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
Masterclass with Professor Koichi Iwabuchi University of Melbourne, Friday 19 February 2010
Theme: Transnational media culture consumption and its implications for the local/national politics of multiculturalism and postcolonialism
The ARC Cultural Research Network is pleased to announce a masterclass with Prof. Koichi Iwabuchi (Waseda University, Japan), to be held at the University of Melbourne. With the CRN's ARC funding now at an end, this will be one of your last chances to participate in one of the CRN's masterclasses with visiting scholars; these events have provided some of the highlights of the CRN's Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Development program since the Network began in 2005.
A maximum of twelve participants for this masterclass will be chosen via competitive application, and applications are welcome from all Melbourne-based postgraduate students and Early Career Researchers working in the broad field of cultural studies. The class will run from 9am-5pm, is free of charge to successful applicants, and includes lunch and morning/afternoon teas.
To apply please provide a brief (max. 2 page) CV, and a one-page statement introducing yourself and your research to Prof. Iwabuchi; in this document, you should also highlight your research¹s connection to the masterclass theme and/or Prof. Iwabuchi's work. Applications are due by 1 February 2010, and should be sent to Alison Huber at huberal@unimelb.edu.au.
Koichi Iwabuchi is Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Tokyo. He received a Ph.D. from University of Western Sydney and his Ph.D. thesis won the President's Prize of Australian Association of Asian Studies. He has worked on contemporary media and cultural issues such as globalization and transnationalism, inter-Asian media connections, multicultural questions and cultural citizenship in the Japanese/East Asian contexts. His main English publications include: Recentering Globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism (Duke UP 2002), (co-eds with Mandy Thomas and Stephen Muecke) Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian cultural traffic (Hong Kong UP 2004), (co-ed with Chua Beng Huat) East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave (Hong Kong UP 2008). He is a co-editor (with Chris Berry) of a book series of Hong Kong University Press, TransAsia: Screen Cultures.
This event is supported with funding from the University of Melbourne and the ARC Cultural Research Network.
'Brian Castro's Fiction: The Seductive Play of Language' by Bernadette Brennan
'Narrating the Other: Australian Literary Perceptions of Japan' by Megumi Kato
In the latest edition of Mascara Review Kim Cheng Boey reviews Adam Aitken's latest collection of poetry Eighth Habitation (Giramondo Publishing Company)
Book Collection: Identity Technologies: producing online selves
Deadline: June 15, 2010
The popularity of social networking sites, user-generated content, wireless technologies and games has engendered a rapid proliferation of identities and ways to imagine, produce and consume them. As a result, the internet has become central to how many of its users understand intimacy, communication and community. We contend that this phenomenon is nothing new. Online and offline forms of identity have the potential to act genealogically, challenging our ideas about utopian
approaches to the internet as a place without history, bodies or politics.
How then can we understand what identity means online and why it is so important to so many internet users that they have a digital existence? For us, answers to this question do not have to take the form of utopian ideas about internet identities, time and space, but should admit that issues about internet identity are inevitably embedded in concerns about the production of discourse and about the material conditions of internet access, surveillance and use.
In this essay collection, we hope to gather together investigations into a whole host of questions raised by the popularity and power of identity technologies. What kinds of selves are generated online? How do memory and narrative, key elements of autobiography, exist and persist in various forms of online subjectivity? How is identity related to virtual time and space? How do we account for the role of recreation and entertainment in communicating an online self? How do we describe and analyze the relationship between hardware and software design and the identities they occasion and transmit? Is it possible to resist the hail of ITs (internet technologies)? What is the relationship between identity politics and ITs? We aim to bring together emerging ideas about identity and online life from the fields of cultural studies, new media studies and auto/biography studies in order to explore what online identity is and what it might mean.
Please submit a completed essay by June 15, 2010. Essays must be 4000-6000 words in Chicago B style with 12-point font. Essays must be written in English, but they do not have to be about the anglophone, western version of the internet. The collection will be published in digital and paper form with a university press.
We welcome submissions which include--but are not limited to--the following topics:
theorizing online identity
questions of pedagogy
research methods
youth cultures and emerging identities
social networking
virtual lives
online desires
collaboration
biography and technology
work
shopping
hardware and software
publicity and privacy
regulation
identity theft
personal video
cyberbodies and cyberspaces
avatars
internet surveillance
archives
viruses and "going viral"
deception and authenticity
activism
Send one copy each of your submission as an electronic attachment to:
Anna Poletti, Charles Sturt University apoletti@csu.edu.au
Julie Rak, University of Alberta julie.rak@ualberta.ca
Most young people would rather spend their wages on alcohol and parties, except Min Tran. This 22 year old, Vietnamese Australian Filmmaker from Sunshine is about to premier his 50 minute horror film, 'Roses are Dead' - just in time for Valentine's Day.
Funded entirely from wages earned as a projectionist, the film's production quality goes far beyond what one might expect. Produced over 2 years, this slasher flick ticks all the boxes - good-looking victims, gruesome special effects, and heart-pumping action.
The story begins with a cryptic stranger insisting that two girls buy black, dead roses on Valentine's Day, only to be ridiculed and told to go away. It soon becomes clear that this is no laughing matter with deadly consequences as the girls struggle to survive the what should've been, a romantic evening.
"I've done a few short when I was studying film but this one is the first I wanted to be something amazing. It's cost me about $10,000 but it's definitely been worth it."
Min's talent could be the next success story to rock the media since Saw and Wolf Creek, the most profitable Australian horror films ever made.
