KEYNOTE ADDRESSES
PROFESSOR MARY LOUISE PRATT
Walter Mangold Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne
Silver Professor and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis
Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature Department, New York University
On Staying
Host-guest relations play a constitutive role in most travel. Journeys are organized as
movement between points of hospitality, that is, points where movers are received by stayers.
The presence and hosting capacity of the stayers (or their hostility, for that matter) usually
determines the traveler’s route. Host-guest relations are essential not only to the logistics of
travel, but to achieving its meaning. So we may pose the question: Where and in what ways is
it illuminating to reflect on travel not as the moving of a body or set of bodies, but as the
enactment or unfolding of relations between placed bodies (stayers) and dis-placed bodies
(movers)? What can one learn by recognizing such relations in the architecture and signifying
of travel?
PROFESSOR GAIL JONES
Professor of Writing
Writing and Society Research centre, University of Western Sydney
Everybody’s Constantinople: tropological apparitions and narrative form
Virginia Woolf travelled twice to Constantinople, first as a 24 year old in 1906 and then as a
29 year old, in 1911. A description of the first trip is recorded in fragments of an early
journal; there is no account of her second journey. Yet the term Constantinople oddly persists
in Woolf’s writing: it is a code word for implausible imaginings and magical transformations,
a kind of shibboleth by which she identifies her own lyrical vision and her interest in a
transnational architectonics of fiction. Summoned in novels, essays, biographies and the
diaries, always over-determined by the modernist yearning for an ideal form, the word
reminds us that travel infiltrates narrative not only in remembered details or incidents, but in
the epistemological dimensions of habitual and apparitional tropology. Woolf’s ideological
and aesthetic preoccupations with the city of Istanbul are arguably the foundations of a
colonial version of Turkey, possessed and constituted by the West; however, they might also
indicate the internationalist aspirations of a modernist utopic, and the summoning of
‘Constantinople’ possibly operates as a contestation of imperial power.
As a novelist preoccupied with cross-cultural experience and the writing of other places, I am
interested in exploring the ways in which this apparently paradigmatic case of Orientalism
raises questions about the contradictions of writing otherness, veering as it does between
forms of estrangement and complicity, and the wish, perhaps embedded in formal poetics, to
evade the bleak determinations of imperial presumption.
PROFESSOR CHARLES FORSDICK
Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne
James Barrow Professor of French, University of Liverpool
Travel, Slavery, Memory: thanatourism in the French Atlantic
The paper engages with recent work on trauma, thanatourism and dark tourism to explore
contemporary journeys motivated by a desire to visit sites related directly or indirectly to the
Atlantic slave trade and the plantation slavery system that it supported. Drawing on Tony
Seaton’s typology of dark travel activities, the paper focuses on journeys to sites associated
with enslavement and slavery, to sites of memorialisation (such as graveyards or memorials),
to sites associated with slavery but not directly linked with it historically (such as museums),
and, more rarely, travel to participate in or view re-enactments of events associated with
slavery. The aim is to reflect on the ways in which such forms of travel have variously
manifested themselves in the space known as the ‘French Atlantic’, engaging with a series of
key sites in West Africa, the Caribbean and France itself. The ‘French Atlantic’ provides a
particularly complex frame for such an investigation for it encompasses (i) metropolitan
France, where, since the 2001 Taubira law, slavery has emerged as a particularly potent
political subject, (ii) West African states such as Senegal, associated with key sites such as
Gorée island, and (iii) the mixed histories of the so-called Francophone Caribbean,
encompassing Haiti, independent and post-emancipation since 1804 (yet with a continued
cultural tolerance of child slavery in the form of the restavek), and the DOM-ROMs
(Guadeloupe, Guyana and Martinique), still constitutionally parts of metropolitan France,
where the legacy of slavery remains a politically volatile issue. The paper considers various
entangled sites, such as the planned ‘Memory Village’ in Haiti, the more formal
Guadeloupean ‘route de l’esclave’, the ‘maison des esclaves’ on Gorée island, and other
newly inaugurated memorial sites in metropolitan France. Journeys to these locations permit
exploration of the links – especially in the phenomenon of memorial tourism – between travel
and memory, provoking questions about roots, belonging and homecoming; at the same time,
these are locations at which competing and even contradictory memories meet in
configurations that I consider to be ‘contrapuntal’.
PROFESSOR BILL ASHCROFT
Australian Professorial Fellow, School of the Arts & Media, University of New South
Wales
A Borderless World – Literature, Nation, Transnation
The hope for a better life that drives increasing numbers of refugees to seek shelter has
corresponded to an increasingly hysterical sealing of national borders around the world.
Whatever the world would look like without borders, refugees have been reduced to the
condition of homo sacer – bare life – in what Agamben calls a state of exception outside the
law. This paper considers the oxymoronic conditions by which the nation-state produces
‘states of exception,’ not only to record the sinister development of the incarceration of
asylum seekers, but rather to emphasize the tenacious and innovative nature of the processes
and techniques by which subjects inhabit borders of all kinds – particularly the subjects of the
nation-state. Despite the powerful structural effects of the state – particularly its effects on
transnational mobility, individual subjects inhabit the borders of nations in ways that
demonstrate their political mobility, constituting what I call the ‘transnation’. While the
transnation – the outside of the state that begins within the nation – may or may not engage in
physical travel, it reveals the utopian possibilities offered by the actual proliferation of
national subjects. The paper considers the function of literature in the transnation, particularly
the utopian possibilities it offers to move between the structures of the state.
ABSTRACTS
AHLBERG, SOFIA
Houellebecq and the Ends of Knowledge
Sofia Ahlberg, School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry, La Trobe
University
[email protected]
No longer tethered to a distinct area, knowledge now travels to far-flung places (including the
blogosphere) without delivering security or certainty. What passes for knowledge loses its
status and is reduced to mere information as a result of increasing fragmentation and
detachment from place. If not the bridging of distance, then, what kind of fantasy terrain does
twenty-first-century knowledge engage and tamper with? “Houellebecq and the Ends of
Knowledge” proposes an innovative development of area studies to account for the
importance of mobility in generating contrast and affinity in the Information Age.
Between the abundance and promiscuity of information lies the space of personal
transformation, a topography of knowledge effectively explored by contemporary French
author Michel Houellebecq in his recent novel The Map and the Territory (2010). In this
paper I will focus on the cartography of knowledge by tracking the movements of
Houellebecq’s protagonist, an upwardly mobile Parisian artist whose art engages with an end
of the world fantasy. The novel contrasts the habitats of Martin’s biological father, fossilised
in a fortress surrounded by urban badlands, with that of Martin’s surrogate father figure, the
fictional representation of the author himself, in rural Ireland. Each stage in the ascent toward
success and self-knowledge across these filial landscapes removes Martin further from human
reciprocity. By demonstrating how narrative itself is a stimulant for an internalised mobility,
the novel calls for complex links between geography, testimony, and storytelling.
ANDERSON, CAROL
A Reliable Witness: Emmeline Lott and the experience of living in an Egyptian harem
Carol Anderson, School of Communications and Arts, Faculty of Education and Arts,
Edith Cowan University, Western Australia
[email protected]
In his recent prize-winning portrait, The Histrionic Wayfarer, Tim Storrier ironically
references the link between identity and travel. Striding through a barren landscape, the
faceless subject of the painting alludes to the identity creation which has frequently been a
central motivation for foreign travel.
In the nineteenth century many travellers, both male and female, recognised the opportunities
that overseas travel presented. Few who have studied women travellers and their narratives
from this time would disagree that the majority shaped their accounts to express the
invigorating spirit of adventure or sense of escape that overseas travel provided. Moreover, a
number found the notion of refashioning their identities particularly appealing and used their
experiences to reposition themselves upon their return to England.
My paper will examine Emmeline Lott who successfully used her travel experiences to create
an entirely new persona for herself as an authoritative writer on life within the harem. In 1863
she travelled to Cairo for a two-year appointment as governess to the five-year old son of
Ismael Pacha, the Viceroy of Egypt. At a time when there were few employment
opportunities open to impoverished genteel women from middle-class backgrounds, Lott
decided to turn what was a cheerless episode to her advantage by writing a controversial
account of her experience. Having lived within the walls of the harem, she was careful to
emphasise the veracity of her account in contrast to other women writers who had only visited
during their travels. Published in 1865, The English Governess in Egypt, Harem Life in Egypt
and Constantinople extended to four editions, and was sufficiently well received for her to
add two more titles in 1867 and 1869 describing her Egyptian sojourn.
BEASLEY, PETA
A Travelling Rose
Peta Beasley, The University of Western Australia and Edith Cowan University.
[email protected]
Desperate not to be separated from her husband of just three years, young Rose de Freycinet
dressed in a sailor’s uniform and stole aboard her husband’s ship, the Uranie, due to set sail
the next day, on September 17, 1817. Both Rose and Louis, were well aware that a woman
being on board ship was a serious breach of naval regulations and it was therefore fortuitous
that news of her stowing away was not discovered until the Uranie was well out to sea. It
could be suggested that Rose had read how Anne Elliot “gloried in being a sailor’s wife”
(Persuasion, Everyman 1994, p. 205), and Mrs Croft believed that “the happiest part of life
has been spent on board a ship” (p. 58), except that Jane Austen’s novel had not yet been
published. Or perhaps she knew of the sadness of Elizabeth Cook, left alone year after year
by her famous naval husband, Captain James Cook? Elizabeth had to endure the birth, and
death, of each of her six children on her own, and was widowed at the age of only thirtyseven. Rather than face this prospect, Rose chose to leave her home and family and travel
with her husband, despite the uncertainty of the future and the discomfort she would surely
endure.
But what is more unique about Rose’s journey is the diary she kept. Literally erased from all
official reports and expedition sketches, it was not until 1927 that the story of Rose de
Freycinet was revealed through a series of letters written to her friend Caroline, Baronne de
Nanteuil, in the form of a diary. The diary is an intimate but astute record of life on board a
ship, of observations of people encountered and of the strange and exotic places visited. The
story of Rose de Freycinet is certainly one worth telling as it offers a unique female account
of a voyage of scientific discovery, taking the reader to all corners of the globe from
Gibraltar, to Cape Town, to Mauritius and even to the distant shores of Shark Bay in Western
Australia. But moreover, it is the story of a young woman, prepared to challenge the
ordinances of the day, and to journey forth, determined that there would be no distance
between her and her husband. Like Mrs Croft, Rose knew that while she and Louis were
together, “there was nothing to be feared”. (Persuasion, p. 58)
BEHMOIRAS, JOSIANE
The End of The World Tour: Real Time Travel for The Neo-nomad
Josiane Behmoiras, School of Languages and Linguistics & School of Culture and
Communication, The University of Melbourne
[email protected] For my presentation I will read an extract from my short story – working title: Story #1 –
from The End of the World Tour, a series of interlocked short stories about a group of
Australian tourists who join an ‘adventure’ travel group for a tour of India at the eve of The
End of The World, a looming – if not immediate – global catastrophic event predicted by all
major international experts. Each story follows one or more characters as they land in Delhi
and set out to ramble during the two days of free time they are given before the actual start of
the tour. A major meltdown of information technologies will interrupt their ramble on the
morning of the second day, pinning each one of them to a location and a situation that will
require some degree of broadmindedness and/or survival skills.
The stories explore the moral, emotional and cultural complexities of being in other places,
highlighting the case of India as an archetypal space or confronting cultural experiences for
the visitor. In Story#1, young Jolie-Mae ultimately cannot ‘get’ India through a travel mode
that is defined by western conventions and expectations, and a false nomadic state that is
mediated by communications technologies. As French philosopher Paul Virilio argues, the
displaced person is at home nowhere, while the neo-nomad is at home everywhere thanks to
the ‘real time’ of electronic technologies. This mode of travel threatens to hinder a genuine
mutual understanding between visitor and local, including the local stray dog that Jolie-Mae
‘tames’.
BLACKWOOD, GEMMA
Wish You Were Here: Film Tourism and the Ethics of Sightseeing
Gemma Blackwood, School of Culture and Communication, The University of
Melbourne
[email protected]
Dean MacCannell’s recent text The Ethics of Sightseeing (University of California Press,
2011) provides the tourist scholar with an exploratory and provocative attempt to reconcile
the dueling concepts of the idealistic, culturally-attuned, questing global traveller versus the
insular and politically-naïve mass tourist who, as MacCannell puts it “gazes dumbly” upon
travel sites. Putting tourism through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis, MacCannell asks the
question “what does the tourist want?” and links the answer to new moral imperatives of
enjoyment and pleasure, as well as to understandings of cultural relativism, post-colonial
“missionary” outlooks about cultural superiority, and even assimilationist attitudes toward
foreign cultures. Certainly, contemporary sightseeing is a multifaceted issue, and is made
more complex through its combination with other visual cultural “virtual travel” mediums
such as cinema. Through an examination of the new Australian “horror on holidays” film
Wish You Were Here (dir. Edgerton, 2012), I will unpack MacCannell’s recent text about the
social and ethical implications of contemporary travel, as well as apply it to the study of the
niche industry of contemporary film tourism. Indeed, film tourism, which may be understood
as a kind of enhanced addition to traditional modes of cinematic spectatorship, can bring to
the tourist gaze a new understanding of space, given that the ideological readings of a film’s
narrative can also be applied to corresponding real-life travel spaces.
