François Péron and the Tasmanians: an unrequited romance (original) (raw)
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'...Oh my soul sings!' John Watt Beattie and the perception of Tasmanian identity
Scots under the Southern Cross, Edited by Fred Chair, SAnne Beggs Sunter & Alison Inglis
John Watt Beattie (1859–1930) was born in Aberdeen, Scotland. After moving to Van Diemen's Land in 1878 he became prominent as a photographer, antiquarian and tourism promoter. Beattie, like many Scots who emigrated as free settlers to what is now Tasmania, developed a great love for his new home. He tirelessly sought to promote it, collect and record its history, and to argue for the protection of areas of outstanding natural beauty. The dramatic landscapes and troubled history of the island appear to have struck a chord with the romantic Beattie. Both the style of his photography, fitting well within the language of the sublime, and his willingness to engage with (and indeed to focus on) aspects of Tasmania's less savoury past mark him out as a man simultaneously of, and ahead of his time. However there are many contradictions in Beattie's work. This paper seeks to investigate Beattie the man, and explore how his influence has served to colour the way locals and visitors regard Tasmania even today.
H-France Book Review (forthcoming, 2015).
Skilfully set within its historical context by Fornasiero and West-Sooby, Péron’s Memoir provides us with a wider perspective into the history of Australia’s colonization by Europeans, as well as a window into the codes of seafaring during the volatile post-revolutionary period. Péron’s insights stretch our picture of events and motivations to encompass more than just official British perspectives. The Memoir reveals the intensity of competition between European powers for access to trading ports and the tactical considerations lying at the heart of the diplomatic codes of civility governing relations at sea and in far-flung settlements. Reading the account, one cannot help but be struck by the contrast between the belligerent language Péron uses throughout and the civility that is said to characterize encounters between French and British. Adhering to the script of diplomatic interaction was crucial not only for ensuring a smooth passage through areas controlled by foreign powers, but also in the interests of assembling the most reliable information on those places which could then be used against them. Tensions were high and overseas possessions jealously guarded and enviously coveted. Nothing on the surface during the visit of the Baudin expedition pointed to any overt ambitions of the French to gazump the British in their takeover of lands in the antipodes.
From Paris and Rome to Quebec -Reading Fanon in Radical Montreal Intellectual Circles of the 1960s 1
Canada&Beyond, 2021
The aim of this article is to trace the socio-political context in which Frantz Fanon's thought reached left-wing French and English-speaking intellectuals in Montreal between 1950 and 1970, and to analyze the reception of the theses of the author of The Wretched of the Earth in the discourse of these circles on culture and art, especially literature. The reading of Fanon's main concepts becomes here the object of a certain cultural-political interpretation, in which strategies of adaptation or even appropriation make it possible to inscribe Fanon's work in the Franco-Quebecois independence struggle in the era of the Quiet Revolution or to link the identity aspirations of the Quebec Black minority with the demands of the Black Power movement as well as the worldwide anti-imperialist movement. In these different contexts, literature has its own distinct tasks, inextricably linked to the aspirations of the societies within which it is produced. From defending the language of the dominated to creating a new vision of the world and of man, through direct involvement in political affairs: the writer, according to Fanon interpreted in Quebec, becomes one of the central figures of the revolutionary struggle.
Tasmania is often spoken of domestically as a "problem". Indeed, talk of "the problem of Tasmania" circulates through intellectual and governmental as much as everyday discourse. For writers like Peter Conrad and Tim Bowdenexpatriate Tasmanians who write of their "return" to the islandthe discourse on the problem of Tasmania is particularly challenging. As returnees, the narrators of Conrad's Down Home (1988) and Bowden's The Devil in Tim (2005) engage in reflections on identity, alterity and history in ways that exploit and resist the stereotypes, tropes and narratives that have traditionally underpinned discussion of the Tasmanian problem. This essay argues that while the texts can be read as complicit with the ideology that sustains the idea of that problem, in their turn to encounters with "ordinary" Tasmania they present alternative visions of the state that question the ideologies that position the island as limited, backward and perpetually beset by intransigent challenges.
2005
A long tradition of disparaging "Tasmanian-ness" in the media meant that sometimes colonials had no choice but to understand their community as "other." Journalistic hostilities between domestic and offshore journalists are traceable to the 1840s, but undoubtedly found utility much earlier. The Hobart Courier saw nothing patriotic in the Port Phillip Patriot's accusation in 1844 that "the whole of the convicts [were let] loose upon the town [of Hobart] on Christmas Day, [and] who, to the number of fifty, had availed themselves of the opportunity to take to the bush!" 18 Later, while the Melbourne Punch reported of "Vandemonian abuse" on the island, the Ballarat Times kept its readership appraised when Tasmania was "on the eve of another political crisis." 20 The Age followed suit by publishing stories about "Parliamentary scenes" 21 in the State, and the Illustrated Melbourne News reported on "the sound caning" and "horsewhippings" between Tasmanian Daily News writer Mr. Yates and exalderman Mr. Thomson. 22 This evidence alone implies that cultivating a sense of ''''' •-410