Liz Conor - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Liz Conor
Papers presented at the Third Biennial Conference of the Network for Research in Women's Hist... more Papers presented at the Third Biennial Conference of the Network for Research in Women's History, Melbourne, July 1996. Deposited with permission of the Department of History, University of Melbourne.
Reproduced with permission of the School of English, La Trobe University.At a public forum hosted... more Reproduced with permission of the School of English, La Trobe University.At a public forum hosted by Derryn Hinch for Channel 9, I found myself inadvertently wrestling with Kate Fischer over the role of the public intellectual. Kate was part of a panel which included Sam Newman and the Cappers, called in and dressed up to discuss 'The Battle of the Sexes' with a studio audience, amongst whom were seated various advocates for the feminist and men's movements
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2018
Abstract:In April 1852 the Spanish monk Rosendo Salvado took two Yued Noongar boys to a Daguerreo... more Abstract:In April 1852 the Spanish monk Rosendo Salvado took two Yued Noongar boys to a Daguerreotype studio in Naples and had their portraits taken. They were among five Yued Noongar children taken to Europe by clergy, none of whom survived. Unlike the adults whose care they were entrusted to, they were not so much networkers but caught up in network's not of their making and carried along through these vast colonial circuitries; in this case child migration, monastic evangelising and ecclesiastical print. In this paper I chart the movement of these children within the context of the mobility of racialised childhood and its cultural renderings, in the engravings and letters of the boys.
Postcolonial Studies, 2012
The dissemination of the Piccaninny type critically depended on the print media whose development... more The dissemination of the Piccaninny type critically depended on the print media whose development coincided with, and underpinned, colonial modernity. Racialized child types such as the Piccaninny were put to work in the colonial imagination to set down very distinct claims to land ownership, inheritance, dispossession and eradication. While a number of such child types reflect ideas of inheritance in colonial discourse, such as the Bush Baby, Wild Child, Street Urchin, Drover's Boy, Half-caste and Lost Child, this paper concentrates on the Piccaninny type, tracing its recurrence and meanings in Australian cultural forms. It accounts for the recurrence of this figure of childhood as a racialized type, and examines the ways Australia put images of Indigenous children to work in producing a mythology of national identity and tenure. The Piccaninny type encapsulated an acquisitive impulse over colonized children that brought about their disinheritance—either through their removal from their families or through the dispossession of their homelands. Within this setting black child beauty as a commodity form for white consumption, in imagery, ceramics, fabrics and popular ephemera, acted as a fetish which disavowed the injury of these children's disinheritance and delimited their cultural presence to cute domestic and tourist bric-a-brac. The Piccaninny denoted racialized children and, this paper argues, was deployed in colonial discourse to outline the lineage of inheritance, particularly in land tenure.
Aboriginal History Journal, 2013
In 1936 a flurry of newspaper reports alleged widespread prostitution of Aboriginal women and gir... more In 1936 a flurry of newspaper reports alleged widespread prostitution of Aboriginal women and girls to Japanese pearlers. The claims had a dramatic impact. Within weeks of them being printed a report was placed before the Department of the Interior. A vessel was commissioned to patrol the Arnhem Land coast. The allegations were raised at the first meeting of State Aboriginal protection authorities. Cabinet closed Australian waters to foreign pearling craft and a control base was established in the Tiwi Islands. Japanese luggers were fired upon with machine guns and a crew detained in Darwin. These escalating events occurred within five years of a series of attacks on Japanese by Aborigines (culminating in the infamous Caledon Bay spearing of five trepangers, along with the killings of two white men and one policeman on Woodah Island), and only five years before Australian and Japanese forces waged war. Much ink was spilt over the course of this print scandal, and while reports made use of established language such as 'vice' and 'outrage', a telling omission was the commonly known phrase 'Black Velvet'. The lapse could be considered a deliberate attempt to mask the expression's explicit reference to the tactile sensations associated with illicit white contact with racialised genitals. However tracing its use reveals that the phrase exclusively pertained to white men's sexualisation of Aboriginal women. Aboriginal women were not 'Black Velvet' to Japanese men, indicating this colloquial language played a role in establishing settlers' sense of proprietorial ownership of Aboriginal women's bodies-quite literally, for whom Aboriginal women were out-of-bounds. 1 Terms historicised in this article remain offensive and have continuing power to offend. This article attempts to dispel and challenge the meanings conveyed by the term 'Black Velvet' by tracing its use in print media and thereby intervening in the attitudes it disseminated.
