Glenn Morrison | Charles Darwin University (original) (raw)

Books by Glenn Morrison

Writing Home explores the literary representation of Australian places by those who have walked t... more Writing Home explores the literary representation of Australian places by those who have walked them. In particular, it examines how Aboriginal and settler narratives of walking have shaped portrayals of Australia's Red Centre and consequently ideas of nation and belonging.

Central Australia has long been characterised as a frontier, the supposed divide between black and white, ancient and modern. But persistently representing it in this way is preventing Australians from re-imagining this internationally significant region as home. Writing Home argues that the frontier no longer adequately describes Central Australia, and that the Aboriginal songlines make a significant but under-acknowledged contribution to Australian discourses of hybridity, belonging and home.

Drawing on anthropology, cultural theory, journalism, politics and philosophy, the book traces shifting perceptions of Australian place and space since precolonial times, through six recounted walking journeys of the Red Centre.

In a recent essay, literary editor Julianne Schultz suggests the challenge for Australian writers... more In a recent essay, literary editor Julianne Schultz suggests the challenge for Australian writers and journalists is to find ways to allow the various histories of their country to percolate together and inform each other. The purpose is to ‘foster a rich, informed hybrid culture that is not subsumed by myth’ (Schultz 2014). In central Australia, a region often linked to the nation’s identity, one thing stands in the way of such an aim: the hegemonic metaphor of frontier. Curiously, it is this very metaphor that underscores many of the stories defining a popular imagining of ‘what it means to be Australian’.
In this thesis I argue that persistently representing Central Australia as a frontier prevents Australians from reimagining it as home. Reading for representations of frontier and home, I undertake a critical analysis of six regional walking narratives that together model place as a palimpsest, thereby articulating a discontinuous history of the Centre’s contested spaces since the precolonial era. For the first time, prominent recounted journeys by settler journalists, travel writers and anthropologists are examined alongside an Aboriginal Dreamtime journey along a songline. The comparative and cross-cultural analysis of the texts draws on their shared foundation of walking and writing as means of place-making.
From the six essays emerge a variety of representations for the Centre which, while dominated by the frontier metaphor, betray a distinctive cultural hybridity in the contact zone between settler and Aboriginal Australians. Frontier, the research suggests, is no longer a suitable term to describe Central Australia, and the songlines ― long trivialised by settler Australians’ use of the pejorative Walkabout ― are potentially an important contributor to Australian discourses of hybridity, settler belonging and home. In this way, the work brings a new approach to an ecopoetics of Central Australia. The research advances the underreported role of walking in Australian history and literature, the fledgling writing of Australian places, and builds on recent interest in walking as a critical tool and reading strategy for postcolonial geographies.

Book chapter by Glenn Morrison

Creative Maneouvres: Making, Writing, Being, Aug 2014

Creative Manoeuvres is a collection of new writings on a topic of enduring interest: the role of ... more Creative Manoeuvres is a collection of new writings on a topic of enduring interest: the role of creative practice in the formation of knowledge. The contributors to this collection are primarily creative writers, working in poetry, fiction, nonfiction and ethnography. Many include the visual or performing arts within their practice; and all are academics as well as creative writers. Their chapters move the study of creative writing beyond subjective accounts of ‘how I write’ towards broader issues of how knowledge is addressed by, or incorporated into, or embodied in, art. Each chapter also does double duty as a case study on approaches to creative and research work, both describing and critically exploring the strategies, or ‘creative manoeuvres’, these writers have adopted to advance their practice in both creative and critical domains. In this way, the book not only exemplifies moves in the contemporary academy to understand better the value creative practice can offer to the university, but also provides a rich and engaging set of narratives about ways of being, ways of making and ways of coming to know. In both practical and theoretical modes, it contributes to the ongoing questions about creativity and/versus scholarship that have been debated over recent decades.

