wilderness in Jindabyne. His allegorical presence in the landscape means there is work to be done before this badland can truly become something more. Gibson (Badland 178) suggests country gets “called bad […] partly because the law needs the outlaw for reassuring citizens that the unruly and the unknown can be named and contained even if they cannot be annihilated.” In Jindabyne the movement from backtracking to backfilling (as a speculative and fragmental approach to the bodies and landscapes of aftermath culture) undermines the institutional framing of country that still seeks to conceal shared historical, environmental and global trauma. The haunting of Jindabyne country undoes the ‘official’ production of outlaw/negative space and its discursively good double by realising the complexity of resurfacing – electricity is everywhere and the land is “uncanny” not in the least because “the town of Jindabyne itself is the living double of the drowned original” (Ryan 53). The imaginative backfill of Jindabyne reorients a confused, purgatorial Australia toward the “small light of home” (53) – the hope of one day being “in country,” and as Gibson (Badland 3) suggests, the “remembering,” that is “something good we can do in response to the bad in our lands.” References Baird, Warwick, Brian Egloff and Rachel Lenehan. “Sharing the mountains: joint management of Australia’s alpine region with Aboriginal people.” historic environment 17.2 (2003): 32-36. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema after Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Cordaiy, Hunter. “Man, Woman and Death: Ray Lawrence on Jindabyne.” Metro 149 (2006): 38-42. Curthoys, Anne. “An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous.” Race Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer. Sydney, UNSW P, 2000. 21-36. Gelder, Ken and Jane M. Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness an Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1998. Gibson, Ross. Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. Gibson, Ross. “Places, Past, Disappearance.” Transformations 13 (2006). Aug. 11 2008 transformations.cqu.edu.au/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Country.” M/C Journal 11.5 (this issue). Kitson, Michael. “Carver Country: Adapting Raymond Carver in Australia.” Metro150 (2006): 54-60. Lambert, Anthony. “Movement within a Filmic terra nullius: Woman, Land and Identity in Australian Cinema.” Balayi, Culture, Law and Colonialism 1.2 (2001): 7-17. Lambert, Anthony. “White Aborigines: Women, Mimicry, Mobility and Space.” Diasporas of Australian Cinema. Eds. Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, and Anthony Lambert. UK: Intellectbooks, 2009. Forthcoming. Lambert, Anthony. “Mediating Crime, Mediating Culture.” Crime, Media, Culture 4.2 (2008): 237-255. Lennon, Jane. “The cultural significance of Australian alpine areas.” Historic environment 17.2 (2003): 14-17. McFarlane, Brian. “Locations and Relocations: Jindabyne & MacBeth.” Metro Magazine 150 (Spring 2006): 10-15. McHugh, Siobhan. The Snowy: The People Behind the Power. William Heinemann Australia, 1999. http://www.mchugh.org/books/snowy.html. Read, Peter. Haunted Earth. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Rundle, Guy. “Goodbye to all that: The end of Australian left-liberalism and the revival of a radical politics.” Arena Magazine 88 (2007): 40-46. Ryan, Matthew. “On the treatment of non-indigenous belonging.” Arena Magazine 84 (2006): 52-53. Simpson, Catherine. “Reconfiguring Rusticity: feminizing Australian Cinema’s country towns’. Studies in Australasian Cinemas 2.1 (2008): forthcoming. Simpson, Catherine. “Antipodean Automobility & Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road.” Australian Humanities Review 39-40 (2006). http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2006/simpson.html. Trbic, Boris. “Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne: So Much Pain, So Close to Home.” Screen Education 44 (2006): 58–64. Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 2005.

Abstract:

Introduction One of the ways in which ‘country’ is made to work discursively is in ‘country music’ – defining a genre and sensibility in music production, marketing and consumption. This article seeks to excavate one small niche in the historical geography of country music to explore exactly how discursive antecedents emerged, and crucially, how images associated with ‘country’ surfaced and travelled internationally via one of the new ‘global’ media of the first half of the twentieth century – sheet music. My central arguments are twofold: first, that alongside aural qualities and lyrical content, the visual elements of sheet music were important and thus far have been under-acknowledged. Sheet music diffused the imagery connecting ‘country’ to music, to particular landscapes, and masculinities. In the literature on country music much emphasis has been placed on film, radio and television (Tichi; Peterson). Yet, sheet music was for several decades the most common way people bought personal copies of songs they liked and intended to play at home on piano, guitar or ukulele. This was particularly the case in Australia – geographically distant, and rarely included in international tours by American country music stars. Sheet music is thus a rich text to reveal the historical contours of ‘country’. My second and related argument is that that the possibilities for the globalising of ‘country’ were first explored in music. The idea of transnational discourses associated with ‘country’ and ‘rurality’ is relatively new (Cloke et al; Gorman-Murray et al; McCarthy), but in music we see early evidence of a globalising discourse of ‘country’ well ahead of the time period usually analysed. Accordingly, my focus is on the sheet music of country songs in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and on how visual representations hybridised travelling themes to create a new vernacular ‘country’ in Australia. Creating ‘Country’ Music Country music, as its name suggests, is perceived as the music of rural areas, “defined in contrast to metropolitan norms” (Smith 301). However, the ‘naturalness’ of associations between country music and rurality belies a history of urban capitalism and the refinement of deliberate methods of marketing music through associated visual imagery. Early groups wore suits and dressed for urban audiences – but then altered appearances later, on the insistence of urban record companies, to emphasise rurality and cowboy heritage. Post-1950, ‘country’ came to replace ‘folk’ music as a marketing label, as the latter was considered to have too many communistic references (Hemphill 5), and the ethnic mixing of earlier folk styles was conveniently forgotten in the marketing of ‘country’ music as distinct from African American ‘race’ and ‘r and b’ music. Now an industry of its own with multinational headquarters in Nashville, country music is a ‘cash cow’ for entertainment corporations, with lower average production costs, considerable profit margins, and marketing advantages that stem from tropes of working class identity and ‘rural’ honesty (see Lewis; Arango). Another of country music’s associations is with American geography – and an imagined heartland in the colonial frontier of the American West. Slippages between ‘country’ and ‘western’ in music, film and dress enhance this. But historical fictions are masked: ‘purists’ argue that western dress and music have nothing to do with ‘country’ (see truewesternmusic.com), while recognition of the Spanish-Mexican, Native American and Hawaiian origins of ‘cowboy’ mythology is meagre (George-Warren and Freedman). Similarly, the highly international diffusion and adaptation of country music as it rose to prominence in the 1940s is frequently downplayed (Connell and Gibson), as are the destructive elements of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous peoples in frontier America (though Johnny Cash’s 1964 album The Ballads Of The American Indian: Bitter Tears was an exception). Adding to the above is the way ‘country’ operates discursively in music as a means to construct particular masculinities. Again, linked to rural imagery and the American frontier, the dominant masculinity is of rugged men wrestling nature, negotiating hardships and the pressures of family life. Country music valorises ‘heroic masculinities’ (Holt and Thompson), with echoes of earlier cowboy identities reverberating into contemporary performance through dress style, lyrical content and marketing imagery. The men of country music mythology live an isolated existence, working hard to earn an income for dependent families. Their music speaks to the triumph of hard work, honest values (meaning in this context a musical style, and lyrical concerns that are ‘down to earth’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘without pretence’) and physical strength, in spite of neglect from national governments and uncaring urban leaders. Country music has often come to be associated with conservative politics, heteronormativity, and whiteness (Gibson and Davidson), echoing the wider politics of ‘country’ – it is no coincidence, for example, that the slogan for the 2008 Republican National Convention in America was ‘country first’. And yet, throughout its history, country music has also enabled more diverse gender performances to emerge – from those emphasising (or bemoaning) domesticity; assertive femininity; creative negotiation of ‘country’ norms by gay men; and ‘alternative’ culture (captured in the marketing tag, ‘alt.country’); to those acknowledging white male victimhood, criminality (‘the outlaw’), vulnerability and cruelty (see Johnson; McCusker and Pecknold; Saucier). Despite dominant tropes of ‘honesty’, country music is far from transparent, standing for certain values and identities, and yet enabling the construction of diverse and contradictory others. Historical analysis is therefore required to trace the emergence of ‘country’ in music, as it travelled beyond America. A Note on Sheet Music as Media Source Sheet music was one of the main modes of distribution of music from the 1930s through to the 1950s – a formative period in which an eclectic group of otherwise distinct ‘hillbilly’ and ‘folk’ styles moved into a single genre identity, and after which vinyl singles and LP records with picture covers dominated. Sheet music was prevalent in everyday life: beyond radio, a hit song was one that was widely purchased as sheet music, while pianos and sheet music collections (stored in a piece of furniture called a ‘music canterbury’) in family homes were commonplace. Sheet music is in many respects preferable to recorded music as a form of evidence for historical analysis of country music. Picture LP covers did not arrive until the late 1950s (by which time rock and roll had surpassed country music). Until then, 78 rpm shellac discs, the main form of pre-recorded music, featured generic brown paper sleeves from the individual record companies, or city retail stores. Also, while radio was clearly central to the consumption of music in this period, it obviously also lacked the pictorial element that sheet music could provide. Sheet music bridged the music and printing industries – the latter already well-equipped with colour printing, graphic design and marketing tools. Sheet music was often literally crammed with information, providing the researcher with musical notation, lyrics, cover art and embedded advertisem*nts – aural and visual texts combined. These multiple dimensions of sheet music proved useful here, for clues to the context of the music/media industries and geography of distribution (for instance, in addresses for publishers and sheet music retail shops). Moreover, most sheet music of the time used rich, sometimes exaggerated, images to convince passing shoppers to buy songs that they had possibly never heard. As sheet music required caricature rather than detail or historical accuracy, it enabled fantasy without distraction. In terms of representations of ‘country’, then, sheet music is perhaps even more evocative than film or television. Hundreds of sheet music items were collected for this research over several years, through deliberate searching (for instance, in library archives and specialist sheet music stores) and with some serendipity (for instance, when buying second hand sheet music in charity shops or garage sales). The collected material is probably not representative of all music available at the time – it is as much a specialised personal collection as a comprehensive survey. However, at least some material from all the major Australian country music performers of the time were found, and the resulting collection appears to be several times larger than that held currently by the National Library of Australia (from which some entries were sourced). All examples here are of songs written by, or cover art designed for Australian country music performers. For brevity’s sake, the following analysis of the sheet music follows a crudely chronological framework. Country Music in Australia Before ‘Country’ Country music did not ‘arrive’ in Australia from America as a fully-finished genre category; nor was Australia at the time without rural mythology or its own folk music traditions. Associations between Australian national identity, rurality and popular culture were entrenched in a period of intense creativity and renewed national pride in the decades prior to and after Federation in 1901. This period saw an outpouring of art, poetry, music and writing in new nationalist idiom, rooted in ‘the bush’ (though drawing heavily on Celtic expressions), and celebrating themes of mateship, rural adversity and ‘battlers’. By the turn of the twentieth century, such myths, invoked through memory and nostalgia, had already been popularised. Australia had a fully-established system of colonies, capital cities and state governments, and was highly urbanised. Yet the poetry, folk music and art, invariably set in rural locales, looked back to the early 1800s, romanticising bush characters and frontier events. The ‘bush ballad’ was a central and recurring motif, one that commentators have argued was distinctly, and essentially ‘Australian’ (Watson; Smith). Sheet music from this early period reflects the nationalistic, bush-orientated popular culture of the time: iconic Australian fauna and flora are prominent, and Australian folk culture is emphasised as ‘native’ (being the first era of cultural expressions from Australian-born residents). Pioneer life and achievements are celebrated. ‘Along the road to Gundagai’, for instance, was about an iconic Australian country town and depicted sheep droving along rustic trails with overhanging eucalypts. Male figures are either absent, or are depicted in situ as lone drovers in the archetypal ‘shepherd’ image, behind their flocks of sheep (Figure 1). Figure 1: No. 1 Magpie Ballads – The Pioneer (c1900) and Along the road to Gundagai (1923). Further colonial ruralities developed in Australia from the 1910s to 1940s, when agrarian values grew in the promotion of Australian agricultural exports. Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’ to industrialisation, and governments promoted rural development and inland migration. It was a period in which rural lifestyles were seen as superior to those in the crowded inner city, and government strategies sought to create a landed proletariat through post-war land settlement and farm allotment schemes. National security was said to rely on populating the inland with those of European descent, developing rural industries, and breeding a healthier and yet compliant population (Dufty), from which armies of war-ready men could be recruited in times of conflict. Popular culture served these national interests, and thus during these decades, when ‘hillbilly’ and other North American music forms were imported, they were transformed, adapted and reworked (as in other places such as Canada – see Lehr). There were definite parallels in the frontier narratives of the United States (Whiteoak), and several local adaptations followed: Tex Morton became Australia’s ‘Yodelling boundary rider’ and Gordon Parsons became ‘Australia’s yodelling bushman’. American songs were re-recorded and performed, and new original songs written with Australian lyrics, titles and themes. Visual imagery in sheet music built upon earlier folk/bush frontier themes to re-cast Australian pastoralism in a more settled, modernist and nationalist aesthetic; farms were places for the production of a robust nation. Where male figures were present on sheet music covers in the early twentieth century, they became more prominent in this period, and wore Akubras (Figure 2). The lyrics to John Ashe’s Growin’ the Golden Fleece (1952) exemplify this mix of Australian frontier imagery, new pastoralist/nationalist rhetoric, and the importation of American cowboy masculinity: Go west and take up sheep, man, North Queensland is the shot But if you don’t get rich, man, you’re sure to get dry rot Oh! Growin’ the golden fleece, battlin’ a-way out west Is bound to break your flamin’ heart, or else expand your chest… We westerners are handy, we can’t afford to crack Not while the whole darn’d country is riding on our back Figure 2: Eric Tutin’s Shearers’ Jamboree (1946). As in America, country music struck a chord because it emerged “at a point in history when the project of the creation and settlement of a new society was underway but had been neither completed nor abandoned” (Dyer 33). Governments pressed on with the colonial project of inland expansion in Australia, despite the theft of indigenous country this entailed, and popular culture such as music became a means to normalise and naturalise the process. Again, mutations of American western imagery, and particular iconic male figures were important, as in Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail (Figure 3): Wagon wheels are rolling on, and the days seem mighty long Clouds of heat-dust in the air, bawling cattle everywhere They’re on the overlander trail Where only sheer determination will prevail Men of Aussie with a job to do, they’ll stick and drive the cattle through And though they sweat they know they surely must Keep on the trail that winds a-head thro’ heat and dust All sons of Aussie and they will not fail. Sheet music depicted silhouetted men in cowboy hats on horses (either riding solo or in small groups), riding into sunsets or before looming mountain ranges. Music – an important part of popular culture in the 1940s – furthered the colonial project of invading, securing and transforming the Australian interior by normalising its agendas and providing it with heroic male characters, stirring tales and catchy tunes. Figure 3: ‘Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail and Smoky Dawson’s The Overlander’s Song (1946). ‘Country Music’ Becomes a (Globalised) Genre Further growth in Australian country music followed waves of popularity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and was heavily influenced by new cross-media publicity opportunities. Radio shows expanded, and western TV shows such as Bonanza and On the Range fuelled a ‘golden age’. Australian performers such as Slim Dusty and Smokey Dawson rose to fame (see Fitzgerald and Hayward) in an era when rural-urban migration peaked. Sheet music reflected the further diffusion and adoption of American visual imagery: where male figures were present on sheet music covers, they became more prominent than before and wore Stetsons. Some were depicted as chiselled-faced but simple men, with plain clothing and square jaws. Others began to more enthusiastically embrace cowboy looks, with bandana neckerchiefs, rawhide waistcoats, embellished and harnessed tall shaft boots, pipe-edged western shirts with wide collars, smile pockets, snap fasteners and shotgun cuffs, and fringed leather jackets (Figure 4). Landscapes altered further too: cacti replaced eucalypts, and iconic ‘western’ imagery of dusty towns, deserts, mesas and buttes appeared (Figure 5). Any semblance of folk music’s appeal to rustic authenticity was jettisoned in favour of showmanship, as cowboy personas were constructed to maximise cinematic appeal. Figure 4: Al Dexter’s Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943) and Reg Lindsay’s (1954) Country and Western Song Album. Figure 5: Tim McNamara’s Hitching Post (1948) and Smoky Dawson’s Golden West Album (1951). Far from slavish mimicry of American culture, however, hybridisations were common. According to Australian music historian Graeme Smith (300): “Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen […] cowboys become boundary riders.” Thus alongside reproductions of the musical notations of American songs by Lefty Frizzel, Roy Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were songs with localised themes by new Australian stars such as Reg Lindsay and Smoky Dawson: My curlyheaded buckaroo, My home way out back, and On the Murray Valley. On the cover of The square dance by the billabong (Figure 6) – the title of which itself was a conjunction of archetypal ‘country’ images from both America and Australia – a background of eucalypts and windmills frames dancers in classic 1940s western (American) garb. In the case of Tex Morton’s Beautiful Queensland (Figure 7), itself mutated from W. Lee O’Daniel’s Beautiful Texas (c1945), the sheet music instructed those playing the music that the ‘names of other states may be substituted for Queensland’. ‘Country’ music had become an established genre, with normative values, standardised images and themes and yet constituted a stylistic formula with enough polysemy to enable local adaptations and variations. Figure 6: The Square dance by the billabong, Vernon Lisle, 1951. Figure 7: Beautiful Queensland, Tex Morton, c1945 source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn1793930. Conclusions In country music images of place and masculinity combine. In music, frontier landscapes are populated by rugged men living ‘on the range’ in neo-colonial attempts to tame the land and convert it to productive uses. This article has considered only one media – sheet music – in only one country (Australia) and in only one time period (1900-1950s). There is much more to say than was possible here about country music, place and gender – particularly recently, since ‘country’ has fragmented into several niches, and marketing of country music via cable television and the internet has ensued (see McCusker and Pecknold). My purpose here has been instead to explore the early origins of ‘country’ mythology in popular culture, through a media source rarely analysed. Images associated with ‘country’ travelled internationally via sheet music, immensely popular in the 1930s and 1940s before the advent of television. The visual elements of sheet music contributed to the popularisation and standardisation of genre expectations and appearances, and yet these too travelled and were adapted and varied in places like Australia which had their own colonial histories and folk music heritages. Evidenced here is how combinations of geographical and gender imagery embraced imported American cowboy imagery and adapted it to local markets and concerns. Australia saw itself as a modern rural utopia with export aspirations and a desire to secure permanence through taming and populating its inland. Sheet music reflected all this. So too, sheet music reveals the historical contours of ‘country’ as a transnational discourse – and the extent to which ‘country’ brought with it a clearly defined set of normative values, a somewhat exaggerated cowboy masculinity, and a remarkable capacity to be moulded to local circ*mstances. Well before later and more supposedly ‘global’ media such as the internet and television, the humble printed sheet of notated music was steadily shaping ‘country’ imagery, and an emergent international geography of cultural flows. References Arango, Tim. “Cashville USA.” Fortune, Jan 29, 2007. Sept 3, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm. Cloke, Paul, Marsden, Terry and Mooney, Patrick, eds. Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Sage, 2006. Connell, John and Gibson, Chris. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place, London: Routledge, 2003. Dufty, Rae. Rethinking the politics of distribution: the geographies and governmentalities of housing assistance in rural New South Wales, Australia, PhD thesis, UNSW, 2008. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture, London: Routledge, 1997. George-Warren, Holly and Freedman, Michelle. How the West was Worn: a History of Western Wear, New York: Abrams, 2000. Fitzgerald, Jon and Hayward, Phil. “At the confluence: Slim Dusty and Australian country music.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Phil Hayward. Gympie: Australian Institute of Country Music Press, 2003. 29-54. Gibson, Chris and Davidson, Deborah. “Tamworth, Australia’s ‘country music capital’: place marketing, rural narratives and resident reactions.” Journal of Rural Studies 20 (2004): 387-404. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, Darian-Smith, Kate and Gibson, Chris. “Scaling the rural: reflections on rural cultural studies.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008): in press. Hemphill, Paul. The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Holt, Douglas B. and Thompson, Craig J. “Man-of-action heroes: the pursuit of heroic masculinity in everyday consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004). Johnson, Corey W. “‘The first step is the two-step’: hegemonic masculinity and dancing in a country western gay bar.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18 (2004): 445-464. Lehr, John C. “‘Texas (When I die)’: national identity and images of place in Canadian country music broadcasts.” The Canadian Geographer 27 (1983): 361-370. Lewis, George H. “Lap dancer or hillbilly deluxe? The cultural construction of modern country music.” Journal of Popular Culture, 31 (1997): 163-173. McCarthy, James. “Rural geography: globalizing the countryside.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): 132-137. McCusker, Kristine M. and Pecknold, Diane. Eds. A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. UP of Mississippi, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Saucier, Karen A. “Healers and heartbreakers: images of women and men in country music.” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1986): 147-166. Smith, Graeme. “Australian country music and the hillbilly yodel.” Popular Music 13 (1994): 297-311. Tichi, Cecelia. Readin’ Country Music. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. truewesternmusic.com “True western music.”, Sept 3, 2008, http://truewesternmusic.com/. Watson, Eric. Country Music in Australia. Sydney: Rodeo Publications, 1984. Whiteoak, John. “Two frontiers: early cowboy music and Australian popular culture.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. P. Hayward. Gympie: AICMP: 2003. 1-28.

Abstract:

IntroductionThe Internet (especially in the so-called Web 2.0 phase), digital media and file-sharing networks have thrust copyright law under public scrutiny, provoking discourses questioning what is fair in the digital age. Accessible hardware and software has led to prosumerism – creativity blending media consumption with media production to create new works that are freely disseminated online via popular video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube or genre specific music sites like GYBO (“Get Your Bootleg On”) amongst many others. The term “prosumer” is older than the Web, and the conceptual convergence of producer and consumer roles is certainly not new, for “at electric speeds the consumer becomes producer as the public becomes participant role player” (McLuhan 4). Similarly, Toffler’s “Third Wave” challenges “old power relationships” and promises to “heal the historic breach between producer and consumer, giving rise to the ‘prosumer’ economics” (27). Prosumption blurs the traditionally separate consumer and producer creating a new creative era of mass customisation of artefacts culled from the (copyrighted) media landscape (Tapscott 62-3). Simultaneously, corporate interests dependent upon the protections provided by copyright law lobby for augmented rights and actively defend their intellectual property through law suits, takedown notices and technological reinforcement. Despite a lack demonstrable economic harm in many cases, the propertarian approach is winning and frequently leading to absurd results (Collins).The balance between private and public interests in creative works is facilitated by the doctrine of fair use (as codified in the United States Copyright Act 1976, section 107). The majority of copyright laws contain “fair” exceptions to claims of infringement, but fair use is characterised by a flexible, open-ended approach that allows the law to flex with the times. Until recently the defence was unique to the U.S., but on 2 January Israel amended its copyright laws to include a fair use defence. (For an overview of the new Israeli fair use exception, see Efroni.) Despite its flexibility, fair use has been systematically eroded by ever encroaching copyrights. This paper argues that copyright enforcement has spun out of control and the raison d’être of the law has shifted from being “an engine of free expression” (Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539, 558 (1985)) towards a “legal regime for intellectual property that increasingly looks like the law of real property, or more properly an idealized construct of that law, one in which courts seeks out and punish virtually any use of an intellectual property right by another” (Lemley 1032). Although the copyright landscape appears bleak, two recent cases suggest that fair use has not fallen by the wayside and may well recover. This paper situates fair use as an essential legal and cultural mechanism for optimising creative expression.A Brief History of CopyrightThe law of copyright extends back to eighteenth century England when the Statute of Anne (1710) was enacted. Whilst the length of this paper precludes an in depth analysis of the law and its export to the U.S., it is important to stress the goals of copyright. “Copyright in the American tradition was not meant to be a “property right” as the public generally understands property. It was originally a narrow federal policy that granted a limited trade monopoly in exchange for universal use and access” (Vaidhyanathan 11). Copyright was designed as a right limited in scope and duration to ensure that culturally important creative works were not the victims of monopolies and were free (as later mandated in the U.S. Constitution) “to promote the progress.” During the 18th century English copyright discourse Lord Camden warned against propertarian approaches lest “all our learning will be locked up in the hands of the Tonsons and the Lintons of the age, who will set what price upon it their avarice chooses to demand, till the public become as much their slaves, as their own hackney compilers are” (Donaldson v. Becket 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 1000). Camden’s sentiments found favour in subsequent years with members of the North American judiciary reiterating that copyright was a limited right in the interests of society—the law’s primary beneficiary (see for example, Wheaton v. Peters 33 US 591 [1834]; Fox Film Corporation v. Doyal 286 US 123 [1932]; US v. Paramount Pictures 334 US 131 [1948]; Mazer v. Stein 347 US 201, 219 [1954]; Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aitken 422 U.S. 151 [1975]; Aronson v. Quick Point Pencil Co. 440 US 257 [1979]; Dowling v. United States 473 US 207 [1985]; Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539 [1985]; Luther R. Campbell a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker, et al. v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. 510 U.S 569 [1994]). Putting the “Fair” in Fair UseIn Folsom v. Marsh 9 F. Cas. 342 (C.C.D. Mass. 1841) (No. 4,901) Justice Storey formulated the modern shape of fair use from a wealth of case law extending back to 1740 and across the Atlantic. Over the course of one hundred years the English judiciary developed a relatively cohesive set of principles governing the use of a first author’s work by a subsequent author without consent. Storey’s synthesis of these principles proved so comprehensive that later English courts would look to his decision for guidance (Scott v. Stanford L.R. 3 Eq. 718, 722 (1867)). Patry explains fair use as integral to the social utility of copyright to “encourage. . . learned men to compose and write useful books” by allowing a second author to use, under certain circ*mstances, a portion of a prior author’s work, where the second author would himself produce a work promoting the goals of copyright (Patry 4-5).Fair use is a safety valve on copyright law to prevent oppressive monopolies, but some scholars suggest that fair use is less a defence and more a right that subordinates copyrights. Lange and Lange Anderson argue that the doctrine is not fundamentally about copyright or a system of property, but is rather concerned with the recognition of the public domain and its preservation from the ever encroaching advances of copyright (2001). Fair use should not be understood as subordinate to the exclusive rights of copyright owners. Rather, as Lange and Lange Anderson claim, the doctrine should stand in the superior position: the complete spectrum of ownership through copyright can only be determined pursuant to a consideration of what is required by fair use (Lange and Lange Anderson 19). The language of section 107 suggests that fair use is not subordinate to the bundle of rights enjoyed by copyright ownership: “Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . is not an infringement of copyright” (Copyright Act 1976, s.107). Fair use is not merely about the marketplace for copyright works; it is concerned with what Weinreb refers to as “a community’s established practices and understandings” (1151-2). This argument boldly suggests that judicial application of fair use has consistently erred through subordinating the doctrine to copyright and considering simply the effect of the appropriation on the market place for the original work.The emphasis on economic factors has led courts to sympathise with copyright owners leading to a propertarian or Blackstonian approach to copyright (Collins; Travis) propagating the myth that any use of copyrighted materials must be licensed. Law and media reports alike are potted with examples. For example, in Bridgeport Music, Inc., et al v. Dimension Films et al 383 F. 3d 400 (6th Cir. 2004) a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the transformative use of a three-note guitar sample infringed copyrights and that musicians must obtain licence from copyright owners for every appropriated audio fragment regardless of duration or recognisability. Similarly, in 2006 Christopher Knight self-produced a one-minute television advertisem*nt to support his campaign to be elected to the board of education for Rockingham County, North Carolina. As a fan of Star Wars, Knight used a makeshift Death Star and lightsaber in his clip, capitalising on the imagery of the Jedi Knight opposing the oppressive regime of the Empire to protect the people. According to an interview in The Register the advertisem*nt was well received by local audiences prompting Knight to upload it to his YouTube channel. Several months later, Knight’s clip appeared on Web Junk 2.0, a cable show broadcast by VH1, a channel owned by media conglomerate Viacom. Although his permission was not sought, Knight was pleased with the exposure, after all “how often does a local school board ad wind up on VH1?” (Metz). Uploading the segment of Web Junk 2.0 featuring the advertisem*nt to YouTube, however, led Viacom to quickly issue a take-down notice citing copyright infringement. Knight expressed his confusion at the apparent unfairness of the situation: “Viacom says that I can’t use my clip showing my commercial, claiming copy infringement? As we say in the South, that’s ass-backwards” (Metz).The current state of copyright law is, as Patry says, “depressing”:We are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage ... things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together.The erosion of fair use by encroaching private interests represented by copyrights has led to strong critiques leveled at the judiciary and legislators by Lessig, McLeod and Vaidhyanathan. “Free culture” proponents warn that an overly strict copyright regime unbalanced by an equally prevalent fair use doctrine is dangerous to creativity, innovation, culture and democracy. After all, “few, if any, things ... are strictly original throughout. Every book in literature, science and art, borrows, and must necessarily borrow, and use much which was well known and used before. No man creates a new language for himself, at least if he be a wise man, in writing a book. He contents himself with the use of language already known and used and understood by others” (Emerson v. Davis, 8 F. Cas. 615, 619 (No. 4,436) (CCD Mass. 1845), qted in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, 62 U.S.L.W. at 4171 (1994)). The rise of the Web 2.0 phase with its emphasis on end-user created content has led to an unrelenting wave of creativity, and much of it incorporates or “mashes up” copyright material. As Negativland observes, free appropriation is “inevitable when a population bombarded with electronic media meets the hardware [and software] that encourages them to capture it” and creatively express themselves through appropriated media forms (251). The current state of copyright and fair use is bleak, but not beyond recovery. Two recent cases suggest a resurgence of the ideology underpinning the doctrine of fair use and the role played by copyright.Let’s Go CrazyIn “Let’s Go Crazy #1” on YouTube, Holden Lenz (then eighteen months old) is caught bopping to a barely recognizable recording of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” in his mother’s Pennsylvanian kitchen. The twenty-nine second long video was viewed a mere twenty-eight times by family and friends before Stephanie Lenz received an email from YouTube informing her of its compliance with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notice issued by Universal, copyright owners of Prince’s recording (McDonald). Lenz has since filed a counterclaim against Universal and YouTube has reinstated the video. Ironically, the media exposure surrounding Lenz’s situation has led to the video being viewed 633,560 times at the time of writing. Comments associated with the video indicate a less than reverential opinion of Prince and Universal and support the fairness of using the song. On 8 Aug. 2008 a Californian District Court denied Universal’s motion to dismiss Lenz’s counterclaim. The question at the centre of the court judgment was whether copyright owners should consider “the fair use doctrine in formulating a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.” The court ultimately found in favour of Lenz and also reaffirmed the position of fair use in relation to copyright. Universal rested its argument on two key points. First, that copyright owners cannot be expected to consider fair use prior to issuing takedown notices because fair use is a defence, invoked after the act rather than a use authorized by the copyright owner or the law. Second, because the DMCA does not mention fair use, then there should be no requirement to consider it, or at the very least, it should not be considered until it is raised in legal defence.In rejecting both arguments the court accepted Lenz’s argument that fair use is an authorised use of copyrighted materials because the doctrine of fair use is embedded into the Copyright Act 1976. The court substantiated the point by emphasising the language of section 107. Although fair use is absent from the DMCA, the court reiterated that it is part of the Copyright Act and that “notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A” a fair use “is not an infringement of copyright” (s.107, Copyright Act 1976). Overzealous rights holders frequently abuse the DMCA as a means to quash all use of copyrighted materials without considering fair use. This decision reaffirms that fair use “should not be considered a bizarre, occasionally tolerated departure from the grand conception of the copyright design” but something that it is integral to the constitution of copyright law and essential in ensuring that copyright’s goals can be fulfilled (Leval 1100). Unlicensed musical sampling has never fared well in the courtroom. Three decades of rejection and admonishment by judges culminated in Bridgeport Music, Inc., et al v. Dimension Films et al 383 F. 3d 400 (6th Cir. 2004): “Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this stifling creativity in any significant way” was the ruling on an action brought against an unlicensed use of a three-note guitar sample under section 114, an audio piracy provision. The Bridgeport decision sounded a death knell for unlicensed sampling, ensuring that only artists with sufficient capital to pay the piper could legitimately be creative with the wealth of recorded music available. The cost of licensing samples can often outweigh the creative merit of the act itself as discussed by McLeod (86) and Beaujon (25). In August 2008 the Supreme Court of New York heard EMI v. Premise Media in which EMI sought an injunction against an unlicensed fifteen second excerpt of John Lennon’s “Imagine” featured in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a controversial documentary canvassing alleged chilling of intelligent design proponents in academic circles. (The family of John Lennon and EMI had previously failed to persuade a Manhattan federal court in a similar action.) The court upheld Premise Media’s arguments for fair use and rejected the Bridgeport approach on which EMI had rested its entire complaint. Justice Lowe criticised the Bridgeport court for its failure to examine the legislative intent of section 114 suggesting that courts should look to the black letter of the law rather than blindly accept propertarian arguments. This decision is of particular importance because it establishes that fair use applies to unlicensed use of sound recordings and re-establishes de minimis use.ConclusionThis paper was partly inspired by the final entry on eminent copyright scholar William Patry’s personal copyright law blog (1 Aug. 2008). A copyright lawyer for over 25 years, Patry articulated his belief that copyright law has swung too far away from its initial objectives and that balance could never be restored. The two cases presented in this paper demonstrate that fair use – and therefore balance – can be recovered in copyright. The federal Supreme Court and lower courts have stressed that copyright was intended to promote creativity and have upheld the fair doctrine, but in order for the balance to exist in copyright law, cases must come before the courts; copyright myth must be challenged. As McLeod states, “the real-world problems occur when institutions that actually have the resources to defend themselves against unwarranted or frivolous lawsuits choose to take the safe route, thus eroding fair use”(146-7). ReferencesBeaujon, Andrew. “It’s Not the Beat, It’s the Mocean.” CMJ New Music Monthly. April 1999.Collins, Steve. “Good Copy, Bad Copy: Covers, Sampling and Copyright.” M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/02-collins.php›.———. “‘Property Talk’ and the Revival of Blackstonian Copyright.” M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/5-collins.php›.Donaldson v. Becket 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 953.Efroni, Zohar. “Israel’s Fair Use.” The Center for Internet and Society (2008). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5670›.Lange, David, and Jennifer Lange Anderson. “Copyright, Fair Use and Transformative Critical Appropriation.” Conference on the Public Domain, Duke Law School. 2001. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/papers/langeand.pdf›.Lemley, Mark. “Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding.” Texas Law Review 83 (2005): 1031.Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas. New York: Random House, 2001.———. Free Culture. New York: Penguin, 2004.Leval, Pierre. “Toward a Fair Use Standard.” Harvard Law Review 103 (1990): 1105.McDonald, Heather. “Holden Lenz, 18 Months, versus Prince and Universal Music Group.” About.com: Music Careers 2007. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://musicians.about.com/b/2007/10/27/holden-lenz-18-months-versus-prince-and-universal-music-group.htm›.McLeod, Kembrew. “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.” Stay Free 2002. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/20/public_enemy.html›.———. Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. United States: Doubleday, 2005.McLuhan, Marshall, and Barrington Nevitt. Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. Ontario: Longman Canada, 1972.Metz, Cade. “Viacom Slaps YouTuber for Behaving like Viacom.” The Register 2007. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/30/viacom_slaps_pol/›.Negativland, ed. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2. Concord: Seeland, 1995.Patry, William. The Fair Use Privilege in Copyright Law. Washington DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1985.———. “End of the Blog.” The Patry Copyright Blog. 1 Aug. 2008. 27 Aug. 2008 ‹http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2008/08/end-of-blog.html›.Tapscott, Don. The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence. New York: McGraw Hill, 1996.Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. London, Glasgow, Sydney, Auckland. Toronto, Johannesburg: William Collins, 1980.Travis, Hannibal. “Pirates of the Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian Copyright and the First Amendment.” Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 15 (2000), No. 777.Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York; London: New York UP, 2003.