Cultural Studies Review, 2017
National belonging for Xavier Herbert was intimately tied to interracial sexuality. ‘Euraustralia... more National belonging for Xavier Herbert was intimately tied to interracial sexuality. ‘Euraustralians’ (‘half-castes’) were for Herbert a redemptive motif that could assuage the ‘awful loneliness of the colonial born’ by which he hinted at the land claim of settler-colonials as spurious. Herbert’s exposure of the spectrum of interracial sex—from companionate marriage to casual prostitution to endemic sexual assault—in his novels Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975) was unprecedented and potentially game-changing in the administration of Aboriginal women’s sexuality under the assimilation era. But his deeply fraught masculinity was expressed through a picaresque frontier manhood that expressed itself through this spectrum of relations with Aboriginal women. For all his radical assertions of a ‘Euraustralian’ or hybrid nation, Herbert was myopic and dismissive of the women attached to the ‘lean loins’ he hoped it would spring from. He was also vitriolic about the white w...
Cultural Studies Review, 2017
Xavier Herbert is one of Australia’s outstanding novelists and one of the more controversial. In ... more Xavier Herbert is one of Australia’s outstanding novelists and one of the more controversial. In his time, he was also an outspoken public figure. Yet many young Australians today have not heard of the man or his novels. His key works Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975) won major awards and were judged as highly significant on publication, yet there has been relatively little analysis of their impact. Although providing much material for Baz Luhrmann’s blockbuster film Australia (2008), his works are rarely recommended as texts in school curricula or in universities. Gough Whitlam took a particular interest in the final draft of Poor Fellow My Country, describing it as a work of ‘national significance’ and ensuring the manuscript was sponsored to final publication. In 1976 Randolph Stow described it as ‘THE Australian classic’. Yet, a search of the Australian Literature database will show that it is one of the most under-read and least taught works in the Australian...
History Australia, 2019
In the lead-up to this year's Invasion (AKA Australia) Day, NITV (National Indigenous Television)... more In the lead-up to this year's Invasion (AKA Australia) Day, NITV (National Indigenous Television) ran a selection of Australian films 'celebrating the strength, resilience and survival' of Aboriginal people, under the hashtag #AlwaysWillBe. Its curated programme slated the television premier of Warwick Thornton's 2017 film Sweet Country, for the 26 January evening timeslot. 1 Warwick Thornton's hopes for the film prior to Sweet Country's release highlight the potential for historical understanding to effect social change in the present. He advocates Australians learn history that is important to Indigenous people, even if not in the curriculum, 'and through that we can make better decisions about our future'. 2 As a filmmaker turning to interwar frontier violence, Thornton's expectation is that story, particularly when voiced by Aboriginal tellers, is politically potentit can effect much-needed change by explaining the origins of ongoing discrimination, precarity, youth suicide, incarceration, abuse of women, and violence. His illuminating film also points to the silences around frontier sexual violence. In a paper at the AHA 2018 conference reflecting on Sweet Country, Annemarie McLaren dwells on this potential for cinema to enact an untold history, particularly one based on real eventsthe murder of Gallipoli veteran Harry Henty by Aboriginal farm hand Willaberta Jack at Hatches Creek Station in 1929. As many historians noted on the release of Baz Luhrmann's blockbuster Australia (2008), it can be a fraught relationship, where historical inaccuracies are sustained to plump up the effect of spectacle. McLaren notes, 'Where the historian's moral contract lies with the past, for the filmmaker it lies with their audience'. 3 She argues that Sweet Country is both historical fiction and historically-inspired fiction. Contestations over the appropriate representational genres through which history should be conveyed have become critical but unresolved questions since the 'History wars'. 4 Sweet Country's intervention is the foregrounding of Aboriginal voices in the telling of this history.