BOWD, GAVIN
To a Coast Opposite Humanity: the Travels and Travails of Michel Houellebecq
Gavin Bowd, Senior Lecturer in French, University of St Andrews, Scotland
[email protected]
‘So this was what men had called the sea, what they had considered the great consoler, the
great destroyer as well, the one that erodes, that gently puts an end to things. I was
impressed’. These words from neohuman Daniel25 in The Possibility of an Island show the
paradoxical nature of travel in the world of Michel Houellebecq. At first, the alienated subject
was ‘In the liberal system/Like a wolf on wasteland’ (Le Sens du combat), who makes, in
Whatever, a failed attempt at fusion with the landscape of the Auvergne. As Houellebecq’s
work evolves, travel, and especially tourism, seem to offer a more harmonious form of postindustrial capitalism: the sexual reconciliation of the temperate and torrid zones in Platform,
Lufthansa’s route to Playa Blanca, la France profonde as tourist paradise in The Map and the
Territory. And yet, despite such dreams of utopia, there is the inevitable ‘return to the real’.
The coast-line, Houellebecq’s favoured locus of happiness, is also the place for apocalyptic
upheaval. The inward utopia of The Map does not protect its characters from the transience of
human life. It remains for the Houellebecquian traveller to choose atopia by ‘going west’.
BROPHY, KEVIN
‘How far is the world from here? — travels in Kashmir in 2007’
Kevin Brophy, School of culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
[email protected]
This paper is a shortened form of a longer 10,000 word essay. It is an exercise in the essay
form, testing ideas relating to the way travelling can shape one’s thinking in retrospect, as
much as during the experience of travelling. The paper recounts an experience of being under
a form of house arrest in the highly politicized and heavily armed city of Srinigar in Kashmir
in 2007, as a result of the naïve risk-taking so common among travellers. This experience in
turn has prompted several years of reflection and reading around the history of Kashmir in
order to come to a wider contextual understanding of what we were seeing and experiencing
in 2007.
BRUYERE, VINCENT
Travelling Forms of Value and the Accumulation of Biocapital
Vincent Bruyere, Assistant Professor, Department of French & Francophone Studies,
Pennsylvania State University, USA
[email protected]
In the context of the renewal of humanistic inquiry by cultural and postcolonial studies,
travelogues functions as zone of ethical instantiation where comes into view competing
rhetorics of alterity. Moving from the texts to the trope, I would like to question to which
extent travelling informed, and more importantly, continues to inform discourse on values in
the age of what British sociologist Nikolas Rose calls “biocapital”. This paper therefore
proposes to explore another avenue in mobility studies that touches upon a history of
discourse of values that bonds humanistic inquiry and political economy in modern research
universities of life. By virtue of this dual mandate and through such a contestable coupling,
the objective is then at least twofold. On one hand, I will examine a selection of contemporary
debates on the value of humanistic inquiry under the scrutiny of a political economy of
reproduction and productivity in culture of life, and on the other hand – as an answer to that
plight, and form within, via a review of scholarship on bioprospecting in the early-modern
and modern Americas, the bioethics of gene patenting, and geopolitics of human trade
(slavery and organ traffic) – I will define the space of a demand for scholarship on forms of
value.
BUNYAN, MARCUS
Traverse Subject: Migration, photography, visibility
Marcus Bunyan, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne
[email protected]
This paper is an extension of the opening speech I gave to artist Kim Percy’s installation
Traverse at Stockroom gallery, Kyneton in March of this year. Using photographs of Kim’s
installation and other photographs of refugees arriving by boat, Children Overboard, Tampa
and photographs from the detention centres to illustrate the talk the paper will investigate the
(in)visibility of refugees as they travel across the sea to arrive in this country.
Imagine living in an (in)between space, living in a refugee camp over there. Marc Augé
coined the phrase “non-place” to refer to places of transience that do not hold enough
significance to be regarded as “places”.1 These camps are such places. Put yourself in that
predicament, seeking a better life, seeking to escape persecution, war, prejudice and death,
deliberately placing yourself and your family in a fragile boat, like a seed pod floating upon
the waters, taking the dangerous journey to reach Australia. Imagine the emotional and
intellectual turmoil that must surround such a decision, the decision to place your life in the
hands of the ocean. Important decisions affecting the entire course of one’s life are rarely
made without some form of mental distress.
This paper will investigate this displacement, diaspora, disruption.
Ultimately it will focus on the concept of the inverted Panopticon. In this interesting concept
the asylum seekers sit in the tower looking outwards, seeing the promised land but unable to
touch it and the guards (prison officers, government, the Australian people) are all around but
most are blind. They look inwards but cannot see / they look outwards and most go about
their daily business. The perimeter fence of the detention center becomes the horizon line of
the sea. As in Kim’s photographic red lined horizons of sea and sky, over the horizon is out of
sight, out of mind.
CEUTERICK, MAUDE
Female Road Movies: the Escape, Refashioning and (Un)becoming of Women
Maud Ceuterick, Department of Media, Film and Communication, University of Otago, New
Zealand
[email protected]
Women increasingly travel alone or bond with other women on the road, but the
representation of women travelling independently is still quite scarce on cinematic screens. In
traditional male road movies, the road offers an opportunity to escape, along with a romantic
vision of freedom, all of which allows the characters to question their present way of life. In
the course of their physical and mental journey, the male protagonists will refashion their
vision of the world and go through social and emotional experiences. They will subsequently
become different, transformed selves.
Bonnie Frederick, Carrie Tarr, Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, among other film and
travel theorists, seem to agree on the additional difficulties encountered by women travellers
compared to their male counterparts. While men seem to be successful at refashioning their
lives and adopting a new identity after their escape from ‘home’, women struggle to escape
from their traditional ‘passive’ position and generally fail to become independent subjects. In
most cases they appear to be punished for leaving home or constrained again to their old
passive self, as seen in Vagabond (Agnes Varda, 1985), or in the later infamous Thelma and
Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991). Therefore, while the journey involves a process of ‘becoming’ in
male road movies, in the female equivalent women, I will argue, do not seem to successfully
complete that process. By focusing on Kings of the Road by Wim Wenders (1976) and
Messidor by Alain Tanner (1979) this paper will consider the ‘un‐becoming of women’ in
female road movies.
CHUSHAK, NADIYA
Reminiscences of a Summer on Adriatic Sea and Reality of Being Stuck for Hours on a
Border: What Do Nostalgic Memories of Travel Tell Us About Post-Socialist Transition in
Serbia.
Nadiya Chushak, School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne
[email protected]
With the collapse of Yugoslavia opportunities for travel for people living in Serbia were
drastically diminished. This was caused by a number of factors: new borders between former
republics, Western imposition of control on the movement, and population impoverishment,
to name just a few. Of late, travel is becoming more attainable for Serbian citizens, but the
nostalgic memories of the travel in the Yugoslav times still provide a strong contrast to the
difficulties they encounter nowadays when attempting to leave their country.
Pervasiveness of these nostalgic stories about travel has several explanations. To begin with,
Yugoslav citizens indeed were quite mobile. Tourism was used by the state to popularise its
ideology of the “brotherhood and unity” of Yugoslav nations, as well as myth of the heroic
partisan struggle during the Second World War. Furthermore, through a well-established
system of state and industry-owned resorts, as well as private summer houses, many citizens
of Yugoslavia could spend their vacations on the Adriatic seashore. Finally, “Yugoslavs”
could relatively freely travel to the “West” – both for work and vacations.
Examination of some of the re-current themes in nostalgic discourses, juxtaposed with the
analysis of the situation in contemporary Serbia, provides us not only with the new insights
into Yugoslav history but also illuminate the drawbacks of the post-socialist transformation. It
reveals limitations that were brought upon Serbian citizens by the neo-liberal condition limits of spatial mobility, but also overall shrinking of life-style choices people. Drawing on
representations from popular culture, stories of my informants and auto-ethnography, I will
explore how such travels down the memory lane at the same time reveal restrictions of the
post-socialist transition and offer a utopian escape from them.
CLARKE, ROBERT
Journeys to Country: Absence and Loss in Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Travel
Narratives
Robert Clarke, School of English, Journalism and European Languages, Faculty of
Arts, University of Tasmania
[email protected]
In the ‘journey to Country’ an Aboriginal traveller journeys from their urban or suburban
‘home’ to what they regard as ‘Home Country’: the territory that belonged to the tribe or clan
to which the contemporary writer can draw a (sometimes tenuous) familial link. As a defining
chronotope of Aboriginal travel narrative, the journey to Country sets the context for the
exploration of the complications of identity and history. One of the challenges for the
Aboriginal traveller is to appraise him/herself of the personal and communal trauma
associated with Country. In his essay “Trauma, Absence, Loss” Dominick LaCapra considers
the distinction between absence and loss within discourses of historical trauma, and analyses
the consequences that arise when absence and loss are conflated: when absence is converted
into loss “one increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics”; and
“[w]hen loss is converted into […] absence, one faces the impasse of endless melancholy […]
in which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed”
(LaCapra 698). In considering the journeys to Country in Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987)
and Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang and Me (2005), I draw on LaCapra’s work to
examine how both texts variously collude with and resist the entanglement of absence and
loss in their encounters with the trauma inherent in the journeys to Country. At stake is the
significance of the journey to Country as a postcolonial ritual within a national culture
coming to terms with the notions of rapprochement, reconciliation, and renewal.
COOKE, STEVEN
Coming ‘home’? Imagination and performance in returns to sites of atrocity.
Steven Cooke, Donna Frieze and Andrea Witcomb, Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia
and the Pacific, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University,
Melbourne Burwood Campus
[email protected]
In her ground-breaking book, ‘Return to Auschwitz’ (1981/ 1997), Kitty Hart-Moxon wrote
of her return to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau where she spent a number of years as a
prisoner during the Holocaust as a visit to a place she belonged, almost a ‘homecoming’. Her
description of her return and its emotional impact illustrates the complex relationships
between imagination, memory, place and performance that have been key themes of recent
conceptualisations of identity and travel.
Based on videotestimony interviews held in the Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History
archive and the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Centre’s archive, this paper examines Holocaust
survivor testimony as it relates to their return to the sites of atrocity. It explores how
survivor’s (re)encounters with real and imaginative landscapes reveals conceptions of agency,
community, absence and belonging. It uses the concept of imagination in survivor
videotestimony to examine the motivations for traveling or not traveling to their place of birth
in Poland or specifically to Auschwitz-Birkenau, perceptions of their relationships with
fellow travellers, particularly family members, how the visit affected their willingness and/or
ability to give a testimony and the narrative construction of their experiences. It also analyses
their description of their behaviour at the site of return and understandings of, and reaction to
other visitors. Through critically understanding this engagement with real and imagined
places, the paper develops the theoretical relationship between performativity and ideas of
affect within the context of traveller’s engagement with the landscapes of the Holocaust.
DE NOOY, JULIANA
French – decorative or transformative? The confrontation with language difference in
Australian memoirs of living in France
Juliana de Nooy, School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of
Queensland
[email protected]
Travel memoirs tend to be premised on the transformation of the self through spatial
translation. This paper explores the roles language might play in this transformation, and the
possibilities of a linguistic translation of the self among memoirs of Australians in France.
Michael Cronin has remarked on the “[i]ndifference to the question of language in many of
the key texts on writing and travel that have been published over the last two decades” (2000,
p. 2) and Mary Besmeres has noted that “[o]nly a fraction of travel books in English [...]
emphasise the language borders that are crossed in much international travel, and deal in a
sustained way with the question of how language impinges on the self” (2008, p. 245).
Among the recent rush of memoirs by Australians of their sojourns in France (only one
published in the 1990s, but 33 since 2000), the encounter with French language is invariably
evoked. In some cases it is merely decorative, serving to embellish an elegant backdrop of
cafés, boutiques and markets. In others, the foreign language is an obstacle to be overcome,
its effect is a limiting one, diminishing the author to a shy shadow of the familiar self. In yet
others, the author’s proficiency in French smooths over language difference, concealing it. In
a handful of the memoirs, however, language is the very means of transformation of the self,
reforging the author’s experience through movements of mind, tongue and lips. The paper
focuses on these memoirs.
Besemeres, M. (2008). Australian ‘immersion’ narratives: memoirs of contemporary language
travel. In D. Deacon, P. Russell & A. Woollacott (Eds.), Transnational Ties: Australian Lives
in the World (pp. 245-257). Acton, A.C.T.: ANU E Press.
Cronin, M. (2000). Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation. Cork: Cork University
Press.
DE PONT, GENEVIEVE
‘Peace seemed to brood there’: New Zealanders’ Travel Diaries and Religious Identities.
Genevieve de Pont, Department of History, University of Auckland
[email protected]
The nominal Anglican and avid Spiritualist Henrietta Rothwell spent a day visiting the grave
of Cecil Rhodes in 1927. On the pages of her travel diary she described her experience there
in religious terms: ‘we figuratively took the shoes from off our feet and felt on consecrated
ground’. She then recounted closing her eyes and experiencing an emblem-filled vision of
Rhodes’s life and its ‘meaning’. Rothwell’s travel diaries contained a number of moments
like this, when she felt close to a supernatural world, but her journey was not a ‘pilgrimage’ in
the usual sense of the word. Religious feeling was simply a part of her everyday life and
came on tour with her.