'Life in Marvelous Times': Cultural Work in the Racial Present - A Race/Knowledge Project Conference
Friday, May 14, 2010
Keynote address by Vijay Prashad, Thursday, May 13, 2010
The University of Washington, Seattle
In the 2009 single "Life in Marvelous Times," Mos Def declares that "we are alive in amazing times." The lyrical images that follow those opening lines, the sleeve artwork, and the fan-made video Mos Def chose to represent the song suggest that the meaning of "marvelous" and "amazing" must be read as multiple; they must be read to mean both "excellent" and "great" but also "to cause wonder," "to astonish," and "to bewilder." According to Mos Def, we must be amazed and marvel at how "basic survival requires super heroics"; we must be amazed and marvel at the "delicate hearts" and "diabolical minds," at the "revelations, hatred, love and war." Taking a cue from Mos Def, The Race/Knowledge Project understands the racial present as one of these marvelous times. This is a moment marked both by seemingly intractable political stalemates and by possibilities for large-scale transformation; by dispossession, displacement and unchecked accumulation and by new mobilities, movements and coalitions which seek to counter those formations; and by the incivility of political discourse and by the widespread acknowledgment of the fraudulent nature of those discourses and their claim to represent "public" good. We marvel at the horror; we marvel at the possibility. We marvel at the crisis, the beauty, the apathy, and the critical potential.
This conference is premised on the understanding that cultural workers like Mos Def help us to comprehend and re-think these "amazing" and "marvelous times." We especially marvel at how literature, music, performance, film, television, visual art, and all cultural production work to theorize,
actively (re)produce, and shape this racial present. Though much cultural knowledge is assumed to be theorized and disseminated through the academy, cultural workers occupy multiple locations that generate insightful and invaluable criticism of these "marvelous times." Cultural work, then, allows
us to ask different questions about political identities, radical coalitions, cultural/social critique, and political emancipation across disciplines, institutional boundaries, and the divisions constructed between
"activist," "academic," and "community" work.
The broad questions driving this conference include:
How does the marvelous erupt in culture and become politically meaningful?
What counts as cultural work?
What are the different ways cultural work addresses race, social justice, gender, sexuality in an era of global capitalism?
What is the relationship between cultural production and social mobilization?
The Race/Knowledge Project situates the concerns of this conference within global histories of decolonial struggle. In doing so, we position our inquiries within the legacies of social struggles that considered culture and cultural politics to be key vehicles of institutional and political contestation. In these terms, we recognize the university as a site of racial dominance and systemic inequality, as well as a terrain of social struggle. As such, we understand that a critical focus on culture asks us to not only challenge the content of academic knowledge production, but also its institutional rituals and forms. Understanding the conference format as one such ritual of knowledge production, we seek submissions that disrupt the line between the study and production of culture, and put into question both the forms and contents with which we know our "marvelous times."
In addition to university faculty and graduate students, we strongly encourage submissions from undergraduate students, artists, performers and other cultural workers, activists, and organizers, both in and outside of the university, as well as from K-12 teachers.
Possible topics may include but are not limited to the following:
cultural workers, cultural work and cultural politics in "marvelous times"
race/racialization in its shifting articulations with gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, nationality and transnationality
racism and anti-racist praxis in the context of "neoliberal multiculturalism" and the ="colorblind present"
Women of Color and materialist feminisms and the work of culture
racial nationalisms and the state
migrations, the violence of borders, and border thinking
links between university sites, local/global activisms and performance
anticapitalist struggles in the racial present
racialized and gendered labor in regimes of "globalized" capital
Queer of Color critique and cultural production
the prison-industrial complex, immiseration, and the "new abolitionism"
neocolonialism and decolonial struggle at "home" and "abroad"
intellectual and activist labor with/against academic work
racial democracy and fascism
state violences and social movements
whiteness, property, and (new) racial histories
Possible session formats may include but are not limited to:
critical dialogues/roundtables between cultural workers, activists, academics, and educators
performances and performance-based workshops
collaborative, multi-format presentations
facilitated workshops or dialogues on topics related to the above
readings followed by discussion
visual presentations, art installations or film screenings
short-format film plus interactive dialogue
paper presentations
workshops on anti-racist/anti-oppression pedagogy (community-based, K-12 and university level)
planned collaborative reading and discussion of particular texts or traditions
Please email proposals (of no more than 250 words) and equipment needs to: rkp9@uw.edu by February 8, 2010.
"Owing to the overwhelming demand from participants, we have decided to extend the deadline for submitting paper abstracts to 31 January 2010"
Migration, indigenization and exchange: Chinese overseas from global perspectives
Recent globalization which began at the end of the last century has had a tremendous impact on Chinese overseas; the conventional notions on Chinese migration, indigenization and exchange between ethnic Chinese and their host or adopted countries as well as between ethnic Chinese and China require re-examination. The major objectives of the 7th International Conference of ISSCO are to re-look from regional as well as global perspectives at these issues, in particular the challenges faced by Chinese overseas in the political, economic, linguistic, cultural, educational and religious areas. These challenges may also be compared with the historical experiences of the Chinese overseas for a better understanding of their present situation, and possibly a prognosis of the future.
Conference Languages : English, Chinese and Malay are the three official languages of the conference
Important Deadlines
Call for papers final deadline 30 January 2010
Registration Payment deadline15 February 2010
Accommodation confirmation 28 February 2010
Winners of the latest round of the Art & Australia Contemporary Art Award are Peter Madden and Susan Jacobs. Shorlisted entrants include Paul Adair, Emily Ferretti, Michaela Gleave, Georgie Hill, Matt Hinkley, Owen Leong, Cyrus Tang and Krystie Wade.
This is an open competition that supports emerging professional artists through the publication of their work on the back cover of Art & Australia. Additionally, one recipient's work will be acquired annually for the Art & Australia collection.
The winners of the award are selected by Art & Australia in consultation with its Advisory Board members Anna Waldmann, Justin Paton and Rex Butler.