The American Historical Review, 2016
Arena Magazine, Aug 1, 1998
Re-Orienting Whiteness, 2009
Curiously, the wide-scale appropriation of Aboriginal girls' and women'... more Curiously, the wide-scale appropriation of Aboriginal girls' and women's labour as domestic apprentices and child carers in Australian mission and government stations, and white homes, did not inspire a motherly'Mammy'type in the white imagination. Rather, Aboriginal ...
Australian Historical Studies, 2016
objects, broadly defined. There is a history of a road that ‘transported colonialism and brought ... more objects, broadly defined. There is a history of a road that ‘transported colonialism and brought people into new, not always welcome relationships’ (134). There are essays on minute books of the Māori land court, on diaries, photographs, carvings, a printing press, stamps, embroidery, slippers, toys, a memorial tree, a cottage, a piano, a medicine chest, a cannon and billies (used for making tea and cooking over fires, with recipes included). The essays trace the global flow of people, objects, technologies, print cultures, and medical and scientific knowledge. They trace colonial networks and links toChina, India, andSouth Africa.Many of the objects exhibit themingling of cultures as people shared and incorporated new materials and techniques. The slippers of celebrated Māori leader Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui are a symbol of how he blended Māori and European worlds in his own life. For the history of women, material culture history is a rich resource. Their lives emerge through objects, sometimes in unexpected places. Spinks Cottage, Wellington sheds light on the Spinks sisters and female entrepreneurship in the mid-nineteenth century. Tragedies of colonial life are illustrated in the 1869 photograph of Rachel Stewart and her baby son. He died shortly after the portrait was taken. There is a Victorian feeding bottle in the photograph, that author Alison Clarke surmises may have contributed to the death of the infant. Altogether this is an entrancing and remarkable book. It should attract a wider audience than might normally read about colonial history, and provide those who do with new lenses with which to view, refine, enrich and expand understanding and analysis.
Interventions, 2014
Reynell Eveleigh Johns held various posts in the public service in central and northeastern Victo... more Reynell Eveleigh Johns held various posts in the public service in central and northeastern Victoria. From 1858 to 1903 Johns maintained five scrapbook volumes, amassing some sixty-five articles and engravings from newspaper cuttings on Aborigines. Concurrently European and ‘native’ bodies were partitioned and aggregated into raced and gendered identities through clothing and adornment. The shift in textile manufacture from workshop to factory, and spinning frames to water-powered mechanized looms, coincided with the development of the steam-driven cylinder press, typefounding, typesetting and paper-making machinery. This essay is concerned with patterns of meaning, created by the assemblage of component parts, as inscripting topographies of racialized literacy. It argues that surfaces, either raised or recessed, tenured understanding to the economies of print and textile within colonial perception. The industrialization of print and textile overlapped chronologically with the exploration, settlement and expansion of frontiers in Australia, from 1780 to 1840. These technologies created distinct impressions and provided various forms of coverage. Their facility for reproduction and reiteration entrenched the colonial social matrix from which racial identities and their divisions emerged. By reiterative marks across various surfaces, the moveable parts of press and loom assembled social categories that were aggregated and imprinted, or woven, into the colonial imagination.
Lilith a Feminist History Journal, 2006
Liz Conor opines that the public performance of gender, within the indeterminate political effect... more Liz Conor opines that the public performance of gender, within the indeterminate political effects of feminine visibility, has particular pertinence to feminist historians, considering the future.
Cultural Studies Review, 2013
A review of Stephen Muecke's Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (Uni... more A review of Stephen Muecke's Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2004).
Settler Colonial Studies, 2013
‘In hundreds of printed accounts that reflected on gender relations in the Australian Aboriginal ... more ‘In hundreds of printed accounts that reflected on gender relations in the Australian Aboriginal society, settlers routinely characterised women as subject to ‘tyrannical’ men – whom they pilloried as ‘lords and masters’. The settler-colonial trope of Bride Capture reiterated well-worn meanings about Aboriginal gender relations in print culture. That the treatment of women in ‘native tribes’ became an indice of civilisation is well established in studies of colonial gender relations. This article examines the critical role of print in instating and entrenching those understandings through a tracery of reiterations of Bride Capture.