Northern Territory Literary Awards, 2013

Northern Territory Literary Awards 2010, 2010

Fishtails in the Dust: Writing from the Centre, 2009

The Interdata Environmental Resource Management Handbook of Australia and New Zealand, 1992

Papers by Glenn Morrison

While Frederick Turner’s envisioning of the frontier remains pervasive in representations of Aust... more While Frederick Turner’s envisioning of the frontier remains pervasive in representations of Australian postcolonial geographies and constructions of national identity, recent anthropological evidence suggests more nuanced ‘lifeworlds’ may better approximate the lived experience of ‘frontier’ towns such as Alice Springs, in Central Australia.
This paper reimagines Baudelaire’s flâneur to examine two walking narratives from the region. The analysis reveals at least two levels of produced space prevailing in Alice Springs, with many other imagined spaces imbricated in a more complex political geography than Turner’s frontier might explain. The paper aims to alert writers and journalists to recent shifts in anthropology, leading hopefully to more nuanced representations of Australian postcolonial geographies.
The first text is a Central Australian Aboriginal Dreaming narrative called A Man from the Dreamtime, a traditional Kaytetye story. Kaytetye elder Tommy Kngwarraye Thompson told the story to anthropologist Myfany Turpin as part of a collection published as Growing Up Kaytetye (2003). The second is one (walking) chapter from a recent narrative of political geography and memoir by Eleanor Hogan entitled Alice Springs (2012).

The Encounters: Place, Situation, Context Papers—The Refereed Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs. Eds. Cassandra Atherton, Rhonda Dredge, Et. Al. Canberra: The Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2012,, 2012

Strident criticism since publication has failed to dampen enthusiasm for Bruce Chatwin’s The song... more Strident criticism since publication has failed to dampen enthusiasm for Bruce Chatwin’s The songlines (1987), which a quarter century later remains popular among visitors to Central
Australia and those interested in Aboriginal culture. Early critical reception was shaped by postcolonial theory during the emergence of Aboriginal land rights in Australia, and a
corresponding period of critical reflection for anthropologists. This led to significant themes and strengths of the text being overlooked, which are now being retrieved under the influence
of ecocriticism. As part of a research project aimed at helping Australian nonfiction writers to better tackle the writing of place, The songlines is read afresh for walking’s contribution to its
representation of a postcolonial geography. The narrative emerges as a peregrination, rather than as an example of Said’s orientalism, for which it was widely criticised. The preliminary results presented here highlight walking’s close relationship with place through embodiment, specifically its ability to help overcome the ‘filters’ through which humans view the world; in simple terms, when Chatwin walks, his prose talks. Walking enhances constructions of race and frontier, as well as underpinning the text’s thematic concern with place-making. The research provides new and valuable insights for writers of place, and promises a productive
critical reading of this popular work, notably as to walking’s role in the construction of an Australian identity. Building on theoretical interest in walking as a critical tool, the paper contends that walking be considered as one technique of a postcolonial ecocriticism.

Conference Presentations by Glenn Morrison

On Thursday 18th May 2017 the Desert Peoples Centre campus of Batchelor Institute hosted the inau... more On Thursday 18th May 2017 the Desert Peoples Centre campus of Batchelor Institute hosted the inaugural
Knowledge Intersections Research Symposium. This event came about out of a desire to showcase and share the
excellent research work being done across the central Australian region. It was also an opportunity to explore the
‘Knowledge Intersections’ to be found across and between this work.
It was intentionally held in harmony with the NT Writer’s festival which took place from the 18th to 21st May, 2017.
The theme of the NT Writers’ Festival was ‘Crossings | Iwerre-Atherre’. This theme, and the conceptual work behind
it, was carefully developed by the NT Writers’ Festival organisers. The language in the title came from local Arrernte
people who interpreted crossings as iwerre-atherre, meaning two roads meeting, neither blocking nor erasing the
other; two-way learning or travelling together.
The theme ‘Knowledge Intersections’ was adopted for the research symposium to encourage local researchers to
share how the research work they are doing reflects these thematic ideas. Specifically presenters at the symposium
were challenged to reflect on these two questions;
• How can/does research help create intersections or meeting points for knowledge
systems, without one blocking or erasing the other?
• How does two-way learning happen in research and how does it help us to travel
together?
Researchers from across the central Australian region presented on diverse topics including Indigenous Ecological
Knowledge, the boarding school experience, collaborative publishing projects, literature, resilience, decolonising
education policies and practices, narratives, poetry and visual arts.
Included here are papers by most of the presenters from the symposium. We offer them as a record of the ideas
shared on the day and a way of engaging with the intersections of knowledge even further. These papers have
been peer edited.

