Nadia Rhook | La Trobe University (original) (raw)

Papers by Nadia Rhook

Fremantle Press, 2022

Second Fleet Baby examines birth and parenthood with a consciousness that spans centuries. This p... more Second Fleet Baby examines birth and parenthood with a consciousness that spans centuries. This poetry draws on the energies of 18th Century English convict women, including Rhook’s own ancestors, to open raw questions of belonging. How might a settler reconcile the violence bound up with their role populating stolen land with the love and euphoria that can flow from parenthood? Inter-generational ties are traced through the soft weapons of the body, connecting the intimacies of nation-making with the politics of reproduction in lavishly personal ways. Through stories of childhood, of fertility, and of nurturing new life during a pandemic, the patriarchal weight of history is cast off and origins are pulled ‘from the seabed to the surface’.

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2018

Australia within the settled grids of Auckland's urban centre. The same was happening throughout ... more Australia within the settled grids of Auckland's urban centre. The same was happening throughout the Antipodean colonial world. In Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra, in study groups, breakfast clubs, gaols, pubs and public urban spaces, Aboriginal people from nations throughout Australia inhabited places long considered to have been "settled" by settler nations with their presence, their politics and their selfconsciously Black, and Black Panther, identities. So, too, in the streets of the Pacific's colonial cities-Port Vila, Port Moresby and Suva-in the villages and plantations of New Britain, Fiji and the Solomons, existing church networks and new political ones were being utilized and formed around new and localised notions of independence, sovereignty and decolonization. 1

Postcolonial Studies, 2020

This article traces the spatially grounded operation of ‘medical sovereignty’ by reading property... more This article traces the spatially grounded operation of ‘medical sovereignty’ by reading property alongside medical practice and regulation in a settler colonial city. It does so through the lens of the Antipodean life of one Canton-born doctor, James Lamsey, who was a prolific proprietor in the regional Australian city of Bendigo and used his interlinked proprietorial and medical powers to mediate between the Bendigo Chinese community and white settlers and doctors. Reading medical power through the lens of Lamsey’s life, shaped, as it was, by European-made laws, shows how settler medical sovereignty was enacted in a dynamic relation with Chinese medical sovereignty, performed here in the urban context of Bendigo, on unceded Indigenous Dja Dja Wurrung land. With support from the common law system, health-related boards were, in the late nineteenth century, intensifying a settler sovereignty, where board members and doctors practised increasingly exclusive forms of discretionary power and exercised the right to exclude non-white people from membership. At the same time, Lamsey was enacting a diasporic medical sovereignty that drew on Chinese imperial and British colonial authority. He leveraged his medical sovereignty towards promoting collective Chinese entitlements to health and to counter the exclusions of a whitening settler sovereignty.

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History , 2018

This issue picks up the understanding of imperial networks as processual, constantly (re)created ... more This issue picks up the understanding of imperial networks as processual, constantly (re)created and used by imperial powers as well as Indigenous and subaltern people, and asks scholars to think about how marginality, power and resistance have operated in imperial networks in new ways. It explores transoceanic, transborder or transcolonial alliances, lateral connections and solidarities, and diverse resistance movements, formed by Indigenous people and people of colour who were normally suppressed, ignored, or reviled in imperial archives. In a range of contexts, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the authors observe the upshots of the presence of unexpected people in unexpected places. As such, this issue seeks to question the historical and contemporary assumptions that lay behind the apparent unexpectedness of moments of transgression. The authors map the impact of imperial networks over time, and direct our attention to moments of transgression, resistance, and the assertion of Indigenous and subaltern rights.

This article maps the in-situ affective strategies employed by Indian leaders to counter the 190... more This article maps the in-situ affective strategies employed by Indian leaders to counter the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, the legal cornerstone of the White Australia Policy. It explores how a masseur, Teepoo Hall, and a merchant, Khooda Bux, mobilised Indian trade networks at a time when British imperial networks were in complex tension with growing settler Australian and Indian projects of national independence. It does so by paying attention to the urban position of shop counters and massage benches: objects that brought strangers and acquaintances into relations economic and intimate, from where affect was produced and circulated. New imperial histories have privileged a wide-lens transnational frame. I argue that a determined focus on counters and benches—sites of bodily density that I term “clustering objects”—affords a closer view of the processes of networking and their spatial- affective dynamics. In fin-de-siècle Melbourne, counters were privileged sites where Indians and White settlers forged bonds that linked individuals to larger, transoceanic and anti-imperial networks.