The Modern Girl Around the World, 2008
Papers presented at the Third Biennial Conference of the Network for Research in Women's Hist... more Papers presented at the Third Biennial Conference of the Network for Research in Women's History, Melbourne, July 1996. Deposited with permission of the Department of History, University of Melbourne.
Reproduced with permission of the School of English, La Trobe University.At a public forum hosted... more Reproduced with permission of the School of English, La Trobe University.At a public forum hosted by Derryn Hinch for Channel 9, I found myself inadvertently wrestling with Kate Fischer over the role of the public intellectual. Kate was part of a panel which included Sam Newman and the Cappers, called in and dressed up to discuss 'The Battle of the Sexes' with a studio audience, amongst whom were seated various advocates for the feminist and men's movements
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2018
Abstract:In April 1852 the Spanish monk Rosendo Salvado took two Yued Noongar boys to a Daguerreo... more Abstract:In April 1852 the Spanish monk Rosendo Salvado took two Yued Noongar boys to a Daguerreotype studio in Naples and had their portraits taken. They were among five Yued Noongar children taken to Europe by clergy, none of whom survived. Unlike the adults whose care they were entrusted to, they were not so much networkers but caught up in network's not of their making and carried along through these vast colonial circuitries; in this case child migration, monastic evangelising and ecclesiastical print. In this paper I chart the movement of these children within the context of the mobility of racialised childhood and its cultural renderings, in the engravings and letters of the boys.
Postcolonial Studies, 2012
The dissemination of the Piccaninny type critically depended on the print media whose development... more The dissemination of the Piccaninny type critically depended on the print media whose development coincided with, and underpinned, colonial modernity. Racialized child types such as the Piccaninny were put to work in the colonial imagination to set down very distinct claims to land ownership, inheritance, dispossession and eradication. While a number of such child types reflect ideas of inheritance in colonial discourse, such as the Bush Baby, Wild Child, Street Urchin, Drover's Boy, Half-caste and Lost Child, this paper concentrates on the Piccaninny type, tracing its recurrence and meanings in Australian cultural forms. It accounts for the recurrence of this figure of childhood as a racialized type, and examines the ways Australia put images of Indigenous children to work in producing a mythology of national identity and tenure. The Piccaninny type encapsulated an acquisitive impulse over colonized children that brought about their disinheritance—either through their removal from their families or through the dispossession of their homelands. Within this setting black child beauty as a commodity form for white consumption, in imagery, ceramics, fabrics and popular ephemera, acted as a fetish which disavowed the injury of these children's disinheritance and delimited their cultural presence to cute domestic and tourist bric-a-brac. The Piccaninny denoted racialized children and, this paper argues, was deployed in colonial discourse to outline the lineage of inheritance, particularly in land tenure.
Aboriginal History Journal, 2013
In 1936 a flurry of newspaper reports alleged widespread prostitution of Aboriginal women and gir... more In 1936 a flurry of newspaper reports alleged widespread prostitution of Aboriginal women and girls to Japanese pearlers. The claims had a dramatic impact. Within weeks of them being printed a report was placed before the Department of the Interior. A vessel was commissioned to patrol the Arnhem Land coast. The allegations were raised at the first meeting of State Aboriginal protection authorities. Cabinet closed Australian waters to foreign pearling craft and a control base was established in the Tiwi Islands. Japanese luggers were fired upon with machine guns and a crew detained in Darwin. These escalating events occurred within five years of a series of attacks on Japanese by Aborigines (culminating in the infamous Caledon Bay spearing of five trepangers, along with the killings of two white men and one policeman on Woodah Island), and only five years before Australian and Japanese forces waged war. Much ink was spilt over the course of this print scandal, and while reports made use of established language such as 'vice' and 'outrage', a telling omission was the commonly known phrase 'Black Velvet'. The lapse could be considered a deliberate attempt to mask the expression's explicit reference to the tactile sensations associated with illicit white contact with racialised genitals. However tracing its use reveals that the phrase exclusively pertained to white men's sexualisation of Aboriginal women. Aboriginal women were not 'Black Velvet' to Japanese men, indicating this colloquial language played a role in establishing settlers' sense of proprietorial ownership of Aboriginal women's bodies-quite literally, for whom Aboriginal women were out-of-bounds. 1 Terms historicised in this article remain offensive and have continuing power to offend. This article attempts to dispel and challenge the meanings conveyed by the term 'Black Velvet' by tracing its use in print media and thereby intervening in the attitudes it disseminated.