Abstract:

Despite the now-traditional tendency of noir scholarship to call attention to the retrospective and constructed nature of this genre— James Naremore argues that film noir is best regarded as a “mythology”— one feature that has rarely come under question is its association with the city (2). Despite the existence of numerous rural noirs, the depiction of urban space is associated with this genre more consistently than any other element. Even in critical accounts that attempt to deconstruct the solidity of the noir genre, the city is left as an implicit inclusion, and the country, an implict exclusion. Naremore, for example, does not include the urban environment in a list of the central tenets of film noir that he calls into question: “nothing links together all the things described as noir—not the theme of crime, not a cinematographic technique, not even a resistance to Aristotelian narratives or happy endings” (10). Elizabeth Cowie identifies film noir a “fantasy,” whose “tenuous critical status” has been compensated for “by a tenacity of critical use” (121). As part of Cowie’s project, to revise the assumption that noirs are almost exclusively male-centered, she cites character types, visual style, and narrative tendencies, but never urban spaces, as familiar elements of noir that ought to be reconsidered. If the city is rarely tackled as an unnecessary or part-time element of film noir in discursive studies, it is often the first trait identified by critics in the kind of formative, characteristic-compiling studies that Cowie and Naremore work against.Andrew Dickos opens Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir with a list of noir’s key attributes. The first item is “an urban setting or at least an urban influence” (6). Nicholas Christopher maintains that “the city is the seedbed of film noir. […] However one tries to define or explain noir, the common denominator must always be the city. The two are inseparable” (37). Though the tendencies of noir scholars— both constructive and deconstructive— might lead readers to believe otherwise, rural locations figure prominently in a number of noir films. I will show that the noir genre is, indeed, flexible enough to encompass many films set predominantly or partly in rural locations. Steve Neale, who encourages scholars to work with genre terms familiar to original audiences, would point out that the rural noir is an academic discovery not an industry term, or one with much popular currency (166). Still, this does not lessen the critical usefulness of this subgenre, or its implications for noir scholarship.While structuralist and post-structuralist modes of criticism dominated film genre criticism in the 1970s and 80s, as Thomas Schatz has pointed out, these approaches often sacrifice close attention to film texts, for more abstract, high-stakes observations: “while there is certainly a degree to which virtually every mass-mediated cultural artifact can be examined from [a mythical or ideological] perspective, there appears to be a point at which we tend to lose sight of the initial object of inquiry” (100). Though my reading of these films sidesteps attention to social and political concerns, this article performs the no-less-important task of clarifying the textual features of this sub-genre. To this end, I will survey the tendencies of the rural noir more generally, mentioning more than ten films that fit this subgenre, before narrowing my analysis to a reading of Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948), Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949), They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949) and On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952). Robert Mitchum tries to escape his criminal life by settling in a small, mountain-side town in Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947). A foggy marsh provides a dramatic setting for the Bonnie and Clyde-like demise of lovers on the run in Gun Crazy (Joseph Lewis, 1950). In The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950), Sterling Hayden longs to return home after he is forced to abandon his childhood horse farm for a life of organised crime in the city. Rob Ryan plays a cop unable to control his violent impulses in On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952). He is re-assigned from New York City to a rural community up-state in hopes that a less chaotic environment will have a curative effect. The apple orchards of Thieves’ Highway are no refuge from networks of criminal corruption. In They Live By Night, a pair of young lovers, try to leave their criminal lives behind, hiding out in farmhouses, cabins, and other pastoral locations in the American South. Finally, the location of prisons explains a number of sequences set in spare, road-side locations such as those in The Killer is Loose (Budd Boetticher, 1956), The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953), and Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948). What are some common tendencies of the rural noir? First, they usually feature both rural and urban settings, which allows the portrayal of one to be measured against the other. What we see of the city structures the definition of the country, and vice versa. Second, the lead character moves between these two locations by driving. For criminals, the car is more essential for survival in the country than in the city, so nearly all rural noirs are also road movies. Third, nature often figures as a redemptive force for urbanites steeped in lives of crime. Fourth, the curative quality of the country is usually tied to a love interest in this location: the “nurturing woman” as defined by Janey Place, who encourages the protagonist to forsake his criminal life (60). Fifth, the country is never fully crime-free. In The Killer is Loose, for example, an escaped convict’s first victim is a farmer, whom he clubs before stealing his truck. The convict (Wendell Corey), then, easily slips through a motorcade with the farmer’s identification. Here, the sprawling countryside provides an effective cover for the killer. This farmland is not an innocent locale, but the criminal’s safety-net. In films where a well-intentioned lead attempts to put his criminal life behind him by moving to a remote location, urban associates have little trouble tracking him down. While the country often appears, to protagonists like Jeff in Out of the Past or Bowie in They Live By Night, as an ideal place to escape from crime, as these films unfold, violence reaches the countryside. If these are similar points, what are some differences among rural noirs? First, there are many differences by degree among the common elements listed above. For instance, some rural noirs present their location with unabashed romanticism, while others critique the idealisation of these locations; some “nurturing women” are complicit with criminal activity, while others are entirely innocent. Second, while noir films are commonly known for treating similar urban locations, Los Angeles in particular, these films feature a wide variety of locations: Out of the Past and Thieves’ Highway take place in California, the most common setting for rural noirs, but On Dangerous Ground is set in northern New England, They Live by Night takes place in the Depression-era South, Moonrise in Southern swampland, and the most dynamic scene of The Asphalt Jungle is in rural Kentucky. Third, these films also vary considerably in the balance of settings. If the three typical locations of the rural noir are the country, the city, and the road, the distribution of these three locations varies widely across these films. The location of The Asphalt Jungle matches the title until its dramatic conclusion. The Hitch-hiker, arguably a rural noir, is set in travelling cars, with just brief stops in the barren landscape outside. Two of the films I analyse, They Live By Night and Moonrise are set entirely in the country; a remarkable exception to the majority of films in this subgenre. There are only two other critical essays on the rural noir. In “Shadows in the Hinterland: Rural Noir,” Jonathan F. Bell contextualises the rural noir in terms of post-war transformations of the American landscape. He argues that these films express a forlorn faith in the agrarian myth while the U.S. was becoming increasingly developed and suburbanised. That is to say, the rural noir simultaneously reflects anxiety over the loss of rural land, but also the stubborn belief that the countryside will always exist, if the urbanite needs it as a refuge. Garry Morris suggests the following equation as the shortest way to state the thematic interest of this genre: “Noir = industrialisation + (thwarted) spirituality.” He attributes much of the malaise of noir protagonists to the inhospitable urban environment, “far from [society’s] pastoral and romantic and spiritual origins.” Where Bell focuses on nine films— Detour (1945), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Out of the Past (1947), Key Largo (1948), Gun Crazy (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1952), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Split Second (1953), and Killer’s Kiss (1955)— Morris’s much shorter article includes just The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Gun Crazy. Of the four films I discuss, only On Dangerous Ground has previously been treated as part of this subgenre, though it has never been discussed alongside Nicholas Ray’s other rural noir. To further the development of the project that these authors have started— the formation of a rural noir corpus— I propose the inclusion of three additional films in this subgenre: Moonrise (1948), They Live by Night (1949), and Thieves’ Highway (1949). With both On Dangerous Ground and They Live by Night to his credit, Nicholas Ray has the distinction of being the most prolific director of rural noirs. In They Live by Night, two young lovers, Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), attempt to escape from their established criminal lives. Twenty-three year old Bowie has just been released from juvenile prison and finds rural Texas refreshing: “Out here, the air smells different,” he says. He meets Keechie through her father, a small time criminal organiser who would be happy to keep her secluded for life. When one of Bowie’s accomplices, Chicamaw (Howard DaSilva), shoots a policeman after a robbing a bank with Bowie, the young couple is forced to run. Foster Hirsch calls They Live by Night “a genre rarity, a sentimental noir” (34). The naïve blissfulness of their affection is associated with the primitive settings they navigate. Though Bowie and Keechie are the most sympathetic protagonists of any rural noir, this is no safeguard against an inevitable, characteristically noir demise. Janey Place writes, “the young lovers are doomed, but the possibility of their love transcends and redeems them both, and its failure criticises the urbanised world that will not let them live” (63). As indicated here, the country offers the young lovers refuge for some time, and their bond is depicted as wonderfully strong, but it is doomed by the stronger force of the law.Raymond Williams discusses how different characteristics are associated with urban and rural spaces:On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved center: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. (1) They Live By Night breaks down these dichotomies, showing the persistence of crime rooted in rural areas.Bowie desires to “get squared around” and live a more natural life with Keechie. Williams’ country adjectives— “peace, innocence, and simple virtue”— describe the nature of this relationship perfectly. Yet, criminal activity, usually associated with the city, has an overwhelmingly strong presence in this region and their lives. Bowie, following the doomed logic of many a crime film character, plans to launch a new, more honest life with cash raised in a heist. Keechie recognises the contradictions in this plan: “Fine way to get squared around, teaming with them. Stealing money and robbing banks. You’ll get in so deep trying to get squared, they’ll have enough to keep you in for two life times.” For Bowie, crime and the pursuit of love are inseparably bound, refuting the illusion of the pure and innocent countryside personified by characters like Mary Malden in On Dangerous Ground and Ann Miller in Out of the Past.In Ray’s other rural noir, On Dangerous Ground, a lonely, angry, and otherwise burned out cop, Wilson (Rob Ryan), finds both love and peace in his time away from the city. While on his up-state assignment, Wilson meets Mary Walden (Ida Lupino), a blind woman who lives a secluded life miles away from this already desolate, rural community. Mary has a calming influence on Wilson, and fits well within Janey Place’s notion of the archetypal nurturing woman in film noir: “The redemptive woman often represents or is part of a primal connection with nature and/or with the past, which are safe, static states rather than active, exciting ones, but she can sometimes offer the only transcendence possible in film noir” (63).If, as Colin McArthur observes, Ray’s characters frequently seek redemption in rural locales— “[protagonists] may reject progress and modernity; they may choose to go or are sent into primitive areas. […] The journeys which bring them closer to nature may also offer them hope of salvation” (124) — the conclusions of On Dangerous Ground versus They Live By Night offer two markedly different resolutions to this narrative. Where Bowie and Keechie’s life on the lam cannot be sustained, On Dangerous Ground, against the wishes of its director, portrays a much more romanticised version of pastoral life. According to Andrew Dickos, “Ray wanted to end the film on the ambivalent image of Jim Wilson returning to the bleak city,” after he had restored order up-state (132). The actual ending is more sentimental. Jim rushes back north to be with Mary. They passionately kiss in close-up, cueing an exuberant orchestral score as The End appears over a slow tracking shot of the majestic, snow covered landscape. In this way, On Dangerous Ground overturns the usual temporal associations of rural versus urban spaces. As Raymond Williams identifies, “The common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future” (297). For Wilson, by contrast, city life was no longer sustainable and rurality offers his best means for a future. Leo Marx noted in a variety of American pop culture, from Mark Twain to TV westerns and magazine advertising, a “yearning for a simpler, more harmonious style of life, and existence ‘closer to nature,’ that is the psychic root of all pastoralism— genuine and spurious” (Marx 6). Where most rural noirs expose the agrarian myth as a fantasy and a sham, On Dangerous Ground, exceptionally, perpetuates it as actual and effectual. Here, a bad cop is made good with a few days spent in a sparsely populated area and with a woman shaped by her rural upbringing.As opposed to On Dangerous Ground, where the protagonist’s movement from city to country matches his split identity as a formerly corrupt man wishing to be pure, Frank Borzage’s B-film Moonrise (1948) is located entirely in rural or small-town locations. Set in the fictional Southern town of Woodville, which spans swamps, lushly wooded streets and aging Antebellum mansions, the lead character finds good and bad within the same rural location and himself. Dan (Dane Clark) struggles to escape his legacy as the son of a murderer. This conflict is irreparably heightened when Dan kills a man (who had repeatedly teased and bullied him) in self-defence. The instability of Dan’s moral compass is expressed in the way he treats innocent elements of the natural world: flies, dogs, and, recalling Out of the Past, a local deaf boy. He is alternately cruel and kind. Dan is finally redeemed after seeking the advice of a black hermit, Mose (Rex Ingram), who lives in a ramshackle cabin by the swamp. He counsels Dan with the advice that men turn evil from “being lonesome,” not for having “bad blood.” When Dan, eventually, decides to confess to his crime, the sheriff finds him tenderly holding a search hound against a bucolic, rural backdrop. His complete comfortability with the landscape and its creatures finally allows Dan to reconcile the film’s opening opposition. He is no longer torturously in between good and evil, but openly recognises his wrongs and commits to do good in the future. If I had to select just a single shot to illustrate that noirs are set in rural locations more often than most scholarship would have us believe, it would be the opening sequence of Moonrise. From the first shot, this film associates rural locations with criminal elements. The credit sequence juxtaposes pooling water with an ominous brass score. In this disorienting opening, the camera travels from an image of water, to a group of men framed from the knees down. The camera dollies out and pans left, showing that these men, trudging solemnly, are another’s legal executioners. The frame tilts upward and we see a man hung in silhouette. This dense shot is followed by an image of a baby in a crib, also shadowed, the water again, and finally the execution scene. If this sequence is a thematic montage, it can also be discussed, more simply, as a series of establishing shots: a series of images that, seemingly, could not be more opposed— a baby, a universal symbol of innocence, set against the ominous execution, cruel experience— are paired together by virtue of their common location. The montage continues, showing that the baby is the son of the condemned man. As Dan struggles with the legacy of his father throughout the film, this opening shot continues to inform our reading of this character, split between the potential for good or evil.What a baby is to Moonrise, or, to cite a more familiar reference, what the insurance business is to many a James M. Cain roman noir, produce distribution is to Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949). The apple, often a part of wholesome American myths, is at the centre of this story about corruption. Here, a distribution network that brings Americans this hearty, simple product is connected with criminal activity and violent abuses of power more commonly portrayed in connection with cinematic staples of organised crime such as bootlegging or robbery. This film portrays bad apples in the apple business, showing that no profit driven enterprise— no matter how traditional or rural— is beyond the reach of corruption.Fitting the nature of this subject, numerous scenes in the Dassin film take place in the daylight (in addition to darkness), and in the countryside (in addition to the city) as we move between wine and apple country to the market districts of San Francisco. But if the subject and setting of Thieves’ Highway are unusual for a noir, the behaviour of its characters is not. Spare, bright country landscapes form the backdrop for prototypical noir behaviour: predatory competition for money and power.As one would expect of a film noir, the subject of apple distribution is portrayed with dynamic violence. In the most exciting scene of the film, a truck careens off the road after a long pursuit from rival sellers. Apples scatter across a hillside as the truck bursts into flames. This scene is held in a long-shot, as unscrupulous thugs gather the produce for sale while the unfortunate driver burns to death. Here, the reputedly innocent American apple is subject to cold-blooded, profit-maximizing calculations as much as the more typical topics of noir such as blackmail, fraud, or murder. Passages on desolate roads and at apple orchards qualify Thieves’ Highway as a rural noir; the dark, cynical manner in which capitalist enterprise is treated is resonant with nearly all film noirs. Thieves’ Highway follows a common narrative pattern amongst rural noirs to gradually reveal rural spaces as connected to criminality in urban locations. Typically, this disillusioning fact is narrated from the perspective of a lead character who first has a greater sense of safety in rural settings but learns, over the course of the story, to be more wary in all locations. In Thieves’, Nick’s hope that apple-delivery might earn an honest dollar (he is the only driver to treat the orchard owners fairly) gradually gives way to an awareness of the inevitable corruption that has taken over this enterprise at all levels of production, from farmer, to trucker, to wholesaler, and thus, at all locations, the country, the road, and the city.Between this essay, and the previous work of Morris and Bell on the subject, we are developing a more complete survey of the rural noir. Where Bell’s and Morris’s essays focus more resolutely on rural noirs that relied on the contrast of the city versus the country— which, significantly, was the first tendency of this subgenre that I observed— Moonrise and They Live By Night demonstrate that this genre can work entirely apart from the city. From start to finish, these films take place in small towns and rural locations. As opposed to Out of the Past, On Dangerous Ground, or The Asphalt Jungle, characters are never pulled back to, nor flee from, an urban life of crime. Instead, vices that are commonly associated with the city have a free-standing life in the rural locations that are often thought of as a refuge from these harsh elements. If both Bell and Morris study the way that rural noirs draw differences between the city and country, two of the three films I add to the subgenre constitute more complete rural noirs, films that work wholly outside urban locations, not just in contrast with it. Bell, like me, notes considerable variety in rural noirs locations, “desert landscapes, farms, mountains, and forests all qualify as settings for consideration,” but he also notes that “Diverse as these landscapes are, this set of films uses them in surprisingly like-minded fashion to achieve a counterpoint to the ubiquitous noir city” (219). In Bell’s analysis, all nine films he studies, feature significant urban segments. He is, in fact, so inclusive as to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss as a rural noir even though it does not contain a single frame shot or set outside of New York City. Rurality is evoked only as a possibility, as alienated urbanite Davy (Jamie Smith) receives letters from his horse-farm-running relatives. Reading these letters offers Davy brief moments of respite from drudgerous city spaces such as the subway and his cramped apartment. In its emphasis on the centrality of rural locations, my project is more similar to David Bell’s work on the rural in horror films than to Jonathan F. Bell’s work on the rural noir. David Bell analyses the way that contemporary horror films work against a “long tradition” of the “idyllic rural” in many Western texts (95). As opposed to works “from Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman to contemporary television shows like Northern Exposure and films such as A River Runs Through It or Grand Canyon” in which the rural is positioned as “a restorative to urban anomie,” David Bell analyses films such as Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that depict “a series of anti-idyllic visions of the rural” (95). Moonrise and They Live By Night, like these horror films, portray the crime and the country as coexistent spheres at the same time that the majority of other popular culture, including noirs like Killer’s Kiss or On Dangerous Ground, portray them as mutually exclusive.To use a mode of generic analysis developed by Rick Altman, the rural noir, while preserving the dominant syntax of other noirs, presents a remarkably different semantic element (31). Consider the following description of the genre, from the introduction to Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide: “The darkness that fills the mirror of the past, which lurks in a dark corner or obscures a dark passage out of the oppressively dark city, is not merely the key adjective of so many film noir titles but the obvious metaphor for the condition of the protagonist’s mind” (Silver and Ward, 4). In this instance, the narrative elements, or syntax, of film noir outlined by Silver and Ward do not require revision, but the urban location, a semantic element, does. Moonrise and They Live By Night demonstrate the sustainability of the aforementioned syntactic elements— the dark, psychological experience of the leads and their inescapable criminal past— apart from the familiar semantic element of the city.The rural noir must also cause us to reconsider— beyond rural representations or film noir— more generally pitched genre theories. Consider the importance of place to film genre, the majority of which are defined by a typical setting: for melodramas, it is the family home, for Westerns, the American west, and for musicals, the stage. Thomas Schatz separates American genres according to their setting, between genres which deal with “determinate” versus “indeterminate” space:There is a vital distinction between kinds of generic settings and conflicts. Certain genres […] have conflicts that, indigenous to the environment, reflect the physical and ideological struggle for its control. […] Other genres have conflicts that are not indigenous to the locale but are the results of the conflict between the values, attitudes, and actions of its principal characters and the ‘civilised’ setting they inhabit. (26) Schatz discusses noirs, along with detective films, as films which trade in “determinate” settings, limited to the space of the city. The rural noir slips between Schatz’s dichotomy, moving past the space of the city, but not into the civilised, tame settings of the genres of “indeterminate spaces.” It is only fitting that a genre whose very definition lies in its disruption of Hollywood norms— trading high- for low-key lighting, effectual male protagonists for helpless ones, and a confident, coherent worldview for a more paranoid, unstable one would, finally, be able to accommodate a variation— the rural noir— that would seem to upset one of its central tenets, an urban locale. Considering the long list of Hollywood standards that film noirs violated, according to two of its original explicators, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton— “a logical action, an evident distinction between good and evil, well-defined characters with clear motives, scenes that are more spectacular than brutal, a heroine who is exquisitely feminine and a hero who is honest”— it should, perhaps, not be so surprising that the genre is flexible enough to accommodate the existence of the rural noir after all (14). AcknowledgmentsIn addition to M/C Journal's anonymous readers, the author would like to thank Corey Creekmur, Mike Slowik, Barbara Steinson, and Andrew Gorman-Murray for their helpful suggestions. ReferencesAltman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 27-41.The Asphalt Jungle. Dir. John Huston. MGM/UA, 1950.Bell, David. “Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror.” Contested Countryside Cultures. Eds. Paul Cloke and Jo Little. London, Routledge, 1997. 94-108.Bell, Jonathan F. “Shadows in the Hinterland: Rural Noir.” Architecture and Film. Ed. Mark Lamster. New York: Princeton Architectural P, 2000. 217-230.Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. A Panorama of American Film Noir. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002.Christopher, Nicholas. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.Cowie, Elizabeth. “Film Noir and Women.” Shades of Noir. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: Verso, 1993. 121-166.Dickos, Andrew. Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2002.Hirsch, Foster. Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir. New York: Limelight Editions, 1999.Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.McArthur, Colin. Underworld U.S.A. London: BFI, 1972.Moonrise. Dir. Frank Borzage. Republic, 1948.Morris, Gary. “Noir Country: Alien Nation.” Bright Lights Film Journal Nov. 2006. 13. Jun. 2008 http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/54/noircountry.htm Muller, Eddie. Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1998.Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Berkeley, C.A.: U of California P, 2008.Neale, Steve. “Questions of Genre.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 160-184.On Dangerous Ground. Dir. Nicholas Ray. RKO, 1951.Out of the Past. Dir. Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1947.Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: BFI, 1999. 47-68.Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres. New York: Random House, 1981.Schatz, Thomas. “The Structural Influence: New Directions in Film Genre Study.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 92-102.Silver, Alain and Elizabeth Ward. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. London: Bloomsbury, 1980.They Live by Night. Dir. Nicholas Ray. RKO, 1949.Thieves’ Highway. Dir. Jules Dassin. Fox, 1949.Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Abstract:

