Call for Papers - The Vietnam Inheritance: Cultural, social and political legacies of the Vietnam War in Australia: An Interdisciplinary Symposium marking the 35th anniversary of the end of the war
29 & 30 April 2010 Monash University, Caulfield Campus
Jointly convened by The School of Political and Social Inquiry, and The School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts, Monash University.
This symposium provides an opportunity for scholars from a range of disciplines to reflect on the impact of the war and its aftermath in Australia on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of its conclusion. In particular, we are interested in explorations of the cultural, social and political legacies of the war in Australia.
Selected papers from this symposium will be published in an A-ranked journal.
Abstracts of 200 words and brief author/s bio/s to be submitted by to Denise Cuthbert at denise.cuthbert@arts.monash.edu.auby Friday 26 February
BMW Award for Intercultural Commitment – Call for Submissions 2010
The BMW Group is pleased to announce its first call for submissions for the Award for Intercultural Commitment. The company is looking for intercultural initiators worldwide whose goal is to motivate people from diverse backgrounds to encounter one another with open minds and to take committed action. With the Award, the BMW Group aims to support the best projects and thus contribute to their lasting success. To this end, the company offers award winners customized support services as well as a
financial jump start.
The deadline for submissions is 31 May 2010. The award ceremony will take place in Munich, Germany, on 18 November 2010. You will find further information about the Award in the flyer below as well as on www.bmwgroup.com/award.
Original 20-minute papers are sought for the symposium 'Migrant Security: Citizenship and Social Inclusion in a Transnational Era'. The symposium is hosted by the Public Memory Research Centre at the University of Southern Queensland, 15-16 July 2010.
The symposium aims to promote cross-disciplinary debate in order to probe new formulations of migrants' experience of community and individual security. The symposium seeks to analyse migrant perceptions of citizenship and social inclusion, particularly through the nature of migrants' engagement with civic society. Significantly, the symposium will embed this approach with scholarship regarding transnational identities and the politics of forgiveness and belonging. There is growing scholarly interest in migration, social inclusion and new understandings of transnational sentiment. The established body of scholarship regarding migration and civic identity is increasingly being revisited in the light of new interest in transnational identities and the increasingly complex relationship between local, national and global authorities.
For further information, including the keynote speaker and session chairs, please visit the symposium website:
http://www.usq.edu.au/migrantsecurity
Submitting an Abstract
Participants from a range of disciplines are invited to submit a 200 word abstract as a Word document. The submission should include:
The 2nd international conference to be organised by the Indian Association for the Study of Australia on 22-24 January 2011.
The theme of the conference is : Re-mapping the Future : History, Culture and Environment in Australia and India
This conference will be supported by the University of New South Wales. Australia India Council is also expected to collaborate with the organisation of the conference. We also look forward to be partnering with Monash University and the University of Wollongong in the organisation of the conference.
Professor James Donald, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, University of New South Wales, has kindly agreed to inaugurate the conference. Professor Paul Brown and Sanjukta Dasgupta will give the keynote addresses.
Interested in writing and progressive politics? Looking for an outlet for your ideas? Why not blog for Overland magazine!
For some years now, Overland has supplemented its online content with a lively group blog. But, with the editorial staff based in Melbourne, the blog lacks a national focus. And that’s what we want to change.
We want to hear about what’s happening for writers and activists around the country: not just in the big cities but everywhere. Overland bloggers can write about anything, from the book they read last night to their thoughts on the situation in Afghanistan. But we’re particularly keen to find online correspondents who will let us (and everyone else) know about writing and politics in their community. We want reports about book launches, festivals, demonstrations, poetry slams and protests: we want your take on what’s happening where you are, as well as your thoughts on the
world.
We can’t pay bloggers. But we can offer guaranteed exposure for your writing on a high-traffic site of a prestigious journal. You’ll make connections with other writers; you’ll get your words out there;
you’ll build something of a profile.
If that sounds appealing, there’s a few things you should know.
We’re looking for people willing to blog at least once a week. And we want them to be broadly sympathetic to the Overland project. If you don’t know what that means, have a look at the website and check out some past issues.
If you’d like to be involved, you need to send the following to overland@vu.edu.au (in an email with ‘Overland blog application’ in the subject)
two or three short (300 words or so) samples of your writing, or links to the same
a brief CV (or, at least, some information about yourself) a statement about your particular interests (eg, poetry, anti-war activism, short fiction, etc) suggestions for your first posts.