This article uses the 1898 manslaughter trial of two Indian medical practitioners in Victoria, Au... more This article uses the 1898 manslaughter trial of two Indian medical practitioners in Victoria, Australia, as a lens to explore the settler colonial politics of medicine. Whereas imperial and colonial historians have long recognised the close and complex interrelationship of medicine and race, the emotional dimensions to care-giving have been under-appreciated – as has the place of the emotions within wider histories of sickness and health. Yet, this case studies shows, grief, vulnerability, catharsis and pride shaped the practice of medicine in fin-de-siecle Victoria. In particular, I argue that, like other emotions, grief does racial work.

What have architecture and poetry got to do with property? This is a core question in the poetry ... more What have architecture and poetry got to do with property? This is a core question in the poetry collection ‘signs of impression’, which explores the operation of possession in a settler colonial context. It does so through the story of James Lamsey, a Chinese doctor, prolific proprietor and philanthropist who forged a space for himself in the regional Victorian city of Bendigo in the late 19th Century. Many thinkers have observed connections between architecture and poetry. ‘Architecture and poetry share a paradoxical sense of “room”’, writes Nicola Fucign, ‘A poem has both space and boundary: room within a room.’1 This spatial connection is beautifully script-bound in the Chinese character for poetry 詩, ‘shi’, a of compound ‘speech’ + temple’.2 However, I am less interested in the alluring spatial synergies between poetry and architecture than the work which poetry performs, and which architecture performs. Poetry and architecture both have the power to impress and move people. More dangerous than this, poetry and architecture can also be ways to lay claims to property through their affective powers. This essay argues that thinking about the synergies between architecture and poetry might deepen understandings of the operation of property and settler colonial power.

In 1927, a ship carrying indentured Vietnamese workers travelled down the eastern coast of Austra... more In 1927, a ship carrying indentured Vietnamese workers travelled down the eastern coast of Australia on its way to New Caledonia. The movement of the Ville d’Amiens steamer through Australian waters sparked protests against alleged ‘French slavery’ and, eventually, moved politicians to recall the ‘injustice’ of the ‘pre-White Australia’ era. This article uses the Ville d’Amiens episode as a portal through which to explore the nexus between geographies of colonialism and of emotion. It argues that colonial and national power operated in pervasively ‘triangular’ ways, via the interplay of an affective triangle – of guilt, shame and pride – and a geo-political triangle – of French Vietnam, Australia and New Caledonia. Further, the article calls for greater exploration of the historical, geo-spatial contingencies of memory, motion and emotion.

Larissa Behrendt’s latest work is a profound lesson for the gullible. "Finding Eliza" calls out n... more Larissa Behrendt’s latest work is a profound lesson for the gullible. "Finding Eliza" calls out narrative tricks that have been deployed with colonizing affect by white writers, artists, and legal authorities, not least dramatically those about cannibalism.

Historians have demonstrated how mobility was gendered across nineteenth-century colonial context... more Historians have demonstrated how mobility was gendered across nineteenth-century colonial contexts and how “moving” female subjects have made and remade patriarchal settler colonial regimes. But subjects who moved also came to a stop and spoke. This article explores the ways a Norwegian woman spoke and was heard within the various social and legal spaces of Victoria, an Antipodean British settler colony. Louisa Fritz arrived in Melbourne in 1891 and weeks later became the informant in a trial of “indecent assault with attempt to rape.”1 She did so while European settlers were working out the bio- and linguistic politics of creating a “White Australian nation.” Through a close analysis of Fritz’s speech, this article demonstrates that if spaces are bodily constructions, they are equally linguistic/acoustic constructions made by the speech(es) of migrants, settlers, and those in the blurry space between these categories. More specifically, I argue that paying attention to women’s speech illuminates the linguistic dimensions of settler colonialism.