Cultural Studies Review, 2017
National belonging for Xavier Herbert was intimately tied to interracial sexuality. ‘Euraustralia... more National belonging for Xavier Herbert was intimately tied to interracial sexuality. ‘Euraustralians’ (‘half-castes’) were for Herbert a redemptive motif that could assuage the ‘awful loneliness of the colonial born’ by which he hinted at the land claim of settler-colonials as spurious. Herbert’s exposure of the spectrum of interracial sex—from companionate marriage to casual prostitution to endemic sexual assault—in his novels Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975) was unprecedented and potentially game-changing in the administration of Aboriginal women’s sexuality under the assimilation era. But his deeply fraught masculinity was expressed through a picaresque frontier manhood that expressed itself through this spectrum of relations with Aboriginal women. For all his radical assertions of a ‘Euraustralian’ or hybrid nation, Herbert was myopic and dismissive of the women attached to the ‘lean loins’ he hoped it would spring from. He was also vitriolic about the white w...
Cultural Studies Review, 2017
Xavier Herbert is one of Australia’s outstanding novelists and one of the more controversial. In ... more Xavier Herbert is one of Australia’s outstanding novelists and one of the more controversial. In his time, he was also an outspoken public figure. Yet many young Australians today have not heard of the man or his novels. His key works Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975) won major awards and were judged as highly significant on publication, yet there has been relatively little analysis of their impact. Although providing much material for Baz Luhrmann’s blockbuster film Australia (2008), his works are rarely recommended as texts in school curricula or in universities. Gough Whitlam took a particular interest in the final draft of Poor Fellow My Country, describing it as a work of ‘national significance’ and ensuring the manuscript was sponsored to final publication. In 1976 Randolph Stow described it as ‘THE Australian classic’. Yet, a search of the Australian Literature database will show that it is one of the most under-read and least taught works in the Australian...
History Australia, 2019
In the lead-up to this year's Invasion (AKA Australia) Day, NITV (National Indigenous Television)... more In the lead-up to this year's Invasion (AKA Australia) Day, NITV (National Indigenous Television) ran a selection of Australian films 'celebrating the strength, resilience and survival' of Aboriginal people, under the hashtag #AlwaysWillBe. Its curated programme slated the television premier of Warwick Thornton's 2017 film Sweet Country, for the 26 January evening timeslot. 1 Warwick Thornton's hopes for the film prior to Sweet Country's release highlight the potential for historical understanding to effect social change in the present. He advocates Australians learn history that is important to Indigenous people, even if not in the curriculum, 'and through that we can make better decisions about our future'. 2 As a filmmaker turning to interwar frontier violence, Thornton's expectation is that story, particularly when voiced by Aboriginal tellers, is politically potentit can effect much-needed change by explaining the origins of ongoing discrimination, precarity, youth suicide, incarceration, abuse of women, and violence. His illuminating film also points to the silences around frontier sexual violence. In a paper at the AHA 2018 conference reflecting on Sweet Country, Annemarie McLaren dwells on this potential for cinema to enact an untold history, particularly one based on real eventsthe murder of Gallipoli veteran Harry Henty by Aboriginal farm hand Willaberta Jack at Hatches Creek Station in 1929. As many historians noted on the release of Baz Luhrmann's blockbuster Australia (2008), it can be a fraught relationship, where historical inaccuracies are sustained to plump up the effect of spectacle. McLaren notes, 'Where the historian's moral contract lies with the past, for the filmmaker it lies with their audience'. 3 She argues that Sweet Country is both historical fiction and historically-inspired fiction. Contestations over the appropriate representational genres through which history should be conveyed have become critical but unresolved questions since the 'History wars'. 4 Sweet Country's intervention is the foregrounding of Aboriginal voices in the telling of this history.