This paper uses travel diaries written by New Zealand tourists travelling internationally
between the end of the First World War and the inauguration of regularly scheduled jet travel
to Auckland in 1963, to explore some of the margins of ‘spiritual travel’ within twentiethcentury tourism. It considers the expression of spiritual feeling and the ways in which the
diarists’ religious affiliations or identities influenced their experiences of spaces which were
not officially ‘holy’ according to their faith, including non-denominational gravesites and
national or imperial memorial monuments. It also engages with these tourists’ relationships
to holy objects or spaces of religions other than their own, and reflects on the ways religious
affiliation could influence travellers’ experiences when visiting a country hostile to members
of certain religious groups: Nazi Germany. Modernism and modern tourism have often been
conceptualised as post-religious, yet religious identity and belief was a significant vector
informing the experiences of these modern tourists. I argue that the modern tourist and the
religious sphere should not be seen as antithetical.
DECOURCY, ELISA
The Photographed Self: Picturing Englishness, Masculinity and Exceptionality in the
Early Twentieth Century Travelogue
Elisa Decourcy, Department of Modern History, Politics & International Relations,
Macquarie University, NSW.
[email protected]
This paper examines the styles of photography early twentieth century English, male travelers
requested when having themselves pictured for their travel publications. Photographic
portraits and snapshots emphasised and elaborated upon the textual dimension of selfconstruction in these publications. My paper discusses how travellers’ identities were split
between their loyalty to imperial nationality and their desire to present themselves as quasiexplorers, venturing into uncharted landscapes. In essence, the traveling ideal that this genre
expressed was one fractured by competing assertions of national belonging and individual
exceptionality. My paper will discuss how male travel writers used photography, alongside
textual commentary, to present themselves as exhibiting an English identity crafted in the
context of British imperial authority and responsibility. My analysis of photographs that
contribute to the formation of this nationalistic authorial persona will examine three tropes of
masculine Englishness: the athletic adventurer, the commanding surveyor and the respectable
gentleman. However, travelogues were complied from independent ventures and were, to
varying extents, written with self-aggrandising motives. My paper will demonstrate that while
travellers – consciously and subconsciously – reiterated imperial ideologies in their
photography and narratives, they also problematized their English identities through
masquerading in indigenous clothing and bypassing the official channels of imperial
administration to mingle with indigenous elites. An analysis of photograph in the travelogue
genre from the early twentieth century exposes the complex, competing visual discourses that
coalesced in each authors’ creation and imagining of the English travelling ideal.
DOERING, ADAM
Returning to Travel...to Belong?
Adam Doering Department of Tourism, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
[email protected]
How does belonging fit into the Western travel subjectivity? When one reflects on the ideals
of travel in the West the initial response seems simple: there is no belonging. From colonial
conquest to contemporary claims of global citizenry, Western travel ideals remain centred on
modernist-cum-Enlightenment narratives of freedom, universality, displacement and
development of the self/others. In the Western travel ideal, one often ‘belongs’ nowhere
(alienation/exile/away from home) or everywhere (at-home-in-the-world). Something is
amiss.
Drawing inspiration from Derrida’s concept of paleonymy and a Deleuzian understanding of
repetition and difference, which argues for a writing practice that engages more closely with
the ideas that move(d) us rather than seeking out something entirely novel or new, this paper
addresses the two interrelated concerns: What has historically been absent, silenced, and/or
privileged in the pursuit of the Western travel ideal? And how might this nuanced
understanding open a space for those of us who have been moved by ‘travel’ to engage with
life differently in the present? Or alternatively, as Kaplan (1996) suggests in Questions of
Travel, is it finally time to abandon the heavily burdened concept of travel once and for all?
Working within and against the ideals of travel, the paper strives to build a relational ethic of
travel and belonging; one that acknowledges that no matter where or how you travel, you
belong. Traditionally perceived of as an expression of freedom, autonomy and selfdetermination, conceiving of belonging in terms of a transcendental identity undermines what
Diprose (2008:28) refers to as ontology of belonging that accounts for ‘the responsibilities
accompanying the sociality of being-with-others.’ Linking Diprose’s ontology of belonging to
travel, I argue that it would be a critical and creative endeavour to begin to rethink the
Western ideals of travel as an expression of belonging rather than an escape or displacement
from it.
Returning to travel to belong not only draws our attention to the problematic and asocial
‘ideals’ of Western travel, but also raises one of the more perplexing issues in contemporary
life: How do you belong?
DOIG, TOM
Suffering as Scenery: the place of 'authentic travel' in a post-authentic world
Tom Doig, School of Culture and Communications, University of Melbourne
[email protected]
“ ... for no other reason than to satisfy their curiosity.” – Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the
Hindu Kush
“I hate travelling and explorers.” – Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
I propose to submit a 6000-word paper re-examining the concept of 'authentic travel' in an era
of globalised mass tourism. The essay will merge academic argument with creative reflection,
focusing on travel literature and its numerous ‘others’. The paper will include approximately
3,000 words excerpted from my first travel book, Moron to Moron: Two men, two bikes, one
Mongolian misadventure (to be published by Allen & Unwin in 2013).
Pleasure is at the heart of most definitions – and critiques – of tourism. However, while
'serious' travellers and travel writers often seek to transcend and/or deny the enjoyment
inherent in their activities, I contend that pleasure remains central to almost all (voluntary)
travel. Following Maxine Feifer (Going Places: Tourism in History from Imperial Rome to
the Present, 1986), I argue that confusion, discomfort and even suffering have become
touristic commodities, which a certain type of tourist – the traveller – consumes with relish.
The modernist ideal of 'authentic travel' has thus become a postmodern subset of (inauthentic)
global tourism. The principal difference is that while tourists complain about inconvenience,
travellers complain about convenience.
With reference to Moron to Moron, I argue playfully that 21st-century travellers and
adventurers can be conceived of as a kind of neo-Mongol horde, rampaging
uncomprehendingly through foreign lands. At the same time, Chinggis Haan (Genghis Khan)
and his armies can be productively re-imagined as proto-tourists, their trips through Eastern
Europe and South-East Asia the precursors of contemporary Kontiki Tours.
DUCHE, VERONIQUE
The Anti-Ideal in Renaissance Travel: Rabelais’ Quart Livre
Véronique Duché, School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne
[email protected]
Rabelais’ characters, the giant Gargantua and his son Pantagruel, spend a lot of time in
travelling: they travel through France in order to improve their education, and visit every
famous university. Different regions of France are described, and especially the Touraine,
where Rabelais was born, in the heart of the Chinon vineyards. The fourth book devoted to
the adventures of the giants, the Quart Livre (1552), is also a travel narrative: Pantagruel and
his friends undertake a journey over the sea to consult the “oracle de la Dive bouteille,” which
they hope will provide the definitive answer to Panurge’s question about marriage. But this
epic voyage is not an easy one: blown by ill winds, the travelers stop in many strange islands
populated by surrealistic monsters. On the island of Ruach for example the locals live by
wind and die by farting; on the island of Procuration, the Chicanous earn their livelihood by
being beaten; the inhabitants of Ennasin have unconventional family relationships, and
Gaster, the Lord of the belly, is the governor of an island, where he tyrannizes his servants
Engastrimythes and Gastrolatres. The happily quest undertaken by Pantagruel and his fellow
travelers turns to a terrifying journey, a nightmare.
Of course this world of “inquietante etrangeté” is a parody rich with significance. Through the
adventures of his characters, Rabelais expresses his anxiety and his despair about the French
society and the growing civil violence. Does the Ideal still have some place in the
Renaissance France?
I aim to show how Rabelais’ ideas of Travel and Utopia evolve, from Pantagruel (1532) and
Gargantua (1534) to the Quart Livre, which is designed to demonstrate that the utopians
visions are false and even dangerous.
DUMENDEN, IRIS
Roots: Social capital and the refugee student
Iris Dumenden, Faculty of Education, La Trobe University
[email protected]
This presentation is based on my doctoral thesis, currently under examination, which explores
the educational and personal experiences in Melbourne of a young refugee from Burma –
from his final year in a mainstream secondary school through to his completion of an
undergraduate degree at university. In this presentation, I focus on how this young man was
able to tap into his minority ethnic community’s resources – both in Australia and overseas –
to improve his chances for educational success within mainstream Australian society. The
discussion centres on the concept of social capital that draws upon the work of Pierre
Bourdieu and Alejandro Portes.
ELLIOTT, ANDREW
“Meeting the Japanese” in Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War
Andrew Elliott, Department of English Faculty of Culture and Representation, Doshisha
Women’s College of Liberal Arts, Kyoto, Japan
[email protected]
W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s 1938 trip to China at the time of the second SinoJapanese War produced a number of co-authored travel texts, including magazine articles and
the experimental Journey to a War (London, 1939), which contained poetry, prose and
photographs. In recent critical studies of these works, Marsha Bryant and Douglas Kerr have
both pointed to the problems of “arrival” that surface especially in the central “Travel-Diary”
section of Journey, wherein the two travellers journey to, but never actually arrive at, their
destination, whether the war ‘front’ or the ‘real’ China. This paper will consider this problem
in regard to Auden and Isherwood’s final arrival in Shanghai, and their subsequent “meeting
[of] the Japanese” (as they state in the title to a contemporary journal article), linking it to the
representation of Japan within the text as a whole. Where, for example, does Japan fit in
relation to Auden and Isherwood, or war-torn China, the British in Hong Kong, and the treaty
concessions in Canton and Shanghai? How does the text portray the skilful command of
mobility (one of the four pillars of colonial authority, according to Kerr) by the Japanese, and
how does that compare to Auden and Isherwood’s apparently more unsteady progress? What
does it mean to reach Shanghai at the end, easily traversing battle lines that, just previously,
had seemed both elusive and impenetrable? How can we understand the (almost complete)
textual silence about their post-China destination of Japan itself? Hoping to examine these
and other questions, this paper is part of a larger ongoing project about Western travel writing
and the Japanese empire, and connects to continuing debates about empire, mobility, and
Western representations of the Orient.
ERIKSON, SOFIA
Uncanny Australia: identity and belonging in British travel writing on Australia between
1870 and 1939
Sofia Eriksson, Macquarie University
[email protected]
During the past couple of decades, travel writing has frequently been at the centre of
discussions of otherness and identity, particularly in studies employing a postcolonial
perspective. While most such studies have focused on the construction of the colonised in the
context of societies that were considered racially distinct from the imperial metropole, this
paper takes a different approach. It refocuses the lens on otherness and identity in the context
of British travellers and their encounter, not with a society that was racially ‘other’, but with
the white, British settler society of Australia.
The Australian population was at this time made up chiefly of people who could have been
the traveller’s friends or relatives, or perhaps the local shopkeeper or washerwoman – people
who were until recently like the travellers themselves. If Australia was a nation in the making,
it was a nation being made by British people becoming an Australian people.
This paper looks at travel accounts written by metropolitan Britons about their experiences in
the Australian colonies between 1870 and 1939. It argues that the result of the ambiguous
relationship between their home and their destination was an uncanny and often destabilising
encounter, in which the boundaries of sameness and difference were constantly negotiated
and challenged. The paper will also suggest that the recurring preoccupation with imperial
and racial loyalty that dominated these accounts was a way of dealing with this uncertain
situation.
FALK, CATHY
The Hmong: Diaspora, technology, and identity
Cathy Falk, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne
[email protected]
Ethnomusicological interpretations and analyses of musical traditions have, in the past,
usually been embedded in notions of identity defined by a sense of place, space and time and
of belonging to a specific sociomusical environment. For a diasporic, refugee group such as
the Hmong, sense of place is retained in the memory of, or nostalgia for, a place whose
imagined reality is preserved in stories and song texts. The fluid and changing experience of
present spaces, places and scapes in which diasporic Hmong now find themselves interlocks
with an imagined past in China and Laos and a dreamed future in which westernised Hmong
now engage in tourism to China seeking their cultural and geographical roots. For the
multiply displaced Hmong, the maintenance of identity has always been predicated in the
preservation of fundamentally oral communication systems between groups cleaved by time
and space. Until recently, the absence of a Hmong writing system has been keenly understood
as an absence of access to a source of power, and compensated for by a correspondingly
monumental oral corpus of Hmong history, culture, kinship and cosmology documented in
esoteric and secular song, stories and instrumental music. In the diaspora to western countries,
the Hmong have exploited the potential of emerging technologies, from the telephone to
audio and video cassettes, as tools which enable long-distance oral communication.
Cyberspace has now entered the Hmong communicative repertory of mechanisms for
maintaining “we Hmongness” in a global context. This paper explores some of the
implications for ethnomusicological interpretations of musical production when the “field” is
dispersed not only geographically in real time but also in a parallel reality on the world wide
web, where the Hmong now conduct their own ethnography, presenting new constructions of
themselves to themselves as well as to other, non-Hmong people as both a literate and oral
representation of a pan-Hmong identity.
FLOOD, ADELE
Artists as Travelers in Landscapes of Memory and Time: Researching Ideas of Self
through Personal Narratives of Text and Imagery
Adele Flood, University of New South Wales
[email protected]
This presentation will identify the links between memories of place, and the emotional
responses that contribute to a body of finished works. It will then present ways in which these
links can form the basis for researching ideas of self through personal narratives.