Reviewing Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby (2013), Eve Vincent notes that it shares with Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1984) one significant feature: “a glossary of Indigenous words.” Working with various forms of the term “abroad”, this article surveys the debate The Bone People ignited around the relative merits of such a glossary in texts written predominantly in English, the colonizing language. At stake here is the development of a post-colonial community that incorporates Indigenous identity and otherness (Maori or Aboriginal) with the historical legacy of the English/Indigenous-language multi-lingualism of multi-cultural Australia and New Zealand. I argue that the terms of this debate have remained static since 1984 and that this creates a problem for post-colonial theory. Specifically, the debate has favoured a binary either/or approach, whereby either the Indigenous language or English has been empowered with authority over the text’s linguistic, historical, cultural and political territory. Given that the significations of “abroad” include a travelling encounter with overseas places and the notion of being widely scattered or dispersed, the term has value for an investigation into how post-colonialism as a historical circ*mstance is mediated and transformed within literature. Post-colonial literature is a response to the “homeland” encounter with a foreign “abroad” that creates particular wide scatterings or dispersals of writing within literary texts.In 1989, Maryanne Dever wrote that “some critics have viewed [The Bone People’s] glossary as a direct denial of otherness. … It can be argued, however, that the glossary is in fact a further way of asserting that otherness” (24). Dever is responding to Simon During, who wrote in 1985 that “by translating the Maori words into English [the glossary allows] them no otherness within its Europeanising apparatus” (During 374). Dever continues: “[The glossary] is a considered statement of the very separateness of the Maori language. In this way, the text inverts the conventional sense of privileging, the glossary forming the key into a restricted or privileged form of knowledge” (24). Dever’s language is telling: “direct denial of otherness,” “asserting that otherness,” and “the very separateness of the Maori language,” reinforce a binary way of thinking that is reproduced by Vincent in 2013 (24).This binary hinders a considered engagement with post-colonial difference because it produces hierarchal outcomes. For Toril Moi, “binary oppositions are heavily imbricated in the patriarchal value system: each opposition can be analysed as a hierarchy where the ‘feminine’ side is always seen as the negative, powerless instance” (104). Inspired by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s concept of “tidalectics”, my article argues that the neologism “glossary islands” provides a more productive way of thinking about the power relations of the relationship of glossaries of Indigenous words to Hulme’s and Lucashenko’s mainly English-language, post-colonial novels. Resisting a binary either/or approach, “glossary islands” engages with the inevitable intermingling of languages of post-colonial and multi-cultural nations and holds value for a new methodological approach to the glossary as an element of post-colonial (islandic) literature.Both The Bone People and Mullumbimby employ female protagonists (Kerewin Holmes and Jo Breen respectively) to explore how family issues resolve into an assertion of place-based community for people othered by enduring colonial forces. Difficult loves and difficult children provide opportunities for tension and uneasy resolution in each text. In Hulme’s novel, Kerewin resists the romantic advances of Joe Gillayley to the end, without ever entirely rejecting him. Similarly, in Mullumbimby, Jo and Twoboy Jackson conduct a vacillating relationship, though one that ultimately steadies. The Bone People tells of an autistic child, Simon P. Gillayley, while Mullumbimby thematises a difficult mother-daughter relationship in its narration of single-mother Jo’s struggles with Ellen. Furthermore, employing realist and magic realist techniques, both novels present family and love as allegories of post-colonial community, thereby exemplifying Stephen Slemon’s thesis that “the real social relations of post-colonial cultures appear, through the mediation of the text’s language of narration, in the thematic dimension of the post-colonial magic realist work” (12).Each text also shows how post-colonial literature always engages with the “abroad” by virtue of the post-colonial relationship of the indigenous “homeland” to the colonial “imported abroad”. DeLoughrey characterises this post-colonial relationship to the “abroad” by a “homeland” as a “tidalectics”, meaning “a dynamic and shifting relationship between land and sea that allows island literatures to be engaged in their spatial and historical complexity” (2-3). The Bone People and Mullumbimby are examples of island literatures for their geographic setting. But DeLoughrey does not compress “tidalectics” to such a reductionist definition. The term itself is as “dynamic and shifting” as what it signifies, and available for diverse post-colonial redeployments (DeLoughrey 2).The margin of land and sea that DeLoughrey foregrounds as constitutive of “tidalectics” is imaginatively re-expressed in both The Bone People and Mullumbimby. Lucashenko’s novel is set in the Byron Bay hinterland, and the text is replete with teasing references to “tidalectics”. For example, “Jo knew that the water she watched was endlessly cycling upriver and down, travelling constantly between the saltwater and the fresh” (Lucashenko 260-61). The writing, however, frequently exceeds a literal “tidalectics”: “Everything in the world was shapeshifting around her, every moment of every day. Nothing remained as it was” (Lucashenko 261).Significantly, Jo is no passive figure at the centre of such “shapeshifting”. She actively takes advantage of the “dynamic and shifting” interplay between elemental presences of her geographical circ*mstances (DeLoughrey 2). It is while “resting her back against the granite and bronze directional marker that was the last material evidence of humanity between Ocean Shores and New Zealand,” that Jo achieves her major epiphany as a character (Lucashenko 261). “Her eyelids sagged wearily. … Jo groaned aloud, exhausted by her ignorance and the unending demands being made on her to exceed it. The temptation to fall asleep in the sun, and leave these demands far behind, began to take her over. … No. We need answers” (Lucashenko 263). The “tidalectics” of her epiphany is telling: the “silence then splintered” (262) and “momentarily the wrens became, not birds, but mere dark movement” (263). The effect is dramatic: “The hairs on Jo’s arms goosepimpled. Her breathing grew fast” (263). “With an unspoken curse for her own obtuseness”, Jo becomes freshly decisive (264). Thus, a “tidalectics” is not a mere geographic backdrop. Rather, a “dynamic and shifting” landscape—a metamorphosis—energizes Jo’s identity in Mullumbimby. In the “homeland”/“abroad” flux of “tidalectics”, post-colonial community germinates.The geography of The Bone People is also a “tidalectics”, as demonstrated, for instance, by chapter five’s title: “Spring Tide, Neap Tide, Ebb Tide, Flood” (Hulme 202). Hulme’s novel contains literally hundreds of such passages that dramatise the margin of land and sea as “dynamic and shifting” (DeLoughrey 2). Again: “She’s standing on the orangegold shingle, arms akimbo, drinking the beach in, absorbing sea and spindrift, breathing it into her dusty memory. It’s all here, alive and salt and roaring and real. The vast cold ocean and the surf breaking five yards away and the warm knowledge of home just up the shore” (163). Like the protagonist of Mullumbimby, Kerewin Holmes is an energised subject at the margin of land and sea. Geography as “tidalectics” is activated in the construction of character identity. Kerewin involves her surroundings with her sense of self, as constituted through memory, in a fashion that enfolds the literal with the metaphorical: memory is “dusty” in the midst of “vast” waters (163).Thus, at least three senses of “abroad” filter through these novels. Firstly, the “abroad” exists in the sense of an abroad-colonizing power retaining influence even in post-colonial times, as elaborated in Simon During’s distinction between the “post-colonised” and the “post-colonisers” (Simon 460). Secondly, the “abroad” reveals itself in DeLoughrey’s related conceptualisation of “tidalectics” as a specific expression of the “abroad”/“homeland” relationship. Thirdly, the “abroad” is present by virtue of the more general definition it shares with “tidalectics”; for “abroad”, like “tidalectics”, also signifies being widely scattered, at large, ranging freely. There is both denotation and connotation in “tidalectics”, which Lucashenko expresses here: “the world was nothing but water in the air and water in the streams” (82). That is, beyond any “literal littoral” geography, “abroad” is linked to “tidalectics” in this more general sense of being widely scattered, dispersed, ranging freely.The “tidalectics” of Lucashenko’s and Hulme’s novels is also shared across their form because each novel is a complex interweaving of English and the Indigenous language. Here though, we encounter a clear difference between the two novels, which seems related to the predominant genres of the respective texts. In Lucashenko’s largely realist mode of writing, the use of Indigenous words is more transparent to a monolingual English speaker than is Hulme’s use of Maori in her novel, which tends more towards magic realism. A monolingual English speaker can often translate Lucashenko almost automatically, through context, or through an in-text translation of the words worked into the prose. With Hulme, context usually withholds adequate clues to the meaning of the Maori words, nor are any in-text translations of the Maori commonly offered.Leaving aside for now any consideration of their glossaries, each novel presents a different representation of the post-colonial/“abroad” relationship of an Indigenous language to English. Mullumbimby is the more conservative text in this respect. The note prefacing Mullumbimby’s Glossary reads: “In this novel, Jo speaks a mixture of Bundjalung and Yugambeh languages, interspersed with a variety of Aboriginal English terms” (283). However, the Indigenous words often shade quite seamlessly into their English translation, and the “Aboriginal English” Jo speaks is actually not that different from standard English dialogue as found in many contemporary Australian novels. If anything, there is only a slight, distinguishing American flavour to Jo’s dialogue. In Mullumbimby, the Indigenous tongue tends to disappear into the text’s dominant language: English.By contrast, The Bone People contains many instances where Maori presents in all its bold strangeness to a monolingual English speaker. My reading experience consisted in running my eyes over the words but not really taking them in, except insofar as they represented a portion of Maori of unknown meaning. I could look up the recondite English words (of which there were many) in my dictionary or online, but it was much harder to conveniently source definitions of the Maori words, especially when they formed larger syntactic units.The situation is reversed, however, when one considers the two glossaries. Mullumbimby’s glossary asserts the difference of the Indigenous language(s) by having no page numbers alongside its Indigenous words (contrast The Bone People’s glossary) and because, despite being titled Glossary as a self-sufficient part of the book, it is not mentioned in any Contents page. One comes across Lucashenko’s glossary, at the end of her novel, quite unexpectedly. Conversely, Hulme’s glossary is clearly referenced on its Contents page, where it is directly described as a “Translation of Maori Words and Phrases” commencing on page 446. Hulme’s glossary appears predictably, and contains page references to all its Maori words or phrases. This contrasts with Lucashenko’s glossary, which follows alphabetical order, rather than the novel’s order. Mullumbimby’s glossary is thus a more assertive textual element than The Bone People’s glossary, which from the Contents page on is more hom*ogenised with the prevailing English text.Surely the various complexities of these two glossaries show the need for a better way of critically engaging with them that does not lead to the re-accentuation of the binary terms in which the scholarly discussion about their genre has been couched so far. Such a methodology needs to be sensitive to the different forms of these glossaries and of others like them in other texts. But some terminological minesweeping is required in order to develop this methodology, for a novel and a glossary are different textual forms and should not be compared like for like. A novel is a work of the imagination in fictional form whereas a glossary is a meta-text that, according to The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, comprises “a list with explanations, often accompanying a text, of abstruse, obsolete, dialectal, or technical terms.” The failure to take this difference substantially into account explains why the debate around Hulme’s and Lucashenko’s glossaries as instruments of post-colonial language relationships has defaulted, thus far, to a binary approach insensitive to the complexities of linguistic relations in post-colonial and multi-cultural nations. Ignoring the formal difference between novel and glossary patronises a reading that proceeds by reference to binary opposition, and thus hierarchy.By contrast, my approach is to read these glossaries as texts that can be read and interpreted as one might read and interpret the novels they adjoin, and also with close attention to the architecture of their relationship to the novels they accompany. This close reading methodology enables attention to the differences amongst glossaries, as much as to the differences between them and the texts they gloss. One consequence of this is that, as I have shown above, a text might be conservative so far as its novel segment is concerned, yet radical so far as its glossary is concerned (Mullumbimby), or vice versa (The Bone People).To recap, “tidalectics” provides a way of engaging with the post-colonial/“abroad” (linguistic) complexities of island nations and literatures. It denotes “a dynamic and shifting relationship between land and sea that allows island literatures to be engaged in their spatial and historical complexity” (DeLoughrey 2-3). The methodological challenge for my article is to show how “tidalectics” is useful to a consideration of that sub-genre of post-colonial novels containing glossaries. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s unpacking of “tidalectics” considers not just islands but also the colonial relationships of (archetypally mainland European) colonial forces to islands. Referring to the popularity of “desert-island stories” (12), DeLoughrey notes how “Since the colonial expansion of Europe, its literature has increasingly inscribed the island as a reflection of various political, sociological, and colonial practices” (13). Further, “European inscriptions of island topoi have often upheld imperial logic and must be recognized as ideological tools that helped make colonial expansion possible” (13). DeLoughrey also underscores the characteristics of such “desert-island stories” (12), including how accidental colonization of “a desert isle has been a powerful and repeated trope of empire building and of British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (13). Shipwrecks are the most common narrative device of such “accidents”.Drawing on the broad continuum of the several significations of “abroad”, one can draw a parallel between the novel-glossary relationship and the mainland-island relationship DeLoughrey outlines. I recall here Stephen Slemon’s suggestion that “the real social relations of post-colonial cultures appear, through the mediation of the text’s language of narration, in the thematic dimension of the post-colonial magic realist work” (12). Adapting Slemon’s approach, one might read the formal (as opposed to thematic) dimension of the glossary in a post-colonial narrative like The Bone People or Mullumbimby as another literary appearance of “the real social relations of post-colonial cultures” (Slemon 12). What’s appearing is the figure of the island in the form of the glossary: hence, my neologism “glossary islands”. These novels are thus not only examples of island novels to be read via “tidalectics”, but of novels with their own islands appended to them, as glossaries, in the “abroad” of their textuality.Thus, rather than seeing a glossary in a binary either/or way as a sign of the (artificial) supremacy of either English or the Indigenous language, one could use the notion of “glossary islands” to more fully engage with the complexities of post-colonialism as expressed in literature. Seen in this light, a glossary (as to The Bone People or Mullumbimby) can be read as an “abroad” through which the novel circulates its own ideas or inventions of post-colonial community. In this view, islands and glossaries are linked through being intensified sites of knowledge, as described by DeLoughrey. Crucially, the entire, complex, novel-glossary relationship needs to be analysed, and it is possible (though space considerations mediate against pursuing this here) that a post-colonial novel’s glossary expresses the (Freudian) unconscious knowledge of the novel itself.Clearly then, there is a deep irony in how what Simon During calls the “Europeanising apparatus” of the glossary itself becomes, in Mullumbimby, an object of colonisation (During 374). (Recall how one comes across the glossary at the end of Lucashenko’s novel unexpectedly—accidentally—as a European might be cast up upon a desert island.) I hazard the suggestion that a post-colonial novel is more radical in its post-colonial politics the more “island-like” its glossary is, because this implies that the “glossary island” is being used to better work out the nature of post-colonial community as expressed and proposed in the novel itself. Here then, again, the seemingly more radical novel linguistically, The Bone People, seems in fact to be less radical than Mullumbimby, given the latter’s more “island-like” glossary. Certainly their prospects for post-colonial community are being worked out on different levels.Working with the various significations of “abroad” that span the macro level of historical circ*mstances and the micro levels of post-colonial literature, this article has introduced a new methodological approach to engaging with Indigenous language glossaries at the end of post-colonial texts written largely in English. This methodology responds to the need to go beyond the binary either/or approach that has characterised the debate in this patch of post-colonial studies so far. A binary view of language relations, I suggest, is debilitating to prospects for post-colonial community in post-colonial, multi-cultural and island nations like Australia and New Zealand, where language flows are multifarious and complex. My proposed methodology, as highlighted in the neologism “glossary islands”, seems to show promise for the (re-)interpretation of Mullumbimby and The Bone People as texts that deal, albeit in different ways, with similar issues of language relations and of community. An “abroad” methodology provides a powerful infrastructure for engagement with domains such as post-colonialism that, as Stephen Slemon indicates, involve the intensive intermingling of the largest geo-historical circ*mstances with the detail, even minutiae, of the textual expression of those circ*mstances, as in literature.ReferencesDeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2007.Dever, Maryanne. “Violence as Lingua Franca: Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.” World Literature Written in English 29.2 (1989): 23-35.During, Simon. “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism?” Landfall 39.3 (1985): 366-80.———. “Postmodernism or Post-Colonialism Today.” Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed. Thomas Docherty. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. 448-62.Hulme, Keri. The Bone People. London: Pan-Picador, 1986.Lucashenko, Melissa. Mullumbimby. St Lucia, Queensland: U of Queensland P, 2013.Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1985.Slemon, Stephen. “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse.” Canadian Literature 116 (Spring 1988): 9-24.The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. Lesley Brown. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993.Vincent, Eve. “Country Matters.” Sydney Review of Books. Sydney: The Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, 2013. 8 Aug. 2016 <http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/country-matters/>.

Abstract:

To re-imagine can, at one extreme, be a casual thought (what if I moved all the furniture in the living room?) and, at the other, re-imagining can be a complex process (what if I adapt a classic text into a major film?). There is a long history of working with the ideas of others and of re-working our own ideas. Of taking a concept and re-imagining it into something that is similar to the original and yet offers something new. Such re-imaginations are all around us; from the various interpretations of the Sherlock Holmes stories to the adjustments made, often over generations, to family recipes. Some of these efforts are the result of a creative drive to experiment and push boundaries, some efforts are inspired by changes in society or technology, yet others will be born of a sense of 'this can be done better' or 'done differently'. Essentially, to re-imagine is to ask questions, to interrogate that which is often taken for granted. This issue of M/C Journal seeks to explore the 'why' and the 'how' of re-imagining both the everyday and the extraordinary. In a reflection of the scale and scope of the potential to re-imagine all that is around us, this issue is particularly diverse. The contributions offer explorations into varied disciplines, use a range of methodological lenses, and deploy different writing styles. To this end we present a range of articles—some of which contain quite challenging content—that cover copyright, crime fiction, the stage, the literary brand and film, horror and children’s film, television, military-inspired fashion, and a piece that focuses on events leading up to September 11, 2001. We then present three, quite different, works that explore various aspects of Australian Indigenous culture and history. We begin with our feature article: “‘They’re creepy and they’re kooky’ and They’re Copyrighted: How Copyright Is Used to Dampen the (Re-)Imagination”. In this work Steve Collins explores important issues of copyright in the re-imagining and re-purposing of content. In particular, this article unpacks—using examples from the United States—how copyright legislation can restrict the activities of creative practitioners, across varied fields, and so adds to the debate on copyright reform. In our lead article “The Re-imagining Inherent in Crime Fiction Translation”, by Alistair Rolls, ideas of re-imagination, language, and the world’s most popular genre—crime fiction—are critically appraised. Rolls looks at a suite of issues around imagining original and re-imagining, through translation, crime fiction texts. These two forms of creativity are essential to the genre's development for, as Rolls notes, this type of fiction was born, “simultaneously in France and America but also in the translation zone between the two.” Amy Antonio re-imagines the femme fatale. Antonio acknowledges the centrality of the femme fatale to the noir tradition and re-imagines this iconic figure by positioning her on the Renaissance stage, explaining how the historical factors that precipitated the emergence of the noir femme fatale in the years following World War II, similarly existed in the sixteenth century and, as a result, the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. The articles in this issue turn from fiction, to theatre, and then to film with Leonie Rutherford embarking on a “Re-imagining the Brand” exercise. Through two, very informative, case studies—Adventures of Tin Tin and Silver, Return to Treasure Island—Rutherford engages with issues of re-imagining classic literary texts as big-screen blockbusters. This article addresses some of the complexities associated with the updating “of classic texts [that] require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the ‘original’.” Erin Hawley also looks at film, through a lens of horror, in “Re-imagining the Horror Genre in Children’s Animated Film”. Hawley explores how animated films have always been an ambiguous space “in terms of age, pleasure, and viewership.” Hawley goes on to challenge common assumptions that “animation itself is often a signifier of safety, fun, nostalgia, and childishness; it is a means of addressing families and young audiences” and outlines how animation complements horror where, “the fantastic and transformative aspects of animation can be powerful tools for telling stories that are dark, surprising, or somehow subversive.” Issues of the small screen, and social media, are reviewed by Karin van Es, Daniela van Geenen, and Thomas Boeschoten in their work of “Re-imagining Television Audience Research on Twitter”. In particular, this work highlights issues with how audience research is undertaken and argues for new ways forward that adapt to the changing viewing landscape: one that features social media as an increasingly important tool for people to engage with more traditional types of entertainment. Fashion, too, features within this special issue with the work Emerald L. King and Denise N. Rall, “Re-imagining the Empire of Japan through Japanese Schoolboy Uniforms”. King and Rall present their research into the significant re-imagining of Japanese cultural and national identities, which are explored in this work through the cataclysmic impact of Western ideologies on Japanese cultural traditions. The idea of re-imagining is challenged by Meg Stalcup through her article “What If? Re-imagined Scenarios and the Re-virtualisation of History” which looks at several events that took place in the lead up to September 11, 2001. Several of the men who would become 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. Police officers in the United States replayed these incidents of contact, yet their questioning “what if?” asked not only if those moments could have revealed the plot of that traumatic day, but also places alternate scenarios into play. John C. Ryan, Danielle Brady, and Christopher Kueh guide us through a geographical re-imagining of one of Australia’s capital cities in “Where Fanny Balbuk Walked: Re-imagining Perth’s Wetlands through Digital Modelling”. This re-imagining of a major city’s natural environment calls “attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities.” Moreover, this work highlights the value of re-imagining a city anew as well as re-imagining the original after a process of considerable change. Rachel Franks traces the history of an effort to communicate the concept of equality under the law, to the Indigenous peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), in “A True Crime Tale: Re-imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board for the Tasmanian Aborigines”. This article provides an overview of some of the various re-imaginings of this Board—including the re-imagining of the Board’s history—and also offers a new re-imagination of this curious, colonial object; positing that the Board serves as an early “pamphlet” on justice and punishment. Brooke Collins-Gearing, Vivien Cadungog, Sophie Camilleri, Erin Comensoli, Elissa Duncan, Leitesha Green, Adam Phillips, and Rebecca Stone take a very different, and rather creative, approach to re-imagining with “Listenin’ Up: Re-Imagining Ourselves through Stories of and from Country” a work that explores Western discourses of education; and looks at ways to engage with Aboriginal knowledge through the pedagogical and personal act of listening. These authors attempt to re-imagine “the institutionalised space of our classroom through a dialogic pedagogy.” These articles are, necessarily, brief. Yet, each work does provide insight into various aspects of the re-imagining process while offering new perspectives on how re-imagining takes place—in material culture, learning practices, or in all important media re-interpretations of the world around us. We extend our thanks to our contributors. We thank, too, all those who engaged in the blind peer review process. We sincerely appreciate the efforts of those who offered their expertise and their time as well as offering valuable comments on a wide range of contributions. Rachel Franks, Simon Dwyer, and Denise N. RallEditors

Abstract:

Literary critics have mainly read Herman Melville’s short story “I and My Chimney” (1856) as allegory. This article elaborates on the tradition of interpreting Melville’s text allegorically by relating it to Fredric Jameson’s post-structural reinterpretation of allegory. In doing so, it argues that the story is not a simple example of allegory but rather an auto-reflexive engagement with allegory that reflects the cultural and historical ambivalences of the time in which Melville was writing. The suggestion is that Melville deliberately used signifiers (or the lack thereof) of directionality and place to reframe the overt context of his allegory (Civil War divisions of North and South) through teasing reference to the contemporaneous emergence of Manifest Destiny as an East-West historical spatialization. To this extent, from a literary-historical perspective, Melville’s text presents as an enquiry into the relationship between the obvious allegorical elements of a text and the literal or material elements that may either support or, as in this case, problematize traditional allegorical modes. In some ways, Melville’s story faintly anticipates Jameson’s post-structural theory of allegory as produced over a century later. “I and My Chimney” may also be linked to later texts, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which shift the directionality of American Literary History, in a definite way, from a North-South to an East-West axis. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books may also be mentioned here. While, in recent years, some literary critics have produced readings of Melville’s story that depart from the traditional emphasis on its allegorical nature, this article claims to be the first to engage with “I and My Chimney” from within an allegorical perspective also informed by post-structural thinking. To do this, it focuses on the setting or directionality of the story, and on the orientating details of the titular chimney.Written and published shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861-1865), which pitted North against South, Melville’s story is told in the first person by a narrator with overweening affection for the chimney he sees as an image of himself: “I and my chimney, two gray-headed old smokers, reside in the country. We are, I may say, old settlers here; particularly my old chimney, which settles more and more every day” (327). Within the merged identity of narrator and chimney, however, the latter takes precedence, almost completely, over the former: “though I always say, I and my chimney, as Cardinal Wolsey used to say, I and my King, yet this egotistic way of speaking, wherein I take precedence of my chimney, is hardly borne out by the facts; in everything, except the above phrase, my chimney taking precedence of me” (327). Immediately, this sentence underscores a disjunction between words (“the above phrase”) and material circ*mstances (“the facts”) that will become crucial in my later consideration of Melville’s story as post-structural allegory.Detailed architectural and architectonic descriptions manifesting the chimney as “the one great domineering object” of the narrator’s house characterize the opening pages of the story (328). Intermingled with these descriptions, the narrator recounts the various interpersonal and business-related stratagems he has been forced to adopt in order to protect his chimney from the “Northern influences” that would threaten it. Numbered in this company are his mortgagee, the narrator’s own wife and daughters, and Mr. Hiram Scribe—“a rough sort of architect” (341). The key subplot implicated with the narrator’s fears for his chimney concerns its provenance. The narrator’s “late kinsman, Captain Julian Dacres” built the house, along with its stupendous chimney, and upon his death a rumour developed concerning supposed “concealed treasure” in the chimney (346). Once the architect Scribe insinuates, in correspondence to the chimney’s alter ego (the narrator), “that there is architectural cause to conjecture that somewhere concealed in your chimney is a reserved space, hermetically closed, in short, a secret chamber, or rather closet” the narrator’s wife and daughter use Scribe’s suggestion of a possible connection to Dacres’s alleged hidden treasure to reiterate their calls for the chimney’s destruction (345):Although they had never before dreamed of such a revelation as Mr. Scribe’s, yet upon the first suggestion they instinctively saw the extreme likelihood of it. In corroboration, they cited first my kinsman, and second, my chimney; alleging that the profound mystery involving the former, and the equally profound masonry involving the latter, though both acknowledged facts, were alike preposterous on any other supposition than the secret closet. (347)To protect his chimney, the narrator bribes Mr. Scribe, inviting him to produce a “‘little certificate—something, say, like a steam-boat certificate, certifying that you, a competent surveyor, have surveyed my chimney, and found no reason to believe any unsoundness; in short, any—any secret closet in it’” (351). Having enticed Scribe to scribe words against himself, the narrator concludes his tale triumphantly: “I am simply standing guard over my mossy old chimney; for it is resolved between me and my chimney, that I and my chimney will never surrender” (354).Despite its inherent interest, literary critics have largely overlooked “I and My Chimney”. Katja Kanzler observes that “together with much of [Melville’s] other short fiction, and his uncollected magazine pieces in particular, it has never really come out of the shadow of the more epic texts long considered his masterpieces” (583). To the extent that critics have engaged the story, they have mainly read it as traditional allegory (Chatfield; Emery; Sealts; Sowder). Further, the allegorical trend in the reception of Melville’s text clusters within the period from the early 1940s to the early 1980s. More recently, other critics have explored new ways of reading Melville’s story, but none, to my knowledge, have re-investigated its dominant allegorical mode of reception in the light of the post-structural engagements with allegory captured succinctly in Fredric Jameson’s work (Allison; Kanzler; Wilson). This article acknowledges the perspicacity of the mid-twentieth-century tradition of the allegorical interpretation of Melville’s story, while nuancing its insights through greater attention to the spatialized materiality of the text, its “geomorphic” nature, and its broader historical contexts.E. Hale Chatfield argues that “I and My Chimney” evidences one broad allegorical polarity of “Aristocratic Tradition vs. Innovation and Destruction” (164). This umbrella category is parsed by Sealts as an individualized allegory of besieged patriarchal identity and by Sowder as a national-level allegory of anxieties linked to the antebellum North-South relationship. Chatfield’s opposition works equally well for an individual or for communities of individuals. Thus, in this view, even as it structures our reception of Melville’s story, allegory remains unproblematized in itself through its internal interlocking. In turn, “I and My Chimney” provides fertile soil for critics to harvest an allegorical crop. Its very title inveigles the reader towards an allegorical attitude: the upstanding “I” of the title is associated with the architecture of the chimney, itself also upstanding. What is of the chimney is also, allegorically, of the “I”, and the vertical chimney, like the letter “I”, argues, as it were, a north-south axis, being “swung vertical to hit the meridian moon,” as Melville writes on his story’s first page (327). The narrator, or “I”, is as north-south as is his narrated allegory.Herman Melville was a Northern resident with Southern predilections, at least to the extent that he co-opted “Southern-ness” to, in Katja Kanzler’s words, “articulate the anxiety of mid-nineteenth-century cultural elites about what they perceive as a cultural decline” (583). As Chatfield notes, the South stood for “Aristocratic Tradition”; the North, for “Innovation and Destruction” (164). Reflecting the conventional mid-twentieth-century view that “I and My Chimney” is a guileless allegory of North-South relations, William J. Sowder argues that itreveals allegorically an accurate history of Southern slavery from the latter part of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth—that critical period when the South spent most of its time and energy apologizing for the existence of slavery. It discloses the split which Northern liberals so ably effected between liberal and conservative forces in the South, and it lays bare the intransigence of the traditional South on the Negro question. Above everything, the story reveals that the South had little in common with the rest of the Union: the War between the States was inevitable. (129-30)Sowder goes into painstaking detail prosecuting his North-South allegorical reading of Melville’s text, to the extent of finding multiple correspondences between what is allegorizing and what is being allegorized within a single sentence. One example, with Sowder’s allegorical interpolations in square brackets, comes from a passage where Melville is writing about his narrator’s replaced “gable roof” (Melville 331): “‘it was replaced with a modern roof [the cotton gin], more fit for a railway woodhouse [an industrial society] than an old country gentleman’s abode’” (Sowder 137).Sowder’s argument is historically erudite, and utterly convincing overall, except in one crucial detail. That is, for a text supposedly so much about the South, and written so much from its perspective—Sowder labels the narrator a “bitter Old Southerner”—it is remarkable how the story is only very ambiguously set in the South (145). Sowder distances himself from an earlier generation of commentators who “generally assumed that the old man is Melville and that the country is the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshires, where Melville lived from 1850 to 1863,” concluding, “in fact, I find it hard to picture the narrator as a Northerner at all: the country which he describes sounds too much like the Land of Cotton” (130).Quite obviously, the narrator of any literary text does not necessarily represent its author, and in the case of “I and My Chimney”, if the narrator is not inevitably coincident with the author, then it follows that the setting of the story is not necessarily coincident with “the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshires.” That said, the position of critics prior to Sowder that the setting is Massachusetts, and by extension that the narrator is Melville (a Southern sympathizer displaced to the North), hints at an oversight in the traditional allegorical reading of Melville’s text—related to its spatializations—the implications of which Sowder misses.Think about it: “too much like the Land of Cotton” is an exceedingly odd phrase; “too much like” the South, but not conclusively like the South (Sowder 130)! A key characteristic of Melville’s story is the ambiguity of its setting and, by extension, of its directionality. For the text to operate (following Chatfield, Emery, Sealts and Sowder) as a straightforward allegory of the American North-South relationship, the terms “north” and “south” cannot afford to be problematized. Even so, whereas so much in the story reads as related to either the South or the North, as cultural locations, the notions of “south-ness” and “north-ness” themselves are made friable (in this article, the lower case broadly indicates the material domain, the upper case, the cultural). At its most fundamental allegorical level, the story undoes its own allegorical expressions; as I will be arguing, the materiality of its directionality deconstructs what everything else in the text strives (allegorically) to maintain.Remarkably, for a text purporting to allegorize the North as the South’s polar opposite, nowhere does the story definitively indicate where it is set. The absence of place names or other textual features which might place “I and My Chimney” in the South, is over-compensated for by an abundance of geographically distracting signifiers of “place-ness” that negatively emphasize the circ*mstance that the story is not set definitively where it is set suggestively. The narrator muses at one point that “in fact, I’ve often thought that the proper place for my old chimney is ivied old England” (332). Elsewhere, further destabilizing the geographical coordinates of the text, reference is made to “the garden of Versailles” (329). Again, the architect Hiram Scribe’s house is named New Petra. Rich as it is with cultural resonances, at base, Petra denominates a city in Jordan; New Petra, by contrast, is place-less.It would appear that something strange is going on with allegory in this deceptively straightforward allegory, and that this strangeness is linked to equally strange goings on with the geographical and directional relations of north and south, as sites of the historical and cultural American North and South that the story allegorizes so assiduously. As tensions between North and South would shortly lead to the Civil War, Melville writes an allegorical text clearly about these tensions, while simultaneously deconstructing the allegorical index of geographical north to cultural North and of geographical south to cultural South.Fredric Jameson’s work on allegory scaffolds the historically and materially nuanced reading I am proposing of “I and My Chimney”. Jameson writes:Our traditional conception of allegory—based, for instance, on stereotypes of Bunyan—is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences: this is, so to speak, a one-dimensional view of this signifying process, which might only be set in motion and complexified were we willing to entertain the more alarming notion that such equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text. (73)As American history undergoes transformation, Melville foreshadows Jameson’s transformation of allegory through his (Melville’s) own transformations of directionality and place. In a story about North and South, are we in the south or the north? Allegorical “equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text” (Jameson 73). North-north equivalences falter; South-south equivalences falter.As noted above, the chimney of Melville’s story—“swung vertical to hit the meridian moon”—insists upon a north-south axis, much as, in an allegorical mode, the vertical “I” of the narrator structures a polarity of north and south (327). However, a closer reading shows that the chimney is no less complicit in the confusion of north and south than the environs of the house it occupies:In those houses which are strictly double houses—that is, where the hall is in the middle—the fire-places usually are on opposite sides; so that while one member of the household is warming himself at a fire built into a recess of the north wall, say another member, the former’s own brother, perhaps, may be holding his feet to the blaze before a hearth in the south wall—the two thus fairly sitting back to back. Is this well? (328)Here, Melville is directly allegorizing the “sulky” state of the American nation; the brothers are, as it were, North and South (328). However, just as the text’s signifiers of place problematize the notions of north and south (and thus the associated cultural resonances of capitalized North and South), this passage, in queering the axes of the chimneys, further upsets the primary allegory. The same chimney that structures Melville’s text along a north-south or up-down orientation, now defers to an east-west axis, for the back-to-back and (in cultural and allegorical terms) North-South brothers, sit at a 90-degree angle to their house’s chimneys, which thus logically manifest a cross-wise orientation of east-west (in cultural and allegorical terms, East-West). To this extent, there is something of an exquisite crossover and confusion of cultural North and South, as represented by the two brothers, and geographical/architectural/architectonic north and south (now vacillating between an east-west and a north-south orientation). The North-South cultural relationship of the brothers distorts the allegorical force of the narrator’s spine-like chimney (not to mention of the brother’s respective chimneys), thus enflaming Jameson’s allegorical equivalences. The promiscuous literality of the smokestack—Katja Kanzler notes the “astonishing materiality” of the chimney—subverts its main allegorical function; directionality both supports and disrupts allegory (591). Simply put, there is a disjunction between words and material circ*mstances; the “way of speaking… is hardly borne out by the facts” (Melville 327).The not unjustified critical focus on “I and My Chimney” as an allegory of North-South cultural (and shortly wartime) tensions, has not kept up with post-structural developments in allegorical theory as represented in Fredric Jameson’s work. In part, I suggest, this is because critics to date have missed the importance to Melville’s allegory of its extra-textual context. According to William J. Sowder, “Melville showed a lively interest in such contemporary social events as the gold rush, the French Revolution of 1848, and the activities of the English Chartists” (129). The pity is that readings of “I and My Chimney” have limited this “lively interest” to the Civil War. Melville’s attentiveness to “contemporary social events” should also encompass, I suggest, the East-West (east-west) dynamic of mid-nineteenth century American history, as much as the North-South (north-south) dynamic.The redialing of Melville’s allegory along another directional axis is thus accounted for. When “I and My Chimney” was published in 1856, there was, of course, at least one other major historical development in play besides the prospect of the Civil War, and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny ran, not to put it too finely, along an East-West (east-west) axis. Indeed, Manifest Destiny is at least as replete with a directional emphasis as the discourse of Civil War North-South opposition. As quoted in Frederick Merk’s Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, Senator Daniel S. Dickinson states to the Senate, in 1848, “but the tide of emigration and the course of empire have since been westward” (Merk 29). Allied to this tradition, of course, is the well-known contemporaneous saying, “go West, young man, go West” (“Go West, Young Man”).To the extent that Melville’s text appears to anticipate Jameson’s post-structural theory of allegory, it may be linked, I suggest, to Melville’s sense of being at an intersection of American history. The meta-narrative of national history when “I and My Chimney” was produced had a spatial dimension to it: north-south directionality (culturally, North-South) was giving way to east-west directionality (culturally, East-West). Civil War would soon give way to Manifest Destiny; just as Melville’s texts themselves would, much later admittedly, give way to texts of Manifest Destiny in all its forms, including Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. Equivalently, as much as the narrator’s wife represents Northern “progress” she might also be taken to signify Western “ambition”.However, it is not only that “I and My Chimney” is a switching-point text of geo-history (mediating relations, most obviously, between the tendencies of Southern Exceptionalism and of Western National Ambition) but that it operates as a potentially generalizable test case of the limits of allegory by setting up an all-too-simple allegory of North-South/north-south relations which is subsequently subtly problematized along the lines of East-West/east-west directionality. As I have argued, Melville’s “experimental allegory” continually diverts words (that is, the symbols allegory relies upon) through the turbulence of material circ*mstances.North, or north, is simultaneously a cultural and a geographical or directional coordinate of Melville’s text, and the chimney of “I and My Chimney” is both a signifier of the difference between N/north and S/south and also a portal to a 360-degrees all-encompassing engagement of (allegorical) writing with history in all its (spatialized) manifestations.ReferencesAllison, J. “Conservative Architecture: Hawthorne in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” South Central Review 13.1 (1996): 17-25.Chatfield, E.H. “Levels of Meaning in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Imago 19.2 (1962): 163-69.Emery, A.M. “The Political Significance of Melville’s Chimney.” The New England Quarterly 55.2 (1982): 201-28.“Go West, Young Man.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 29 Sep. 2017. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_young_man>.Jameson, F. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88.Kanzler, K. “Architecture, Writing, and Vulnerable Signification in Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Studies 54.4 (2009): 583-601.Kerouac, J. On the Road. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Melville, H. “I and My Chimney.” Great Short Works of Herman Melville. New York: Perennial-HarperCollins, 2004: 327-54.Merk, F. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.Sealts, M.M. “Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Literature 13 (May 1941): 142-54.Sowder, W.J. “Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney:’ A Southern Exposure.” Mississippi Quarterly 16.3 (1963): 128-45.Wilder, L.I. Little House on the Prairie Series.Wilson, S. “Melville and the Architecture of Antebellum Masculinity.” American Literature 76.1 (2004): 59-87.