The American Historical Review, 2016
Arena Magazine, Aug 1, 1998
Re-Orienting Whiteness, 2009
Curiously, the wide-scale appropriation of Aboriginal girls' and women'... more Curiously, the wide-scale appropriation of Aboriginal girls' and women's labour as domestic apprentices and child carers in Australian mission and government stations, and white homes, did not inspire a motherly'Mammy'type in the white imagination. Rather, Aboriginal ...
Australian Historical Studies, 2016
objects, broadly defined. There is a history of a road that ‘transported colonialism and brought ... more objects, broadly defined. There is a history of a road that ‘transported colonialism and brought people into new, not always welcome relationships’ (134). There are essays on minute books of the Māori land court, on diaries, photographs, carvings, a printing press, stamps, embroidery, slippers, toys, a memorial tree, a cottage, a piano, a medicine chest, a cannon and billies (used for making tea and cooking over fires, with recipes included). The essays trace the global flow of people, objects, technologies, print cultures, and medical and scientific knowledge. They trace colonial networks and links toChina, India, andSouth Africa.Many of the objects exhibit themingling of cultures as people shared and incorporated new materials and techniques. The slippers of celebrated Māori leader Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui are a symbol of how he blended Māori and European worlds in his own life. For the history of women, material culture history is a rich resource. Their lives emerge through objects, sometimes in unexpected places. Spinks Cottage, Wellington sheds light on the Spinks sisters and female entrepreneurship in the mid-nineteenth century. Tragedies of colonial life are illustrated in the 1869 photograph of Rachel Stewart and her baby son. He died shortly after the portrait was taken. There is a Victorian feeding bottle in the photograph, that author Alison Clarke surmises may have contributed to the death of the infant. Altogether this is an entrancing and remarkable book. It should attract a wider audience than might normally read about colonial history, and provide those who do with new lenses with which to view, refine, enrich and expand understanding and analysis.
Interventions, 2014
Reynell Eveleigh Johns held various posts in the public service in central and northeastern Victo... more Reynell Eveleigh Johns held various posts in the public service in central and northeastern Victoria. From 1858 to 1903 Johns maintained five scrapbook volumes, amassing some sixty-five articles and engravings from newspaper cuttings on Aborigines. Concurrently European and ‘native’ bodies were partitioned and aggregated into raced and gendered identities through clothing and adornment. The shift in textile manufacture from workshop to factory, and spinning frames to water-powered mechanized looms, coincided with the development of the steam-driven cylinder press, typefounding, typesetting and paper-making machinery. This essay is concerned with patterns of meaning, created by the assemblage of component parts, as inscripting topographies of racialized literacy. It argues that surfaces, either raised or recessed, tenured understanding to the economies of print and textile within colonial perception. The industrialization of print and textile overlapped chronologically with the exploration, settlement and expansion of frontiers in Australia, from 1780 to 1840. These technologies created distinct impressions and provided various forms of coverage. Their facility for reproduction and reiteration entrenched the colonial social matrix from which racial identities and their divisions emerged. By reiterative marks across various surfaces, the moveable parts of press and loom assembled social categories that were aggregated and imprinted, or woven, into the colonial imagination.
Lilith a Feminist History Journal, 2006
Liz Conor opines that the public performance of gender, within the indeterminate political effect... more Liz Conor opines that the public performance of gender, within the indeterminate political effects of feminine visibility, has particular pertinence to feminist historians, considering the future.
Cultural Studies Review, 2013
A review of Stephen Muecke's Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (Uni... more A review of Stephen Muecke's Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2004).
Settler Colonial Studies, 2013
‘In hundreds of printed accounts that reflected on gender relations in the Australian Aboriginal ... more ‘In hundreds of printed accounts that reflected on gender relations in the Australian Aboriginal society, settlers routinely characterised women as subject to ‘tyrannical’ men – whom they pilloried as ‘lords and masters’. The settler-colonial trope of Bride Capture reiterated well-worn meanings about Aboriginal gender relations in print culture. That the treatment of women in ‘native tribes’ became an indice of civilisation is well established in studies of colonial gender relations. This article examines the critical role of print in instating and entrenching those understandings through a tracery of reiterations of Bride Capture.
The Modern Girl Around the World, 2008