The use of journals as records allows individuals to record what they find in the world and
what they seek in the world. They are invaluable tools for learning about the self and about
others. Journals are the personal landscapes of ideas, that can be viewed either
chronologically or at random, that form the basis for understanding and researching ideas of
self.
In this presentation I will demonstrate how I:
• record my own thoughts, ideas, and images of places I have been
• refer to these drawings and writings when I am creating art works.
• record the writings and thoughts of others who inspire a response or resonate with my own
ideas or experiences
• use the journal as a tool for reflection about where I am, what I am feeling and how I am
responding to situations.
• trace the narrative journey
The paper comprises two main sections: firstly an introduction that discusses the ways in
which journals can be employed as repositories of memory. Secondly it entails a journal’s
narrative that includes the journal images both in words and visuals of specific periods or
fragments of time which will make explicit the links between place, memory and emotional
response that result in the finished works.
FORSEY, MARTIN & LOW, MITCHELL
Coming to the Real Australia: Representation and Imagination among Exchange and
Study Abroad Students
Martin Forsey and Mitchell Low, School of Social and Cultural Studies, The University
of Western Australia
[email protected]
Student exchange and Study Abroad are well-established programs that facilitate particular
student-traveller experiences, ideally promoting greater cultural literacy and expanded “global
perspectives”. This paper reports the first stage of a study aimed at evaluating response of
exchange students to a course in Australian Studies requiring students to critically examine
popular representations of Australia. In this paper, we summarise findings from a preliminary
survey and a series of semi-structured interviews that elicited the preconceptions about
Australia that study abroad and exchange students carried with them in coming to Australia.
Whilst academic discussions of Australia’s national image have focussed on the ways in
which these images are created and disseminated to international audiences through
television, film and tourism advertising, there has been little discussion of how these
representations are actually perceived by their intended audiences. We consider the additional
dimensions of how these notions of place are received and translated in the imaginations of
educated visitors to Australia. We find that the roots of these imaginings largely reside in the
representations of Australia these students have come into contact with on the big and small
screens in their countries of origin. Circles of representation are very apparent through this
study. Images of Australia presented in often decades-old Hollywood films and tourism
advertisements, continue to weave their way through the imaginations of the young people we
surveyed, most of them eager to experience the “real Australia” created for them by
generations of image makers. Questions arise whether a unit of study devoted to upsetting
these sorts of imaginaries is capable of shifting perceptions and breaking the circles of
representation in some way.
FRANÇOIS, PIETER
Guidebooks and travel accounts as changing intertwined genres: British travel literature on
Belgium (1815-36)
Pieter Francois, Centre for Anthropology & Mind, University of Oxford
[email protected]
In this paper I analyse a large group of British guidebooks and travel accounts on Belgium
published between 1815 (the opening up of Continental Europe to British travellers following
the Battle of Waterloo) and 1836 (the publication of Murray’s first guidebook on Continental
Europe). This generation of little studied guidebooks occupies an important place in the
transition of typical eighteenth-century Grand Tour manuals to the ‘modern’ guidebooks of
Murray and Baedeker. The angle of this paper is to study these guidebooks and travel
accounts as an illustration of the fast changing genre definitions of ‘travel guide/guidebook’
and ‘travel account’ during the period 1815-36. Readers’ expectations of guidebooks and of
travel accounts changed in tandem. Especially changes in the function of guidebooks resulted
in an important reorientation of what readers expected to find in travel accounts. This paper
claims that for an in-depth understanding of this intertwinedness in changes in both genres a
thorough reconstruction of the social background of the writers of guidebooks and travel
guides is key. A special focus is placed on the fast eroding belief during the period 1815-36
that writers of guidebooks, who were very often employed in the emerging tourist industry,
were in no position to tell the ‘cultured travellers’ what to see, let alone to offer them
guidance on how to experience their travels. In 1815 this still vibrant belief was strongly tied
to the idea that travelling was a ‘cultured’ activity which took place in an ‘idealized’ space.
By 1836 this had changed drastically and an often voiced complaint was that travellers felt
pressured by the prescribing power of the guidebook. This paper will analyse how this
complaint was partly rooted in the growing democratization of the travel world and at the
same time has to be seen as a literary stereotype with a strong class bias.
GRESSIER, CATIE
Safari hunting, gender and the boundaries of the human in the Okavango Delta, Botswana
Catie Gressier, University of Western Australia
[email protected]
The opportunity for pushing the boundaries of identity and the cultural imaginary exists not
only for travellers, but also for hosts within the global tourism nexus. Safari guides in the
Okavango Delta, Botswana, possess a keen awareness of the idealised perceptions urban
tourists hold of their bush-based lifestyles, and donning the khaki entails performing frontier
values that in many ways conform to traditional notions of hardened masculinities. Value is
placed on resourcefulness, stoicism and physical strength, along with the ability to drink
whiskey, shoot rifles and hold one’s own in the African bush. These values have become
normalised in local cultural values and practices, and there is an expectation that women, as
well as men, personify these frontier characteristics. Through exploring the sometimes
playful, sometimes anxiety-provoking performance of contemporary versions of the ‘great
white hunter’, and through probing male hunters’ claims of mobilising their animal natures
during the hunt, this paper explores the boundaries of gender and the human in the Okavango.
Building on thirteen months of ethnographic research, I argue that in the white community’s
eco-centric imaginaries, where misanthropy prevails while nature is deified, women have
become men, and men, outmanoeuvring women once more, have become animals.
HALL, MICHAEL
The Negro Traveler's Guide to a Jim Crow South: An Interdisciplinary Investigation in
U.S. Cultural History, 1936-1967
Michael Hall, Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts (ILA), Emory University, Atlanta,
[email protected]
From 1936-1964 the Negro Motorist Green Book, the brain child of Victor H. Green and
commonly referred to as the Green Book, served as a guide for black American travelers to
both lessen embarrassing situations in travel as well as protect travelers from physical harm in
a Jim Crow U.S. South. The travel guide assisted African American travelers during a period
in U.S. history when Howard Johnson was the only national chain where black persons could
sleep and eat and Esso gas stations (now Exxon Mobil Co.) provided the only stations where
African Americans could both refuel and use restrooms. It is in 1964 with the impending
passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that the guide book seemingly becomes obsolete as
racial discrimination in public accommodations is no longer legally sanctioned.
This paper examines the now obscure Negro Motorist Green Book as a significant guidebook
in the cultural history of African American travel as well as a social document reflecting, like
a litmus test, the changing state of race relations in the U.S. South, and U.S. more broadly, as
it transitions from a Jim Crow Era through the Civil Rights Movement of the
1960s. Combining literary analysis, visual culture, cultural history of travel and with a lens to
the ways race/ethnicity, gender and class impact modern experiences and expressions of
mobility, I demonstrate the value of tourism and travel studies, as a cutting edge
interdisciplinary field of study, to new scholarship in American, African American and
African Diaspora studies.
HERRSCHNER, IRINA
The concept of ‘home’ for a mobile generation
Irina Herrschner, Monash UNiversity
[email protected]
The concept of ‘home’ is traditionally a static one closely related to a geographic location. A
case study on young internationals living in Melbourne has found a shift in this concept and
diverse combinations of mobility and their particular influences on identity and ‘home’.
Three kinds of mobilities have been found influential for a development towards a
geographically detached, individualistic definition of home and the self. Namely these are
physical mobility – the actual movement of people and items, virtual mobility – the virtual
movement of ideas and images, and social mobility – the moving within and between social
networks. All three types have grown significantly over the last decade and formed
combinations including not only the mobile parts of societies. Due to this rapid growth is the
analysis of Generation Y especially effective to understand this phenomenon.
For some members of this cohort, all types of mobility have become normality, leading to a
‘hypermobiltiy’. As social networks are detached from places the meaning and importance of
‘home’ shifts accordingly.
Social mobility also influences a shift in identity. A concept commonly been based on one
specific geographic location forms a national identity. With the relative unimportance of
locality, identity too moves away from geographical fixity towards a transnational identity or
‘globeidentity’.
Although keeping in mind, that these developments mainly take part in a small part of society
are these changes leading to great social changes. This becomes especially significant when
contrasting the developments away from nation states with the political right movements in
some countries.
HUNTER, ASSUNTA
Thai massage in Chiang Mai: wellness, leisure and authenticity
Assunta Hunter, Centre for Health and Society, University of Melbourne
[email protected] In the last 15 years Thai government tourism policy has been aimed at developing Thailand as
the major Asian centre for medical tourism. In Thailand, medical tourism has come to include
wellness tourism and spa tourism. Wellness tourism in Thailand takes many forms. It includes
healthy holidays where the focus is massage and fasting and meditation and yoga retreats are
also popular. All of these activities are available in many different locations including at spa
resorts where wellness activities are combined with luxury holiday destinations. Spa tourism
and the wellness industry have become the focus of intensive Thai government promotion.
The popularity of spa tourism has been supported by the creation of a trained massage
workforce. Since 1985, the Thai government has developed a new massage curriculum in
order to train modern Thai massage practitioners which aims to produce massage practitioners
suitable for the tourist trade. Tourists come both to have massage, and to learn massage.
Tourism and tourism policy have become significant drivers in shaping the teaching of Thai
massage. As tourists and teachers have become increasingly mobile there has been a
hybridization of knowledge and practices from which new kinds of Thai traditional massage
have emerged. I focus on how the teaching of Thai massage has been the subject of Thai
government policy, which has simultaneously diminished the association of massage with the
sex trade and produced professional practitioners who now practice a westernized form of
massage suitable for foreigners. The professionalization and commercialization of massage
has been a feature of Thailand’s strategy to establish itself as the health tourism hub of Asia.
Thai government control of massage teaching, the curriculum, and the licensing and
registration of spa premises aims to manage the world-wide perception of Thailand’s spa
services and its practices. The commercialization of Thai massage has created global flows of
capital, resources and people in a project in which Thai massage has been established as a
world-wide brand.
HUNTER, EMILY & JONES, MEREDITH
Beyond the enclave: when place crashes in on cosmetic surgery tourism
Presenting Author: Emily Hunter, Research Associate, University of Technology,
Sydney. Co-authors: Meredith Jones (UTS), David Bell (Leeds), Kate Hardy (Leeds),
Ruth Holliday (Leeds), Elspeth Probyn (University of Sydney), Jacqueline SanchezTaylor (Leicester)
[email protected]
Cosmetic Surgery Tourism is a significant and growing area of medical tourism involving
travel by choice to undergo aesthetic surgical procedures, usually at a lower cost in a less
developed nation. This paper draws on a multi-site research project exploring the practices,
locations and experiences of cosmetic surgery tourism from the UK and Australia to surgery
destinations in their respective regions. In particular, we take up Anthony Elliot’s (2008)
representation of cosmetic surgery tourism sites as ‘placeless, indistinguishable and indistinct’
tourist enclaves and argue instead for the importance of place in cosmetic surgery tourism.
We will draw on examples from our fieldwork in Thailand and Tunisia to show that the
experiences of cosmetic surgery tourists who participated in our research were profoundly
impacted by place in the surgery destination.
HUSSEIN, SHAKIRA
Imperial feminists, native informants, and privileged access
Shakira Hussein, National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies,
Asia Institute, University of Melbourne
Western women travel-writers have a long claimed that their gender gained them a superior
degree of insight into Muslim societies because of their access to female private space. Lady
Mary Montagu set a template for later imperial feminist travellers with her analysis of her
much-cited visit to a Turkish bathhouse: “’Tis no less than death for a man to be found in one
of those places”. Contemporary writers such as Geraldine Brookes (Nine Parts of Desire) and
Christine Seierstad (The Bookseller of Kabul) continue to privileges of feminine access to
Muslim societies. However, some of the most heavily contested claims to such privileged
access now relate to Muslim women and women of Muslim background providing accounts
of their journeys to the West or their return journeys to their families’ country of origin, with
Ayaan Hirsi Ali as the most prominent example. This paper examines contested claims of
authenticity and privilege, placing recent high-profile disputes into their historical context and
analysing the implications for transnational and transcultural feminism.
INGRAM, CATHERINE
Tourism, musical authenticity and minority culture in a Kam village in rural southwestern
China
Catherine Ingram, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne
[email protected] In twenty-first century China, tourism, musical authenticity and minority culture are all major
interrelated spaces of negotiation. The recent exponential growth in “eco-tourism” and
“cultural tourism” as drawcards for local governments in marginalized and/or minority
regions that seek to compete for the tourist market has seen tourists seeking newer and more
“authentic” experiences of China’s natural and cultural attractions. The emphasis on
“authenticity” (in Chinese, yuanshengtai 原生态) within the realm of music in China is not
only evidenced within this tourist trade, but also by nationwide televised song competitions
broadcast to an audience of millions and the large-scale promotion of Intangible Cultural
Heritage both nationally and, internationally, with UNESCO. Minority cultures, which in
contemporary China are most easily adopted to present the “authentic” or “unspoiled” cultural
image that many tourists seek, are frequently also multivalent political symbols that both state
and local communities create and manipulate for often-strategic ends. This paper analyses the
dynamic intersection of the three important domains of tourism, musical authenticity and
minority culture within the context of the very first large-scale festival held in one Kam (in
Chinese, Dong 侗) minority village in rural southwestern China. Drawing on my 24 months’
musical ethnographic fieldwork in that Kam village, and on my participation as both
performer and spectator within the festival, I describe and analyse the major influences arising
through the intersection of these three domains. I also demonstrate that only through
combining these multiple perspectives can the different domains be individually understood.