Applications close at the end of February. Shortly thereafter, we’ll be in touch with the best applicants to explain in more detail how the blog works. We anticipate relaunching the expanded blog by mid-March.
Stanley Hunt's From Shekki to Sydney: An Autobiography
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries large numbers of Chinese travelled to the USA, Australia and other parts of the world to prospect for gold, or to work as labourers, gardeners and traders, but there are few eyewitness accounts of the lives of these people who predominantly came from South China. Stanley Hunt's From Shekki to Sydney fills part of that gap in Chinese and Australian social history by documenting his childhood in Shekki, his experiences after relocating to Australia, and the lives of his parents and grandparents. His story will resonate with those of many silent others all over the world.
Stanley Hunt was born Chan Pui-Tak in Shekki, Zhongshan county, Guangdong province, China. The Japanese had invaded North China, and were beginning to bomb Shekki and the nearby coastal areas of South China when he, his mother and two younger siblings, left home to join his father in Australia. Reunited in Sydney on 5 April 1939, the small family travelled north to the county town of Warialda where his father ran a general store. Australian troops were fighting in Europe and Asia, the country was still suffering lingering effects of the Great Depression, and his father was on the verge of bankruptcy. On the timely advice of a travelling salesman, his father was able to save himself from financial ruin by negotiating new terms for repaying his accounts.
Through times of rations and quotas, the family value-added to their limited supplies, worked very hard and paid off their debts before relocating to Sydney in early 1945. Stanley and his father acquired businesses and prospered. Stanley is recognised for his significant contributions to social and community work in Australia, and China.
The father worked in Australia and had only returned to Shekki a couple of times during the author's childhood: father and son were virtual strangers when they were reunited in Australia in 1939. As a twelve-year-old boy he began to work as a man alongside his father, and the development of their relationship contains many poignant moments that underscore the impact of "old country" traditions on a younger generation of Chinese maturing into adults in Australia. The author is a highly observant "outsider"as he grows from boy to man and is transformed into an "insider"......
Pamela Tan's The Chinese Factor: An Australian Chinese woman's life in China from 1950 to 1979
Pamela Tan (Tan Pingmei) left Australia in 1950 as a young Overseas Chinese woman patriotically attracted to the possibilities of the new China created by the success of the communist revolution. She stayed for nearly 30 years, experiencing a roller coaster ride through a period of initial promise followed by a series of disasters to the country, disasters that inevitably affected her personally. Finally, by now disillusioned with her life in China notwithstanding several years of the country’s recovery from Maoist excesses, she returned to Australia to start a new life in 1979, and was joined by her Chinese family the next year. As a student, occasional consultant on China for government and private bodies, and writer, she gradually completed her intellectual and spiritual movement away from the socialist ideals that had long sustained her in China to the quite different philosophy of Buddhism. In this honest and informative memoir, Pamela explores her experience, beliefs, confusion and fear in China, while also providing insight into her young life in Melbourne that contributed to her quest, and her post-China journey once back in Australia. The China experience is the core of her story.
While this book is a personal memoir focusing on Pamela Tan’s life in China, it inevitably charts the trajectory of the People’s Republic itself. We see an optimistic Pamela in the first half of the 1950s, a period of peace and construction that generated similar feelings in wide swathes of society. Things started to go wrong with the anti-rightist campaign in 1957, the campaign when several of Pamela’s friends were labeled ‘rightists,’ and, for the first time she felt fear. This was soon followed in 1958-60 by the ruinous Great Leap Forward, a half-baked economic strategy that resulted in a massive famine costing perhaps 30 million peasant lives, and also resulting in drastic reductions of rations in the cities. Yet Pamela, like most urban residents and arguably even most peasants, continued to have faith in Mao and the party.
The Cultural Revolution, with its chaos and violence, was a further shock, but like most of her colleagues Pamela continued to believe, at least in Mao. Each further strange development, notably the death of Lin Biao, Mao’s personally chosen successor, while fleeing China, together with charges that Lin had planned to assassinate Mao, further strained faith in the leader and system. Doubts were growing in the population generally, but for Pamela and many others it was only the events of 1976—the ousting of Deng Xiaoping and his moderate policies, the resurgence of radical echoes of the Cultural Revolution, and the failure to honour properly Premier Zhou Enlai following his death, that pushed loss of faith to the breaking point. Still she assessed Mao as ‘a great man,’ but one who ‘had exceeded the limit.’
