CFP - Baz Luhrmann's Australia Reviewed, National Museum of Australia, Canberra [26.06.2009]
To mark a year since its premiere, the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University and the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia present:
Baz Luhrmann's Australia Reviewed: An interdisciplinary conference on history, film and popular culture
7 & 8 December 2009 National Museum of Australia, Canberra
Keynote Address:
Meaghan Morris, Chair Professor of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University (Hong Kong), and Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney
Confirmed speakers include Peter Stanley (National Museum of Australia), John Docker (University of Sydney), and Ann McGrath (Australian National University)
'In his fabulous hyperbolic film Australia, Baz Luhrmann has leaped over the ruins of the 'history wars' and given Australians a new past a myth of national origin that is disturbing, thrilling, heartbreaking, hilarious and touching'. Marcia Langton, 2008.
Arguably Luhrmann's epic film Australia is the most ambitious, creative, and expensive engagement with our nation's past since the opening of the National Museum of Australia in 2001. Even though it is ostensibly a 1940s romance between the English aristocratic fish-out-of-water, Lady Sarah Ashley and the Drover, a quintessential Aussie bloke, the film engages with recent debates in Australia's national history from the removal of Aboriginal children from their families to the bombing of Darwin. The backdrop to this mismatched romance is the contradictory racial frontier of northern Australia, where official segregation, casual and entrenched discrimination, and sexual and labour exploitation coincided with inter-racial friendships, illicit relationships and mixed-race children. Luhrmann's engagement with our nation's racial past is explicit; the film begins with a definition of the Stolen Generations, and concludes by commemorating Prime Minister Rudd's 2008 apology.
The film's release met with both praise and sharp criticism from film critics, politicians, and other public commentators. This conference presents an opportunity for scholars to review and extend these initial debates on Luhrmann's re-visioning of Australia's past. We invite scholars from the disciplines of history, Indigenous studies, Australian studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, gender studies, film studies, tourism studies, and anthropology to explore the myriad ways in which this film engages with Australia's national history, self-fashioning, and identity.
Themes and topics for 20 minute papers may include, but are not limited to:
- Australia's national and popular imaginings
- notions of genealogy and inheritance in national imaginings
- reconciliation narratives and shared histories
- land, sovereignty and questions of possession
- the idea of home and belonging
- sexuality and national imaginings
- images of race on the northern frontier
- Selling Australia through Australia
- Australia and histories
- histories of cattlemen and droving, including Aboriginal workers
- imperial connections and dynasties
- Aboriginal and Chinese labour on the frontier
- World War II, including the bombing of Darwin, the Japanese 'threat', and Aboriginal servicemen
- frontier violence and racism -'mixed-relations': inter-racial relationships and marriages
- Stolen Generations
- native title and dispossession
- Australia's borrowings and the language of film
- filmic references and histories, ie Wizard of Oz, Jedda etc
- histories and representations of Indigenous people in film
- melodrama and constructions of race
- cinematic representations of country and landscape
- material culture studies and film
- Australia and Australian literary influences
We welcome proposals from post-graduate students and Indigenous scholars.
We will be looking to publish selected papers from this conference.
Please send a title, 200 word abstract and short biography to Shino Konishi by Friday 31 July 2009.
Organisers
Dr Shino Konishi, shino.konishi@anu.edu.au
Dr Maria Nugent, mnugent@nma.gov.au