JACKSON, ANDY
Writing poetry about medical tourism: An arts residency in India
Andy Jackson, Asialink, University of Melbourne
Contemporary creative endeavour is intensely affected by expectations. Artists are required
to generate clear and detailed plans in order to garner funding and support, and to consider in
advance how they will engage in cross-cultural artistic exchange. But creativity requires
openness to the surprises of life and an ability to accept and incorporate difficulties to make
uncertainty or even ignorance productive. All forms of travel and of artistic exchange “offer
rare opportunities to detach from deeply ingrained ways of knowing” (Langford 2002, Fluent
Bodies, Duke University Press, 2002). Contemporary travellers now have strong expectations
about what they will encounter and gain from their time in another country. Travel for
medical reasons requires even greater pre-planning, research and expectations. Details
become increasingly important and demand comprehensive and careful management. At the
outset are primary questions of cost, the hospital’s reputation, possible complications,
infections and post-treatment care. There are also a set of secondary issues requiring attention
such as: visas, hotels, transport and dietary requirements. Experiencing professional care in
another country gives the patient an intimate appreciation of that country, but also reminds
them of their own insecurities and sensibilities. Andy Jackson travelled to Chennai, India, on
an arts residency and wrote about the experiences of medical tourism through the eyes of the
patients and medical professionals he encountered. His presentation will explore the personal
dimensions of medical tourism via poetry, suggesting that frustration and confusion are
essential productive elements of cross-cultural encounters about medicine.
JILOVSKY, ESTHER
No Place Like the Past: The Holocaust and the Representation of Bolechow in Daniel
Mendelsohn’s ‘The Lost’
Esther Jilovsky, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne
[email protected]
For many years now, the site of former concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau has been
Poland’s most visited tourist attraction. Framing the emergence of both ‘dark tourism’
(Lennon and Foley) and ‘heritage tourism’ (McCain and Ray), this popularity is mirrored in
the vast number of memoirs detailing journeys to Holocaust sites published since the early
1990s. In Holocaust memoirs, including those by descendants of survivors, Auschwitz and
other sites of Nazi persecution during the Holocaust are not only tourist attractions, but loci
around which the narratives revolve both in the past and in the present.
In ‘The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million’ the author and narrator Daniel Mendelsohn
describes visiting Bolechow, the shtetl of his grandfather, located in the contemporary
Ukraine. Yet in this Holocaust memoir, visiting Bolechow involves extensive travel not only
to the Ukraine but also to New York, Sydney, Israel, Sweden and Denmark, where
Mendelsohn interviews elderly Holocaust survivors. This paper argues that the representation
of these visits in ‘The Lost’ blurs the boundary between memory and place, to the extent that
writing about visiting Bolechow not only takes place in the Ukraine. It will illustrate how the
memories of Bolechow which Mendelsohn encounters – manifest in language, food and the
people themselves – form the Bolechow of his quest, geographically and temporally distant
from the actual town in the Ukraine.
JOHNSON, ANNA
“Savage Life and Scenes”: Dark Tourism in Colonial Australia
Anna Johnston, Co-Director, Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath
School of English, Journalism, and European Languages, University of Tasmania
What did historical tourism look like in colonial Australia, a travel destination celebrated both
as a “new home” for white Britons and the repository of an ancient Aboriginal culture? Whilst
British travellers usually emphasised the novelty and the modernity of the nascent nation, the
dark history of colonisation and dispossession haunted their travel narratives. Histories of
trauma and sites of memorialisation, however, were not limited to massacres of indigenous
peoples. Often more resonant for British travellers were sites where settlers had suffered,
struggled, or died. This paper uncovers histories of trauma and dark tourism in nineteenthcentury travel writing about the Australian colonies. Using postcolonial and trauma theories,
it argues that the utopian impulse of travel writing may be based on the eradication of prior
peoples, places, and modes of mobility, which in the antipodean settler colonies necessitated
the removal of indigenous peoples and narratives in order to make new spaces available for
imperial travellers and colonial settlers.
JOHNSTON, JUDITH
Anna Jameson’s Journey Elsewhere
Judith Johnston, Department of English, University of Sydney.
[email protected]
In the Winter of 1836-7 the writer and critic, Anna Jameson, found herself in Toronto, Canada
where she had travelled to reunite with her uncongenial husband, a reunion based on the
practical needs of both, his to demonstrate, for the purposes of promotion, a functional
marriage, hers to obtain a formal separation and some financial maintenance. She expresses
her feelings of desolation and loneliness in her published travels, Winter Studies and Summer
Rambles in Canada (1838) abandoning the generally bold, brisk tone of the British lady
traveller.
While her references in her travelogue to 'home' are often to England, it is not to this 'home'
that Jameson journeys constantly in her imagination during the long Canadian winter, which
comprises the first third of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. 'Home' is
somewhere altogether elsewhere and unexpected, not Canada, not England, but Germany.
Elsewhere, as a destination, is not unproblematic for Jameson but nevertheless is the site of a
deeply-seated romance with that country on a number of grounds. First is her attachment to
Ottilie von Goethe, daughter-in-law of Germany's supreme man of letters. Second is her
cordial reception and ready entrée into the highest literary circles in Germany. Third, is her
sense of independence, generated by the ease with which travelling in Germany could be
accomplished. Elsewhere is the site where she believes she will realize her true potential.
However, Jameson struggles to learn the language, and to make herself au fait with the
writings of the most noted of the German literary intelligentsia and her travel book is
testament to her attempts to refashion herself as an authority on German literature and culture.
Anna Jameson's journey to Elsewhere renegotiates the travel writing genre to engage with the
wishes, aspirations and ambitions of the traveller as the ultimate destination.
JOHNSON, PATRICIA
Frameworks of Freedom and Fear: Authorising the Voice in Women’s Travel Writing
Patricia Johnson, Tourism Discipline, Newcastle School of Business, University of
Newcastle, NSW
[email protected]
It is well known that traditions of heroism and discovery have played founding roles in
Western travel writing. Travel narratives not only re-imagine worlds through language but
they also provide a site to re-imagine oneself – as a form of human expression. Ways of
seeing, as viewing positions, or viewing platforms, largely depend upon what (at the time of
writing) would be accepted as a legitimate view, and hence, render a work publishable (Pratt
1993). While the author assumes a role within which to frame their travels he/she also
assumes a position from which to narrate. The travel writings of four Western women who
travelled to Iran are analysed to reveal the ways in which the author, a gendered self, invests
in cosmopolitical discourses of the times to position the textual gaze. While these writers
framed their narratives differently they all script their imagined selves in terms of the heroic –
gendered figures that require elements of danger, risk and fear to build character. Although
these figures are not liminal, they require a liminal context to be convincing. As a result, all
draw from circulating discourses of late twentieth century cosmopolitics to contextualise their
experience. In doing so, these narrators evoke dimensions of fear, coupled with notions of
danger and threat, as a way to justify the journey, and to legitimise the voice. These travel
narratives add to the ‘already known’, or popularly believed, about visited cultures according
to known, or taken for granted, discourses of their time. As a result, these texts reveal more
about Western ways of seeing the world and the narrating heroic figure than they do about the
foreign they are writing about.
Pratt, M. L. (1993) Imperial Eyes, Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge.
JONES, PATRICK
Walking Jaara Country: a psychoecology of slow travel
Patrick Jones, Writing and Society Research Group, University of Western Sydney
[email protected]
The author outlines the imperatives of walking again on country, foraging food and medicine
and reconfiguring a sensible, intimate relationship to land based on ancestral knowledges. He
argues resensing a fair and sustainable culture requires slow contact with the earth, not rapid
consumption of it.
The author walks the final 36kms over three days to meet the last Jaara elder living on
country. Uncle Brien Nelson’s anglicised surname was ‘given’ to his forefather on European
contact after Horatio Nelson, the wide roaming British navy admiral, who helped defeat
Napoleon. His name was given just as the industrial revolution in England was beginning;
about to change the world forever and enter into the last and most destructive period of the
Anthropocene, which some have argued began with the introduction of monetary economies
(debt) around 5,000 years ago.
In reconfiguring an ecological culture every activity known to Anthropocenes requires
reevaluation and the author’s personal story of walking through the Whipstick State Forest
and getting to know Uncle Brien, is as much about critiquing capitalism’s pollution ideology
and how travel and adventure have fed epistemologies of colonisation, as it is about the actual
processes of slow movement, looking for food, being quiet and sensing the world.
JOUVE, DOMINIQUE
Segalen et les Immémoriaux : une authenticité en discussion
Dominique Jouve Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie
[email protected]
Dans quelle mesure le voyage de Segalen en Polynésie pouvait-il réaliser ses idéaux ? En
rupture avec le catholicisme de sa famille, il est profondément affecté par sa découverte de la
culture tahitienne puis marquisienne, il vit cette expérience avec tous ses sens et se sent
révolté par l’oubli, la destruction de ce qu’il estime la culture polynésienne authentique. Il se
sent en harmonie avec les peintures, sculptures et écrits de Gauguin et avec sa lutte contre les
autorités religieuses. Il élabore Les Immémoriaux et dans le même temps se démarque de
l’exotisme de son époque. Il jette alors les bases d’une nouvelle théorie fondée sur son
individualisme marqué par ses lectures nietzschéennes. L’objet de ma communication sera la
mise en relation du texte de fiction avec l’essai sur l’exotisme pour explorer plus précisément
ce que Segalen a découvert ; nous examinerons ensuite ce que la théorie de l’entropie ne lui
permettait pas de prévoir : la réception et peut-être l’influence de certains motifs segaléniens
dans quelques textes d’auteures polynésiennes d’aujourd’hui comme Louise Peltzer et
Chantal Spitz.
KELLY, PAULA
From Liminal Space to Contact Zone: The Cruise Ship Tour
Paula Kelly, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
[email protected]
This paper will examine the cruise ship tour as a form of travel that has evolved from a
liminal space, which contains and signifies the economic, cultural and political boundaries
between tourist and local to a physical site where the encounter between tourist and local is
defined by the labour conditions on board. To illustrate this shift this paper will utilise two
documentary films that capture the exchange between cruise ship tourist and local subject,
Dennis O’Rourke’s 1988 Cannibal Tours and Yung Chang’s 2007 Up the Yangtze.
Utilising theories developed by Dean McCannell, Mary Louise Pratt and Renato Rosaldo, this
paper argues that rather than the cruise tour representing a threshold between tourist and
subject, the cruise ship itself can be seen as a “contact zone” (Pratt) where the disparate
relationship between tourist and local subject is performed on board through the identities of
worker and tourist.
By examining both films, set on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea and the Yangtze River
in China respectively, this paper analyses the associations between cruise ship travel,
vanishing cultures and “imperialist nostalgia” (Rosaldo). Furthermore this paper would like to
address the role of the image and the image maker as underlying the inherent power
imbalance in the exchange between tourist and local subject.
KEOMANY, MELANIE
“VAYA ADELANTE”: William S. Burroughs’s Postcolonial Visions of Latin America in
The Yage Letters
Melanie Keomany, English Literature, School of Culture and Communication,
University of Melbourne.
[email protected]
While many people are familiar with William S. Burroughs’s travels through Europe and the
several years he spent in Tangier, Morocco, less attention has been paid to the significant time
he spent in Mexico and Latin America. The Yage Letters is an epistolary novel Burroughs
composed in collaboration with Allen Ginsberg, and mostly consists of letters from
Burroughs (signed with the pen name “William Lee”) to Ginsberg written from January to
July 1953, when Burroughs was travelling throughout Latin America searching for an
hallucinogen called yagé (also known as ayahuasca).
This paper examines Burroughs’s descriptions and depictions of Latin America as related in
his letters to Ginsberg in The Yage Letters. Dry and objective in tone, Burroughs’s letters
offer observations on the legacy of Spanish colonialism while also revealing the influence of
US political interference in the countries he travels through; his account of his travels there is
entirely lacking in the clichéd romanticism often expressed by today’s twenty-first century
Western tourists. Indeed, I believe that Burroughs’s search for yagé is a twentieth century
neo-imperial mimicry of colonial natural history expeditions that took place in previous
centuries, rather than a precursor for current tourism practices. While Burroughs deliberately
maintains his distance with the tone of a disinterested observer, I argue that this affected
detachment reveals how highly unsettling Latin America is for Burroughs. The Yage Letters
exposes the vulnerabilities of race and class for a privileged America in a global world.