Abstract:

The spotlight is on the stand up comic. Huge roars of laughter fill the comedy club, as the stand up comic struts his stuff. The audience lap it up. They drink pint after pint of beer, while reinforcing each other's laughter response, in this feel-good-factor-event. Here, the in-house clan is affiliated to the lord of belly bursting laughter! Eager participants of the above stand up comedy club scenerio are certainly "sophisticated" members of these social laughter occasions. We enjoy being active participants of these types of pleasurable community occasions! I first took an interest in humour research study when I first began writing comedy scripts and plays. It was while I was completing a MSc in Appplied Behavioural Sciences I found that only a limited number of social research projects on humour had been published. After discussions with my tutors, I undertook my research thesis on an interpretive study of contemporary stand up comedy. I'd already completed several short research modules to help me build up my skills in academic study in research design and methodology. At first I didn't have any specific questions about the field of stand up comedy, as I wanted to enter the field with an open and inquisitive mind. I took an ethnographic approach. The questions and answers would "emerge" as the project progressed. I completed an extensive literature review reading all recently published humour research in journals and book publications, plus Phd theses in the UK and elsewhere. I first examined the three "Classical" theories of humour: Superiority; Psychic Relief; and Incongruity, (although there are many other less significant theories). The first two theories are seen as universal theories of humour but there is little evidence to show that humour is universal; rather it is culturally relative within differing social contexts. I found Oliver Double's (1997) book and Phd thesis to be relevant to my study. Double believes the incongruity theory is key to understanding humour, in that stand up comedians rely on effective joketelling and sustaining the audience's faith. As my literature review progressed I began to see a clear split between the theories that argue humour is caused by innate urges, instincts or physiological processes, as opposed to those theories that see humour as a cultural product. By the time I'd completed my study of stand up comedy and analysed all the data collected throughout the research process, I took the the latter argument to be more relevant to common experiences of both comic and comic audience. Although there are many ways of studying humour, much depends on the researcher's main interest; theoretical standpoint; research methods and design. I decided to research humour in a live comedy situation rather than research jokes. I took the view that comedy is an interactional resource, as Michael Mulkay (1988) has noted in his humour research publications. What I mean by this term is that humour functions and is constructed to produce and reproduce certain desirable, socio-cultural effects within social in-groups. Although humour and social group laughter has psychological and anatomical factors that have been identified by behavioural-cognitivists and neuroscientists alike, these studies don't offer much insight into the social interactions, implicit within the joking relationship between comic teller and audience. Likewise, I felt that a study of the semantics, discourse and language is limited, in relation to humour. As these studies seperate humour from real world time, the methods that these disciplines use were not f use in collecting data in the field. I began by listing several comedy clubs in my immediate area. Six comedy clubs were listed within the county that I reside. I selected these comedy clubs for a number of reasons - some practical, other reasons weres based on the numbers of people attending and the differing types of comedians on the comic circuit. I made frequent visits and my primary research method was using "direct observations" of the interactions and cultural exchanges occurring. I used some of the ethnographic methods used by Le Compte and Schensul (1999) to aid data collection. Fieldnotes were analysed for themes and then index coded to delineate the forms of stand up comedy that show both variability and repetiton. Semi-structured interviews took place with several audience members after the shows, eliciting responses about the acts. Notes were taken. After several site visits, a clear pattern of recurring behaviours, especially the purposeful targeting of audience members by each stand up comic emerged. Several stand up comedians, coaches and tutors were also interviewed. Traditionally, ethnographic study use only qualitative research methods but Le Compte and Schensul (1999) apply quantitative methods as well. To measure the amount of variability and repetition of these behaviour patterns, I decided to complete a content analysis of a wide range of stand up comedy videos and cds (50 items in total). Eventually I was able to identify and categorise four specific patterns of comic behaviour or what I termed "Joking Repertoires". I'II briefly discuss these in turn. The first joking repertoire I discovered is the BUILDING RAPPORT repertoire. Here the comic's strategy is to work on the audience's expectations in a mischevious manner. The comic directly targets several audience members in turn throughout his or her act. The comic make fun of the member's dress, accent, laugh, to name but a few characteristics. The audience accepts this direct "piss taking" as a legitimate rule of engagement. The strategy develops and builds a comic audience. An experience and skilled comic compere will use this repertoire to establish a contract between performer and audience. The audience expects and demands this implicit contract. They have paid to be entertained, even at the risk of being humiliated themselves. Of course some audience members want to be picked out and made fun of, as they purposely dress up for the part. Others less confident hide in the darkest corners of the club, out of the comic's gaze. The SPONTENEITY repertoire involves the comic using timing, control and delivery of the comic material in a spontenious manner. For example, during a performance an audience member's mobile phone may ring and stop the comic in his or her tracks. Comics will use these moments to their advantage. Audiences enjoy the unexpected and thrive on the skill of performers who are wellprepared with clever one-liners. They appear to be improvised but they are well thought-out, prior to the performance. Any breach of convention by the comic actor is rewarded with enthusiastic laughter and applause. The third repertoire is the DIRECT PUT DOWN. This is a more aggressive strategy for targeting individuals or group members of the audience. On my field studies of the comedy clubs, this repertoire was used extensively by all or most of the comics. The comic's aim in using direct put downs is to diffuse situations of heckling and regain control of their act. Audience's are usually wise to these put downs and will reward comedians who use cleverly worked out put downs. But audiences can also become quickly critical of the comic who over use or abuse audience members with overly cruel put downs. Much depends on whether or not there is a prevailing hostile atmosphere in the club. The CONFRONTATIONAL repertoire is the fourth category I delineated from my research findings. Here the comic purposely targets a large section of the audience or specific members of society; for example, the Establishment. The comic may take the role of devil's advocate and irritate the hell out of the audience over contentious issues. He or she might want to get the audience to take sides or be completely against what is being stated by the comic. The confrontational comic aims to gain SHOCK VALUE out of the material. Lenny Bruce (2000) and Bill Hicks (1992) were the forerunners of this kind of confrontational humour. Much copied later by UK performers in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher period. This repertoire appears to attract hostile audiences, as the more confrontational the comic, the more hostile the audience reciprocates. The above four joking repertoires can't cover every aspect of the stand up comedy experience. What it does show though is a clear pattern of social group interaction between comic and audience, in the creation of social group laughter. I did find that there are of course exceptions to these four delineated categories; where for example the surrealist humour of say Eddie Izzard (1997), breaks social convention, without targeting anyone or thing in particular. On studying stand up comedy at live events, I discovered different aspects of humour. First, as Provine (1996), a neuroscientist says: "Laughter is not about jokes but about social relations." Second, that the joking relationship relies on the performer establishing a contract of MAKE BELIEVE with the audience, using a number of performance strategies. Third, the contract includes cultural and economic exchanges by all parties and creates specific cultural niches or insider groups. Fourth, these exchanges encourage consumption and reinforcement of both permissive and prescriptive humour. Permissive humour tends towards alternative comedy, which in the UK historically aimed to be politically correct, yet antagonistic to the joke. Prescriptive humour functions as "applied humour". For example, it's function is always to target outsiders. Commonly used by traditionalist comedians, who "tell" ageist,disablist, hom*ophobic, sexist, racist jokes. To my own surprise I found my research of stand up comedy here in the UK to uncover a great deal of prescriptive humour, currently being practiced in the so-called alternative stand up comedy circuit. I found similar prescriptive "targeting" on the pre-recorded videos and Cds of USA stand up acts that I undertook a content analysis of. My conclusions of this study show that stand up comedy appears to function to encompass and perpetuate an array of socialisation practices, circulating within specific cultural domains in the UK and possibily elsewhere. Some of these socialisation practices appear on the surface to be merely "pleasurable" social group occasions but they can also be interpereted as oppressive and discriminatory towards outsider groups, whatever their age, disability, gender, ethnicity or sex. From a more personal experience, I experienced alienation while visiting these clubs. I found it difficult to remain an "objective" researcher, whilst trying to be an active audience member. I seemed to laugh less at the stand up acts, at each subsequent site visit. This wasn't because I'd lost my "sense of humour", but because I became acutely aware (and disappointed) in the fact that joking relationships hasn't really moved on from traditional methods of targeting someone to "get a (cheap) laugh". Today's contemporary stand up comedy and the popular rise of the stand up comedy club, reveals a prescriptive humour, manufactured, delivered and received as an integral part of our mass cultural consumption. Works Cited Berger, P.L. Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience. New York: SUNY P. 1997. Bruce, Lenny. Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Mind: The Rise and Reckless Fall Of Lenny Bruce. Enlightenment: Chrome Dreams CD. 2000. Double, O.J.. Stand Up! On Being a Comedian. London: Methuen. 1997 Hicks, Bill. Relentless. Recorded at the Laff Stop; Austin, Texas USA: Rykodisc. 1992. Izzard, Eddie. Glorious. London: Laughing Stock CD. 1997. Mulkay, M.J.. On Humour: Its Place in Modern Society. Oxford: Polity P. 1998. Holmes, B. "Titter ye not..." New Scientist, (17th April), 1996: 2-3. Links http://www.chinwag.co/uk-comedy.html http://www.comedyonline.co.uk http://www.humorlinks.co/lnks/Academic http://www.ahahaha.co.uk/virginmirth/humour/html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lloyd, Robert V. "Sitting Targets and the Joking Relationships" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/8-lloyd-sitting-targets.php>. APA Style Lloyd, R. (2003, Nov 10). Sitting Targets and the Joking Relationships. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/8-lloyd-sitting-targets.php>

Abstract:

The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation.Surprising to many, Aboriginal Australian mythology includes at least one truly vampire-like entity, despite Althans’ confident assertion that the Bunyip is “Australia’s only monster” (16) which followed McKee’s equally fearless claim that “there is no blackfella tradition of zombies or vampires” (201). Gelder’s Ghost Stories anthology also only mentions the Bunyip, in a tale narrated by Indigenous man Percy Mumbulla (250). Certainly, neither of these academics claim Indigeneity in their ethnicity and most Aboriginal Australian scholars will happily agree that our heterogeneous Indigenous cultures and traditions are devoid of opera-cape wearing Counts who sleep in coffins or are repelled by crucifix-wielding Catholics. Nevertheless, there are fascinating stories--handed down orally from one generation to the next (Australian Aborigines, of course, have no ancestral writing system)--informing wide-eyed youngsters of bloodsucking, supernatural entities that return from the grave to feed upon still living blackfellas: hence Unaipon describes the red-skinned, fig tree-dwelling monster, the “Yara Ma Yha Who […] which sucks the blood from the victim and leaves him helpless upon the ground” (218). Like most vampires, this monster imparts a similarly monstrous existence upon his prey, which it drains of blood through the suckers on its fingers, not its teeth. Additionally, Reed warns: “Little children, beware of the Yara-ma-yha-who! If you do not behave yourselves and do as you are told, they will come and eat you!” (410), but no-one suggests this horrible creature is actually an undead human.For the purposes of this paper at least, the defining characteristics of a vampire are firstly that it must have once been an ordinary, living human. Secondly, it must have an appetite for human blood. Thirdly, it must have a ghoulish inability to undergo a permanent death (note, zombies, unlike vampires it seems, are fonder of brains than fresh hemoglobin and are particularly easy to dispatch). Thus, according to my criteria, an arguably genuine Aboriginal Australian vampire is referred to when Bunson writes of the Mrart being an improperly buried member of the tribe who has returned after death to feed upon the living (13) and when Cheung notes “a number of vampire-like creatures were feared, most especially the mrart, the ghost of a dead person who attacked victims at night and dragged them away from campsites” (40). Unfortunately, details regarding this “number of vampire-like creatures” have not been collated, nor I fear, in this era of rapidly extinguishing Aboriginal Australian language use, are they ever likely to be.Perhaps the best hope for preservation of these little known treasures of our mythology lies not with anthropologists but with the nation’s Indigenous creative writers. Yet no blackfella novelist, apparently, has been interested in the monstrous, bloodsucking, Aboriginal Undead. Despite being described as dominating the “Black Australian novel” (Shoemaker 1), writer Mudrooroo--who has authored three vampire novels--reveals nothing of Aboriginal Australian vampirology in his texts. Significantly, however, Mudrooroo states that Aboriginal Australian novelists such as he “are devoting their words to the Indigenous existential being” (Indigenous 3). Existentiality, of course, has to do with questions of life, death and dying and, for we Aboriginal Australians, such questions inevitably lead to us addressing the terrible consequences of British invasion and genocide upon our cultural identity, and this is reflected in Mudrooroo’s effective use of the vampire trope in his three ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels, as they are also known. Mudrooroo’s bloodsuckers, however, are the invading British and Europeans in his extended ‘white man as ghost’ metaphor: they are not sourced from Aboriginal Australian mythology.Mudrooroo does, notably, intertwine his story of colonising vampires in Australia with characters created by Bram Stoker in his classic novel Dracula (1897). He calls his first Aborigine to become a familiar “Renfield” (Undying 93), and even includes a soft-p*rn re-imagining of an encounter between characters he has inter-textually named “Lucy” and “Mina” (Promised 3). This potential for a contemporary transplantation of Stoker’s European characters to Australia was another aspect I sought to explore in my novel, especially regarding semi-autobiographical writing by mixed-race Aboriginal Australians such as Mudrooroo and myself. I wanted to meta-fictionally insert my self-styled anti-hero into a Stoker-inspired milieu. Thus my work features a protagonist who is confused and occasionally ambivalent about his Aboriginal identity. Brought up as Catholic, as I was, he succumbs to an Australian re-incarnation of Stoker’s Dracula as Anti-Christ and finds himself battling the true-believers of the Catholic Church, including a Moroccan version of Professor Van Helsing and a Buffy-like, quasi-Islamic vampire slayer.Despite his once revered status, Mudrooroo is now exiled from the Australian literary scene as a result of his claim to Indigeneity being (apparently) disproven (see Clark). Illness and old age prevent him from defending the charges, hence it is unlikely that Mudrooroo (or Colin Johnson as he was formerly known) will further develop the Aboriginal Australian vampire trope in his writing. Which situation leaves me to cautiously identify myself as the sole Aboriginal Australian novelist exploring Indigenous vampires in his/her creative writing, as evidenced by my 312 page novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance!, which was a prescribed text in a 2014 Indiana University course on World Literature (Halloran).Set in a contemporary Australia where disparate existential explanations including the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholicism, vampirism and atheism all co-exist, the writing of my novel was motivated by the question: ‘How can such incongruent ideologies be reconciled or bridged?’ My personal worldview is influenced by all four of these explanations for the mysteries of life and death: I was brought up in Catholicism but schooled in scientific methodology, which evolved into an insipid atheism. Culturally I was drawn to the gothic novel and developed an intellectual interest in Stoker’sDracula and its significance as a pro-Catholic, covert mission of proselytization (see Starrs 2004), whilst simultaneously learning more of my totem, Garrawi (the Sulphur-crested White co*ckatoo), and the Aboriginal Dreamtime legends of my ancestral forebears. Much of my novel concerns questions of identity for a relatively light-complexioned, mixed ancestry Aboriginal Australian such as myself, and the place such individuals occupy in the post-colonial world. Mudrooroo, perhaps, was right in surmising that we Aboriginal Australian authors are devoted to writing about “the Indigenous existential being” for my Aboriginal vampire novel is at least semi-autobiographical and fixated on the protagonist’s attempts to reconcile his atheism with his Dreamtime teachings and Catholicism. But Mudrooroo’s writing differs markedly from my own when it comes to the expectations he has regarding the audience’s acceptance of supernatural themes. He apparently fully believed in the possibility of such unearthly spirits existing, and wrote of the “Maban Reality” whereby supernatural events are entirely tenable in the Aboriginal Australian world-view, and the way these matters are presented suggests he expects the reader to be similarly convinced. With this Zeitgeist, Mudrooroo’s ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels can be accurately described as Aboriginal Gothic. In this genre, Chanady explains, “the supernatural, as well as highly improbable events, are presented without any comment by the magical realist narrator” ("Magic Realism" 431).What, then, is the meaning of Aboriginal Gothic, given we Aboriginal peoples have no haunted castles or mist-shrouded graveyards? Again according to Chanady, as she set out in her groundbreaking monograph of 1985, in a work of Magical Realism the author unquestioningly accepts the supernatural as credible (10-12), even as, according to Althans, it combines “the magical and realist, into a new perspective of the world, thus offering alternative ways and new approaches to reality” (26). From this general categorisation, Althans proposes, comes the specific genre of Aboriginal Gothic, which is Magical Realism in an Indigenous context that creates a “cultural matrix foreign to a European audience [...] through blending the Gothic mode in its European tradition with the myths and customs of Aboriginal culture” (28-29). She relates the Aboriginal Gothic to Mudrooroo’s Maban Reality due to its acting “as counter-reality, grounded in the earth or country, to a rational worldview and the demands of a European realism” (28). Within this category sit not only the works of Aboriginal Australian novelists such as Mudrooroo, but also more recent novels by Aboriginal Australian writers Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, who occasionally indulge in improbable narratives informed by supernatural beings (while steering disappointingly clear of vampires).But there is more to the Aboriginal Gothic than a naïve acceptance of Maban Reality, or, for that matter, any other Magical Realist treatments of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Typically, the work of Aboriginal Gothic writers speaks to the historical horrors of colonisation. In contrast to the usually white-authored Australian Gothic, in which the land down under was seen as terrifying by the awestruck colonisers, and the Aborigine was portrayed as “more frightening than any European demon” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10), the Aboriginal Gothic sometimes reverses roles and makes the invading white man the monster. The Australian Gothic was for Aborigines, “a disabling, rather than enabling, discourse” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10) whilst colonial Gothic texts egregiously portrayed the colonised subject as a fearsome and savage Other. Ostensibly sub-human, from a psychoanalytic point of view, the Aborigine may even have symbolised the dark side of the British settler, but who, in the very act of his being subjugated, assures the white invader of his racial superiority, moral integrity and righteous identity. However, when Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away, readers witness the Other writing back, critically. Receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately ‘Gothicised’: eroded and made into the Other, the villainous, predatory savage. In this style of vicious literary retaliation Mudrooroo excelled. Furthermore, as a mixed ancestry Aborigine, like myself, Mudrooroo represented in his very existence, the personification of Aboriginal Gothic, for as Idilko Riendes writes, “The half caste is reminiscent of the Gothic monstrous, as the half caste is something that seems unnatural at first, evoking fears” (107). Perhaps therein lies a source of the vehemency with which some commentators have pilloried Mudrooroo after the somewhat unconvincing evidence of his non-Indigeneity? But I digress from my goal of explicating the meaning of the term Aboriginal Gothic.The boundaries of any genre are slippery and one of the features of postmodern literature is its deliberate blurring of boundaries, hence defining genres is not easy. Perhaps the Gothic can be better understood when the meaning of its polar opposite, the Fantastic, is better understood. Ethnic authorial controversies aside and returning to the equally shady subject of authorial intent, in contrast to the Aboriginal Gothic of novelists Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright, and their accepting of the supernatural as plausible, the Fantastic in literature is characterised by an enlightened rationality in which the supernatural is introduced but ultimately rejected by the author, a literary approach that certainly sits better with my existential atheism. Chanady defined and illustrated the genre as follows: “the fantastic […] reaffirmed hegemonic Western rational paradigms by portraying the supernatural in a contradictory manner as both terrifying and logically impossible […] My examples of the fantastic were drawn from the work of major French writers such as Merimee and Maupassant” ("Magic Realism" 430). Unfortunately, Chanady was unable to illustrate her concept of the Fantastic with examples of Aboriginal horror writing. Why? Because none existed until my novel was published. Whereas Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright incorporated the Magical Realism of Aboriginal Australian mythology into their novels, and asked their readers to accept it as not only plausible but realistic and even factual, I wanted to create a style that blends Aboriginal mythology with the European tradition of vampires, but ultimately rejects this “cultural matrix” due to enlightened rationality, as I deliberately and cynically denounce it all as fanciful superstition.Certainly, the adjective “fantastic” is liberally applied to much of what we call Gothic horror literature, and the sub-genre of Indigenous vampire literature is not immune to this confusion, with non-Australian Indigenous author Aaron Carr’s 1995 Native American vampire novel, The Eye Killers, unhelpfully described in terms of the “fantastic nature of the genre” (Tillett 149). In this novel,Carr exposes contemporary Native American political concerns by skillfully weaving multiple interactive dialogues with horror literature and film, contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations, postmodern philosophies, traditional vampire lore, contemporary Native literature, and Native oral traditions. (Tillett 150)It must be noted, however, that Carr does not denounce the supernatural vampire and its associated folklore, be it European or Laguna/Kerasan/Navajo, as illogical or fanciful. This despite his “dialogues with […] contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations [and] postmodern philosophies”. Indeed, the character “Diana” at one stage pretends to pragmatically denounce the supernatural whilst her interior monologue strenuously defends her irrational beliefs: the novel reads: “‘Of course there aren’t any ghosts,’ Diana said sharply, thinking: Of course there were ghosts. In this room. Everywhere” (197). In taking this stock-standard approach of expecting the reader to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the Undead, Carr locates his work firmly in the Aboriginal Gothic camp and renders commentators such as Tillett liable to be called ignorant and uninformed when they label his work fantastic.The Aboriginal Gothic would leave the reader convinced a belief in the supernatural is non-problematic, whereas the Aboriginal Fantastic novel, where it exists, would, while enjoying the temporary departure from the restraints of reality, eventually conclude there are no such things as ghosts or vampires. Thus, my Aboriginal Fantastic novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! was intended from the very beginning of the creative writing process to be an existentially diametric alternative to Magical Realism and the Aboriginal Gothic (at least in its climactic denouement). The narrative features a protagonist who, in his defeat, realises the danger in superstitious devotion and in doing so his interior monologue introduces to the literary world the new Aboriginal Fantastic genre. Despite a Foucauldian emphasis in most of my critical analysis in which an awareness of the constructed status and nature of the subject/focus of knowledge undermines the foundations of any reductive typology, I am unhesitant in my claim to having invented a new genre of literature here. Unless there is, undiscovered by my research, a yet-to-be heralded work of Aboriginal horror that recognises the impossibility of its subject, my novel is unique even while my attitude might be decried as hubristic. I am also cognizant of the potential for angry feedback from my Aboriginal Australian kin, for my innovative genre is ultimately denigrating of all supernatural devotion, be it vampiric or Dreamtime. Aboriginal Fantastic writing rejects such mythologies as dangerous, fanciful superstition, but I make the (probably) too-little-too-late defence that it rejects the Indigenous existential rationale somewhat less vigorously than it rejects the existential superstitions of Catholicism and/or vampirism.This potential criticism I will forbear, perhaps sullenly and hopefully silently, but I am likely to be goaded to defensiveness by those who argue that like any Indigenous literature, Aboriginal Australian writing is inherently Magical Realist, and that I forsake my culture when I appeal to the rational. Chanady sees “magic realism as a mode that expresses important points of view, often related to marginality and subalternity” ("Magic Realism" 442). She is not alone in seeing it as the generic cultural expression of Indigenous peoples everywhere, for Bhabha writes of it as being the literature of the postcolonial world (6) whilst Rushdie sees it as the expression of a third world consciousness (301). But am I truly betraying my ancestral culture when I dismiss the Mrart as mere superstition? Just because it has colour should we revere ‘black magic’ over other (white or colourless) superstitions? Should we not suspect, as we do when seated before stage show illusionists, some sleight of (writing) hand? Some hidden/sub-textual agenda meant to entertain not educate? Our world has many previously declared mysteries now easily explained by science, and the notion of Earth being created by a Rainbow Serpent is as farcical to me as the notion it was created a few thousand years ago in seven days by an omniscient human-like being called God. If, in expressing this dubiousness, I am betraying my ancestors, I can only offer detractors the feeble defence that I sincerely respect their beliefs whilst not personally sharing them. I attempt no delegitimising of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Indeed, I celebrate different cultural imaginaries for they make our quotidian existence more colourful and enjoyable. There is much pleasure to be had in such excursions from the pedantry of the rational.Another criticism I might hear out--intellectually--would be: “Most successful literature is Magical Realist, and supernatural stories are irresistible”, a truism most commercially successful authors recognise. But my work was never about sales, indeed, the improbability of my (irresistible?) fiction is didactically yoked to a somewhat sanctimonious moral. My protagonist realises the folly and danger in superstitious devotion, although his atheistic epiphany occurs only during his last seconds of life. Thus, whilst pushing this barrow of enlightened rationality, my novel makes a somewhat original contribution to contemporary Australian culture, presenting in a creative writing form rather than anthropological report, an understanding of the potential for melding Aboriginal mythology with Catholicism, the “competing Dreamtimes, white and black” as Turcotte writes ("Re-mastering" 132), if only at the level of ultimately accepting, atheistically, that all are fanciful examples of self-created beyond-death identity, as real--or unreal--as any other religious meme. Whatever vampire literature people read, most such consumers do not believe in the otherworldly antagonists, although there is profound enjoyment to be had in temporarily suspending disbelief and even perpetuating the meme into the mindsets of others. Perhaps, somewhere in the sub-conscious, pre-rational recesses of our caveman-like brains, we still wonder if such supernatural entities reflect a symbolic truth we can’t quite apprehend. Instead, we use a totemic figure like the sultry but terrifying Count Dracula as a proxy for other kinds of primordial anxieties we cannot easily articulate, whether that fear is the child rapist on the loose or impending financial ruin or just the overwhelming sense that our contemporary lifestyles contain the very seeds of our own destruction, and we are actively watering them with our insouciance.In other words, there is little that is new in horror. Yes, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! is an example of what I call the new genre of Aboriginal Fantastic but that claim is not much of an original contribution to knowledge, other than being the invention of an extra label in an unnecessarily formalist/idealist lexicon of literary taxonomy. Certainly, it will not create a legion of fans. But these days it is difficult for a novelist to find anything really new to write about, genre-wise, and if there is a reader prepared to pay hard-earned money for a copy, then I sincerely hope they do not feel they have purchased yet another example of what the HBO television show Californication’s creative writing tutor Hank Moody (David Duchovny) derides as “lame vampire fiction” (episode 2, 2007). I like to think my Aboriginal Fantastic novel has legs as well as fangs. References Althans, Katrin. Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film. Bonn: Bonn UP, 2010. Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Bunson, Matthew. The Vampire Encyclopedia. New York: Gramercy Books, 1993. Carr, Aaron A. Eye Killers. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1995. Chanady, Amaryll. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. Chanady, Amaryll. “Magic Realism Revisited: The Deconstruction of Antinomies.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (June 2003): 428-444. Cheung, Theresa. The Element Encyclopaedia of Vampires. London: Harper Collins, 2009. Clark, Maureen. Mudrooroo: A Likely Story: Identity and Belonging in Postcolonial Australia. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007. Gelder, Ken. The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Halloran, Vivien. “L224: Introduction to World Literatures in English.” Department of English, Indiana University, 2014. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.indiana.edu/~engweb/undergradCourses_spring.shtml›. McKee, Alan. “White Stories, Black Magic: Australian Horror Films of the Aboriginal.”Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia. Eds. Dieter Riemenschneider and Geoffrey V. Davis. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (1997): 193-210. Mudrooroo. The Indigenous Literature of Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997. Mudrooroo. The Undying. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1998. Mudrooroo. The Promised Land. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2000. Reed, Alexander W. Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables. Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1999. Riendes, Ildiko. “The Use of Gothic Elements as Manifestations of Regaining Aboriginal Identity in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart.” Topos 1.1 (2012): 100-114. Rushdie, Salman. “Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta and Penguin Books, 1991. Shoemaker, Adam. Mudrooroo. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1993. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Keeping the Faith: Catholicism in Dracula and its Adaptations.” Journal of Dracula Studies 6 (2004): 13-18. Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012. Tillett, Rebecca. “‘Your Story Reminds Me of Something’: Spectacle and Speculation in Aaron Carr’s Eye Killers.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 33.1 (2002): 149-73. Turcotte, Gerry. “Australian Gothic.” Faculty of Arts — Papers, University of Wollongong, 1998. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/60/›. Turcotte, Gerry. “Re-mastering the Ghosts: Mudrooroo and Gothic Refigurations.” Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo. Ed. Annalisa Oboe. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (2003): 129-151. Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Eds. Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, 2006.