The late nineteenth century saw a wave of Indian migrants arrive in Victoria, many of whom took u... more The late nineteenth century saw a wave of Indian migrants arrive in Victoria, many of whom took up the occupation of hawking. These often- described “turban-clad hawkers” regularly became visible to settlers as they moved through public space en route to the properties of their rural customers. This article explores how the turban became a symbol of the masculine threat Indians posed to the settler order of late nineteenth-century Victoria, Australia. This symbolism was tied up with the two-fold terrestrial and oceanic mobility of ‘turban-clad’ men; mobilities that took on particular meanings in a settler-colonial context where sedentarism was privileged over movement, and in a decade when legislators in Victoria and across the Australian colonies were working out ways to exclude Indian British subjects from the imagined Australian nation. I argue that European settlers’ anxieties about the movements of Indian British subjects over sea and over land became metonymically conflated in ways that expressed and informed the late nineteenth-century project to create a settled and purely white nation. These findings have repercussions for understandings of the contemporaneous emergence of nationalisms in other British settler colonies.

This thesis uses criminal court, legislative, and newspaper archives to excavate the acoustic and... more This thesis uses criminal court, legislative, and newspaper archives to excavate the acoustic and linguistic past of the British settler colony that was 1890s Victoria, Australia. In examining the linguistic norms of various late nineteenth-century colonial Victorian spaces, it develops an understanding of ‘speech’ as a form of action that expressed and constituted social autonomy. The entrée into this period is the arrival of a wave of South Asian migrants in Victoria, not least in numbers or political controversy were some hundreds of male Indian British subjects. Many of these Indians took up hawking, an occupation that enabled a high degree of mobility as hawkers traveled through public and private spaces. On their trade circuits, Indian hawkers encountered a colony occupied by Indigenous people and European and Chinese settlers, and disturbed a settler colonial language-scape that was at once fluid and fixed in English dominance. After following an urban-rural hawking circuit, this study takes a spatial-linguistic tour across Melbourne streets, factories, boarding-houses, shops, courtrooms, the Gaol, and Parliament House, in a decade that saw legislators debate, define, and perform the racial and linguistic boundaries of the Australian nation-to-be. This study’s spatial-linguistic approach enables a re-evaluation of the configuration of settler identity at a time when Victoria was transiting from a status as a self-governing colony to a state of the federated and deeply race-conscious Australian nation. Understanding the entwined spatial politics of speech and race in 1890s Victoria in turn helps to explain why a dictation test, entailing a test in a language chosen at the discretion of an immigration officer, was adopted as the cornerstone of the 1901 federal Immigration Restriction Act. I argue that colonial Victoria’s racial order was constructed by the spatial order(ing) of speech and language, and that this spatial-linguistic order(ing) had material repercussions for colonial residents, not least in the processes of criminal law, and in the engineering of techniques of racial exclusion. Moreover, by locating the in-situ ways that settlers actively created and enforced the ability to speak English as a condition of whiteness, I aim to de-naturalise the privileged status of English as the settler colonial language of entitlement.

This article demonstrates the importance of aurality and speech in law and governance in Melbourn... more This article demonstrates the importance of aurality and speech in law and governance in Melbourne, the capital of the British settler colony of Victoria, Australia. It does so via tracking the role of England-born Chinese Interpreter, Charles Powell Hodges, across Melbourne spaces, notably the Supreme Court and the so-called ‘Chinese Quarter’. By examining Hodges’ involvement in the surrounding racial politics of urban labour, and of carpentry in particular, this article highlights the spatially dependent ways in which power was verbally negotiated in and between colonial state actors, Hodges, and the Chinese merchant and working classes. It further examines Hodges’ role as an advocate for Chinese interests in the context of the 1890s Depression. Hodges spoke against popular anti-Chinese sentiments at a time when white settler linguistic identity was being formulated, and in the lead up to the 1901 Federation of the Australian colonies. A focus on acts of speaking, hearing, and listening, I argue, is a way to deepen historical understandings of governance, and of resistance thereto.

Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by historian, Nicole Curby, for community radio.... more Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by historian, Nicole Curby, for community radio. You can take a tour around the streets, boarding houses, and warehouses of 'improper' colonial Melbourne and listen to discussion of the urban politics of race, labour and immigration restriction, especially regarding Indian, Afghan and Syrian hawkers, and Chinese carpenters, in the 1890s, the decade preceding Australian federation and the introduction of the White Australia Policy. At this url:

http://www.3cr.org.au/summerspecials/podcast/tour-lonsdale-street-1890-nadia-rhook

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

The late nineteenth century saw a wave of Indian, Syrian and Afghan immigrants arrive in Victoria... more The late nineteenth century saw a wave of Indian, Syrian and Afghan immigrants arrive in Victoria, Australia, many of whom took up the highly mobile and audible occupation of hawking. New transnational and Imperial histories have illuminated the racially circumscribed mobility of colonial and Imperial subjects in traveling in and across Empire(s). In this article I conceive the Hawker’s License Courts of colonial Victoria as linguistic “nodes” where met subjects from locales in and beyond the British Empire. I argue that further than studying the mobility of colonial subjects, and of Indian hawkers in Victoria in particular, focusing on the speech uttered by hawkers demonstrates the importance of studying the linguistic colonial past. Doing so brings into focus the spatially located processes by which Whiteness and English language ability were gaining affinity in the late nineteenth century.

Conference Presentations by Nadia Rhook

Talks by Nadia Rhook

Melbourne is replete with posters, monuments and plaques that ask pedestrians to remember the Hod... more Melbourne is replete with posters, monuments and plaques that ask pedestrians to remember the Hoddle grid’s colonial order as a majority/minority, white/Chinese binary that hinged along Little Bourke Street. But these calls to memory conceal more than they divulge. Not only do they erase the sovereignty of the traditional Indigenous owners, but also the diverse populations of colour who have lived in Melbourne from its inception as a city, built over the meeting grounds of the five Kulin nations. Where non-white urban-dwellers have been memorialised, they are usually consigned to marginal and/or racially marked streets, such as Little Bourke Street’s Chinatown. How, I ask here, might we memorialise the dynamic presence of ‘coloured colonials’ in Melbourne’s streets and footpaths?

Fremantle Press, 2022

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2018

Postcolonial Studies, 2020

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History , 2018

http://www.3cr.org.au/summerspecials/podcast/tour-lonsdale-street-1890-nadia-rhook

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

The past lives in every step. boots are here a symbol and a tool – a heel of feminine desire and... more The past lives in every step.

boots are here a symbol and a tool – a heel of feminine desire and a dirt-trodden shoe that cushions feet on paths to power and property, leaving trails of violence and pain. Memories jump and jar in these poems, loosening history from the grip of archives and footnotes to nourish the imagination, freeing me to speak back to my ancestors and the European men who co-created the edifices of 19th Century colonisation. boots looks in mirrors and across seas to dream big. At its restless heart, it draws history closer to my body.

Judging for the People : a Social History of the Supreme Court in Victoria, 1841-2016. , 2016

As Melbourne has never been a monolingual city, neither has its Supreme Court been an entirely mo... more As Melbourne has never been a monolingual city, neither has its Supreme Court been an entirely monolingual space. From the 1850s the Supreme Court regularly functioned as a polyglot linguistic theatre; a stage to which people were drawn to hear the trials of friends, relatives, and strangers. Constructed from wooden stands, seats, and benches, the internal arrangement of the Court was designed to display and enact legal power. As in other courts across the British Empire, English-speaking male settlers, acting as magistrates and lawyers, controlled the order of sound and speech, managing who spoke when, where, and for how long. On the other side of the bench, witnesses and defendants were subject to the highly regulated linguistic norms of the courtroom. As such, the interior space of the Supreme and City Courts functioned as a linguistic theatre. It involved a stage (the bench and witness stand), actors (magistrates, justices of the peace and license applicants) and a (polyglot, multi-racial) audience. This Chapter illustrates how the Melbourne Supreme Court has historically been an acoustic theatre of linguistic difference, race and translation.

Westerly Magazine, 2021

From its vivid cover, Ambelin Kwaymullina’s anti-colonial handbook, ‘Living on Stolen Land’, rend... more From its vivid cover, Ambelin Kwaymullina’s anti-colonial handbook, ‘Living on Stolen Land’, renders in bold brushstrokes the culture of oppression that plagues settler systems, culture and subjectivities. It addresses readers open to considering that colonialism need not be permanently with us, but is maintaining its power through the repetition of particular modes of thought and action.