KOCH, EMMA
Ideologies of Travel: Cultural Mediation in Travellers Phrasebooks
Emma Koch, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne
[email protected]
Much scholarly attention has been given to the ways in which the travel experience is
mediated, by guides and by tools for travellers. The semiotics of travel present in genres such
as television travel shows, newspaper travelogues, in-flight magazines, business advertising
materials, tourists’ postcards, and tourist guidebooks, have been analysed by a range of
scholars. However, little attention has been given to the ideologies present in that seemingly
innocuous text, the travellers phrasebook. This paper argues that the travellers phrasebook in
its function as a broker of intercultural communication also necessarily – both covertly and
overtly – functions as a cultural interpreter, thereby mediating the cultural as well as the
linguistic experience. Taking as its focus the mediation of language, of social interactions,
and of culinary culture, this paper examines the ways in which phrasebooks negotiate
foreignness, through mediation of linguistic complexity, through assumptions (and promises)
about translation and linguistic equivalence, through the conformity to social norms in the
choice of content and use of conversational routines, and through representations of
authenticity and Otherness. It investigates the ways in which phrasebooks construct the an
outline of the foreign (destination) culture, but in so doing implicitly construct an outline of
the familiar (home) culture.
KONISHI, SHINO
Guiding the Blind Traveller: James Holman and the ideal ‘native’
Shino Konishi, Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Australian National
University.
[email protected]
James Holman undertook an arduous journey around the world in the early nineteenth
century; circumnavigating the globe he travelled through South America, Africa, Asia, and
Australasia. His ‘passion for travelling’ was innate, he claimed, and not tempered by his
‘affliction’, blindness. Since his youth he had been determined to ‘explore distant regions, to
trace the varieties exhibited by mankind under the different influences of different climates,
customs and laws, and to investigate with unwearied solicitude the moral and physical
distinctions that separate and diversify the various nations of the earth’. Crucial to his
endeavour were the various indigenous guides he employed on his travels, who not only
guided him through new and unfamiliar territories, but acted as his eyes, and assisted him
with everyday tasks. This paper will focus on Holman’s relationships with his Indigenous
guides: it will examine how he portrayed both the guides and his interactions with them, what
factors, such as Indigenous agency, shaped these representations, and finally how the guides
may have influenced his views of the different British colonies and territories he visited, and
the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the Empire.
KREMMER, CHRISTOPHER
The Transcendent Traveller: Nicholas Bouvier and travel as mystic pilgrimage
Christopher Kremmer, Writing & Society Research Centre, University of Western
Sydney
[email protected]
In 1953, two young Swiss piled into a fragile Fiat and headed east from Geneva towards
adventure. The four year odyssey of Nicholas Bouvier and his friend Thierry Vernet would
take them across the Balkans, the Middle East and Afghanistan, producing a travelogue of
rare beauty and enduring significance. Bouvier's L'Usage du Monde (The Way of the World)
is an intoxicated embrace of travel as redemptive, almost mystical experience, an encounter in
which the self is sacrificed in pursuit of a higher goal—the ideal that people can transcend
cultural barriers and celebrate their shared humanity.
In this paper, the contours of Bouvier's method are dissected to reveal the centrality of
displacement and cultural porosity in achieving the desired transmutation. But is this ideal of
travel more culturally impervious than it seems, a high-brow form of the package tour in
which those who lands we traverse form a convenient backdrop to the drama of the outsider's
pursuit of enlightenment?
LANDRAGIN, ALEX
Literature, Travel & Geographical Literacy
Alex Landragin, Author
[email protected]
The contemporary literary novel is widely reported to be in decline, particularly in its
‘national’ form. By contrast, a supposedly new form of the novel is emerging. ‘Post-national
literature’ is a catch-all term referring to a specific kind of contemporary literature, one that
on closer analysis has roots in the literature of Kipling and Conrad. While much
contemporary fiction is post-national to some degree, some writers are more intentionally and effectively - post-national than others.
One possible way of defining the bounds of a post-national literature is in terms of
geographical literacy, a technical skill set acquired by dint of travel or displacement. The
affordability of travel and enhanced communications technologies means more writers can
write with geographical literacy than ever before. In this paper, I will explore the limits of
post-national literature, and argue that an emerging 'post-national' literature, at least
potentially, offers the possibility to revive the relevance of the literary novel as an artistic
form.
LAZAROO, SIMONE
Ascent
Simone Lazaroo, Creative writing, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Murdoch
University, Western Australia
[email protected] I propose reading an extract from a draft of my ‘long short story’ in progress, The Song not
Sung. This story arose out of time spent in New York City on my way back from study leave
in New York State last year. More than any of the tourist attractions listed in my Lonely
Planet guidebook or the NYC tourist websites, I was struck, both in that city and in San
Francisco, by the big numbers of homeless people, and by the kinds of interactions I observed
between them and tourists. I had the good fortune to converse with a couple of homeless
people in each city, and found that they weren’t being friendly just because they wanted the
money, contrary to local newspaper and middle-class residents’ verbal warnings. Yet I
couldn’t help but sense the big gulf between the homeless people and me, and wondered if
there was really any way that people from such divergent lives – an American homeless man
struggling to keep his dignity intact during the global financial crisis, a middle-class
Australian woman tourist from Perth, arguably the most isolated city in the world - might ever
share more than superficial chat in a short time. My short story proposes to explore the ways
in which such a relationship, albeit ephemeral, might subvert impressions of cities and their
people received from tourist guidebooks and websites. It also explores the ways in which
consumerism and spiritual searching can both exclude and inform one another, and some of
the ways in which travel can transform us, both during the journey and long after it’s finished.
LEAN, GARTH
Transformative Travel: A Mobilities Perspective
Garth L. Lean, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney
[email protected] Physical travel has traditionally been viewed as an agent of transformation. The research
conducted on this topic, however, is surprisingly narrow in scope. Few studies have attempted
to look beyond a particular tourism/travel segment or discipline and most utilise a restricted
range of methods and analysis. These investigations have also failed to consider the long-term
impacts of corporeal travel and how changes continue to evolve over time.
This paper presents the findings of a holistic and interdisciplinary study of transformative
travel. It draws upon the experiences and observations of 78 participants (representing a widevariety of nationalities, ages and experiences), sourced and interviewed over four years using
internet-based methods, along with the researcher’s own travels through South-East Asia,
West Africa and Europe. It is argued that in a modern, mobile world it becomes increasingly
difficult for individuals to distance themselves from those elements that maintain a particular
way of thinking and acting. While a traveller may physically remove their body from a
specific geographic location, contemporary and historic flows of people, ideas, information,
objects, memories and symbols create mobile spaces, places, landscapes and identities; both
familiarity and difference abound. As such, transformative travel is a complex phenomenon.
Innumerable elements interact in a multitude of permutations and combinations ‘before’,
‘during’ and ‘after’ physical travel, making the delivery and prediction of particular outcomes
improbable. Travel is perpetual, taking place not only corporeally, but communicatively,
virtually, imaginatively and symbolically. Travel in all its forms, therefore, continually acts to
construct, maintain and transform individual and collective realities. At its broadest, human
travel might be defined, not simply as movement from one place to another, but as a shift in
conscious attention. Physical travel becomes one of many flows in the socially mobile
de/construction of reality.
LEE, ROBERT
Gunzels and Gricers or Epicures and Aesthetes: Rail Tourism in Australia
Robert Lee, University of Western Sydney
[email protected]
Railway tourism is as old as the railway itself but the opening of long Australian railway
routes in the early 20th century changed the nature of railway tourism: the journey became an
experience in itself. This included more than the views from the carriage window: the train
itself was an object of desire. Trains are large and varied. For some comfort defined the
quality of their experience; for the majesty of steam and a futurist rejoicing in speed and
power made a long railway journey so memorable. Exactly what part of the railway its
passengers fetishized, from locomotive to table d’hôte or from signal box to sleeping berth,
depended on their tastes.
From 1950 a network of luxury air-conditioned sleeping-car trains began to emerge and by
1970 it covered the entire continent. These appealed to passengers’ desire for pampering with
modernistic appointments. At the same time another nostalgic form of rail tourism emerged
as steam train tours, using obsolete sleeping cars and steam locomotives, began operating in
all states.
The steam tours were run for and by railway enthusiasts, the much-derided gunzels and
gricers of reputedly limited personal cleanliness dressed in shapeless anoraks. However, these
tours also attracted a sprinkling of tourists after a different sort of travel experience and in
time these came to dominate. Thus the heritage tourist train was born and became part of a
world phenomenon. Such travel seeks to create an ideal world both out of its time and out of
place. On such trains, time goes backwards and overcoming distance is no longer the aim of
the journey.
LEONG, S.K. ELIZA
Western Representation on the Orient: Macao and China in Ana d’Almeida’s Diary
Eliza S.K. Leong, Institute for Tourism Studies in Macao and Macao Association for
Historical Education.
[email protected]
We live in an era in which critique of the West has become a deep-rooted phenomenon of the
lives of non-Europeans. My research contributes to the study of European women perception
of China, particular of Macao, as mirrored in the nineteenth-century women’s travel writing
accounts. My argument revolves around the Western concept of femininity and domesticity,
based on a review of the mid-nineteenth century women travel writers who visited Macao and
China, in relation to and simultaneously attempting to reinterpret Edward Said’s concept of
Orientalism. My research begins by proving Western women’s involvement in Orientalist
culture which challenges masculine assumptions about women and imperialism. I attempt to
systematize the problem of Western representations of the Orient by taking Ana d’Almeida’s
diary, A Lady’s Visit to Manilla and Japan, as central reference. Her representations of Orient
women undercut the characteristics of what Said has ascribed to the Orientalist gaze.
However, Ana d’Almeida’s view of the Orient as respectable and domestic could not but
challenge Said’s idea of Orientalism. Orientalism becomes a diverse field in which meanings
are shifting. It is clear from Ana d’Almeida’s account that her images provide a challenge to
the Western dominant discursive traits. At the same time, they are complementing an
alternative discourse. The knowledge about the East that Said sees as fundamental to
imperialism is still there but the emphasis now is the threat of an alternative voice. Ana
d’Almeida’s account contributes to an alternative re-interpretation of Said’s Orientalism in
terms of gender and class. Considering women’s travel writing in this way enables us to see
double voices at work in colonial texts. In fact, Ana d’Almeida’s diary is a source of
conceptual classification in understanding the problem of the Western representations of the
Orient which consequently brings out some of the most powerful ideological forces that shape
the nineteenth-century Macao and China.
LEWIS, ALISON
Ida Pfeiffer’s travel writings about Madagascar’s ‘cruel’ queen Ranavalona I (1782-1861):
‘wicked woman’ or proud anticolonialist?
Alison Lewis, German Studies, School of Languages and Linguistics, University of
Melbourne
[email protected]
The Viennese-born woman Ida Pfeiffer was one of the first few European women to travel to
remote places of the world without the accompaniment of a man, and one of the 19th century’s
most popular travel writers. Between the years of 1842 and 1858 she undertook journeys to
Scandinavia and Iceland, the Holy Land, and on two round-the-world trips she visited China
and Madagascar. Her travelogues were popular for their astute observations of foreign
customs and stories of adventures in exotic locations but also valued by geographers such as
Alexander von Humboldt, who was one of her great supporters. On her last world trip to
Madagascar, where she contracted the fatal fever that was subsequently to kill her, she
encountered the infamous African queen Ranavalona I, the commoner queen of Madagascar,
who for years kept the island free of foreign invaders. Ranavalona, whose acts of cruelty
towards her local enemies as well as Europeans were already the stuff of legends, poses a
particular challenge to the ‘lady-traveller’ Pfeiffer. On the one hand the African queen lends
herself to the moralising, humanising discourses of Western colonialism and Pfeiffer cannot
resist essentialising the ruler as a prime example of African savagery. On the other hand,
Pfeiffer had little invested in the French and English traders and missionaries and her origins
in the Austro-Hungarian Empire possibly afforded her a different perspective on cultural
relativism. In this paper I will explore how her position on the periphery of the European
colonial project allows her interrogate the colonialism of other European nations. This paper
examines Pfeiffer’s representations of this ‘wicked woman’ to reflect on the question of
whether Pfeiffer merely reproduces colonial views of her day or whether her more
cosmopolitan position enables a different, more nuanced and sympathetic, as well as more
gendered account of the African female ‘other’.
MACCARTER, KENT
Home²: Displacement, Balance and the Replication of Identity
Kent MacCarter, Managing Editor, Cordite Poetry Review, Lead Editor, Joyful Strains
[email protected], [email protected]
Panel participants: Shalini Akhil, Michelle Aung Thin, Amy Espeseth, Meg Mundell
and Lily Yulianti
Expatriation, immigration, displacement: All of these events foist a significant acculturation
process upon the self for those who experience it. Adaptation into a new society – its
mandatory alterations to daily lives and emotional distancing – results in a ‘replication of
identity’, a self-prime who does not supplant the original, rather it is one who must coexist.
Travelling between the two identities posits an ideal place for the discussion of
personal/emotional mobility – not only via referencing the geographical starting points, but
the personalities each place has created. What is the ideal point – the fulcrum on which to
balance – when living not as one person, but two.
A collection of 27 non-fiction stories from foreign-born professional writers now living in and
working from Australia, Joyful Strains: Expats on Making Australia Home reflects the ethnic
diversity that has grown apace in the arts as it has in our national census; specifically in
novels produced, columns ran, poetry taken and short stories relished. Its publication will be a
critical engagement with what the modern Australian ‘voice’ is now and will become –what it
feels, how it thinks and what it speaks. The collection explores the authors’ experiences,
perils, joys and motivations in relocating to Australia and how their native heritage adds to,
juxtaposes against and refracts from within our dynamic Australian life.