Pamela Tan’s engrossing story puts a human face on the tortuous history of Mao’s China. The very fact that her story is ‘ordinary’ provides great testimony to the power of Mao’s regime in creating a narrative that could, to a large degree, be sustained even as one disaster after another engulfed the Chinese people. There is much to learn from the parallel stories of an individual we can empathize with, and a system that truly ‘exceeded the limit.’
Foreword by Professor Frederick C. Teiwes, one of the world's leading authorities on Chinese elite politics.
We are looking for a dynamic and highly motivated academic who has a commitment to excellence in innovative teaching, research and project management in the emerging field of Digital Humanities. You will contribute to and provide academic leadership in developing digital modes of knowledge in one or more of the following areas of literary and textual studies:
Australian Literature
World Literature
Literary and creative genres of the Information Age
19th/20th century British or American Literature
Location: Canberra/ACT Term of Contract: Fixed Term of 5 Years Grade: Level B/C Salary Package: $75,936 - $102,302 pa plus 17% superannuation Closing Date: 21 February 2010
You will have a PhD or equivalent experience in a cognate field, will have an outstanding record of academic publications and a demonstrated ability to work across disciplines in broad-based humanities projects that build bridges between humanists, technologists and computational scientists. Experience in digital projects in non-academic institutions such as libraries, archives and museums will be an added advantage.
Applications from suitably qualified women and indigenous people will be particularly welcome.
Appointed applicants would take up their positions in early to mid 2010.
Enquiries for this position and further information relating to the Research School of Humanities & the Arts please contact the Director, Professor Howard Morphy:
T: 02 6125 2434, E: howard.morphy@anu.edu.au or visit our website: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/
The third Rediscovered Past Conference on Chinese Australian history and heritage will be held in Cairns on 13-14 February 2010.
Rediscovered Past: Valuing Chinese Roles Across the North
Organised by Chinese Heritage in Northern Australia Inc. (CHINA Inc) at the Hides Hotel, Lake Street, Cairns, QLD
Following the success of the previous Rediscovered Past conferences held in Cairns in 2006 and 2008, the organisers are pleased to announce a third conference to be held in 2010. Again this will be a “no fuss” multidisciplinary event run over two days and will be open to contributions from all fields of Chinese Australian studies – including history, archaeology, heritage management, law, literature, linguistics, art, and library science. The conference will maintain the previous casual, convivial atmosphere that everybody has enjoyed, and the theme will focus on Chinese contributions to the development of northern Australia. Chinese have been part of this region for several centuries, starting with sporadic visits by traders and fishermen and culminating in the large scale immigration of miners, workers and business people during the 19th century. From pioneering tropical agriculture to bringing essential goods and services to remote towns, from generating wealth for the colonies to galvanising debate about social exclusion and ‘white Australia’, their roles in shaping the social, economic and political life of the region have been critical on many levels. Yet these roles have been largely ignored in the writing of history, and so this conference will present fresh, exciting new research that establishes greater understanding and a true valuing of Chinese Australian heritage.
Fees: Full Conference attendance of AUD $30; Single Day attendance of AUD $20; and Half-day attendance of $10. The Conference Dinner and Yumcha will be pay as you go.
The city of Cairns has been a major regional historical site of Chinese Australian life since the 1870s, and the historic Hides Hotel is close to the former Chinese district in Grafton Street. Researchers of Chinese history and heritage may investigate the Cairns Historical Society collections as well as the Pioneer and Martyn Street cemeteries. From Cairns, visitors may travel to Aloomba – a site of extensive Chinese sugarcane farming – to Innisfail (Geraldton) – a site of Chinese banana growing, and to Atherton – the site of the Hou Wang Chinese temple. Those who have the time could venture further afield to Croydon, where the remains of the former Chinatown exists as a significant Chinese Australian archaeological site, and to Cooktown, the site of early Chinese immigration associated with the Palmer River Gold Rush.
For general enquiries, correspondence and registration please contact:
Secretary, Chinese Heritage In Northern Australia Inc
Dr Kevin Rains
5 Railway Street
EAST IPSWICH QLD Australia 4305
email: krains@goldcoast.qld.gov.au