Abstract:

IntroductionThe death of Chris Cornell in the spring of 2017 shook me. As the lead singer of Soundgarden and a pioneer of early 1990s grunge music, his voice revealed an unbridled pain and joy backed up by the raw, guitar-driven rock emanating from the Seattle, Washington music scene. I remember thinking, there’s only one left, referring to Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam, and lone survivor of the four seminal grunge bands that rose to fame in the early 1990s whose lead singers passed away much too soon. Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died in 2002 at the age of 35, and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 had resonated around the globe. I thought about when Cornell and Staley said goodbye to their friend Andy Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, after he overdosed on heroine in 1990. Wood’s untimely death at the age of 24, only days before his band’s debut album release, shook the close-knit Seattle music scene and remained a source of angst and inspiration for a genre of music that shaped youth culture of the 1990s.When grunge first exploded on the pop culture scene, I was a college student flailing around in pursuit of an English degree I had less passion for than I did for music. I grew up listening to The Beatles and Prince; Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis; David Bowie and Willie Nelson, along with a litany of other artists and musicians crafting the kind of meaningful music I responded to. I didn’t just listen to music, I devoured stories about the musicians, their often hedonistic lifestyles; their processes and epiphanies. The music spoke to my being in the world more than the promise of any college degree. I ran with friends who shared this love of music, often turning me on to new bands or suggesting some obscure song from the past to track down. I picked up my first guitar when John Lennon died on the eve of my eleventh birthday and have played for the past 37 years. I rely on music to relocate my sense of self. Rhythm and melody play out like characters in my life, colluding to make me feel something apart from the mundane, moving me from within. So, when I took notice of grunge music in the fall of 1991, it was love at first listen. As a pop cultural phenomenon, grunge ruptured the music and fashion industries caught off guard by its sudden commercial appeal while the media struggled to galvanize its relevance. As a subculture, grunge rallied around a set of attitudes and values that set the movement apart from mainstream (Latysheva). The grunge sound drew from the nihilism of punk and the head banging gospel of heavy metal, tinged with the swagger of 1970s FM rock running counter to the sleek production of pop radio and hair metal bands. Grunge artists wrote emotionally-laden songs that spoke to a particular generation of youth who identified with lyrics about isolation, anger, and death. Grunge set off new fashion trends in favor of dressing down and sporting the latest in second-hand, thrift store apparel, ripping away the Reagan-era starched white-collared working-class aesthetic of the 1980’s corporate culture. Like their punk forbearers who railed against the status quo and the trappings of success incurred through the mass appeal of their art, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and the rest of the grunge cohort often wrestled with the momentum of their success. Fortunes rained down and the media ordained them rock stars.This auto-ethnography revisits some of the cultural impacts of grunge during its rise to cultural relevance and includes my own reflexive interpretation positioned as a fan of grunge music. I use a particular auto-ethnographic orientation called “interpretive-humanistic autoethnography” (Manning and Adams 192) where, along with archival research (i.e. media articles and journal articles), I will use my own reflexive voice to interpret and describe my personal experiences as a fan of grunge music during its peak of popularity from 1991 up to the death of Cobain in 1994. It is a methodology that works to bridge the personal and popular where “the individual story leaves traces of at least one path through a shifting, transforming, and disappearing cultural landscape” (Neumann 183). Grunge RootsThere are many conflicting stories as to when the word “grunge” was first used to describe the sound of a particular style of alternative music seeping from the dank basem*nts and shoddy rehearsal spaces in towns like Olympia, Aberdeen, and Seattle. Lester Bangs, the preeminent cultural writer and critic of all things punk, pop, and rock in the 1970s was said to have used the word at one time (Yarm), and several musicians lay claim to their use of the word in the 1980s. But it was a small Seattle record label founded in 1988 called Sub Pop Records that first included grunge in their marketing materials to describe “the grittiness of the music and the energy” (Yarm 195).This particular sound grew out of the Pacific Northwest blue-collar environment of logging towns, coastal fisheries, and airplane manufacturing. Seattle’s alternative music scene unfolded as a community of musicians responding to the tucked away isolation of their musty surroundings, apart from the outside world, free to submerge themselves in their own cultural milieu of rock music, rain, and youthful rebellion.Where Seattle stood as a major metropolitan city soaked in rainclouds for much of the year, I was soaking up the desert sun in a rural college town when grunge first leapt into the mainstream. Cattle ranches and cotton fields spread across the open plains of West Texas, painted with pickup trucks, starched Wrangler Jeans, and cowboy hats. This was not my world. I’d arrived the year prior from Houston, Texas, an urban sprawl of four million people, but I found the wide-open landscape a welcome change from the concrete jungle of the big city. Along with cowboy boots and western shirts came country music, and lots of it. Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, George Straight; some of the voices that captured the lifestyle of my small rural town, twangy guitars and fiddles blaring on local radio. While popular country artists recorded for behemoth record labels like Warner Brothers and Sony, the tiny Sub Pop Records championed the grunge sound coming out of the Seattle music scene. Sub Pop became a playground for those who cared about their music and little else. The label cultivated an early following through their Sub Pop Singles Club, mailing seven-inch records to subscribers on a monthly basis promoting new releases from up-and-coming bands. Sub Pop’s stark, black and white logo showed up on records sleeves, posters, and t-shirts, reflecting a no-nonsense DIY-attitude rooted in in the production of loud guitars and heavy drums.Like the bands it represented, Sub Pop did not take itself too seriously when one of their best-selling t-shirts simply read “Loser” embracing the slacker mood of newly minted Generation X’ers born between 1961 and 1981. A July 1990 Time Magazine article described this twenty-something demographic as having “few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own” suggesting they “possess only a hazy sense of their own identity” (Gross & Scott). As a member of this generation, I purchased and wore my “Loser” t-shirt with pride, especially in ironic response to the local cowboy way of life. I didn’t hold anything personal against the Wrangler wearing Garth Brooks fan but as a twenty-one-year-old reluctant college student, I wanted to rage with contempt for the status quo of my environment with an ambivalent snarl.Grunge in the MainstreamIn 1991, the Seattle sound exploded onto the international music scene with the release of four seminal grunge-era albums over a six-month period. The first arrived in April, Temple of the Dog, a tribute album of sorts to the late Andy Wood, led by his close friend, Soundgarden singer/songwriter, Chris Cornell. In August, Pearl Jam released their debut album, Ten, with its “surprising and refreshing, melodic restraint” (Fricke). The following month, Nirvana’s Nevermind landed in stores. Now on a major record label, DGC Records, the band had arrived “at the crossroads—scrappy garageland warriors setting their sights on a land of giants” (Robbins). October saw the release of Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger as “a runaway train ride of stammering guitar and psycho-jungle telegraph rhythms” (Fricke). These four albums sent grunge culture into the ether with a wall of sound that would upend the music charts and galvanize a depressed concert ticket market.In fall of 1991, grunge landed like a hammer when I witnessed Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV for the first time. Sonically, the song rang like an anthem for the Gen Xers with its jangly four-chord opening guitar riff signaling the arrival of a youth-oriented call to arms, “here we are now, entertain us” (Nirvana). It was the visual power of seeing a skinny white kid with stringy hair wearing baggy jeans, a striped T-shirt and tennis shoes belting out choruses with a ferociousness typically reserved for black-clad heavy metal headbangers. Cobain’s sound and look didn’t match up. I felt discombobulated, turned sideways, as if vertigo had taken hold and I couldn’t right myself. Stopped in the middle of my tracks on that day, frozen in front of the TV, the subculture of grunge music slammed into my world while I was on my way to the fridge.Suddenly, grunge was everywhere, As Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam albums and performances infiltrated radio, television, and concert halls, there was no shortage of media coverage. From 1992 through 1994, grunge bands were mentioned or featured on the cover of Rolling Stone 33 times (Hillburn). That same year, The New York Times ran the article “Grunge: A Success Story” featuring a short history of the Seattle sound, along with a “lexicon of grunge speak” (Marin), a joke perpetrated by a former 25-year-old Sub Pop employee, Megan Jasper, who never imagined her list of made-up vocabulary given to a New York Times reporter would grace the front page of the style section (Yarm). In their rush to keep up with pervasiveness of grunge culture, even The New York Times fell prey to Gen Xer’s comical cynicism.The circle of friends I ran with were split down the middle between Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a preference for one over the other, as the two bands and their respective front men garnered much of the media attention. Nirvana seemed to appeal to people’s sense of authenticity, perhaps more relatable in their aloofness to mainstream popularity, backed up with Cobain’s simple-yet-brilliant song arrangements and revealing lyrics. Lawrence Grossberg suggests that music fans recognise the difference between authentic and hom*ogenised rock, interpreting and aligning these differences with rock and roll’s association with “resistance, refusal, alienation, marginality, and so on” (62). I tended to gravitate toward Nirvana’s sound, mostly for technical reasons. Nevermind sparkled with aggressive guitar tones while capturing the power and fragility of Cobain’s voice. For many critics, the brilliance of Pearl Jam’s first album suffered from too much echo and reverb muddling the overall production value, but twenty years later they would remix and re-release Ten, correcting these production issues.Grunge FashionAs the music carved out a huge section of the charts, the grunge look was appropriated on fashion runways. When Cobain appeared on MTV wearing a ragged olive green cardigan he’d created a style simply by rummaging through his closet. Vedder and Cornell sported army boots, cargo shorts, and flannel shirts, suitable attire for the overcast climate of the Pacific Northwest, but their everyday garb turned into a fashion trend for Gen Xers that was then milked by designers. In 1992, the editor of Details magazine, James Truman, called grunge “un fashion” (Marin) as stepping out in second-hand clothes ran “counter to the shellacked, flashy aesthetic of 1980s” (Nnadi) for those who preferred “the waif-like look of put-on poverty” (Brady). But it was MTV’s relentless airing of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden videos that sent Gen Xers flocking to malls and thrift-stores in search grunge-like apparel. I purchased a pair of giant, heavyweight Red Wing boots that looked like small cars on my feet, making it difficult to walk, but at least I was prepared for any terrain in all types of weather. The flannel came next; I still wear flannos. Despite its association with dark, murky musical themes, grunge kept me warm and dry.Much of grunge’s appeal to the masses was that it was not gender-specific; men and women dressed to appear unimpressed, sharing a taste for shapeless garments and muted colors without reference to stereotypical masculine or feminine styles. Cobain “allowed his own sexuality to be called into question by often wearing dresses and/or makeup on stage, in film clips, and on photo shoots, and wrote explicitly feminist songs, such as ‘Sappy’ or ‘Been a Son’” (Strong 403). I remember watching Pearl Jam’s 1992 performance on MTV Unplugged, seeing Eddie Vedder scrawl the words “Pro Choice” in black marker on his arm in support of women’s rights while his lyrics in songs like “Daughter”, “Better Man”, and “Why Go” reflected an equitable, humanistic if somewhat tragic perspective. Females and males moshed alongside one another, sharing the same spaces while experiencing and voicing their own response to grunge’s aggressive sound. Unlike the hypersexualised hair-metal bands of the 1980s whose aesthetic motifs often portrayed women as conquests or as powerless décor, the message of grunge rock avoided gender exploitation. As the ‘90s unfolded, underground feminist punk bands of the riot grrrl movement like Bikini Kill, L7, and Babes in Toyland expressed female empowerment with raging vocals and buzz-saw guitars that paved the way for Hole, Sleater-Kinney and other successful female-fronted grunge-era bands. The Decline of GrungeIn 1994, Kurt Cobain appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine in memoriam after committing suicide in the greenhouse of his Seattle home. Mass media quickly spread the news of his passing internationally. Two days after his death, 7,000 fans gathered at Seattle Center to listen to a taped recording of Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife, a rock star in her own right, reading the suicide note he left behind.A few days after Cobain’s suicide, I found myself rolling down the highway with a carload of friends, one of my favorite Nirvana tunes, “Come As You Are” fighting through static. I fiddled with the radio to clear up the signal. The conversation turned to Cobain as we cobbled together the details of his death. I remember the chatter quieting down, Cobain’s voice fading as we gazed out the window at the empty terrain passing. In that reflective moment, I felt like I had experienced an intense, emotional relationship that came to an abrupt end. This “illusion of intimacy” (Horton and Wohl 217) between myself and Cobain elevated the loss I felt with his passing even though I had no intimate, personal ties to him. I counted this person as a friend (Giles 284) because I so closely identified with his words and music. I could not help but feel sad, even angry that he’d decided to end his life.Fueled by depression and a heroin addiction, Cobain’s death signaled an end to grunge’s collective appeal while shining a spotlight on one of the more dangerous aspects of its ethos. A 1992 Rolling Stone article mentioned that several of Seattle’s now-famous international musicians used heroin and “The feeling around town is, the drug is a disaster waiting to happen” (Azzerad). In 2002, eight years to the day of Cobain’s death, Layne Staley, lead singer of Alice In Chains, another seminal grunge outfit, was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose (Wiederhorn). When Cornell took his own life in 2017 after a long battle with depression, The Washington Post said, “The story of grunge is also one of death” (Andrews). The article included a Tweet from a grieving fan that read “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in” (@ThatEricAlper).ConclusionThe grunge movement of the early 1990s emerged out of musical friendships content to be on their own, on the outside, reflecting a sense of isolation and alienation in the music they made. As Cornell said, “We’ve always been fairly reclusive and damaged” (Foege). I felt much the same way in those days, sequestered in the desert, planting my grunge flag in the middle of country music territory, doing what I could to resist the status quo. Cobain, Cornell, Staley, and Vedder wrote about their own anxieties in a way that felt intimate and relatable, forging a bond with their fan base. Christopher Perricone suggests, “the relationship of an artist and audience is a collaborative one, a love relationship in the sense, a friendship” (200). In this way, grunge would become a shared memory among friends who rode the wave of this cultural phenomenon all the way through to its tragic consequences. But the music has survived. Along with my flannel shirts and Red Wing boots.References@ThatEricAlper (Eric Alper). “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in.” Twitter, 18 May 2017, 02:41. 15 Sep. 2018 <https://twitter.com/ThatEricAlper/status/865140400704675840?ref_src>.Andrews, Travis M. “After Chris Cornell’s Death: ‘Only Eddie Vedder Is Left. 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Abstract:

IntroductionIn the year 2000, a group of likeminded individuals got together and convened the first annual World Barista Championship in Monte Carlo. With twelve competitors from around the globe, each competitor was judged by seven judges: one head judge who oversaw the process, two technical judges who assessed technical skills, and four sensory judges who evaluated the taste and appearance of the espresso drinks. Competitors had fifteen minutes to serve four espresso coffees, four cappuccino coffees, and four “signature” drinks that they had devised using one shot of espresso and other ingredients of their choice, but no alcohol. The competitors were also assessed on their overall barista skills, their creativity, and their ability to perform under pressure and impress the judges with their knowledge of coffee. This competition has grown to the extent that eleven years later, in 2011, 54 countries held national barista championships with the winner from each country competing for the highly coveted position of World Barista Champion. That year, Alejandro Mendez from El Salvador became the first world champion from a coffee producing nation. Champion baristas are more likely to come from coffee consuming countries than they are from coffee producing countries as countries that produce coffee seldom have a culture of espresso coffee consumption. While Ireland is not a coffee-producing nation, the Irish are the highest per capita consumers of tea in the world (Mac Con Iomaire, “Ireland”). Despite this, in 2008, Stephen Morrissey from Ireland overcame 50 other national champions to become the 2008 World Barista Champion (see, http://vimeo.com/2254130). Another Irish national champion, Colin Harmon, came fourth in this competition in both 2009 and 2010. This paper discusses the history and development of coffee and coffee houses in Dublin from the 17th century, charting how coffee culture in Dublin appeared, evolved, and stagnated before re-emerging at the beginning of the 21st century, with a remarkable win in the World Barista Championships. The historical links between coffeehouses and media—ranging from print media to electronic and social media—are discussed. In this, the coffee house acts as an informal public gathering space, what urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a “third place,” neither work nor home. These “third places” provide anchors for community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction (Oldenburg). This paper will also show how competition from other “third places” such as clubs, hotels, restaurants, and bars have affected the vibrancy of coffee houses. Early Coffee Houses The first coffee house was established in Constantinople in 1554 (Tannahill 252; Huetz de Lemps 387). The first English coffee houses opened in Oxford in 1650 and in London in 1652. Coffee houses multiplied thereafter but, in 1676, when some London coffee houses became hotbeds for political protest, the city prosecutor decided to close them. The ban was soon lifted and between 1680 and 1730 Londoners discovered the pleasure of drinking coffee (Huetz de Lemps 388), although these coffee houses sold a number of hot drinks including tea and chocolate as well as coffee.The first French coffee houses opened in Marseille in 1671 and in Paris the following year. Coffee houses proliferated during the 18th century: by 1720 there were 380 public cafés in Paris and by the end of the century there were 600 (Huetz de Lemps 387). Café Procope opened in Paris in 1674 and, in the 18th century, became a literary salon with regular patrons: Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Condorcet (Huetz de Lemps 387; Pitte 472). In England, coffee houses developed into exclusive clubs such as Crockford’s and the Reform, whilst elsewhere in Europe they evolved into what we identify as cafés, similar to the tea shops that would open in England in the late 19th century (Tannahill 252-53). Tea quickly displaced coffee in popularity in British coffee houses (Taylor 142). Pettigrew suggests two reasons why Great Britain became a tea-drinking nation while most of the rest of Europe took to coffee (48). The first was the power of the East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600, which controlled the world’s biggest tea monopoly and promoted the beverage enthusiastically. The second was the difficulty England had in securing coffee from the Levant while at war with France at the end of the seventeenth century and again during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13). Tea also became the dominant beverage in Ireland and over a period of time became the staple beverage of the whole country. In 1835, Samuel Bewley and his son Charles dared to break the monopoly of The East India Company by importing over 2,000 chests of tea directly from Canton, China, to Ireland. His family would later become synonymous with the importation of coffee and with opening cafés in Ireland (see, Farmar for full history of the Bewley's and their activities). Ireland remains the highest per-capita consumer of tea in the world. Coffee houses have long been linked with social and political change (Kennedy, Politicks; Pincus). The notion that these new non-alcoholic drinks were responsible for the Enlightenment because people could now gather socially without getting drunk is rejected by Wheaton as frivolous, since there had always been alternatives to strong drink, and European civilisation had achieved much in the previous centuries (91). She comments additionally that cafés, as gathering places for dissenters, took over the role that taverns had long played. Pennell and Vickery support this argument adding that by offering a choice of drinks, and often sweets, at a fixed price and in a more civilized setting than most taverns provided, coffee houses and cafés were part of the rise of the modern restaurant. It is believed that, by 1700, the commercial provision of food and drink constituted the second largest occupational sector in London. Travellers’ accounts are full of descriptions of London taverns, pie shops, coffee, bun and chop houses, breakfast huts, and food hawkers (Pennell; Vickery). Dublin Coffee Houses and Later incarnations The earliest reference to coffee houses in Dublin is to the co*ck Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85). Public dining or drinking establishments listed in the 1738 Dublin Directory include taverns, eating houses, chop houses, coffee houses, and one chocolate house in Fownes Court run by Peter Bardin (Hardiman and Kennedy 157). During the second half of the 17th century, Dublin’s merchant classes transferred allegiance from taverns to the newly fashionable coffee houses as places to conduct business. By 1698, the fashion had spread to country towns with coffee houses found in Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Wexford, and Galway, and slightly later in Belfast and Waterford in the 18th century. Maxwell lists some of Dublin’s leading coffee houses and taverns, noting their clientele: There were Lucas’s Coffee House, on Cork Hill (the scene of many duels), frequented by fashionable young men; the Phoenix, in Werburgh Street, where political dinners were held; Dick’s Coffee House, in Skinner’s Row, much patronized by literary men, for it was over a bookseller’s; the Eagle, in Eustace Street, where meetings of the Volunteers were held; the Old Sot’s Hole, near Essex Bridge, famous for its beefsteaks and ale; the Eagle Tavern, on Cork Hill, which was demolished at the same time as Lucas’s to make room for the Royal Exchange; and many others. (76) Many of the early taverns were situated around the Winetavern Street, Cook Street, and Fishamble Street area. (see Fig. 1) Taverns, and later coffee houses, became meeting places for gentlemen and centres for debate and the exchange of ideas. In 1706, Francis Dickson published the Flying Post newspaper at the Four Courts coffee house in Winetavern Street. The Bear Tavern (1725) and the Black Lyon (1735), where a Masonic Lodge assembled every Wednesday, were also located on this street (Gilbert v.1 160). Dick’s Coffee house was established in the late 17th century by bookseller and newspaper proprietor Richard Pue, and remained open until 1780 when the building was demolished. In 1740, Dick’s customers were described thus: Ye citizens, gentlemen, lawyers and squires,who summer and winter surround our great fires,ye quidnuncs! who frequently come into Pue’s,To live upon politicks, coffee, and news. (Gilbert v.1 174) There has long been an association between coffeehouses and publishing books, pamphlets and particularly newspapers. Other Dublin publishers and newspapermen who owned coffee houses included Richard Norris and Thomas Bacon. Until the 1850s, newspapers were burdened with a number of taxes: on the newsprint, a stamp duty, and on each advertisem*nt. By 1865, these taxes had virtually disappeared, resulting in the appearance of 30 new newspapers in Ireland, 24 of them in Dublin. Most people read from copies which were available free of charge in taverns, clubs, and coffee houses (MacGiolla Phadraig). Coffee houses also kept copies of international newspapers. On 4 May 1706, Francis Dickson notes in the Dublin Intelligence that he held the Paris and London Gazettes, Leyden Gazette and Slip, the Paris and Hague Lettres à la Main, Daily Courant, Post-man, Flying Post, Post-script and Manuscripts in his coffeehouse in Winetavern Street (Kennedy, “Dublin”). Henry Berry’s analysis of shop signs in Dublin identifies 24 different coffee houses in Dublin, with the main clusters in Essex Street near the Custom’s House (Cocoa Tree, Bacon’s, Dempster’s, Dublin, Merchant’s, Norris’s, and Walsh’s) Cork Hill (Lucas’s, St Lawrence’s, and Solyman’s) Skinners’ Row (Bow’s’, Darby’s, and Dick’s) Christ Church Yard (Four Courts, and London) College Green (Jack’s, and Parliament) and Crampton Court (Exchange, and Little Dublin). (see Figure 1, below, for these clusters and the locations of other Dublin coffee houses.) The earliest to be referenced is the co*ck Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85), with Solyman’s (1691), Bow’s (1692), and Patt’s on High Street (1699), all mentioned in print before the 18th century. The name of one, the Cocoa Tree, suggests that chocolate was also served in this coffee house. More evidence of the variety of beverages sold in coffee houses comes from Gilbert who notes that in 1730, one Dublin poet wrote of George Carterwright’s wife at The Custom House Coffee House on Essex Street: Her coffee’s fresh and fresh her tea,Sweet her cream, ptizan, and whea,her drams, of ev’ry sort, we findboth good and pleasant, in their kind. (v. 2 161) Figure 1: Map of Dublin indicating Coffee House clusters 1 = Sackville St.; 2 = Winetavern St.; 3 = Essex St.; 4 = Cork Hill; 5 = Skinner's Row; 6 = College Green.; 7 = Christ Church Yard; 8 = Crampton Court.; 9 = Cook St.; 10 = High St.; 11 = Eustace St.; 12 = Werburgh St.; 13 = Fishamble St.; 14 = Westmorland St.; 15 = South Great George's St.; 16 = Grafton St.; 17 = Kildare St.; 18 = Dame St.; 19 = Anglesea Row; 20 = Foster Place; 21 = Poolbeg St.; 22 = Fleet St.; 23 = Burgh Quay.A = Cafe de Paris, Lincoln Place; B = Red Bank Restaurant, D'Olier St.; C = Morrison's Hotel, Nassau St.; D = Shelbourne Hotel, St. Stephen's Green; E = Jury's Hotel, Dame St. Some coffee houses transformed into the gentlemen’s clubs that appeared in London, Paris and Dublin in the 17th century. These clubs originally met in coffee houses, then taverns, until later proprietary clubs became fashionable. Dublin anticipated London in club fashions with members of the Kildare Street Club (1782) and the Sackville Street Club (1794) owning the premises of their clubhouse, thus dispensing with the proprietor. The first London club to be owned by the members seems to be Arthur’s, founded in 1811 (McDowell 4) and this practice became widespread throughout the 19th century in both London and Dublin. The origin of one of Dublin’s most famous clubs, Daly’s Club, was a chocolate house opened by Patrick Daly in c.1762–65 in premises at 2–3 Dame Street (Brooke). It prospered sufficiently to commission its own granite-faced building on College Green between Anglesea Street and Foster Place which opened in 1789 (Liddy 51). Daly’s Club, “where half the land of Ireland has changed hands”, was renowned for the gambling that took place there (Montgomery 39). Daly’s sumptuous palace catered very well (and discreetly) for honourable Members of Parliament and rich “bucks” alike (Craig 222). The changing political and social landscape following the Act of Union led to Daly’s slow demise and its eventual closure in 1823 (Liddy 51). Coincidentally, the first Starbucks in Ireland opened in 2005 in the same location. Once gentlemen’s clubs had designated buildings where members could eat, drink, socialise, and stay overnight, taverns and coffee houses faced competition from the best Dublin hotels which also had coffee rooms “in which gentlemen could read papers, write letters, take coffee and wine in the evening—an exiguous substitute for a club” (McDowell 17). There were at least 15 establishments in Dublin city claiming to be hotels by 1789 (Corr 1) and their numbers grew in the 19th century, an expansion which was particularly influenced by the growth of railways. By 1790, Dublin’s public houses (“pubs”) outnumbered its coffee houses with Dublin boasting 1,300 (Rooney 132). Names like the Goose and Gridiron, Harp and Crown, Horseshoe and Magpie, and Hen and Chickens—fashionable during the 17th and 18th centuries in Ireland—hung on decorative signs for those who could not read. Throughout the 20th century, the public house provided the dominant “third place” in Irish society, and the drink of choice for itd predominantly male customers was a frothy pint of Guinness. Newspapers were available in public houses and many newspapermen had their own favourite hostelries such as Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street; The Pearl, and The Palace on Fleet Street; and The White Horse Inn on Burgh Quay. Any coffee served in these establishments prior to the arrival of the new coffee culture in the 21st century was, however, of the powdered instant variety. Hotels / Restaurants with Coffee Rooms From the mid-19th century, the public dining landscape of Dublin changed in line with London and other large cities in the United Kingdom. Restaurants did appear gradually in the United Kingdom and research suggests that one possible reason for this growth from the 1860s onwards was the Refreshment Houses and Wine Licences Act (1860). The object of this act was to “reunite the business of eating and drinking”, thereby encouraging public sobriety (Mac Con Iomaire, “Emergence” v.2 95). Advertisem*nts for Dublin restaurants appeared in The Irish Times from the 1860s. Thom’s Directory includes listings for Dining Rooms from the 1870s and Refreshment Rooms are listed from the 1880s. This pattern continued until 1909, when Thom’s Directory first includes a listing for “Restaurants and Tea Rooms”. Some of the establishments that advertised separate coffee rooms include Dublin’s first French restaurant, the Café de Paris, The Red Bank Restaurant, Morrison’s Hotel, Shelbourne Hotel, and Jury’s Hotel (see Fig. 1). The pattern of separate ladies’ coffee rooms emerged in Dublin and London during the latter half of the 19th century and mixed sex dining only became popular around the last decade of the 19th century, partly infuenced by Cesar Ritz and Auguste Escoffier (Mac Con Iomaire, “Public Dining”). Irish Cafés: From Bewley’s to Starbucks A number of cafés appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, most notably Robert Roberts and Bewley’s, both of which were owned by Quaker families. Ernest Bewley took over the running of the Bewley’s importation business in the 1890s and opened a number of Oriental Cafés; South Great Georges Street (1894), Westmoreland Street (1896), and what became the landmark Bewley’s Oriental Café in Grafton Street (1927). Drawing influence from the grand cafés of Paris and Vienna, oriental tearooms, and Egyptian architecture (inspired by the discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamen’s Tomb), the Grafton Street business brought a touch of the exotic into the newly formed Irish Free State. Bewley’s cafés became the haunt of many of Ireland’s leading literary figures, including Samuel Becket, Sean O’Casey, and James Joyce who mentioned the café in his book, Dubliners. A full history of Bewley’s is available (Farmar). It is important to note, however, that pots of tea were sold in equal measure to mugs of coffee in Bewley’s. The cafés changed over time from waitress- to self-service and a failure to adapt to changing fashions led to the business being sold, with only the flagship café in Grafton Street remaining open in a revised capacity. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that a new wave of coffee house culture swept Ireland. This was based around speciality coffee beverages such as espressos, cappuccinos, lattés, macchiatos, and frappuccinnos. This new phenomenon coincided with the unprecedented growth in the Irish economy, during which Ireland became known as the “Celtic Tiger” (Murphy 3). One aspect of this period was a building boom and a subsequent growth in apartment living in the Dublin city centre. The American sitcom Friends and its fictional coffee house, “Central Perk,” may also have helped popularise the use of coffee houses as “third spaces” (Oldenberg) among young apartment dwellers in Dublin. This was also the era of the “dotcom boom” when many young entrepreneurs, software designers, webmasters, and stock market investors were using coffee houses as meeting places for business and also as ad hoc office spaces. This trend is very similar to the situation in the 17th and early 18th centuries where coffeehouses became known as sites for business dealings. Various theories explaining the growth of the new café culture have circulated, with reasons ranging from a growth in Eastern European migrants, anti-smoking legislation, returning sophisticated Irish emigrants, and increased affluence (Fenton). Dublin pubs, facing competition from the new coffee culture, began installing espresso coffee machines made by companies such as Gaggia to attract customers more interested in a good latté than a lager and it is within this context that Irish baristas gained such success in the World Barista competition. In 2001 the Georges Street branch of Bewley’s was taken over by a chain called Café, Bar, Deli specialising in serving good food at reasonable prices. Many ex-Bewley’s staff members subsequently opened their own businesses, roasting coffee and running cafés. Irish-owned coffee chains such as Java Republic, Insomnia, and O’Brien’s Sandwich Bars continued to thrive despite the competition from coffee chains Starbucks and Costa Café. Indeed, so successful was the handmade Irish sandwich and coffee business that, before the economic downturn affected its business, Irish franchise O’Brien’s operated in over 18 countries. The Café, Bar, Deli group had also begun to franchise its operations in 2008 when it too became a victim of the global economic downturn. With the growth of the Internet, many newspapers have experienced falling sales of their printed format and rising uptake of their electronic versions. Most Dublin coffee houses today provide wireless Internet connections so their customers can read not only the local newspapers online, but also others from all over the globe, similar to Francis Dickenson’s coffee house in Winetavern Street in the early 18th century. Dublin has become Europe’s Silicon Valley, housing the European headquarters for companies such as Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Paypal, and Facebook. There are currently plans to provide free wireless connectivity throughout Dublin’s city centre in order to promote e-commerce, however, some coffee houses shut off the wireless Internet in their establishments at certain times of the week in order to promote more social interaction to ensure that these “third places” remain “great good places” at the heart of the community (Oldenburg). Conclusion Ireland is not a country that is normally associated with a coffee culture but coffee houses have been part of the fabric of that country since they emerged in Dublin in the 17th century. These Dublin coffee houses prospered in the 18th century, and survived strong competition from clubs and hotels in the 19th century, and from restaurant and public houses into the 20th century. In 2008, when Stephen Morrissey won the coveted title of World Barista Champion, Ireland’s place as a coffee consuming country was re-established. The first decade of the 21st century witnessed a birth of a new espresso coffee culture, which shows no signs of weakening despite Ireland’s economic travails. References Berry, Henry F. “House and Shop Signs in Dublin in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 40.2 (1910): 81–98. Brooke, Raymond Frederick. Daly’s Club and the Kildare Street Club, Dublin. Dublin, 1930. Corr, Frank. Hotels in Ireland. Dublin: Jemma Publications, 1987. Craig, Maurice. Dublin 1660-1860. Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1980. Farmar, Tony. The Legendary, Lofty, Clattering Café. Dublin: A&A Farmar, 1988. Fenton, Ben. “Cafe Culture taking over in Dublin.” The Telegraph 2 Oct. 2006. 29 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1530308/cafe-culture-taking-over-in-Dublin.html›. Gilbert, John T. A History of the City of Dublin (3 vols.). Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978. Girouard, Mark. Victorian Pubs. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1984. Hardiman, Nodlaig P., and Máire Kennedy. A Directory of Dublin for the Year 1738 Compiled from the Most Authentic of Sources. Dublin: Dublin Corporation Public Libraries, 2000. Huetz de Lemps, Alain. “Colonial Beverages and Consumption of Sugar.” Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 383–93. Kennedy, Máire. “Dublin Coffee Houses.” Ask About Ireland, 2011. 4 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/history-heritage/pages-in-history/dublin-coffee-houses›. ----- “‘Politicks, Coffee and News’: The Dublin Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century.” Dublin Historical Record LVIII.1 (2005): 76–85. Liddy, Pat. Temple Bar—Dublin: An Illustrated History. Dublin: Temple Bar Properties, 1992. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. “The Emergence, Development, and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History.” Ph.D. thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, 2009. 4 Apr. 2012 ‹http://arrow.dit.ie/tourdoc/12›. ----- “Ireland.” Food Cultures of the World Encylopedia. Ed. Ken Albala. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2010. ----- “Public Dining in Dublin: The History and Evolution of Gastronomy and Commercial Dining 1700-1900.” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 24. Special Issue: The History of the Commercial Hospitality Industry from Classical Antiquity to the 19th Century (2012): forthcoming. MacGiolla Phadraig, Brian. “Dublin: One Hundred Years Ago.” Dublin Historical Record 23.2/3 (1969): 56–71. Maxwell, Constantia. Dublin under the Georges 1714–1830. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1979. McDowell, R. B. Land & Learning: Two Irish Clubs. Dublin: The Lilliput P, 1993. Montgomery, K. L. “Old Dublin Clubs and Coffee-Houses.” New Ireland Review VI (1896): 39–44. Murphy, Antoine E. “The ‘Celtic Tiger’—An Analysis of Ireland’s Economic Growth Performance.” EUI Working Papers, 2000 29 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.eui.eu/RSCAS/WP-Texts/00_16.pdf›. Oldenburg, Ray, ed. Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About The “Great Good Places” At the Heart of Our Communities. New York: Marlowe & Company 2001. Pennell, Sarah. “‘Great Quantities of Gooseberry Pye and Baked Clod of Beef’: Victualling and Eating out in Early Modern London.” Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Eds. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 228–59. Pettigrew, Jane. A Social History of Tea. London: National Trust Enterprises, 2001. Pincus, Steve. “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture.” The Journal of Modern History 67.4 (1995): 807–34. Pitte, Jean-Robert. “The Rise of the Restaurant.” Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 471–80. Rooney, Brendan, ed. A Time and a Place: Two Centuries of Irish Social Life. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2006. Tannahill, Reay. Food in History. St Albans, Herts.: Paladin, 1975. Taylor, Laurence. “Coffee: The Bottomless Cup.” The American Dimension: Cultural Myths and Social Realities. Eds. W. Arens and Susan P. Montague. Port Washington, N.Y.: Alfred Publishing, 1976. 14–48. Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300-1789. London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth P, 1983. Williams, Anne. “Historical Attitudes to Women Eating in Restaurants.” Public Eating: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1991. Ed. Harlan Walker. Totnes: Prospect Books, 1992. 311–14. World Barista, Championship. “History–World Barista Championship”. 2012. 02 Apr. 2012 ‹http://worldbaristachampionship.com2012›.AcknowledgementA warm thank you to Dr. Kevin Griffin for producing the map of Dublin for this article.