Each of these writers has a personal story on this topic featured in Joyful Strains: Expats on
Making Australia Home (Affirm Press, 2013). … providing perspective from Croatia, USA,
Indonesia (via Japan), Burma (via Canada) and Fiji (via India).
With the book as a starting point, the discussion will confront ideals in personality, identity
and where the most effective balancing point is between the ‘native’ self and the ‘postacculturation’ self.
MANTLE HOOD, MADE
Contesting sonic space: Musical invasives and the forces of diatonicization in Balinese
children’s music
Made Mantle Hood, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne
[email protected] Gek Amanda, Dek Sri and other ‘stars’ in Bali’s post-Suharto media explosion not only
proliferate, through their children’s music videos, idealized notions of pan-Balineseness, but
inadvertently reorder the intervallic structure and tonal nuance of Bali’s many and diverse
tuning systems. As with other artists in modern urban Southeast Asian soundscapes, Bali’s
child stars dominate the sonic space once occupied by traditional folk songs performed on
instruments with their own diverse styles of tuning systems. In this music, composers write
harmonic progressions for folk melodies on Yamaha keyboards that accompany songs such as
the Maharani and Rick’s Records hits ‘Dadong Dauh’ and ‘Goak Maling Taluh’. Keyboards
also produce computer samples of diatonically tuned bronze gongs and bamboo flutes that
simulate, but do not replicate, local tuning systems.
Yet despite its tonality, contemporary Balinese children’s music successfully reinforces local
identity within the national music industry: songs are sung in Balinese not Indonesian; video
imagery promotes island life while avoiding national rhetoric; and song texts teach local
values such as respect for elders and devotion to Hinduism. But as local as the industry may
appear, it standardizes pitch reference. For generations, pitch reference and intervallic
structure have been sourced from locally tuned gamelan, individually crafted bamboo flutes,
or the spontaneity of an accapella singer. In this paper, I explore the contested sonic space
between equal temperament and the diversity of micro-tonal Balinese tuning systems.
Depicting diatonicization as a ‘musical invasive’, I interview musicians and record producers
and analyze scales to see how local tuning systems are being marginalized in the formative
genre of children’s music.
MANWARING, KAREN and NICOLETTOU, ANGELA
Modern Pilgrims - why the Camino is still calling
Karen Manwaring and Angela Nicolettou, Centre for Adult Education (CAE) and
Swinburne University of Technology.
[email protected]
This paper will explore some of the reasons for the current day resurgence in popularity of the
pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain. Based on the authors' two
pilgrimages on the Camino Frances and on discussion with participants in the Camino
workshops they have been running for 6 years at Melbourne's Centre for Adult Education, this
paper will link the authors' own experiences with those of pilgrims they have met - both 'on
the road' in Europe and here in their Melbourne workshops. These experiences, and references
to literature on the topic of modern pilgrimage, will form the basis for an exploration of the
current popularity of this medieval pilgrimage.
MAHTHUR, TAPSI
Persian Secretary, not Munshi: Mohan Lal in Kabul during the first Anglo-Afghan War
Tapsi Mathur, Department of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
[email protected]
My paper, titled “Persian Secretary, not Munshi: Mohan Lal in Kabul during the first AngloAfghan War,” looks at the travels of Mohan Lal, a Kashmiri Pundit from Delhi, across Sindh
and the Punjab into Afghanistan and parts of modern day Iran, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan
in the 1830s and 40s. I focus particularly on his stay in Kabul in 1841-42, when the British
have been expelled from Kabul, and Mohan Lal takes refuge in the Persian quarters of the city
to pass on intelligence to the British force stationed in Jellalabad, some eighty miles to the
east of Kabul. I offer a reading of the almost daily letters he writes from Kabul to Jellalabad,
and putting these alongside a later self-published account of this period, I will try and
understand how he fashions himself as an ideal colonial servant. His unique location in Kabul
allows him to call on dense networks of information to not only facilitate the re-entry of the
British into Kabul and thus to fully inhabit that mantle of colonial servant, but also to expand
what it means to be a loyal servant as he gives advice on the future directions of British
intervention in Afghanistan. Mohan Lal writing in Kabul during the war generates a rich
archive through which the intersection of empire, travel and collaboration/self-fashioning may
be explored.
MCGREGOR, ANDREW
The Road Movie in Reverse: Retracing the Migrant Journey in Tony Gatlif’s Exils (2004)
Andrew McGregor, French Studies, School of Languages & Linguistics, University of
Melbourne
[email protected]
This paper will explore the cultural resonance in France of Tony Gatlif’s Exils (2004). It will
argue that the film represents a road movie in reverse: a deliberate shift by the director, and by
the film’s protagonists, away from the traditional ‘centre’ – Paris – to the periphery of French
national historical consciousness – Algeria. In so doing, Gatlif suggests that in order for his
protagonists to arrive at self-fulfilment, they must flee the centrifugal pull of Paris, and with it
French integrationism, and embark on the reverse of the migrant journey, venturing on foot,
by train and by boat, often as stowaways, across borders and potentially threatening
landscapes to find their centre at the periphery. In considering the cultural significance of this
reworking of the road-movie genre, and this unconventional repositioning of the French
capital, the paper will examine Gatlif’s claims to cultural authenticity as a French-Algerian
auteur, and will explore the dynamics of Western exoticism represented in French critical
responses to the film.
MCKAY, LAURA
Lying about Cambodia: fiction as contact
Laura McKay, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
[email protected]
At the turn of the new millennium, might it be possible to imagine another without doing
violence to one’s object of description?
Shameem Black, Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late TwentiethCentury Novels, 2010.
‘Lying about Cambodia: fiction as contact’ is a 5000 word creative/critical paper (excerpted
from my MA thesis) that investigates whether writing fiction about an ‘other’ culture should
be construed as contact or representational violence. The paper advances the concept of the
fiction writer as tourist, using the terms ‘contact zones’ (Mary Louise Pratt), ‘transgressive
texts’ (Shelly Fisher Fishkin) and ‘border crossing fiction’ (Shameem Black) to expand on
preconceived notions of representing ‘others’. The creative component of this paper is a 2000
word short story titled ‘Massage 8000’ which functions as an example of writer-as-tourist.
The concept of ‘contact zones’ was developed by Pratt in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation (1992) to address the ‘vast, discontinuous, and overdetermined history of
imperial meaning-making’ (Imperial Eyes 4) of centuries of colonial invasion and domination
in many parts of the world. In the face of a powerful tradition of postcolonial theory, contact
zones open up a space in discourse that address the advent of globalised travel culture,
whereby people from colonial nations are now tourists to the countries their nations might
have once invaded. Writers producing fiction about different cultures are also travellers and
their work requires a discourse. While their explorations have long been cast aside by
postcolonial theorists as examples of ‘representational violence’, this paper employs contact
theories to discuss the place of the writer as traveller in the world of fiction and the effects
these explorations may have on the cultures they write about.
MELVILLE, GEORGIA
Identity strategies and consciousness shifts of Sanmiguelense Mixtec youth in
transnational and transcultural spaces
Georgia Melville, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana – Iztapalapa, Mexico
[email protected]
The indigenous pueblo of San Miguel Cuevas in Oaxaca is a community that crosses borders
and exists in many places - both real and imagined. This is largely due to its high rate of
migration. Even though over half of the community’s population resides at any given time in
other parts Mexico and in California, and are increasingly negotiating their belonging into
new and multiple spaces, many members continue to practice their community’s cultural,
social and political traditions, and continue to retain strong community ties. In this way, most
individuals belong to the pueblo, even though they are geographically and culturally disperse.
For these reasons, San Miguel Cuevas has become a transnational community.
As a result community members, particularly the transnational second generation, have
become both accidental and purposeful practitioners of transnational and transcultural life.
This paper explores different strategies used by the community’s youth in San Miguel
Cuevas, Oaxaca and in Fresno, California to operate in this reality of constant mobility. To
do this, the paper borrows cultural studies and feminist concepts of double consciousness,
agency and situated knowledge. These community shifts and strategies are supported with
ethnographic examples.
MICAL, THOMAS
Airports for Music: Deleuze, Eno, and Ambient Architecture
Thomas Mical, School of Architecture, Rensselear Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA
[email protected]
This work draws from the theory and practice of ambient music, as initiated by Brian Eno
with his pivotal Music for Airports (1978), to rework the performative ambient sound-space
continuum back towards theory. The goal is to identify a (neo-minimalist) spatial theory
within ambient music theory and practice that would allow one to design an airport as an
ambient space somewhere between a "smooth space" and as a diagrammatic abstractmachine, from an origin in ambient music theory. This work pulls from the recent history of
the senses of space, from 20thC theories of Lefebvre and into the contemporary possibilities
of Deleuzian architecture, where ambient environments perform as both a practice and as a
promise of a further enriched world. To make an airport from music, I propose to utilize the
Deleuzian text Logic of Sense (1969) to initially disconnect the 2 orders of sense that are
fused in ambient spaces (sense as percept and sense as concept) as a way of calibrating the
minimal perceptible difference which is the root of ambient music and ambient architecture .
This hypothetical airport for music could include some recent ambient sensory technologies
(invisible but known through senses) to produce new intensities, durations, effects, and
differentiated thresholds, or could simply be a mute container of music not yet recognized.
MIKOLA, MASA
Outside Bonegilla: responses to the construction of a contained nation
Maša Mikola, Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia
[email protected],
Around three hundred thousand displaced people and migrants passed through the migrant
reception centre at Bonegilla after the WW2 before they permanently settled in Australia.
Bonegilla was an initiation place for new migrants or “new Australians”. It became a
materialisation of an ambiguous land ‘in between’, a transient space where the mundane was
lived outside of ordinary conditions. The memory of Bonegilla lives on with many of those
whose first taste of Australia was this somewhat barren, borderline place, along with their
descendants who never directly experienced it. Block 19 of Bonegilla is today the only
remaining section of a once much larger space and has recently become heritage listed. It has
become included into the national narrative of Australia.
Bonegilla holds many meanings. It is a symbol of foreignness, uprootedness, struggle to
belong to what Australia represents, to the hopes it holds and promises it makes. It is a
commemorative space for people in search of new homes. Bonegilla marks a set of very
personal journeys.
The paper follows the story of post-war nation building in Australia and the ways of
incorporating new immigrant faces into the national narrative. Whilst the official narrative of
Bonegilla was geared towards showing happy, grateful and obedient migrants – among them
often children – there is also another, different history of Bonegilla. The paper illuminates this
alternative, ‘outside’ story of Bonegilla, which provides a different reading of the place and
construction of a nation. This is done through the examination of three folders of archival
material reporting on noncompliant behaviour within the camp, and the way Australian
officials interpreted this behaviour. Through these ‘responses of the border’ to the
construction of a contained nation, the paper presents an alternative perspective to the
narrative built around the ‘migration nation’.
MURRAY, ZOE
Postcards from ‘Paradise’: Lord Howe holidays from 1788 to the present
Zoe Murray, University of Sydney
[email protected]
Lord Howe Island boasts an impressive range of drawcards for today’s tourist: the world’s
southernmost coral reef, the world’s tallest rock stack, World Heritage status since 1982, one
of Australia’s best day walks, a home to two endemic species brought back from the brink of
extinction and even a 2004 award for Australia’s cleanest beach. Intriguingly, many features
of the archetypal modern holiday are conspicuously absent: nightclubs, shopping centres,
mobile phone reception and droves of other holidaymakers. However, it is not only in recent
years that Lord Howe Island has appealed to travellers. From the time First Fleet officers felt
the Lord Howe sand between their toes, they marvelled at its Arcadian beauty and reminisced
of ‘the Golden Age as described by Ovid.’ This paper will explore the appeal of this particular
Island holiday, which continues to reinvent itself from one era to another. Drawing from a
growing literature on Australian tourism, the Lord Howe holiday will be placed in a national
context, as a product of wider developments as well as the Island’s own distinctive
characteristics. At the same time, conclusions drawn from this original study of Lord Howe
holidays will enable a stimulating re-evaluation of existing perspectives on the Australian
holiday.
NICHOLLS, MARK & WHITE, ANTHONY
Post War Recovery, Art and Cultural Tourism: Italy 1943 – 1964
Mark Nicholls & Anthony White, School of Culture and Communication, University of
Melbourne
[email protected]
Considering post World War Two Italy, this paper investigates the way art, artists and cultural
tourism worked in parallel to military, political and economic strategies, to define security
and shape prosperity. Post war Italy was a devastated and divided country. We argue that
prominent in its U.S. aid-based recovery was the role played by the arts and related
experiences of cultural tourism that accompanied it.
Alongside the official cultures of domestic and foreign governments operating in Italy during
the period, a range of educational, artistic and cultural academies, institutions, festivals,
events, collaborations, as well as individual artists and cultural producers were also active on
the scene. Cities such as Rome, Venice and Milan housed local modernist, avant-garde and
neo realist artists, filmmakers, writers and designers such as Fontana, Manzoni, Visconti,
Rossellini, Moravia and Carlo Levi. Rome also attracted well known foreign literary figures
such as Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas and Aldous Huxley, avant-garde artists including
Salvador Dali, Asgen Jorn, Roberto Matta, Wilfredo Lam, Henry Moore, Robert
Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, art promoters such as Peggy Guggenheim and Irene Brin
and prominent filmmakers as diverse as David Lean, Orson Welles, Ingrid Bergman, Joe
Mankiewicz, William Wyler and Jean Luc Godard as well as important institutions such as
the French and American academies, foreign news desks and the major Hollywood studies.