Travel author Robyn Davidson writes that it is difficult for outsiders interested in Aboriginal c... more Travel author Robyn Davidson writes that it is difficult for outsiders interested in Aboriginal culture to see past the drunks and the misery, the sentimentalised and kitsch. Narratives of Australian Aboriginal songlines, are one way for non-indigenous readers to peer past the social chaos, and to explore Davidson’s ‘sophistication and beauty of Aboriginal ideas’ through text. There is a tendency among some groups, however, to consider orality to be the only authentic form of indigenous storytelling. Meanwhile, other Aboriginal groups are in a race to get the stories down in an acceptable form before their old people die.
One answer to this conflict comes from Aboriginal people themselves, especially their younger generations, and finds a cross-cultural meeting point in the act of walking — recognised across cultural divides as a form of placemaking— and its narratives of place. By examining a million-dollar project emerging in the remote tri-state cross border area of Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory, called Alive With the Dreaming: Songlines of the Western Desert, and a textual rendering of one of the region’s Dreaming stories by anthropologist Diana James in An Anangu Ontology of Place (2010), the costs and benefits of writing down the oral are explored. The paper suggests that publishing and performing ethically-produced Dreaming stories is crucial to assuring an Aboriginal cultural heritage for future generations.

"Perceptions of space which were set down in the Dreamtime still govern the lives of many Aborigi... more "Perceptions of space which were set down in the Dreamtime still govern the lives of many Aboriginal people in the Australian outback town of Alice Springs. Yet the town operates as a commercial centre subject to western rules and regulated at Federal, Northern Territory and local government levels. In writing the postcolonial geographies of Australia, this paper argues, an understanding of one space cannot be fully realised without understanding the other.
Two walking narratives are examined which highlight how and where the life-worlds of Aboriginal and non-indigenous Australians intersect, a zone commonly called the frontier. The figure of the flâneur is adapted as a critical tool for investigating this space, through the texts. First is a Central Australian Aboriginal Dreaming narrative as retold by Tommy Kngwarraye Thompson, called A Man from the Dreamtime (in Turpin 2003). Second is one (walking) chapter from a recent narrative of political geography and memoir by Melbourne writer Eleanor Hogan entitled Alice Springs (2012).
A close reading of each story denotes the objects that are used to build a narrative environment. In addition to constructing the ‘place’ of the story, such objects can be markers of identity and the politicisation of space. The history of the flâneur is examined briefly via Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin and others, prior to its necessary reimagining for adaption to the Australian outback.
"

The collection of baseline data for planning environmental impact assessment and environmental ma... more The collection of baseline data for planning environmental impact assessment and environmental management is now well established as one of the first steps in managing Australian coastal environments. There remains in many instances however, a gap between the research and collection of baseline data and its incorporation into management practice. This can be attributed to many factors including lack of prioritisation of data collection, inappropriate and perhaps too complex presentation of data, and a lack of appropriate mechanisms enabling the ready utilisation of such research and monitoring data.
The Gold Coast Waterways case study is an example of where preliminary baseline data has been obtained for a heavily modified and highly urbanised estuarine environment. Accompanying this, a simple and practical approach to the use of the data has been formulated and adopted by the management agency. The adopted method forms the first step in the process of reviewing development approvals and deciding upon the environmental suitability of particular management options. A matrix format has been used of presentation of guidelines for decision making and for prioritising information needs. The case study is drawn from work carried out for they Gold Coast Waterways Authority by the Centre for Coastal management in mid-1989.

Book Reviews by Glenn Morrison

Ethical Space, 2018

Doubtless some will continue to argue the internet’s lack of regulation is its greatest asset. Bu... more Doubtless some will continue to argue the internet’s lack of
regulation is its greatest asset. But we would do well to heed Cohen-Almagor’s warning to weigh freedom of expression against social
responsibility. In all areas of human life and endeavour, we accept
boundaries that allow our societies to function. Such regulation
helps define who we are and where we want to go. Dignity, moral
worth and an imperative to ‘do no harm’ are our companions in the
real world. Why not on the internet?

Since Britain’s inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of its press following the News Int... more Since Britain’s inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of its
press following the News International phone hacking scandal, it
has become awkward for journalists in the UK and elsewhere to
discuss what they do and the ethics of doing it in the same breath.
Hearings chaired by Lord Justice Brian Leveson – appointed in
July 2011 – stretched over two years, during which we learned of
the News of the World’s unsavoury treatment of the Dowler and
McCann families and others, and came to question seriously the
right of journalism to keep its status as a Fourth Estate.
So the arrival of a newly revised text on the ethics of practising
journalism and the possibilities for its regulation is more than
welcome, and has great potential to clear the air.