Abstract:

Unconventional energy sources have become increasingly important to the global energy mix. These include coal seam gas, shale gas and shale oil. The unconventional gas industry was pioneered in the United States and embraced following the first oil shock in 1973 (Rogers). As has been the case with many global resources (Hisco*ck), many of the same companies that worked in the USA carried their experience in this industry to early Australian explorations. Recently the USA has secured significant energy security with the development of unconventional energy deposits such as the Marcellus shale gas and the Bakken shale oil (Dobb; McGraw). But this has not come without environmental impact, including contamination to underground water supply (Osborn, Vengosh, Warner, Jackson) and potential greenhouse gas contributions (Howarth, Santoro, Ingraffea; McKenna). The environmental impact of unconventional gas extraction has raised serious public concern about the introduction and growth of the industry in Australia. In coal rich Australia coal seam gas is currently the major source of unconventional gas. Large gas deposits have been found in prime agricultural land along eastern Australia, such as the Liverpool Plains in New South Wales and the Darling Downs in Queensland. Competing land-uses and a series of environmental incidents from the coal seam gas industry have warranted major protest from a coalition of environmentalists and farmers (Berry; McLeish). Conflict between energy companies wanting development and environmentalists warning precaution is an easy script to cast for frontline media coverage. But historical perspectives are often missing in these contemporary debates. While coal mining and natural gas have often received “boosting” historical coverage (Diamond; Wilkinson), and although historical themes of “development” and “rushes” remain predominant when observing the span of the industry (AGA; Blainey), the history of unconventional gas, particularly the history of its environmental impact, has been little studied. Few people are aware, for example, that the first shale gas exploratory well was completed in late 2010 in the Cooper Basin in Central Australia (Molan) and is considered as a “new” frontier in Australian unconventional gas. Moreover many people are unaware that the first coal seam gas wells were completed in 1976 in Queensland. The first four wells offer an important moment for reflection in light of the industry’s recent move into Central Australia. By locating and analysing the first four coal seam gas wells, this essay identifies the roots of the unconventional gas industry in Australia and explores the early environmental impact of these wells. By analysing exploration reports that have been placed online by the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines through the lens of environmental history, the dominant developmental narrative of this industry can also be scrutinised. These narratives often place more significance on economic and national benefits while displacing the environmental and social impacts of the industry (Connor, Higginbotham, Freeman, Albrecht; Duus; McEachern; Trigger). This essay therefore seeks to bring an environmental insight into early unconventional gas mining in Australia. As the author, I am concerned that nearly four decades on and it seems that no one has heeded the warning gleaned from these early wells and early exploration reports, as gas exploration in Australia continues under little scrutiny. Arrival The first four unconventional gas wells in Australia appear at the beginning of the industry world-wide (Schraufnagel, McBane, and Kuuskraa; McClanahan). The wells were explored by Houston Oils and Minerals—a company that entered the Australian mining scene by sharing a mining prospect with International Australian Energy Company (Wiltshire). The International Australian Energy Company was owned by Black Giant Oil Company in the US, which in turn was owned by International Royalty and Oil Company also based in the US. The Texan oilman Robert Kanton held a sixteen percent share in the latter. Kanton had an idea that the Mimosa Syncline in the south-eastern Bowen Basin was a gas trap waiting to be exploited. To test the theory he needed capital. Kanton presented the idea to Houston Oil and Minerals which had the financial backing to take the risk. Shotover No. 1 was drilled by Houston Oil and Minerals thirty miles south-east of the coal mining town of Blackwater. By late August 1975 it was drilled to 2,717 metres, discovered to have little gas, spudded, and, after a spend of $610,000, abandoned. The data from the Shotover well showed that the porosity of the rocks in the area was not a trap, and the Mimosa Syncline was therefore downgraded as a possible hydrocarbon location. There was, however, a small amount of gas found in the coal seams (Benbow 16). The well had passed through the huge coal seams of both the Bowen and Surat basins—important basins for the future of both the coal and gas industries. Mining Concepts In 1975, while Houston Oil and Minerals was drilling the Shotover well, US Steel and the US Bureau of Mines used hydraulic fracture, a technique already used in the petroleum industry, to drill vertical surface wells to drain gas from a coal seam (Methane Drainage Taskforce 102). They were able to remove gas from the coal seam before it was mined and sold enough to make a profit. With the well data from the Shotover well in Australia compiled, Houston returned to the US to research the possibility of harvesting methane in Australia. As the company saw it, methane drainage was “a novel exploitation concept” and the methane in the Bowen Basin was an “enormous hydrocarbon resource” (Wiltshire 7). The Shotover well passed through a section of the German Creek Coal measures and this became their next target. In September 1976 the Shotover well was re-opened and plugged at 1499 meters to become Australia’s first exploratory unconventional gas well. By the end of the month the rig was released and gas production tested. At one point an employee on the drilling operation observed a gas flame “the size of a 44 gal drum” (HOMA, “Shotover # 1” 9). But apart from the brief show, no gas flowed. And yet, Houston Oil and Minerals was not deterred, as they had already taken out other leases for further prospecting (Wiltshire 4). Only a week after the Shotover well had failed, Houston moved the methane search south-east to an area five miles north of the Moura township. Houston Oil and Minerals had researched the coal exploration seismic surveys of the area that were conducted in 1969, 1972, and 1973 to choose the location. Over the next two months in late 1976, two new wells—Kinma No.1 and Carra No.1—were drilled within a mile from each other and completed as gas wells. Houston Oil and Minerals also purchased the old oil exploration well Moura No. 1 from the Queensland Government and completed it as a suspended gas well. The company must have mined the Department of Mines archive to find Moura No.1, as the previous exploration report from 1969 noted methane given off from the coal seams (Sell). By December 1976 Houston Oil and Minerals had three gas wells in the vicinity of each other and by early 1977 testing had occurred. The results were disappointing with minimal gas flow at Kinma and Carra, but Moura showed a little more promise. Here, the drillers were able to convert their Fairbanks-Morse engine driving the pump from an engine run on LPG to one run on methane produced from the well (Porter, “Moura # 1”). Drink This? Although there was not much gas to find in the test production phase, there was a lot of water. The exploration reports produced by the company are incomplete (indeed no report was available for the Shotover well), but the information available shows that a large amount of water was extracted before gas started to flow (Porter, “Carra # 1”; Porter, “Moura # 1”; Porter, “Kinma # 1”). As Porter’s reports outline, prior to gas flowing, the water produced at Carra, Kinma and Moura totalled 37,600 litres, 11,900 and 2,900 respectively. It should be noted that the method used to test the amount of water was not continuous and these amounts were not the full amount of water produced; also, upon gas coming to the surface some of the wells continued to produce water. In short, before any gas flowed at the first unconventional gas wells in Australia at least 50,000 litres of water were taken from underground. Results show that the water was not ready to drink (Mathers, “Moura # 1”; Mathers, “Appendix 1”; HOMA, “Miscellaneous Pages” 21-24). The water had total dissolved solids (minerals) well over the average set by the authorities (WHO; Apps Laboratories; NHMRC; QDAFF). The well at Kinma recorded the highest levels, almost two and a half times the unacceptable standard. On average the water from the Moura well was of reasonable standard, possibly because some water was extracted from the well when it was originally sunk in 1969; but the water from Kinma and Carra was very poor quality, not good enough for crops, stock or to be let run into creeks. The biggest issue was the sodium concentration; all wells had very high salt levels. Kinma and Carra were four and two times the maximum standard respectively. In short, there was a substantial amount of poor quality water produced from drilling and testing the three wells. Fracking Australia Hydraulic fracturing is an artificial process that can encourage more gas to flow to the surface (McGraw; Fischetti; Senate). Prior to the testing phase at the Moura field, well data was sent to the Chemical Research and Development Department at Halliburton in Oklahoma, to examine the ability to fracture the coal and shale in the Australian wells. Halliburton was the founding father of hydraulic fracture. In Oklahoma on 17 March 1949, operating under an exclusive license from Standard Oil, this company conducted the first ever hydraulic fracture of an oil well (Montgomery and Smith). To come up with a program of hydraulic fracturing for the Australian field, Halliburton went back to the laboratory. They bonded together small slabs of coal and shale similar to Australian samples, drilled one-inch holes into the sample, then pressurised the holes and completed a “hydro-frac” in miniature. “These samples were difficult to prepare,” they wrote in their report to Houston Oil and Minerals (HOMA, “Miscellaneous Pages” 10). Their program for fracturing was informed by a field of science that had been evolving since the first hydraulic fracture but had rapidly progressed since the first oil shock. Halliburton’s laboratory test had confirmed that the model of Perkins and Kern developed for widths of hydraulic fracture—in an article that defined the field—should also apply to Australian coals (Perkins and Kern). By late January 1977 Halliburton had issued Houston Oil and Minerals with a program of hydraulic fracture to use on the central Queensland wells. On the final page of their report they warned: “There are many unknowns in a vertical fracture design procedure” (HOMA, “Miscellaneous Pages” 17). In July 1977, Moura No. 1 became the first coal seam gas well hydraulically fractured in Australia. The exploration report states: “During July 1977 the well was killed with 1% KCL solution and the tubing and packer were pulled from the well … and pumping commenced” (Porter 2-3). The use of the word “kill” is interesting—potassium chloride (KCl) is the third and final drug administered in the lethal injection of humans on death row in the USA. Potassium chloride was used to minimise the effect on parts of the coal seam that were water-sensitive and was the recommended solution prior to adding other chemicals (Montgomery and Smith 28); but a word such as “kill” also implies that the well and the larger environment were alive before fracking commenced (Giblett; Trigger). Pumping recommenced after the fracturing fluid was unloaded. Initially gas supply was very good. It increased from an average estimate of 7,000 cubic feet per day to 30,000, but this only lasted two days before coal and sand started flowing back up to the surface. In effect, the cleats were propped open but the coal did not close and hold onto them which meant coal particles and sand flowed back up the pipe with diminishing amounts of gas (Walters 12). Although there were some interesting results, the program was considered a failure. In April 1978, Houston Oil and Minerals finally abandoned the methane concept. Following the failure, they reflected on the possibilities for a coal seam gas industry given the gas prices in Queensland: “Methane drainage wells appear to offer no economic potential” (Wooldridge 2). At the wells they let the tubing drop into the hole, put a fifteen foot cement plug at the top of the hole, covered it with a steel plate and by their own description restored the area to its “original state” (Wiltshire 8). Houston Oil and Minerals now turned to “conventional targets” which included coal exploration (Wiltshire 7). A Thousand Memories The first four wells show some of the critical environmental issues that were present from the outset of the industry in Australia. The process of hydraulic fracture was not just a failure, but conducted on a science that had never been tested in Australia, was ponderous at best, and by Halliburton’s own admission had “many unknowns”. There was also the role of large multinationals providing “experience” (Briody; Hisco*ck) and conducting these tests while having limited knowledge of the Australian landscape. Before any gas came to the surface, a large amount of water was produced that was loaded with a mixture of salt and other heavy minerals. The source of water for both the mud drilling of Carra and Kinma, as well as the hydraulic fracture job on Moura, was extracted from Kianga Creek three miles from the site (HOMA, “Carra # 1” 5; HOMA, “Kinma # 1” 5; Porter, “Moura # 1”). No location was listed for the disposal of the water from the wells, including the hydraulic fracture liquid. Considering the poor quality of water, if the water was disposed on site or let drain into a creek, this would have had significant environmental impact. Nobody has yet answered the question of where all this water went. The environmental issues of water extraction, saline water and hydraulic fracture were present at the first four wells. At the first four wells environmental concern was not a priority. The complexity of inter-company relations, as witnessed at the Shotover well, shows there was little time. The re-use of old wells, such as the Moura well, also shows that economic priorities were more important. Even if environmental information was considered important at the time, no one would have had access to it because, as handwritten notes on some of the reports show, many of the reports were “confidential” (Sell). Even though coal mines commenced filing Environmental Impact Statements in the early 1970s, there is no such documentation for gas exploration conducted by Houston Oil and Minerals. A lack of broader awareness for the surrounding environment, from floral and faunal health to the impact on habitat quality, can be gleaned when reading across all the exploration reports. Nearly four decades on and we now have thousands of wells throughout the world. Yet, the challenges of unconventional gas still persist. The implications of the environmental history of the first four wells in Australia for contemporary unconventional gas exploration and development in this country and beyond are significant. Many environmental issues were present from the beginning of the coal seam gas industry in Australia. Owning up to this history would place policy makers and regulators in a position to strengthen current regulation. The industry continues to face the same challenges today as it did at the start of development—including water extraction, hydraulic fracturing and problems associated with drilling through underground aquifers. Looking more broadly at the unconventional gas industry, shale gas has appeared as the next target for energy resources in Australia. Reflecting on the first exploratory shale gas wells drilled in Central Australia, the chief executive of the company responsible for the shale gas wells noted their deliberate decision to locate their activities in semi-desert country away from “an area of prime agricultural land” and conflict with environmentalists (quoted in Molan). Moreover, the journalist Paul Cleary recently complained about the coal seam gas industry polluting Australia’s food-bowl but concluded that the “next frontier” should be in “remote” Central Australia with shale gas (Cleary 195). It appears that preference is to move the industry to the arid centre of Australia, to the ecologically and culturally unique Lake Eyre Basin region (Robin and Smith). 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Jackson. “Methane Contamination of Drinking Water Accompanying Gas-Well Drilling and Hydraulic Fracturing.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108.20 (2011): 8172-8176. Perkins, T.K., and L.R. Kern. “Widths of Hydraulic Fractures.” Journal of Petroleum Technology 13.9 (1961): 937-949. Porter, Seton M. “Carra # 1:Testing Report, Methane Drainage of the Baralaba Coal Measures, A.T.P. 226P, Central Queensland, Australia.” Oct. 1977. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 6054_7. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 21 Feb. 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=6054&COLLECTION_ID=999›. ———. “Kinma # 1: Testing Report, Methane Drainage of the Baralaba Coal Measures, A.T.P. 226P, Central Queensland, Australia.” Oct. 1977. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 6190_16. 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Abstract:

We (I, Robert Lawrence and, in a rare display of unity, all my online avatars and agents)hereby render and proclaim thisMANIFESTO OF PIECES AND BITS IN SERVICE OF CONTRADICTIONAL AESTHETICSWe start with the simple premise that art has the job of telling us who we are, and that through the modern age doing this job while KEEPING UP with accelerating cultural change has necessitated the invention of something we might call the avant-garde. Along the way there has been an on-again-off-again affair between said avant-garde and technology. We are now in a new phase of the new and the technology under consideration is the Internet.The recent hyperventilating about the term postInternet reflects the artworld’s overdue recognition of the effect of the Internet on the culture at large, and on art as a cultural practice, a market, and a historical process.I propose that we cannot fully understand what the Internet is doing to us through a consideration of what happens on the screen, nor by considering what happens in the physical space we occupy either before or behind the screen. Rather we must critically and creatively fathom the flow of cultural practice between and across these realms. This requires Hybrid art combining both physical and Internet forms.I do not mean to imply that single discipline-based art cannot communicate complexity, but I believe that Internet culture introduces complexities that can only be approached through hybrid practices. And this is especially critical for an art that, in doing the job of “telling us who we are”, wants to address the contradictory ways we now form and promote, or conceal and revise, our multiple identities through online social media profiles inconsistent with our fleshly selves.We need a different way of talking about identity. A history of identity:In the ancient world, individual identity as we understand it did not exist.The renaissance invented the individual.Modernism prioritized and alienated him (sic).Post-Modernism fragmented him/her.The Internet hyper-circulates and amplifies all these modalities, exploding the possibilities of identity.While reducing us to demographic market targets, the Web facilitates mass indulgence in perversely individual interests. The now common act of creating an “online profile” is a regular reiteration of the simple fact that identity is an open-ended hypothesis. We can now live double, or extravagantly multiple, virtual lives. The “me meme” is a ceaseless morph. This is a profound change in how identity was understood just a decade ago. Other historical transformations of identity happened over centuries. This latest and most radical change has occurred in the click of a mouse. Selfhood is now imbued with new complexity, fluidity and amplified contradictions.To fully understand what is actually happening to us, we need an art that engages the variant contracts of the physical and the virtual. We need a Hybrid art that addresses variant temporal and spatial modes of the physical and virtual. We need an art that offers articulations through the ubiquitous web in concert with the distinct perspectives that a physical gallery experience uniquely offers: engagement and removal, reflection and transference. Art that tells us who we are today calls for an aesthetics of contradiction. — Ro Lawrence (and all avatars) 2011, revised 2013, 2015, 2018. The manifesto above grew from an artistic practice beginning in 1998 as I started producing a website for every project that I made in traditional media. The Internet work does not just document or promote the project, nor is it “Netart” in the common sense of creative work restricted to a browser window. All of my efforts with the Internet are directly linked to my projects in traditional media and the web components offer parallel aesthetic voices that augment or overtly contradict the reading suggested by the traditional visual components of each project.This hybrid work grew out of a previous decade of transmedia work in video installation and sculpture, where I would create physical contexts for silent video as a way to remove the video image from the seamless flow of broadcast culture. A video image can signify very differently in a physical context that separates it from the flow of mass media and rather reconnects it to lived physical culture. A significant part of the aesthetic pleasure of this kind of work comes from nuances of dissonance arising from contradictory ways viewers had learned to read the object world and the ways we were then still learning to read the electronic image world. This video installation work was about “relocating” the electronic image, but I was also “locating” the electronic image in another sense, within the boundaries of geographic and cultural location. Linking all my projects to specific geographic locations set up contrasts with the spatial ubiquity of electronic media. In 1998 I amplified this contrast with my addition of extensive Internet components with each installation I made.The Way Things Grow (1998) began as an installation of sculptures combining video with segments of birch trees. Each piece in the gallery was linked to a specific geographic location within driving distance of the gallery exhibiting the work. In the years just before this piece I had moved from a practice of text-augmented video installations to the point where I had reduced the text to small printed handouts that featured absurd Scripts for Performance. These text handouts that viewers could take with them suggested that the work was to be completed by the viewer later outside the gallery. This to-be-continued dynamic was the genesis of a serial form in work going forward from then on. Thematic and narrative elements in the work were serialized via possible actions viewers would perform after leaving the gallery. In the installation for The Way Things Grow, there was no text in the gallery at all to suggest interpretations of this series of video sculptures. Even the titles offered no direct textual help. Rather than telling the viewers something about the work before them in the gallery, the title of each piece led the viewer away from the gallery toward serial actions in the specific geographic locations the works referred to. Each piece was titled with an Internet address.Figure 1: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, video Installation with web components at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/grow.html, 1998.When people went to the web site for each piece they found only a black page referencing a physical horizon with a long line of text that they could scroll to right for meters. Unlike the determinedly embodied work in the gallery, the web components were disembodied texts floating in a black void, but texts about very specific physical locations.Figure 2: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, partial view of webpage at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/growth_variant4.html, 1998.The texts began with the exact longitude and latitude of a geographical site in some way related to birch trees. ... A particularly old or large tree... a factory that turned birch trees into popsicle sticks and medical tongue depressors... etc. The website texts included directions to the site, and absurd scripts for performance. In this way the Internet component transformed the suite of sculptures in the gallery to a series of virtual, and possibly actual, events beyond the gallery. These potential narratives that viewers were invited into comprised an open-ended serial structure. The gallery work was formal, minimal, essentialist. On the web it was social, locative, deconstructive. In both locations, it was located. Here follows an excerpt from the website. GROWTH VARIANT #25: North 44:57:58 by West 93:15:56. On the south side of the Hennepin County Government Center is a park with 9 birch trees. These are urban birches, and they display random scratchings, as well as proclamations of affection expressed with pairs of initials and a “+” –both with and without encircling heart symbols. RECOMMENDED PERFORMANCE: Visit these urban birches once each month. Photograph all changes in their bark made by humans. After 20 years compile a document entitled, "Human Mark Making on Urban Birches, a Visual Study of Specific Universalities". Bring it into the Hennepin County Government Center and ask that it be placed in the archives.An Acre of Art (2000) was a collaborative project with sculptor Mark Knierim. Like The Way Things Grow, this new work, commissioned by the Minneapolis Art Institute, played out in the gallery, in a specific geographic location, and online. In the Art Institute was a gallery installation combining sculptures with absurd combinations of physical rural culture fitting contradictorily into an urban "high art" context. One of the pieces, entitled Landscape (2000), was an 18’ chicken coop faced with a gold picture frame. Inside were two bard rock hens and an iMac. The computer was programmed to stream to the Internet live video from the coop, the world’s first video chicken cam. As a work unfolding across a long stretch of time, the web cam video was a serial narrative without determined division into episodes. The gallery works also referenced a specific acre of agricultural land an hour from the Institute. Here we planted a row of dwarf corn at a diagonal to the mid-western American rural geometric grid of farmland. Visitors to the rural site could sit on “rural art furniture,” contemplate the corn growing, and occasionally witness absurd performances. The third stream of the piece was an extensive website, which playfully theorized the rural/urban/art trialectic. Each of the three locations of the work was exploited to provide a richer transmedia interpretation of the project’s themes than any one venue or medium could. Location Sequence is a serial installation begun in 1999. Each installation has completely different physical elements. The only consistent physical element is 72 segments of a 72” collapsible carpenter's ruler evenly spaced to wrap around the gallery walls. Each of the 72 segments of the ruler displays an Internet web address. Reversing the notion of the Internet as a place of rapid change compared to a more enduring physical world, in this case the Internet components do not change with each new episode of the work, while the physical components transform with each new installation. Thematically, all aspects of the work deal with various shades of meaning of the term "location." Beginning/Middle/End is a 30-year conceptual serial begun in 2002, presenting a series of site-specific actions, objects, or interventions combined with corresponding web pages that collectively negotiate concepts related to time, location, and narrative. Realizing a 30-year project via the web in this manner is a self-conscious contradiction of the culture of the instantaneous that the Internet manifests and propagates.The installation documented here was completed for a one-night event in 2002 with Szilage Gallery in St Petersburg, Florida. Bricks moulded with the URLs for three web sites were placed in a historic brick road with the intention that they would remain there through a historical time frame. The URLs were also projected in light on a creek parallel to the brick road and seen only for several hours. The corresponding web site components speculate on temporal/narrative structures crossing with geographic features, natural and manufactured.Figure 3: Lawrence, Robert, Beginning/Middle/End, site-specific installation with website in conjunction with 30-year series, http://www.h-e-r-e.com/beginning.html, 2002-32.The most recent instalment was done as part of Conflux Festival in 2014 in collaboration with painter Ld Lawrence. White shapes appeared in various public spaces in downtown Manhattan. Upon closer inspection people realized that they were not painted tags or stickers, but magnetic sheets that could be moved or removed. An optical scan tag hidden on the back of each shape directed to a website which encouraged people to move the objects to other locations and send a geo-located photo to the web site to trace the shape's motion through the world. The work online could trace the serial narrative of the physical installation components following the installation during Conflux Festival. Figure 4: Lawrence, Robert w/Lawrence, Ld, Gravity Ace on the Move, site-specific installation with geo-tracking website at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/gravityace/. Completed for Conflux Festival NYC, 2014, as part of Beginning/Middle/End.Dad's Boots (2003) was a multi-sited sculpture/performance. Three different physical manifestations of the work were installed at the same time in three locations: Shirakawa-go Art Festival in Japan; the Phipps Art Center in Hudson, Wisconsin; and at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. Physical components of the work included silent video projection, digital photography, computer key caps, and my father's boots. Each of these three different installations referred back to one web site. Because all these shows were up at the same time, the work was a distributed synchronous serial. In each installation space the title of the work was displayed as an Internet address. At the website was a series of popup texts suggesting performances focused, however absurdly, on reassessing paternal relationships.Figure 5: Lawrence, Robert, Dad’s Boots, simultaneous gallery installation in Florida, Wisconsin and Japan, with website, 2003. Coincidently, beginning the same time as my transmedia physical/Internet art practice, since 1998 I have had a secret other-life as a tango dancer. I came to this practice drawn by the music and the attraction of an after-dark subculture that ran by different rules than the rest of life. While my life as a tanguero was most certainly an escape strategy, I quickly began to see that although tango was different from the rest of the world, it was indeed a part of this world. It had a place and a time and a history. Further, it was a fascinating history about the interplays of power, class, wealth, race, and desire. Figure 6: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Intervention, site-specific dance interventions with extensive web components, 2007-12.As Marta Savigliano points out in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, “Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within. …Tango is a language of decolonization. So pick and choose. Improvise... let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango” (17). The realization that tango, my sensual escape from critical thought, was actually political came just about the time I was beginning to understand the essential dynamic of contradiction between the physical and Internet streams of my work. Tango Intervention began in 2007. I have now, as of 2018, done tango interventions in over 40 cities. Overall, the project can be seen as a serial performance of contradictions. In each case the physical dance interventions are manifestations of sensual fantasy in public space, and the Internet components recontextualize the public actions as site-specific performances with a political edge, revealing a hidden history or current social situation related to the political economy of tango. These themes are further developed in a series of related digital prints and videos shown here in various formats and contexts.In Tango Panopticon (2009), a “spin off” from the Tango Intervention series, the hidden social issue was the growing video surveillance of public space. The first Tango Panopticon production was Mayday 2009 with people dancing tango under public video surveillance in 15 cities. Mayday 2010 was Tango Panopticon 2.0, with tangointervention.org streaming live cell phone video from 16 simultaneous dance interventions on 4 continents. The public encountered the interventions as a sensual reclaiming of public space. Contradictorily, on the web Tango Panopticon 2.0 became a distributed worldwide action against the growing spectre of video surveillance and the increasing control of public commons. Each intervention team was automatically located on an online map when they started streaming video. Visitors to the website could choose an action from the list of cities or click on the map pins to choose which live video to load into the grid of 6 streaming signals. Visitors to the physical intervention sites could download our free open source software and stream their own videos to tangointervention.org.Figure 7: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0, worldwide synchronous dance intervention with live streaming video and extensive web components, 2010.Tango Panopticon also has a life as a serial installation, initially installed as part of the annual conference of “Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts” at Brunel University, London. All shots in the grid of videos are swish pans from close-ups of surveillance cameras to tango interveners dancing under their gaze. Each ongoing installation in the series physically adapts to the site, and with each installation more lines of video frames are added until the images become too small to read.Figure 8: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0 (For Osvaldo), video installation based on worldwide dance intervention series with live streaming video, 2011.My new work Equivalence (in development) is quite didactic in its contradictions between the online and gallery components. A series of square prints of clouds in a gallery are titled with web addresses that open with other cloud images and then fade into randomly loading excerpts from the CIA torture manual used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.Figure 9: Lawrence, Robert, Eauivalence, digital prints, excerpts from CIA Guantanamo Detention Center torture manual, work-in-progress.The gallery images recall Stieglitz’s Equivalents photographs from the early 20th century. Made in the 1920s to 30s, the Equivalents comprise a pivotal change in photographic history, from the early pictorial movement in which photography tried to imitate painting, and a new artistic approach that embraced features distinct to the photographic medium. Stieglitz’s Equivalents merged photographic realism with abstraction and symbolist undertones of transcendent spirituality. Many of the 20th century masters of photography, from Ansel Adams to Minor White, acknowledged the profound influence these photographs had on them. Several images from the Equivalents series were the first photographic art to be acquired by a major art museum in the US, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.My series Equivalence serves as the latest episode in a serial art history narrative. Since the “Pictures Generation” movement in the 1970s, photography has cannibalized its history, but perhaps no photographic body of work has been as quoted as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. A partial list includes: John Baldessari’s series Blowing Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That Are the Same(1973), William Eggleston’s series Wedgwood Blue (1979), John Pfahl’s smoke stack series (1982-89), George Legrady’s Equivalents II(1993), Vik Muniz’sEquivalents(1997), Lisa Oppenheim (2012), and most recently, Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus Series, begun in 2012. Over the course of more than four decades each of these series has presented a unique vision, but all rest on Stieglitz’s shoulders. From that position they make choices about how to operate relative the original Equivalents, ranging from Baldessari and Muniz’s phenomenological playfulness to Eggleston and Smilde’s neo-essentialist approach.My series Equivalence follows along in this serial modernist image franchise. What distinguishes it is that it does not take a single position relative to other Equivalents tribute works. Rather, it exploits its gallery/Internet transmediality to simultaneously assume two contradictory positions. The dissonance of this positioning is one of my main points with the work, and it is in some ways resonant with the contradictions concerning photographic abstraction and representation that Stieglitz engaged in the original Equivalents series almost a century ago.While hanging on the walls of a gallery, Equivalence suggests the same metaphysical intentions as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Simultaneously, in its manifestation on the Internet, my Equivalence series transcends its implied transcendence and claims a very specific time and place –a small brutal encampment on the island of Cuba where the United States abandoned any remaining claim to moral authority. In this illegal prison, forgotten lives drag on invisibly, outside of time, like untold serial narratives without resolution and without justice.Partially to balance the political insistence of Equivalence, I am also working on another series that operates with very different modalities. Following up on the live streaming technology that I developed for my Tango Panopticon public intervention series, I have started Horizon (In Development).Figure 10: Lawrence, Robert, Horizon, worldwide synchronous horizon interventions with live streaming video to Internet, work-in-progress.In Horizon I again use live cell phone video, this time streamed to an infinitely wide web page from live actions around the world done in direct engagement with the horizon line. The performances will begin and automatically come online live at noon in their respective time zone, each added to the growing horizontal line of moving images. As the actions complete, the streamed footage will begin endlessly looping. The project will also stream live during the event to galleries, and then HD footage from the events will be edited and incorporated into video installations. Leading up to this major event day, I will have a series of smaller instalments of the piece, with either live or recorded video. The first of these preliminary versions was completed during the Live Performers Workshop in Rome. Horizon continues to develop, leading to the worldwide synchronous event in 2020.Certainly, artists have always worked in series. However, exploiting the unique temporal dimensions of the Internet, a series of works can develop episodically as a serial work. If that work unfolds with contradictory thematics in its embodied and online forms, it reaches further toward an understanding of the complexities of postInternet culture and identity. ReferencesSaviligliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

Abstract:

Introduction For migrants, the dream of a better life is often expressed by the metaphor of the journey (Papastergiadis 31). Propelled by a variety of forces and choices, migrant life narratives tend to revolve around movement from one place to another, from a homeland associated with cultural and spiritual origins to a hostland which offers new opportunities and possibilities. In many cases, however, their dreams of migrants are deferred; migrants endure hardships and make sacrifices in the hope of a better life for their children. Many studies have explored the social and economic outcomes of the “second” generation – the children of migrants born and raised in the new country. In Australia studies have found, despite some notable exceptions (Betts and Healy; Inglis), that the children of migrants have achieved the economic and social integration their parents dreamed of (Khoo, McDonald, Giorgas, and Birrell). At the same time, however, research has found that the second generation face new challenges, including the negative impact of ethnic and racial discrimination (Dunn, Blair, Bliuc, and Kamp; Jakubowicz, Collins, Reid, and Chafic), the experience of split identities and loyalties (Butcher and Thomas) and a complicated sense of “home” and belonging (Fabiansson; Mason; Collins and Read). In this articles, we explore what the dream of a better life means for second generation migrants, and how that dream might reshape Australia’s multicultural identity. A focus on this generation’s imaginings, visions and hopes for the future is important, we argue, because its distinctive experience, differing from that of other sections of the Australian community in some important ways, needs to be recognised as the nation’s multicultural identity is refashioned in changing circ*mstances. Unlike their parents, the second generation was born into what is now one of the most diverse countries in the world, with over a quarter (26%) of the population born overseas and a further 23% having at least one parent born overseas (Australian Bureau of Statistics). Unlike their parents, they have come of age in the era of digitally-enabled international communication that has transformed the ways in which people connect. This cohort has a distinctive relationship to the national imaginary. The idea of “multicultural Australia” that was part of the country’s adoption of a multicultural policy framework in the early 1970s was based on a narrative of “old” (white Anglo) Australians “welcoming” (or “tolerating”) “new” (immigrant) Australians (Ang and Stratton; Hage). In this narrative, the second generation, who are Australian born but not “old” Australians and of “migrant background” but not “new” Australians, are largely invisible, setting them apart from both their migrant parents and other, overseas born young Australians of diverse backgrounds, with whom they are often grouped (Collins, Reid, and Fabiansson; Ang, Brand, Noble, and Sternberg; Collins, Reid, and Fabiansson; Harris).In what follows, we aim to contribute to calls for a rethinking of Australian national identity and “culture of interaction” to better reflect the experiences of all citizens (Levey; Collins, Reid, and Fabiansson) by focusing on the experiences of the second generation. Taking our cue from Geoffrey Levey, we argue that “it is not the business of government or politicians to complete the definition of what it means to be Australian” and that we should instead look to a sense of national identity that emerges organically from “mundane daily social interaction” (Levey). To this end, we adopt an “everyday multiculturalism” perspective (Wise and Velayutham), “view[ing] situations of co-existence ... as a concrete, specific context of action, in which difference comes across as a constraint ... and as a resource” (Semi, Colombo, Comozzi, and Frisina 67). We see our focus on the second generation as complementary to existing studies that have examined experiences of young Australians of diverse backgrounds through an everyday multiculturalism prism without distinguishing between newly arrived young people and those born in Australia (Ang, Brand, Noble, and Sternberg; Collins, Reid, and Fabiansson; Harris). We emphasise, however, after Mansouri and Johns, that the second generation’s distinctive cultural and socio-structural challenges and needs – including their distinctive relationship to the idea of “multicultural Australia” – deserve special attention. Like Christina Schachtner, we are cognisant that “faced with the task of giving meaning and direction to their lives, the next generation is increasingly confronted with a need to reconsider the revered values of the present and the past and to reorientate themselves while establishing new meanings” (233; emphasis ours). Like her, we recognise that in the contemporary era, young adults often use digital communicative spaces for the purpose of giving meaning to their lives in the circ*mstances in which they find themselves (Schachtner 233). Above all, we concur with Hopkins and Dolic when they state that “understanding the processes that inform the creation and maintenance of ... ethnic minority and Australian mainstream identities amongst second-generation young people is critical if these young people are to feel included and recognised, whilst avoiding the alienation and social exclusion that has had such ugly results in other parts of the world (153).In part one, we draw on initial findings from a collaborative empirical study between Swinburne University and the Victorian Multicultural Commission to outline some of the paradoxes and contradictions encountered by a particular – well-educated (currently or recently enrolled at university) and creative (seeking jobs in the media and cultural industries) – segment of the second generation in their attempts to imagine themselves within the frame of “multicultural Australia” (3 focus groups, of 60-90 minutes duration, involving 7-10 participants were conducted over 2018 and 2019). These include feeling more Australian than their parents while not always being seen as “really” Australian by the broader community; embracing diversity but struggling to find a language in which to adequately express it; and acknowledging the progress being made in representing diversity in the mainstream media while not seeing their stories and those of their parents represented there.In part two, we outline future research directions that look to a range of cultural texts and mediated forms of social interactions across popular culture and media in search of new conversations about personal and national identity that could feed into a renewal of a more inclusive understanding of Australian identity.Living and Talking DiversityOur conversations with second generation young Australians confirmed many of the paradoxes and contradictions experienced by young people of diverse backgrounds in the constant traversing of their parents’ and Australian culture captured in previous research (Ang, Brand, Noble, and Sternberg; Harris). Emblematic of these paradoxes are the complicated ways they relate to “Australian identity,” notably expressed in the tension felt between identifying as “Australian” when overseas and with their parent’s heritage when in Australia. An omnipresent reminder of their provisional status as “Aussies” is questions such as “well I know you’re Australian but what are you really?” As one participant put it: “I identify as Australian, I’m proud of my Australian identity. But in Australia I’m Turkish and that’s just because when someone asks I’m not gonna say ‘oh I’m Australian’ ... I used to live in the UK and if someone asked me there, I was Australian. If someone asks me here, I’m Turkish. So that’s how it is. Turkish, born in Australia”The second generation young people in our study responded to these ambiguities in different ways. Some applied hyphenated labels to themselves, while others felt that identification with the nation was largely irrelevant, documented in existing research (Collins, Reid, and Fabiansson; Harris). As one of our participants put it, “I just personally don’t find national identity to be that important or relevant – it’s just another detail about me – I [don’t] think it should affect anything else.” The study also found that our participants had difficulty in finding specific terms to express their identities. For some, trying to describe their identities was “really confusing,” and their thinking changed from day to day. For others, the reason it was hard to express their identities was that the very substance of mundane, daily life “feels very default”. This was the case when many of our participants reported their lived experiences of diversity, whether related to culinary and sport experiences, or simply social interactions with “the people I talk to” and daily train trips where “everyone [of different ethnicities] just rides the train together and doesn’t think twice about it”. As one young person put it, “the default is going around the corner for dinner and having Mongolian beef and pho”. We found that a factor feeding into the ambivalence of articulating Australian identity is the influence – constraining and enabling – of prevailing idioms of identity and difference. Several instances were uncovered in which widely circulating and highly politicised discourses of identity had the effect of shutting down conversation. In particular, the issue of what was “politically correct” language was a touchstone for much of the discussion among the young people in our study. This concern with “appropriate language” created some hesitancy and confusion, as when one person was trying to describe white Australians: “obviously you know Australia’s still a – how do you, you know, I guess I don’t know how to – the appropriate, you know PC language but Australia’s a white country if that makes sense you know”. Other participants were reluctant to talk about cultural groups and their shared characteristics at all, seeing such statements as potentially racist. In contrast to this feeling of restricted discourse, we found many examples of our participants playing and repurposing received vocabularies. As reported in other research, the young people used ideas about origin, race and ethnicity in loose and shifting ways (Back; Butcher). In some cases, in contrast to fears of “racist” connotations of identifying individuals by their cultural background, the language of labels and shorthand descriptors was used as a lingua franca for playful, albeit not unproblematic, negotiations across cultural boundaries. One participant reported being called one of “The Turks” in classes at university. His response expressed the tensions embedded in this usage, finding it stereotyping but ultimately affectionate. As he expressed it, “it’s like, ‘I have a personality, guys.’ But that was okay, it was endearing, they were all with it”. Another finding highlighted more fraught issues that can be raised when existing identity categories are transposed from contexts strongly marked by historically specific circ*mstances into unrelated contexts. This was the case of a university classmate saying of another Turkish participant that he “was the black guy of the class because … [he] was the darkest”. The circulation of “borrowed” discourses – particularly, as in this case, from the USA – is notable in the digital era, and the broader implications of such usage among people who are not always aware of the connotations of a discourse that is deeply rooted in a particular history and culture, are yet to be fully examined (Lester). The study also shed some light on the struggles the young people in our study encountered in finding a language in which to describe their identities and relationship to “Australianness”. When asked if they thought others would consider them to be “Australian”, responses revealed a spectrum ranging from perceived rejection to an ill-defined and provisional inclusion. One person reported – despite having been born and lived in Australia all their life – that “I don’t think I would ever be called Australian from Australian people – from white Australian people”. Another thought that it was not possible to generalise about being considered Australians by the broader community, as “some do, some don’t”. Again, responses varied. While for some it was a source of unease, for others the distancing from “Australianness” was not experienced negatively, as in the case of the participant who said of being singled out as “different” from the Anglo-Celtic mainstream, “I actually don’t mind that … I’ve got something that a lot of white Australians males don’t have”.A connected finding was the continuing presence of, often subtle but clearly registered, racism. The second generation young people in the study were very conscious of the ways in which experiences of racism they encountered differed from – and represented an improvement on – that of their parents. Drawing an intergenerational contrast between the explicit racism their parents were often subjected to and their own experiences of what they frequently referred to as microaggressions, they mostly saw progress occurring on this front. Another sign of progress they observed was in relation to their own propensity to reject exclusionary thinking, as when they suggested that their parents’ generation are more likely to make “assumptions about culture” based on people’s “outward appearance” which they found problematic because “everyone’s everywhere”. While those cultural faux pas were judged as “well-meaning” and even justified by not “growing up in a culturally diverse setting”, they are at odds with young people’s own experiences and understanding of diversity.The final major finding to emerge from the study was the widespread view that mainstream media fails to represent their lives. Again, our participants acknowledged the progress that has been made over recent decades and applauded moves towards greater representation of non-Anglo-Celtic communities in mainstream free-to-air programming. But the vast majority reported that their experiences are not represented. The sentiment that “I’d love to see someone who looks like me on TV more – on a really basic level – I’d like to see someone who looks like my Dad” was shared by many. What remained missing – and motivated many of the young people in our study to embark on filmmaking careers – was content that reflected their local, place-based lifestyles and the intergenerational dynamics of migrated families that is the fabric of their lives. When asked if Australian media content reflected their experience, one participant put it bluntly: “if I felt like it did, I wouldn’t be actively trying to make documentaries and films about it”.Dreaming DiversityThe findings of the study confirmed earlier research highlighting the ambiguities encountered by second generation Australians who are demographically, emotionally and culturally marked by their parents’ experiences of migration even as they forge their post-migration futures. On the one hand, they reported an allegiance to the Australian nation and recognised that in many ways that they are more part of its fabric than their parents. On the other hand, they reported a number of situations in which they feel marginalised and not “really” Australian, as when they are asked “where are you really from” and when they do not see their stories represented in the mainstream media. In particular, the study highlighted the tensions involved in describing personal and Australian identity, revealing the struggle the second generation often experience in their attempts to express the complexity of their identifications and sense of belonging. As we see it, the lack of recognition of being “really” Australian felt by the young people in our study and their view that mainstream media does not sufficiently represent their experience are connected. Underlying both is a status quo in which the normative Australian is Anglo-Celtic. To help shift this prevailing view of the normative Australian, we endorse earlier calls for a research program centred on analyses of a range of cultural texts and mediated forms of social interactions in search of new conversations about Australian identity. Media, both public and commercial, have the potential to be key agents for community building and identity formation. From radio and television programs through to online discussion forums and social media, media have provided platforms for creating collective imagination and a sense of belonging, including in the context of migration in Australia (Sinclair and Cunningham; Johns; Ang, Brand, Noble, and Sternberg). By supplying symbolic resources through which cultural differences and identities are represented and circulated, they can offer up opportunities for societal reflection, scrutiny and self-interpretation. As a starting point, for example, three current popular media formats that depict or are produced by second-generation Australians lend themselves to such a multi-sited analysis. The first is internet forums in which second generation young people share their quotidian experiences of “bouncing between both cultures in our lives” (Wu and Yuan), often in humorous forms. As the popularity of Subtle Asian Traits and its offshoot Subtle Curry Traits have indicated, these sites tap into the hunger among the Asian diaspora for increased media visibility. The second is the work of comedians, including those who self-identify as of migrant descent. The politics of stereotyping and racial jokes and the difference between them has been a subject of considerable research, including into television comedy productions which are important because of their potential audience reach and ensuing post-viewing conversations (Zambon). The third is a new generation of television programs which are set in situations of diversity without being heralded as “about” diversity. A key case is the television drama series The Heights, first screened on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Australia in 2019, which explores the relationships between the residents of a social housing tower and the people who live in the rapidly gentrifying community that surrounds it in the melting pot of urban Australia. These examples represent a diverse range of cultural expressions – created informally and spontaneously (Subtle Asian Traits, Subtle Curry Traits), fashioned by individuals working in the entertainment industry (comedians), and produced professionally and broadcast on national TV networks (The Heights). What unites them is an engagement with the novel forms of belonging that postwar migration has produced (Papastergiadis 20) and an attempt to communicate and represent the lived experience of contemporary Australian diversity, including negotiated dreams and aspirations for the future. We propose a systematic analysis of the new languages of identity and difference that their efforts to represent the evolving patterns and circ*mstances of diversity in Australia are bringing forth. Conclusions To dream in the context of migration implies, more often than not, the prospect of a better material life in an adopted country. Instead, through the notion of “dreaming diversity”, we foreground the dreams, expectations and imaginations for the future of the Australian second generation which centre on carving out their cultural place in the nation.The empirical research we presented paints a picture of the second generation's paradoxical and contradictory experiences as they navigate the shifting landscape of Australia’s multicultural society. It gives a glimpse of the challenges and hopes they encounter as well as the direction of their attempts to negotiate their place within “Australian identity”. Finally, it highlights the need for a more expansive conversation and language in which that identity can be expressed. A language in which to talk – not just about the many cultures that make up the nation, but also to each other from within them – will be crucial to facilitate the deeper intercultural understanding and engagement many young people aspire to. Our ambition is not to codify a register of approved terms, and even less to formulate a new official discourse for use in multicultural policy documents. It is rather to register, crystalise and expand a discussion around difference and identity that is emerging from everyday interactions of Australians and foster a more committed conversation attuned to contemporary realities and communicative spaces where those interactions take place. In search of a richer vocabulary in which Australian identity might be reimagined, we have identified a research program that will explore emerging ways of talking about difference and identity across a range of cultural and media formats about or by the second generation. While arguing for the significance of the languages and idioms that are emerging in the spaces that young people inhabit, we recognise that, no less than other demographics, second-generation Australians are influenced by circulating narratives and categories in which (national) identity is discussed (Harris 15), including official conceptions and prevailing discourses of identity politics which are often encountered online and through popular culture. Our point is that the dreams, visions and imaginaries of second generation Australians, who will be among the key actors in fashioning Australia’s multicultural futures, are an important element of reimagining Australia’s multiculturalism even if those discourses may be partial, ambivalent or fragmented. We see this research program as building on and extending the tradition of sociological and cultural analyses of popular culture, media and cultural diversity and contributing to a more robust and systematic catalogue of multicultural narratives across different popular formats, genres, and production arrangements characteristic of the diversified media landscape. We have focused on the Australian “new second generation” (Zhou and Bankston), coming of age in the early 21st century, as a significant but under-researched group in the belief that their narratives of aspirations and dreams will be a crucial component of discursive innovations and practical programs for social change.ReferencesAustralian Bureau of Statistics. “The Way We Live Now.” 2017. 1 Mar. 2020 <https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/2024.0>.Ang, Ien, Jeffrey E. Brand, Greg Noble, and Jason Sternberg. Connecting Diversity: Paradoxes of Multicultural Australia. Artarmon: Special Broadcasting Service Corporation, 2006.Back, L., P. Cohen, and M. Keith. “Between Home and Belonging: Critical Ethnographies of Race, Place and Identity.” Finding the Way Home: Young People’s Stories of Gender, Ethnicity, Class and Places in Hamburg and London. Ed. N. Räthzel. 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DOI: 10.1057/9780230244474.Wu, Nicholas, and Karen Yuan. “The Meme-ification of Asianness.” The Atlantic Dec. 2018. <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/the-asian-identity-according-to-subtle-asian-traits/579037/>.Zambon, Kate. “Negotiating New German Identities: Transcultural Comedy and the Construction of Pluralistic Unity.” Media, Culture and Society 39.4 (2017): 552–567. Zhou, Min, and Carl L. Bankston. The Rise of the New Second Generation. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. DOI: 10.1177/0163443716663640.AcknowledgmentsThe empirical data reported here was drawn from Zooming In: Multiculturalism through the Lens of the Next Generation, a research collaboration between Swinburne University and the Victorian Multicultural Commission exploring contemporary perspectives on diversity among young Australians through their filmmaking practice, led by Chief Investigators Dr Glenda Ballantyne (Department of Social Sciences) and Dr Vincent Giarusso (Department of Film and Animation). We wish to thank Liam Wright and Alexa Scarlata for their work as Research Assistants on this project, and particularly the participants who shared their stories. Special thanks also to the editors of this special issue and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on an earlier version of this article. FundingZooming In: Multiculturalism through the Lens of the Next Generation has been generously supported by the Victorian Multicultural Commission, which we gratefully acknowledge.

Abstract:

The Leichhardt Highway is a six hundred-kilometre stretch of sealed inland road that joins the Australian Queensland border town of Goondiwindi with the Capricorn Highway, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Named after the young Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, part of this roadway follows the route his party took as they crossed northern Australia from Morton Bay (Brisbane) to Port Essington (near Darwin). Ignoring the usual colonial practice of honouring the powerful and aristocratic, Leichhardt named the noteworthy features along this route after his supporters and fellow expeditioners. Many of these names are still in use and a series of public monuments have also been erected in the intervening century and a half to commemorate this journey. Unlike Leichhardt, who survived his epic trip, some contemporary travellers who navigate the remote roadway named in his honour do not arrive at their final destinations. Memorials to these violently interrupted lives line the highway, many enigmatically located in places where there is no obvious explanation for the lethal violence that occurred there. This examination profiles the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. All humans know that death awaits them (Morell). Yet, despite this, and the unprecedented torrent of images of death and dying saturating news, television, and social media (Duwe; Sumiala; Bisceglio), Gorer’s mid-century ideas about the denial of death and Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning description of the purpose of human civilization as a defence against this knowledge remains current in the contemporary trope that individuals (at least in the West) deny their mortality. Contributing to this enigmatic situation is how many deny the realities of aging and bodily decay—the promise of the “life extension” industries (Hall)—and are shielded from death by hospitals, palliative care providers, and the multimillion dollar funeral industry (Kiernan). Drawing on Piatti-Farnell’s concept of popular culture artefacts as “haunted/haunting” texts, the below describes how memorials to the dead can powerfully reconnect those who experience them with death’s reality, by providing an “encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience” (Piatti-Farnell). While certainly very different to the “sublime” iconic Gothic structure, the Gothic ruin that Summers argued could be seen as “a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret” (407), these memorials do function in both this way as melancholy/regret-inducing relics as well as in Piatti-Farnell’s sense of bringing the dead into everyday consciousness. Such memorialising activity also evokes one of Spooner’s features of the Gothic, by acknowledging “the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present” (8).Ludwig Leichhardt and His HighwayWhen Leichhardt returned to Sydney in 1846 from his 18-month journey across northern Australia, he was greeted with surprise and then acclaim. Having mounted his expedition without any backing from influential figures in the colony, his party was presumed lost only weeks after its departure. Yet, once Leichhardt and almost all his expedition returned, he was hailed “Prince of Explorers” (Erdos). When awarding him a significant purse raised by public subscription, then Speaker of the Legislative Council voiced what he believed would be the explorer’s lasting memorial —the public memory of his achievement: “the undying glory of having your name enrolled amongst those of the great men whose genius and enterprise have impelled them to seek for fame in the prosecution of geographical science” (ctd. Leichhardt 539). Despite this acclaim, Leichhardt was a controversial figure in his day; his future prestige not enhanced by his Prussian/Germanic background or his disappearance two years later attempting to cross the continent. What troubled the colonial political class, however, was his transgressive act of naming features along his route after commoners rather than the colony’s aristocrats. Today, the Leichhardt Highway closely follows Leichhardt’s 1844-45 route for some 130 kilometres from Miles, north through Wandoan to Taroom. In the first weeks of his journey, Leichhardt named 16 features in this area: 6 of the more major of these after the men in his party—including the Aboriginal man ‘Charley’ and boy John Murphy—4 more after the tradesmen and other non-aristocratic sponsors of his venture, and the remainder either in memory of the journey’s quotidian events or natural features there found. What we now accept as traditional memorialising practice could in this case be termed as Gothic, in that it upset the rational, normal order of its day, and by honouring humble shopkeepers, blacksmiths and Indigenous individuals, revealed the “disturbance and ambivalence” (Botting 4) that underlay colonial class relations (Macintyre). On 1 December 1844, Leichhardt also memorialised his own past, referencing the Gothic in naming a watercourse The Creek of the Ruined Castles due to the “high sandstone rocks, fissured and broken like pillars and walls and the high gates of the ruined castles of Germany” (57). Leichhardt also disturbed and disfigured the nature he so admired, famously carving his initials deep into trees along his route—a number of which still exist, including the so-called Leichhardt Tree, a large coolibah in Taroom’s main street. Leichhardt also wrote his own memorial, keeping detailed records of his experiences—both good and more regretful—in the form of field books, notebooks and letters, with his major volume about this expedition published in London in 1847. Leichhardt’s journey has since been memorialised in various ways along the route. The Leichhardt Tree has been further defaced with numerous plaques nailed into its ancient bark, and the town’s federal government-funded Bicentennial project raised a formal memorial—a large sandstone slab laid with three bronze plaques—in the newly-named Ludwig Leichhardt Park. Leichhardt’s name also adorns many sites both along, and outside, the routes of his expeditions. While these fittingly include natural features such as the Leichhardt River in north-west Queensland (named in 1856 by Augustus Gregory who crossed it by searching for traces of the explorer’s ill-fated 1848 expedition), there are also many businesses across Queensland and the Northern Territory less appropriately carrying his name. More somber monuments to Leichhardt’s legacy also resulted from this journey. The first of these was the white settlement that followed his declaration that the countryside he moved through was well endowed with fertile soils. With squatters and settlers moving in and land taken up before Leichhardt had even arrived back in Sydney, the local Yeeman people were displaced, mistreated and completely eradicated within a decade (Elder). Mid-twentieth century, Patrick White’s literary reincarnation, Voss of the eponymous novel, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker have enshrined in popular memory not only the difficult (and often described as Gothic) nature of the landscape through which Leichhardt travelled (Adams; Mollinson, and Bonham), but also the distinctive and contrary blend of intelligence, spiritual mysticism, recklessness, and stoicism Leichhardt brought to his task. Roadside Memorials Today, the Leichhardt Highway is also lined with a series of roadside shrines to those who have died much more recently. While, like centotaphs, tombstones, and cemeteries, these memorialise the dead, they differ in usually marking the exact location that death occurred. In 43 BC, Cicero articulated the idea of the dead living in memory, “The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living” (93), yet Nelson is one of very few contemporary writers to link roadside memorials to elements of Gothic sensibility. Such constructions can, however, be described as Gothic, in that they make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering. These are also enigmatic sites. Traffic levels are generally low along the flat or gently undulating terrain and many of these memorials are located in locations where there is no obvious explanation for the violence that occurred there. They are loci of contradictions, in that they are both more private than other memorials, in being designed, and often made and erected, by family and friends of the deceased, and yet more public, visible to all who pass by (Campbell). Cemeteries are set apart from their surroundings; the roadside memorial is, in contrast, usually in open view along a thoroughfare. In further contrast to cemeteries, which contain many relatively standardised gravesites, individual roadside memorials encapsulate and express not only the vivid grief of family and friends but also—when they include vehicle wreckage or personal artefacts from the fatal incident—provide concrete evidence of the trauma that occurred. While the majority of individuals interned in cemeteries are long dead, roadside memorials mark relatively contemporary deaths, some so recent that there may still be tyre marks, debris and bloodstains marking the scene. In 2008, when I was regularly travelling this roadway, I documented, and researched, the six then extant memorial sites that marked the locations of ten fatalities from 1999 to 2006. (These were all still in place in mid-2014.) The fatal incidents are very diverse. While half involved trucks and/or road trains, at least three were single vehicle incidents, and the deceased ranged from 13 to 84 years of age. Excell argues that scholarship on roadside memorials should focus on “addressing the diversity of the material culture” (‘Contemporary Deathscapes’) and, in these terms, the Leichhardt Highway memorials vary from simple crosses to complex installations. All include crosses (mostly, but not exclusively, white), and almost all are inscribed with the name and birth/death dates of the deceased. Most include flowers or other plants (sometimes fresh but more often plastic), but sometimes also a range of relics from the crash and/or personal artefacts. These are, thus, unsettling sights, not least in the striking contrast they provide with the highway and surrounding road reserve. The specific location is a key component of their ability to re-sensitise viewers to the dangers of the route they are travelling. The first memorial travelling northwards, for instance, is situated at the very point at which the highway begins, some 18 kilometres from Goondiwindi. Two small white crosses decorated with plastic flowers are set poignantly close together. The inscriptions can also function as a means of mobilising connection with these dead strangers—a way of building Secomb’s “haunted community”, whereby community in the post-colonial age can only be built once past “murderous death” (131) is acknowledged. This memorial is inscribed with “Cec Hann 06 / A Good Bloke / A Good hoarseman [sic]” and “Pat Hann / A Good Woman” to tragically commemorate the deaths of an 84-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife from South Australia who died in the early afternoon of 5 June 2006 when their Ford Falcon, towing a caravan, pulled onto the highway and was hit by a prime mover pulling two trailers (Queensland Police, ‘Double Fatality’; Jones, and McColl). Further north along the highway are two memorials marking the most inexplicable of road deaths: the single vehicle fatality (Connolly, Cullen, and McTigue). Darren Ammenhauser, aged 29, is remembered with a single white cross with flowers and plaque attached to a post, inscribed hopefully, “Darren Ammenhauser 1971-2000 At Rest.” Further again, at Billa Billa Creek, a beautifully crafted metal cross attached to a fence is inscribed with the text, “Kenneth J. Forrester / RIP Jack / 21.10.25 – 27.4.05” marking the death of the 79-year-old driver whose vehicle veered off the highway to collide with a culvert on the creek. It was reported that the vehicle rolled over several times before coming to rest on its wheels and that Forrester was dead when the police arrived (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Traffic Incident’). More complex memorials recollect both single and multiple deaths. One, set on both sides of the road, maps the physical trajectory of the fatal smash. This memorial comprises white crosses on both sides of road, attached to a tree on one side, and a number of ancillary sites including damaged tyres with crosses placed inside them on both sides of the road. Simple inscriptions relay the inability of such words to express real grief: “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed” and “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed / Forever in our hearts.” The oldest and most complex memorial on the route, commemorating the death of four individuals on 18 June 1999, is also situated on both sides of the road, marking the collision of two vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One memorial to a 62-year-old man comprises a cross with flowers, personal and automotive relics, and a plaque set inside a wooden fence and simply inscribed “John Henry Keenan / 23-11-1936–18-06-1999”. The second memorial contains three white crosses set side-by-side, together with flowers and relics, and reveals that members of three generations of the same family died at this location: “Raymond Campbell ‘Butch’ / 26-3-67–18-6-99” (32 years of age), “Lorraine Margaret Campbell ‘Lloydie’ / 29-11-46–18-6-99” (53 years), and “Raymond Jon Campbell RJ / 28-1-86–18-6-99” (13 years). The final memorial on this stretch of highway is dedicated to Jason John Zupp of Toowoomba who died two weeks before Christmas 2005. This consists of a white cross, decorated with flowers and inscribed: “Jason John Zupp / Loved & missed by all”—a phrase echoed in his newspaper obituary. The police media statement noted that, “at 11.24pm a prime mover carrying four empty trailers [stacked two high] has rolled on the Leichhardt Highway 17km north of Taroom” (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Truck Accident’). The roadside memorial was placed alongside a ditch on a straight stretch of road where the body was found. The coroner’s report adds the following chilling information: “Mr Zupp was thrown out of the cabin and his body was found near the cabin. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had applied the brakes or in any way tried to prevent the crash … Jason was not wearing his seatbelt” (Cornack 5, 6). Cornack also remarked the truck was over length, the brakes had not been properly adjusted, and the trip that Zupp had undertaken could not been lawfully completed according to fatigue management regulations then in place (8). Although poignant and highly visible due to these memorials, these deaths form a small part of Australia’s road toll, and underscore our ambivalent relationship with the automobile, where road death is accepted as a necessary side-effect of the freedom of movement the technology offers (Ladd). These memorials thus animate highways as Gothic landscapes due to the “multifaceted” (Haider 56) nature of the fear, terror and horror their acknowledgement can bring. Since 1981, there have been, for instance, between some 1,600 and 3,300 road deaths each year in Australia and, while there is evidence of a long term downward trend, the number of deaths per annum has not changed markedly since 1991 (DITRDLG 1, 2), and has risen in some years since then. The U.S.A. marked its millionth road death in 1951 (Ladd) along the way to over 3,000,000 during the 20th century (Advocates). These deaths are far reaching, with U.K. research suggesting that each death there leaves an average of 6 people significantly affected, and that there are some 10 to 20 per cent of mourners who experience more complicated grief and longer term negative affects during this difficult time (‘Pathways Through Grief’). As the placing of roadside memorials has become a common occurrence the world over (Klaassens, Groote, and Vanclay; Grider; Cohen), these are now considered, in MacConville’s opinion, not only “an appropriate, but also an expected response to tragedy”. Hockey and Draper have explored the therapeutic value of the maintenance of “‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead” (3). This is, however, only one explanation for the reasons that individuals erect roadside memorials with research suggesting roadside memorials perform two main purposes in their linking of the past with the present—as not only sites of grieving and remembrance, but also of warning (Hartig, and Dunn; Everett; Excell, Roadside Memorials; MacConville). Clark adds that by “localis[ing] and personalis[ing] the road dead,” roadside memorials raise the profile of road trauma by connecting the emotionless statistics of road death directly to individual tragedy. They, thus, transform the highway into not only into a site of past horror, but one in which pain and terror could still happen, and happen at any moment. Despite their increasing commonality and their recognition as cultural artefacts, these memorials thus occupy “an uncomfortable place” both in terms of public policy and for some individuals (Lowe). While in some states of the U.S.A. and in Ireland the erection of such memorials is facilitated by local authorities as components of road safety campaigns, in the U.K. there appears to be “a growing official opposition to the erection of memorials” (MacConville). Criticism has focused on the dangers (of distraction and obstruction) these structures pose to passing traffic and pedestrians, while others protest their erection on aesthetic grounds and even claim memorials can lower property values (Everett). While many ascertain a sense of hope and purpose in the physical act of creating such shrines (see, for instance, Grider; Davies), they form an uncanny presence along the highway and can provide dangerous psychological territory for the viewer (Brien). Alongside the townships, tourist sites, motels, and petrol stations vying to attract customers, they stain the roadway with the unmistakable sign that a violent death has happened—bringing death, and the dead, to the fore as a component of these journeys, and destabilising prominent cultural narratives of technological progress and safety (Richter, Barach, Ben-Michael, and Berman).Conclusion This investigation has followed Goddu who proposes that a Gothic text “registers its culture’s contradictions” (3) and, in profiling these memorials as “intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (Goddu 3) has proposed memorials as Gothic artefacts that can both disturb and reveal. Roadside memorials are, indeed, so loaded with emotional content that their close contemplation can be traumatising (Brien), yet they are inescapable while navigating the roadway. Part of their power resides in their ability to re-animate those persons killed in these violent in the minds of those viewing these memorials. In this way, these individuals are reincarnated as ghostly presences along the highway, forming channels via which the traveller can not only make human contact with the dead, but also come to recognise and ponder their own sense of mortality. While roadside memorials are thus like civic war memorials in bringing untimely death to the forefront of public view, roadside memorials provide a much more raw expression of the chaotic, anarchic and traumatic moment that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. While traditional memorials—such as those dedicated by, and to, Leichhardt—moreover, pay homage to the vitality of the lives of those they commemorate, roadside memorials not only acknowledge the alarming circ*mstances of unexpected death but also stand testament to the power of the paradox of the incontrovertibility of sudden death versus our lack of ability to postpone it. In this way, further research into these and other examples of Gothic memorialising practice has much to offer various areas of cultural study in Australia.ReferencesAdams, Brian. Sidney Nolan: Such Is Life. Hawthorn, Vic.: Hutchinson, 1987. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities & Fatality Rate: 1899-2003.” 2004. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Bisceglio, Paul. “How Social Media Is Changing the Way We Approach Death.” The Atlantic 20 Aug. 2013. Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. 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Abstract:

Ever since I tripped over Tiddles while I was carrying a pile of discs into the studio, I’ve known it was possible to get a laugh out of gramophone records!Max Bygraves In 1978 the music critic Lester Bangs published a typically pugnacious essay with the fighting title, “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies.” Before deliciously launching into his execution of Uri Geller’s self-titled album or Rick Dees’ The Original Disco Duck, Bangs asserts that because that decade was history’s silliest, it stands to reason “that ridiculous records should become the norm instead of anomalies,” that abominations should be the best of our time (Bangs, 1978). This absurd pretzel logic sounds uncannily like Jacques Derrida’s definition of the “post” condition, since for it to arrive it begins by not arriving (Derrida 1987, 29). Lester is thinking like a poststructuralist. The oddness of the most singularly odd album out in Bangs’ greatest misses of the seventies had nothing to do with how ridiculous it was, but the fact that it even existed at all. (Bangs 1978) The album was entitled The Best of Marcel Marceao. Produced by Michael Viner the album contained four tracks, with two identical on both sides: “Silence,” which is nineteen minutes long and “Applause,” one minute. To underline how extraordinary this gramophone record is, John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1959) is cacophonous by comparison. While Bangs agrees with popular opinion that The Best of Marcel Marceao the “ultimate concept album,” he concluded that this is “one of those rare records that never dates” (Bangs, 1978). This tacet album is a good way to start thinking about the Classical Gas project, and the ironic semiotics at work in it (Tofts & Gye 2011). It too is about records that are silent and that never date. First, the album’s cover art, featuring a theatrically posed Marceau, implies the invitation to speak in the absence of speech; or, in our terms, it is asking to be re-written. Secondly, the French mime’s surname is spelled incorrectly, with an “o” rather than “u” as the final letter. As well as the caprice of an actual album by Marcel Marceau, the implicit presence and absence of the letters o and u is appropriately in excess of expectations, weird and unexpected like an early title in the Classical Gas catalogue, Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (classical-gas.com) Like a zootrope animation, it is impossible not to see the o and u flickering at one at the same time on the cover. In this duplicity it performs the conventional and logical permutation of English grammar. Silence invites difference, variation within a finite lexical set and the opportunity to choose individual items from it. Here is album cover art that speaks of presence and absence, of that which is anticipated and unexpected: a gramophone recoding without sound. In this the Marceau cover is one of Roland Barthes’ mythologies, something larger than life, structured like a language and structured out of language (Barthes 1982). This ambiguity is the perfidious grammar that underwrites Classical Gas. Images, we learned from structuralism, are codified, or rather, are code. Visual remix is a rhetorical gesture of recoding that interferes with the semiotic DNA of an image. The juxtaposition of text and image is interchangeable and requires our imagination of what we are looking at and what it might sound like. This persistent interplay of metaphor and metonymy has enabled us to take more than forty easy listening albums and republish them as mild-mannered recordings from the maverick history of ideas, from Marxism and psychoanalysis, to reception theory, poststructuralism and the writings of critical auteurs. Foucault à gogo, for instance, takes a 1965 James Last dance album and recodes it as the second volume of The History of Sexuality. In saying this, we are mindful of the ambivalence of the very possibility of this connection, to how and when the eureka moment of remix recognition occurs, if at all. Mix and remix are, after Jean Baudrillard, both precession and procession of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1983). The nature of remix is that it is always already elusive and anachronistic. Not everyone can be guaranteed to see the shadow of one text in dialogue with another, like a hi-fi palimpsest. Or another way of saying this, such an epiphany of déjà vu, of having seen this before, may happen after the fact of encounter. This anachrony is central to remix practices, from the films of Quentin Tarrantino and the “séance fictions” of Soda_Jerk, to obscure Flintstones/Goodfellas mashups on YouTube. It is also implicit in critical understandings of an improbable familiarity with the superabundance of cultural archives, the dizzying excess of an infinite record library straight out of Jorge Luis Borges’ ever-expanding imagination. Drifting through the stacks of such a repository over an entire lifetime any title found, for librarian and reader alike, is either original and remix, sometime. Metalanguages that seek to counter this ambivalence are forms of bad faith, like film spoilers Brodie’s Notes. Accordingly, this essay sets out to explain some of the generic conventions of Classical Gas, as a remix project in which an image’s semiotic DNA is rewired and recontextualised. While a fake, it is also completely real (Faith in fakes, as it happens, may well be a forthcoming Umberto Eco title in the series). While these album covers are hyperreal, realistic in excess of being real, the project does take some inspiration from an actual, rather than imaginary archive of album covers. In 2005, Jewish artist Dani Gal happened upon a 1968 LP that documented the events surrounding the Six Day War in Israel in 1967. To his surprise, he found a considerable number of similar LPs to do with significant twentieth century historical events, speeches and political debates. In the artist’s own words, the LPs collected in his Historical Record Archive (2005-ongoing) are in fact silent, since it is only their covers that are exhibited in installations of this work, signifying a potential sound that visitors must try to audition. As Gal has observed, the interactive contract of the work is derived from the audience’s instinct to “try to imagine the sounds” even though they cannot listen to them (Gal 2011, 182). Classical Gas deliberately plays with this potential yearning that Gal astutely instils in his viewer and aspiring auditor. While they can never be listened to, they can entice, after Gilles Deleuze, a “virtual co-existence” of imaginary sound that manifests itself as a contract between viewer and LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). The writer Jeffrey Sconce condensed this embrace of the virtual as something plausibly real when he pithily observed of the Classical Gas project that it is “the thrift-bin in my fantasy world. I want to play S/Z at 78 rpm” (Sconce 2011). In terms of Sconce’s spectral media interests the LPs are haunted by the trace of potential “other” sounds that have taken possession of and appropriated the covers for another use (Sconce 2000).Mimetic While most albums are elusive and metaphoric (such as Freud’s Totem and Taboo, or Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference), some titles do make a concession to a tantalizing, mimetic literalness (such as Das Institut fur Sozialforschung). They display a trace of the haunting subject in terms of a tantalizing echo of fact or suggestion of verifiable biography. The motivation here is the recognition of a potential similarity, since most Classical Gas titles work by contrast. As with Roland Barthes’ analysis of the erotics of the fashion system, so with Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty: it is “where the garment gapes” that the tease begins. (Barthes 1994, 9) Or, in this instance, where the cigarette smokes. (classical-gas.com) A casual Max Bygraves, paused in mid-thought, looks askance while lighting up. Despite the temptation to read even more into this, a smoking related illness did not contribute to Bygraves’ death in 2012. However, dying of Alzheimer’s disease, his dementia is suggestive of the album’s intrinsic capacity to be a palimpsest of the co-presence of different memories, of confused identities, obscure realities that are virtual and real. Beginning with the album cover itself, it has to become an LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). First, it is a cardboard, planar sleeve measuring 310mm squared, that can be imprinted with a myriad of different images. Secondly, it is conventionally identified in terms of a title, such as Organ Highlights or Classics Up to Date. Thirdly it is inscribed by genre, which may be song, drama, spoken word, or novelty albums of industrial or instrumental sounds, such as Memories of Steam and Accelerated Accordians. A case in point is John Woodhouse And His Magic Accordion from 1969. (classical-gas.com) All aspects of its generic attributes as benign and wholesome accordion tunes are warped and re-interpreted in Classical Gas. Springtime for Kittler appeared not long after the death of its eponymous philosopher in 2011. Directed by Richard D. James, also known as Aphex Twin, it is a homage album to Friedrich Kittler by the PostProducers, a fictitious remix collective inspired by Mel Brooks whose personnel include Mark Amerika and Darren Tofts. The single from this album, yet to be released, is a paean to Kittler’s last words, “Alle Apparate auschalten.” Foucault à gogo (vol. 2), the first album remixed for this series, is also typical of this archaeological approach to the found object. (classical-gas.com) The erasure and replacement of pre-existing text in a similar font re-writes an iconic image of wooing that is indicative of romantic album covers of this period. This album is reflective of the overall project in that the actual James Last album (1968) preceded the publication of the Foucault text (1976) that haunts it. This is suggestive of how coding and recoding are in the eye of the beholder and the specific time in which the remixed album is encountered. It doesn’t take James Last, Michel Foucault or Theodor Holm Nelson to tell you that there is no such thing as a collective memory with linear recall. As the record producer Milt Gabler observes in the liner notes to this album, “whatever the title with this artist, the tune remains the same, that distinct and unique Foucault à gogo.” “This artist” in this instance is Last or Foucault, as well as Last and Foucault. Similarly Milt Gabler is an actual author of liner notes (though not on the James Last album) whose words from another album, another context and another time, are appropriated and deftly re-written with Last’s Hammond à gogo volume 2 and The History of Sexuality in mind as a palimpsest (this approach to sampling liner notes and re-writing them as if they speak for the new album is a trope at work in all the titles in the series). And after all is said and done with the real or remixed title, both artists, after Umberto Eco, will have spoken once more of love (Eco 1985, 68). Ambivalence Foucault à gogo is suggestive of the semiotic rewiring that underwrites Classical Gas as a whole. What is at stake in this is something that poststructuralism learned from its predecessor. Taking the tenuous conventionality of Ferdinand de Saussure’s signifier and signified as a starting point, Lacan, Derrida and others embraced the freedom of this arbitrariness as the convention or social contract that brings together a thing and a word that denotes it. This insight of liberation, or what Hélène Cixous and others, after Jacques Lacan, called jouissance (Lacan 1992), meant that texts were bristling with ambiguity and ambivalence, free play, promiscuity and, with a nod to Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival (Bakhtin 1984). A picture of a pipe was, after Foucault after Magritte, not a pipe (Foucault 1983). This po-faced sophistry is expressed in René Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” of 1948, which screamed out that the word pipe could mean anything. Foucault’s reprise of Magritte in “This is Not a Pipe” also speaks of Classical Gas’ embrace of the elasticity of sign and signifier, his “plastic elements” an inadvertent suggestion of vinyl (Foucault 1983, 53). (classical-gas.com) This uncanny association of structuralism and remixed vinyl LPs is intimated in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Its original cover art is straight out of a structuralist text-book, with its paired icons and words of love, rain, honey, rose, etc. But this text as performed by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians in New York in 1956 is no less plausible than Saussure’s lectures in Geneva in 1906. Cultural memory and cultural amnesia are one and the same thing. Out of all of the Classical Gas catalogue, this album is arguably the most suggestive of what Jeffrey Sconce would call “haunting” (Sconce, 2000), an ambivalent mixing of the “memory and desire” that T.S. Eliot wrote of in the allusive pages of The Waste Land (Eliot 1975, 27). Here we encounter the memory of a bookish study of signs from the early twentieth century and the desire for its vinyl equivalent on World Record Club in the 1960s. Memory and desire, either or, or both. This ambivalence was deftly articulated by Roland Barthes in his last book, Camera Lucida, as a kind of spectral haunting, a vision or act of double seeing in the perception of the photographic image. This flickering of perception is never static, predictable or repeatable. It is a way of seeing contingent upon who is doing the looking and when. Barthes famously conceptualised this interplay in perception of an between the conventions that culture has mandated, its studium, and the unexpected, idiosyncratic double vision that is unique to the observer, its punctum (Barthes 1982, 26-27). Accordingly, the Cours de linguistique générale is a record by Saussure as well as the posthumous publication in Paris and Lausanne of notes from his lectures in 1916. (Barthes 1982, 51) With the caption “Idiot children in an institution, New Jersey, 1924,” American photographer Lewis Hine’s anthropological study declares that this is a clinical image of pathological notions of monstrosity and aberration at the time. Barthes though, writing in a post-1968 Paris, only sees an outrageous Danton collar and a banal finger bandage (Barthes 1982, 51). With the radical, protestant cries of the fallout of the Paris riots in mind, as well as a nod to music writer Greil Marcus (1989), it is tempting to see Hine’s image as the warped cover of a Dead Kennedys album, perhaps Plastic Surgery Disasters. In terms of the Classical Gas approach to recoding, though, this would be far too predictable; for a start there is neither a pipe, a tan cardigan nor a chenille scarf to be seen. A more heart-warming, suitable title might be Ray Conniff’s 1965 Christmas Album: Here We Come A-Caroling. Irony (secretprehistory.net) Like our Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices project (Tofts & Gye), Classical Gas approaches the idea of recoding and remixing with a relentless irony. The kind of records we collect and the covers which we use for this project are what you would expect to find in the hutch of an old gramophone player, rather than “what’s hot” in iTunes. The process of recoding the album covers seeks to realign expectations of what is being looked at, such that it becomes difficult to see it in any other way. In this an album’s recoded signification implies the recognition of the already seen, of album covers like this, that signal something other than what we are seeing; colours, fonts etc., belonging to a historical period, to its genres and its demographic. One of the more bucolic and duplicitous forms of rhetoric, irony wants it both ways, to be totally lounge and theoretically too-cool-for school, as in Rencontre Terrestre by Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet. (classical-gas.com) This image persuades through the subtle alteration of typography that it belongs to a style, a period and a vibe that would seem to be at odds with the title and content of the album, but as a totality of image and text is entirely plausible. The same is true of Roland Barthes’ S/Z. The radical semiologist invites us into his comfortable sitting room for a cup of coffee. A traditional Times font reinforces the image of Barthes as an avuncular, Sunday afternoon story-teller or crooner, more Alistair Cooke/Perry Como than French Marxist. (classical-gas.com) In some instances, like Histoire de Tel Quel, there is no text at all on the cover and the image has to do its signifying work iconographically. (classical-gas.com) Here a sixties collage of French-ness on the original Victor Sylvester album from 1963 precedes and anticipates the re-written album it has been waiting for. That said, the original title In France is rather bland compared to Histoire de Tel Quel. A chic blond, the Eiffel Tower and intellectual obscurity vamp synaesthetically, conjuring the smell of Gauloises, espresso and agitated discussions of Communism on the Boulevard St. Germain. With Marcel Marceao with an “o” in mind, this example of a cover without text ironically demonstrates how Classical Gas, like The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices, is ostensibly a writing project. Just as the images are taken hostage from other contexts, text from the liner notes is sampled from other records and re-written in an act of ghost-writing to complete the remixed album. Without the liner notes, Classical Gas would make a capable Photoshop project, but lacks any force as critical remix. The redesigned and re-titled covers certainly re-code the album, transform it into something else; something else that obviously or obliquely reflects the theme, ideas or content of the title, whether it’s Louis Althusser’s Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon or Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference. If you don’t hear the ruggedness of Leslie Fiedler’s essays in No! In Thunder then the writing hasn’t worked. The liner notes are the albums’ conscience, the rubric that speaks the tunes, the words and elusive ideas that are implied but can never be heard. The Histoire de Tel Quel notes illustrate this suggestiveness: You may well think as is. Philippe Forest doesn’t, not in this Éditions du Seuil classic. The titles included on this recording have been chosen with a dual purpose: for those who wish to think and those who wish to listen. What Forest captures in this album is distinctive, fresh and daring. For what country has said it like it is, has produced more robustesse than France? Here is some of that country’s most famous talent swinging from silk stockings, the can-can, to amour, presented with the full spectrum of stereo sound. (classical-gas.com) The writing accurately imitates the inflection and rhythm of liner notes of the period, so on the one hand it sounds plausibly like a toe-tapping dance album. On the other, and at the same time, it gestures knowingly to the written texts upon which it is based, invoking its rigours as a philosophical text. The dithering suggestiveness of both – is it music or text – is like a scrambled moving image always coming into focus, never quite resolving into one or the other. But either is plausible. The Tel Quel theorists were interested in popular culture like the can-can, they were fascinated with the topic of love and if instead of books they produced albums, their thinking would be auditioned in full stereo sound. With irony in mind, then, it’s hardly surprising to know that the implicit title of the project, that is neither seen nor heard but always imminent, is Classical Gasbags. (classical-gas.com) Liner notes elaborate and complete an implicit narrative in the title and image, making something compellingly realistic that is a composite of reality and fabulation. Consider Adrian Martin’s Surrealism (A Quite Special Frivolity): France is the undeniable capital of today’s contemporary sound. For Adrian Martin, this is home ground. His French soul glows and expands in the lovely Mediterranean warmth of this old favourite, released for the first time on Project 3 Total Sound Stereo. But don’t be deceived by the tonal and melodic caprices that carry you along in flutter-free sound. As Martin hits his groove, there will be revolution by night. Watch out for new Adrian Martin releases soon, including La nuit expérimentale and, his first title in English in many years, One more Bullet in the Head (produced by Bucky Pizzarelli). (classical-gas.com) Referring to Martin’s famous essay of the same name, these notes allusively skirt around his actual biography (he regularly spends time in France), his professional writing on surrealism (“revolution by night” was the sub-title of a catalogue for the Surrealism exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1993 to which he contributed an essay) (Martin 1993), as well as “One more bullet in the head,” the rejected title of an essay that was published in World Art magazine in New York in the mid-1990s. While the cover evokes the cool vibe of nouvelle vague Paris, it is actually from a 1968 album, Roma Oggi by the American guitarist Tony Mottola (a real person who actually sounds like a fictional character from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America, a film on which Martin has written a book for the British Film Institute). Plausibility, in terms of Martin’s Surrealism album, has to be as compellingly real as the sincerity of Sandy Scott’s Here’s Sandy. And it should be no surprise to see the cover art of Scott’s album return as Georges Bataille’s Erotism. Gramophone The history of the gramophone represents the technological desire to write sound. In this the gramophone record is a ligature of sound and text, a form of phonographic writing. With this history in mind it’s hardly surprising that theorists such as Derrida and Kittler included the gramophone under the conceptual framework of a general grammatology (Derrida 1992, 253 & Kittler 1997, 28). (classical-gas.com) Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology is the avatar of Classical Gas in its re-writing of a previous writing. Re-inscribing the picaresque Pal Joey soundtrack as a foundation text of post-structuralism is appropriate in terms of the gramme or literate principle of Western metaphysics as well as the echolalia of remix. As Derrida observes in Of Grammatology, history and knowledge “have always been determined (and not only etymologically or philosophically) as detours for the purpose of the reappropriation of presence” (Derrida 1976, 10). A gas way to finish, you might say. But in retrospect the ur-text that drives the poetics of Classical Gas is not Of Grammatology but the errant Marcel Marceau album described previously. Far from being an oddity, an aberration or a “novelty” album, it is a classic gramophone recording, the quintessential writing of an absent speech, offbeat and untimely. References Bahktin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Bangs, Lester. “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies”. Phonograph Record Magazine, March, 1978. Reproduced at http://rateyourmusic.com/list/dacapo/the_ten_most_ridiculous_records_of_the_seventies__by_lester_bangs. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Flamingo, 1982. ---. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Granada, 1982. ---. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ---. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987. ---. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Eco, Umberto. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985. Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe. Trans. James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. ---. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1985. Gal, Dani. Interview with Jens Hoffmann, Istanbul Biennale Companion. Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts, 2011. Kittler, Friedrich. “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems. Ed. John Johnston. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960): The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989. Martin, Adrian. “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema,” in Surrealism: Revolution by Night. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1993. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. ---. Online communication with authors, June 2011. Tofts, Darren and Lisa Gye. The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices. 2010-ongoing. http://www.secretprehistory.net/. ---. Classical Gas. 2011-ongoing. http://www.classical-gas.com/.

Abstract:

Image 1: “Oklahoma State Highway Re-imagined.” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using Wikimedia image by Ks0stm (CC BY-SA 3 2013). Introduction This article is divided in three major parts. First a scenario, second its context, and third, an analysis. The text draws on ethnographic research on security practices in the United States among police and parts of the intelligence community from 2006 through to the beginning of 2014. Real names are used when the material is drawn from archival sources, while individuals who were interviewed during fieldwork are referred to by their position rank or title. For matters of fact not otherwise referenced, see the sources compiled on “The Complete 911 Timeline” at History Commons. First, a scenario. Oklahoma, 2001 It is 1 April 2001, in far western Oklahoma, warm beneath the late afternoon sun. Highway Patrol Trooper C.L. Parkins is about 80 kilometres from the border of Texas, watching trucks and cars speed along Interstate 40. The speed limit is around 110 kilometres per hour, and just then, his radar clocks a blue Toyota Corolla going 135 kph. The driver is not wearing a seatbelt. Trooper Parkins swung in behind the vehicle, and after a while signalled that the car should pull over. The driver was dark-haired and short; in Parkins’s memory, he spoke English without any problem. He asked the man to come sit in the patrol car while he did a series of routine checks—to see if the vehicle was stolen, if there were warrants out for his arrest, if his license was valid. Parkins said, “I visited with him a little bit but I just barely remember even having him in my car. You stop so many people that if […] you don't arrest them or anything […] you don't remember too much after a couple months” (Clay and Ellis). Nawaf Al Hazmi had a valid California driver’s license, with an address in San Diego, and the car’s registration had been legally transferred to him by his former roommate. Parkins’s inquiries to the National Crime Information Center returned no warnings, nor did anything seem odd in their interaction. So the officer wrote Al Hazmi two tickets totalling $138, one for speeding and one for failure to use a seat belt, and told him to be on his way. Al Hazmi, for his part, was crossing the country to a new apartment in a Virginia suburb of Washington, DC, and upon arrival he mailed the payment for his tickets to the county court clerk in Oklahoma. Over the next five months, he lived several places on the East Coast: going to the gym, making routine purchases, and taking a few trips that included Las Vegas and Florida. He had a couple more encounters with local law enforcement and these too were unremarkable. On 1 May 2001 he was mugged, and promptly notified the police, who documented the incident with his name and local address (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 139). At the end of June, having moved to New Jersey, he was involved in a minor traffic accident on the George Washington Bridge, and officers again recorded his real name and details of the incident. In July, Khalid Al Mihdhar, the previous owner of the car, returned from abroad, and joined Al Hazmi in New Jersey. The two were boyhood friends, and they went together to a library several times to look up travel information, and then, with Al Hazmi’s younger brother Selem, to book their final flight. On 11 September, the three boarded American Airlines flight 77 as part of the Al Qaeda team that flew the mid-sized jet into the west façade of the Pentagon. They died along with the piloting hijacker, all the passengers, and 125 people on the ground. Theirs was one of four airplanes hijacked that day, one of which was crashed by passengers, the others into significant sites of American power, by men who had been living for varying lengths of time all but unnoticed in the United States. No one thought that Trooper Parkins, or the other officers with whom the 9/11 hijackers crossed paths, should have acted differently. The Commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety himself commented that the trooper “did the right thing” at that April traffic stop. And yet, interviewed by a local newspaper in January of 2002, Parkins mused to the reporter “it's difficult sometimes to think back and go: 'What if you had known something else?'" (Clay and Ellis). Missed Opportunities Image 2: “Hijackers Timeline (Redacted).” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s “Working Draft Chronology of Events for Hijackers and Associates”. In fact, several of the men who would become the 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. Mohamed Atta, usually pointed to as the ringleader, was given a citation in Florida that spring of 2001 for driving without a license. When he missed his court date, a bench warrant was issued (Wall Street Journal). Perhaps the warrant was not flagged properly, however, since nothing happened when he was pulled over again, for speeding. In the government inquiries that followed attack, and in the press, these brushes with the law were “missed opportunities” to thwart the 9/11 plot (Kean and Hamilton, Report 353). Among a certain set of career law enforcement personnel, particularly those active in management and police associations, these missed opportunities were fraught with a sense of personal failure. Yet, in short order, they were to become a source of professional revelation. The scenarios—Trooper Parkins and Al Hazmi, other encounters in other states, the general fact that there had been chance meetings between police officers and the hijackers—were re-imagined in the aftermath of 9/11. Those moments were returned to and reversed, so that multiple potentialities could be seen, beyond or in addition to what had taken place. The deputy director of an intelligence fusion centre told me in an interview, “it is always a local cop who saw something” and he replayed how the incidents of contact had unfolded with the men. These scenarios offered a way to recapture the past. In the uncertainty of every encounter, whether a traffic stop or questioning someone taking photos of a landmark (and potential terrorist target), was also potential. Through a process of re-imagining, police encounters with the public became part of the government’s “national intelligence” strategy. Previously a division had been marked between foreign and domestic intelligence. While the phrase “national intelligence” had long been used, notably in National Intelligence Estimates, after 9/11 it became more significant. The overall director of the US intelligence community became the Director National Intelligence, for instance, and the cohesive term marked the way that increasingly diverse institutional components, types of data and forms of action were evolving to address the collection of data and intelligence production (McConnell). In a series of working groups mobilised by members of major police professional organisations, and funded by the US Department of Justice, career officers and representatives from federal agencies produced detailed recommendations and plans for involving police in the new Information Sharing Environment. Among the plans drawn up during this period was what would eventually come to be the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, built principally around the idea of encounters such as the one between Parkins and Al Hazmi. Map 1: Map of pilot sites in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Evaluation Environment in 2010 (courtesy of the author; no longer available online). Map 2: Map of participating sites in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, as of 2014. In an interview, a fusion centre director who participated in this planning as well as its implementation, told me that his thought had been, “if we train state and local cops to understand pre-terrorism indicators, if we train them to be more curious, and to question more what they see,” this could feed into “a system where they could actually get that information to somebody where it matters.” In devising the reporting initiative, the working groups counter-actualised the scenarios of those encounters, and the kinds of larger plots to which they were understood to belong, in order to extract a set of concepts: categories of suspicious “activities” or “patterns of behaviour” corresponding to the phases of a terrorism event in the process of becoming (Deleuze, Negotiations). This conceptualisation of terrorism was standardised, so that it could be taught, and applied, in discerning and documenting the incidents comprising an event’s phases. In police officer training, the various suspicious behaviours were called “terrorism precursor activities” and were divided between criminal and non-criminal. “Functional Standards,” developed by the Los Angeles Police Department and then tested by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), served to code the observed behaviours for sharing (via compatible communication protocols) up the federal hierarchy and also horizontally between states and regions. In the popular parlance of videos made for the public by local police departments and DHS, which would come to populate the internet within a few years, these categories were “signs of terrorism,” more specifically: surveillance, eliciting information, testing security, and so on. Image 3: “The Seven Signs of Terrorism (sometimes eight).” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using materials in the public domain. If the problem of 9/11 had been that the men who would become hijackers had gone unnoticed, the basic idea of the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative was to create a mechanism through which the eyes and ears of everyone could contribute to their detection. In this vein, “If You See Something, Say Something™” was a campaign that originated with the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and was then licensed for use to DHS. The tips and leads such campaigns generated, together with the reports from officers on suspicious incidents that might have to do with terrorism, were coordinated in the Information Sharing Environment. Drawing on reports thus generated, the Federal Government would, in theory, communicate timely information on security threats to law enforcement so that they would be better able to discern the incidents to be reported. The cycle aimed to catch events in emergence, in a distinctively anticipatory strategy of counterterrorism (Stalcup). Re-imagination A curious fact emerges from this history, and it is key to understanding how this initiative developed. That is, there was nothing suspicious in the encounters. The soon-to-be terrorists’ licenses were up-to-date, the cars were legal, they were not nervous. Even Mohamed Atta’s warrant would have resulted in nothing more than a fine. It is not self-evident, given these facts, how a governmental technology came to be designed from these scenarios. How––if nothing seemed of immediate concern, if there had been nothing suspicious to discern––did an intelligence strategy come to be assembled around such encounters? Evidently, strident demands were made after the events of 9/11 to know, “what went wrong?” Policies were crafted and implemented according to the answers given: it was too easy to obtain identification, or to enter and stay in the country, or to buy airplane tickets and fly. But the trooper’s question, the reader will recall, was somewhat different. He had said, “It’s difficult sometimes to think back and go: ‘What if you had known something else?’” To ask “what if you had known something else?” is also to ask what else might have been. Janet Roitman shows that identifying a crisis tends to implicate precisely the question of what went wrong. Crisis, and its critique, take up history as a series of right and wrong turns, bad choices made between existing dichotomies (90): liberty-security, security-privacy, ordinary-suspicious. It is to say, what were the possibilities and how could we have selected the correct one? Such questions seek to retrospectively uncover latencies—systemic or structural, human error or a moral lapse (71)—but they ask of those latencies what false understanding of the enemy, of threat, of priorities, allowed a terrible thing to happen. “What if…?” instead turns to the virtuality hidden in history, through which missed opportunities can be re-imagined. Image 4: “The Cholmondeley Sisters and Their Swaddled Babies.” Anonymous, c. 1600-1610 (British School, 17th century); Deleuze and Parnet (150). CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using materials in the public domain. Gilles Deleuze, speaking with Claire Parnet, says, “memory is not an actual image which forms after the object has been perceived, but a virtual image coexisting with the actual perception of the object” (150). Re-imagined scenarios take up the potential of memory, so that as the trooper’s traffic stop was revisited, it also became a way of imagining what else might have been. As Immanuel Kant, among others, points out, “the productive power of imagination is […] not exactly creative, for it is not capable of producing a sense representation that was never given to our faculty of sense; one can always furnish evidence of the material of its ideas” (61). The “memory” of these encounters provided the material for re-imagining them, and thereby re-virtualising history. This was different than other governmental responses, such as examining past events in order to assess the probable risk of their repetition, or drawing on past events to imagine future scenarios, for use in exercises that identify vulnerabilities and remedy deficiencies (Anderson). Re-imagining scenarios of police-hijacker encounters through the question of “what if?” evoked what Erin Manning calls “a certain array of recognizable elastic points” (39), through which options for other movements were invented. The Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative’s architects instrumentalised such moments as they designed new governmental entities and programs to anticipate terrorism. For each element of the encounter, an aspect of the initiative was developed: training, functional standards, a way to (hypothetically) get real-time information about threats. Suspicion was identified as a key affect, one which, if cultivated, could offer a way to effectively deal not with binary right or wrong possibilities, but with the potential which lies nestled in uncertainty. The “signs of terrorism” (that is, categories of “terrorism precursor activities”) served to maximise receptivity to encounters. Indeed, it can apparently create an oversensitivity, manifested, for example, in police surveillance of innocent people exercising their right to assemble (Madigan), or the confiscation of photographers’s equipment (Simon). “What went wrong?” and “what if?” were different interrogations of the same pre-9/11 incidents. The questions are of course intimately related. Moments where something went wrong are when one is likely to ask, what else might have been known? Moreover, what else might have been? The answers to each question informed and shaped the other, as re-imagined scenarios became the means of extracting categories of suspicious activities and patterns of behaviour that comprise the phases of an event in becoming. Conclusion The 9/11 Commission, after two years of investigation into the causes of the disastrous day, reported that “the most important failure was one of imagination” (Kean and Hamilton, Summary). The iconic images of 9/11––such as airplanes being flown into symbols of American power––already existed, in guises ranging from fictive thrillers to the infamous FBI field memo sent to headquarters on Arab men learning to fly, but not land. In 1974 there had already been an actual (failed) attempt to steal a plane and kill the president by crashing it into the White House (Kean and Hamilton, Report Ch11 n21). The threats had been imagined, as Pat O’Malley and Philip Bougen put it, but not how to govern them, and because the ways to address those threats had been not imagined, they were discounted as matters for intervention (29). O’Malley and Bougen argue that one effect of 9/11, and the general rise of incalculable insecurities, was to make it necessary for the “merely imaginable” to become governable. Images of threats from the mundane to the extreme had to be conjured, and then imagination applied again, to devise ways to render them amenable to calculation, minimisation or elimination. In the words of the 9/11 Commission, the Government must bureaucratise imagination. There is a sense in which this led to more of the same. Re-imagining the early encounters reinforced expectations for officers to do what they already do, that is, to be on the lookout for suspicious behaviours. Yet, the images of threat brought forth, in their mixing of memory and an elastic “almost,” generated their own momentum and distinctive demands. Existing capacities, such as suspicion, were re-shaped and elaborated into specific forms of security governance. The question of “what if?” and the scenarios of police-hijacker encounter were particularly potent equipment for this re-imagining of history and its re-virtualisation. References Anderson, Ben. “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography 34.6 (2010): 777-98. Clay, Nolan, and Randy Ellis. “Terrorist Ticketed Last Year on I-40.” NewsOK, 20 Jan. 2002. 25 Nov. 2014 ‹http://newsok.com/article/2779124›. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II. New York: Columbia UP 2007 [1977]. 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