As a result, Rome, along with Milan and Venice which had similarly vibrant, international
cultural communities at this time, became cosmopolitan centres of creative and cultural
activity which, far from simply reproducing the imperatives of the victorious western
superpower, gave rise to a fractured, multiple but fundamentally stable society with a
dynamic cosmopolitan energy which had a lasting effect not only on contemporary
international art and entertainment cultures, but also, as we argue, on international perceptions
of what a settled post war European country might look like.
There are many reasons why post war Italy housed such a large, diverse and cosmopolitan
creative community. Its traditional cultures of tourism, however, impress themselves as of
paramount importance. Tourists themselves, these creative artists and institutions played a
large role in the fabrication of the myths of La dolce vite in Italy which we argue were, and
remain, fundamental both to Italian tourism and to critical readings of cultural tourism
generally.
O’BRIEN, LUCIE
Mobility and Australian cultural identity in Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney
Lucie O’Brien, School of Culture & Communication, University of Melbourne
[email protected]
Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney employs various forms of mobility to represent
three distinct visions of Australian cultural identity: an anachronistic bush tradition, a
cosmopolitan bourgeois culture and a radical form of utopian socialism. The misogynous
Michael Baguenault embarks on solitary journeys through outback Australia, in search of an
elusive communion with the land. With his madness and eventual death, Stead suggests that
such journeys are futile, representing the sterility of Australia’s masculinist bush tradition. By
contrast, Baruch Mendelssohn and Joseph Baguenault indulge in urban flâneurie in order to
escape the parochialism of Australian culture. Enjoying the spectacle of Sydney’s lavish
shops, elaborate amusements and well-dressed women, they experience urban mobility as a
liberating aspect of transnational modernist culture.
Despite her sympathies with this cosmopolitan vision, Stead also associates this form of
flâneurie with consumerism and a leisured, bourgeois existence. In this respect, it jars
uncomfortably with her utopian vision of an egalitarian working class culture. Accordingly
she sustains a contrapuntal theme of vagrancy, in the form of political activist Catherine
Baguenault. Unlike the leisurely sauntering of Baruch and Joseph, Catherine’s homelessness
and continuous, restless movement illustrate her rejection of bourgeois values and her
passionate pursuit of socialist ideals.
With these conflicting images of mobility, Stead illustrates three distinct visions of Australian
culture, one parochial and nationalist, one cosmopolitan and transnational, and a third,
utopian vision, at once local and internationalist in scope. These contrasting tropes of
flâneurie, outback wandering and urban vagrancy reveal Stead’s modernist desire to transcend
her Australian identity, but at the same time, her commitment to socialist politics and her
materialist concern with working people’s lives.
O’DWYER, DOMINIC
Altruistic holidays, Colonialism and the Desire to Help: Volunteer Tourism in Latin
America
Dominic O'Dwyer, The University of Melbourne
[email protected]
Travelling around the world, visiting strange and exotic places has long been a rite of passage
for many middle class Australians. In many cases, students like me will save up hard-earned
money to spend on a six-month, or even year long, adventure, instead of buying a car or
saving for a deposit on a house. We are often driven by a desire to explore the world, find out
what it is all about or even just to put off full-time work for a little longer. For a lot of young
travellers (we generally don’t like to be called tourists) these desires merge with a nagging
feeling that we should also be doing something to confront the injustices we see in the world.
Volunteer tourism presents itself as a solution to this dilemma, combining the best elements
of travel with a volunteering experience that ‘makes a difference’. Latin America has become
an enticing travel destination for backpackers and it also boasts a disproportionate share of
volunteer projects. The phenomenon has been broadly well received by academics, with the
vast majority of studies focussing on the perspective of volunteers and the benefits associated
with the experience. At the same time there has been an almost complete absence of academic
work exploring the attitudes of host communities and the effects that different projects have
upon them. The underlying premise is that that young Australians can and should help
different communities in Latin America and that these communities require this ‘help’. This
thesis seeks to understand and deconstruct the discursive space in which volunteer tourism
occurs. This context allows the narrative of helping, presented by the organisations involved
and often the volunteers themselves, to go largely unchallenged.
OUSTON, ADAM
The Melancholic Orient: Robert Dessaix's 'Landscape of Forgetting'
Adam Ouston, School of English, Journalism and European Languages, University of
Tasmania
[email protected] Arabesques (2008) opens with an infamous scene of carnal solicitation involving Oscar
Wilde, André Gide and an Algerian boy in a café in nineteenth-century Algiers. Wilde takes
Gide by the arm and asks, “Dear, would you like the little musician?” To which, in a
“choking voice,” Gide replies, “Yes” (21), announcing a moment of ambivalent liberation and
self-realisation. Throughout Arabesques, North Africa is cast as a “landscape of forgetting”
(31), to which individuals from the West travel (and travelled) in order to escape the
repressive cultural regimes of home. Following in Gide’s footsteps, Dessaix’s North Africa is
a clichéd, eroticised space characterised by a homoerotic Orientalism in which the traveller
can “forget” himself and explore “other” regions of his psyche. However, Arabesques also
presents a counter-image, or rather an anti-image, of the Orient. Although Dessaix searches
the Orient for an experience of “Unmediated being” (223), when he finds it there is no means
by which he can understand it; the ramifications of this are that this landscape causes Dessaix
to “barely recognise” (193) himself. Moreover, in this state of suspension, Dessaix discovers
that the only way to anchor himself in this landscape is via the clichés and tropes of
Orientalist discourse–that is, by rendering the landscape familiar once again. The alternative,
as I demonstrate, is silence. As cultural criticism, Arabesques redecorates the already
garlanded East in a manner that is almost ironic, for the text’s (not to mention the traveller’s)
self-consciousness of the politics of Orientalism is instrumental in depicting the encounter
between East and West. Increasingly aware of the imperial ground on which it walks,
Arabesques domesticates the Maghreb via a vocabulary of the staged and the exotic that
renders the Orient seductively picturesque (hence the “landscape of forgetting”) but at the
same time deflates the potential for an experience of the Other, limited as it is to colonial
discourse. In this way the Maghreb is both seductive and repulsive, and Arabesques
strategically turns Orientalist discourse against itself via a “denuding of the imperial
armature” that is “exhibitionist” in its cultural criticism as opposed to non-repressive and nonmanipulative (LeHardy Sweet 210). Faced with the ensuing silence, Dessaix confirms his
own sense of cultural dislocation and rebellion, and thus these clichés are shown to lend
themselves, ironically, to representations of profound and complex psychic conditions.
PAUK, BARBARA
“A Ramble among the haunts of Paul and Virginia”: Nineteenth-Century Literary Tourism
Barbara Pauk, European Languages and Studies, School of Humanities, University of
Western Australia
[email protected]
In the 1830s and 1840s, the press and travel accounts report that many travellers to Mauritius
– where ships en route to India replenished provisions - visited the tombs of Paul and
Virginia. The two main characters of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s bestselling
pastoral novel Paul et Virginie (1788) were well known in France and England. This paper
argues that Paul and Virginia and its characters was appropriated by English readers and
became meaningful in English culture. This appropriation can be read as an act of intellectual
colonisation and compared to the English colonisation of the island itself. Similarly to British
translators and authors who rewrote Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s text, the numerous visitors,
engraved their own names and comments on the monuments’ blank surfaces and chipped off
fragments to take home as mementos. These practices and palimpsests demonstrate the
importance of both, the text and the characters in English imagination. Paul and Virginia were
more than fictional characters. They represented, and were used to reinforce, aspects of
British ideologies of the time. Virginia’s tomb became a monument to ideal femininity.
PERKINS, ANITA
East German Travel Ideals: Two responses to a space of enforced immobility
Anita Perkins, Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Otago, New
Zealand
[email protected]
By the beginning of the 1980s, the vast majority of East Germans have been trapped behind
the Berlin Wall for twenty years in a society with strictly enforced travel restrictions. This
paper, a comparative analysis of two travel texts from a cultural mobilities perspective, sheds
light on why Fernweh, or the strong desire to travel elsewhere, is a powerful and widespread
sentiment in the extreme political context of the German Democratic Republic. Specifically, I
draw on the responses of two East German figures who both yearn to travel beyond the East
German border: First is the protagonist of Erich Loest’s novel, Zwiebelmuster (1985), an
historian and writer called Hans-Georg Haas who makes numerous applications to the
Ministry of Culture to try and secure a travel visa. This text is largely informed by the
autobiographical experiences of Loest, who is imprisoned and sentenced to a writing ban
(Schreibverbot). Second, is Friedrich Christian Delius’ novella, Der Spaziergang von Rostock
nach Syrakus (1995) [The Journey/Excursion from Rostock to Syracuse]. This narrative
recounts the story of waiter Paul Gompitz (based on real life figure, Klaus Müller), who
escapes East Germany by sea in order to emulate the 1802 journey of his childhood hero,
Johann Gottfried Seume.
Over the course of both journeys, the idea of travel becomes more important than the
destination itself. For example, Haas thinks, “It’s solely about the journey”/”um Reise
schlechthin” (Loest 1985, 176), and Müller views his mobility “as my human right”/“als mein
Menschenrecht” (Der Spiegel 1995, 176). Accordingly, I compare and reflect on the
motivations, challenges and outcomes of Haas’s and Gompitz’s/Müller’s Fernweh, in order to
try and define the seemingly paradoxical notion of an East German travel ideal.
Delius, Friedrich Christian. Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus: Erzählung.
Germany: Rowohlt Verlag, 1995.
Loest, Erich. Zwiebelmuster: Roman. Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1985.
Der Spiegel. “Spaziergang Nach Syrakus”. Der Spiegel 30, 24. July. 1995. Web. 3 Feb. 2012.
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-9204258.html
PYM, TINONEE
Guided by Empire: Self, Sisterhood and the Politics of Travel
Tinonee Pym, School of Culture & Communication, University of Melbourne
[email protected]
Over the last two decades, the genre of the women’s travel guidebook has emerged as a
product of the contemporary democratization of travel, as well as the convergence of feminist
and popular discourses in regard to the significance of mobility for women. Situated at the
discursive nexus of cultural imperialism, feminism, and the rhetoric of ‘self-development’,
this nascent genre merits a close critical analysis for its construction of the Western woman
traveller as exemplary global citizen.
In this genre, the gendering of the travelling subject elides other markers of difference
between women globally, imposing a form of cultural imperialism through the seemingly
benign discourse of ‘global sisterhood’. Drawing on the work of Mary Louise Pratt, this paper
constitutes an attempt to explore how the genre works to both reinscribe and obscure imperial
power relations through the discursive production of the ‘woman traveller’.
In this paper, I explore how the ‘difference’ of female subjectivity is produced through an
emphasis on autobiographical narrative and the alignment of the woman traveller with the
figure of the writer, through nostalgic references to icons of popular feminist history. I also
examine how the discourse of the ‘inner journey’, coded as unique to female subjectivity, is
used to construct the ‘world’ as a blank page for self-constitution. The masculine conventions
of travel writing are thus rewritten through the interpellation of Western female subjects
through consumerism and liberal feminist rhetoric.
In turn, I show how the discourse of ‘global sisterhood’ assists in validating this Western
project of self-transformation through ‘consuming otherness’, whereby contact with the
‘other’ is viewed as a way to access a more ‘authentic’ version of the self. This paper
interrogates the genre’s elaboration of Western female subjectivity which sheds light on
broader cultural discourses regarding postcolonial representational strategies, consuming
otherness and transnational feminism.
RAVI, SRILATA
Enigmatic Readjustments: Home and the City in Francophone Post-colonial Return
Narratives
Srilata Ravi, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
[email protected]
This paper examines the new ideals for literary engagement that underpin post-colonial return
narratives published in the last decade. It will focus specifically on Haitian-Canadian writer
Danny Laferrière’s, L’énigme du retour (2009) and Malagasy-French-writer Michèle
Rakotoson’s Juillet au pays-Chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar (2007). Returning to their
island homes after several years, both writers have to cope, not only with their sense of
personal estrangement, but also with cityscapes metaphorically erased by civil wars, political
violence and economic catastrophes. Francophone postcolonial return narratives have
undergone significant conceptual shifts since the publication of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un
retour au pays natal (1949). They have become less militant and idealistic about their
transformative potential, and more self-reflexive and unorthodoxically transgressive in their
creation of textual “homelands”. In the light of this observation, how do Laferrière’s and
Rakotoson’s textual voyages of displacement negotiate between the expatriate-tourist’s sense
of cultural alienation and his/her “burden of commitment” (Cazenave and Célérier 2011)?
This paper will attempt to answer this question through a reading of the “absent city” as
“home” in L’énigme du retour and Juillet au pays-Chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar (Port
au Prince and Antananarivo respectively). It will demonstrate how Michèle Rakotoson’s
conception of “réajustement permanent” (“continual readjustment”) and Danny Lafferrière’s
“retour énigmatique” (“enigmatic return”) open up an innovative aesthetic of commitment in
Francophone post-colonial travel writings.
REES, ANNE
Stepping through the Silver Screen: Australian Women Encounter America, 1930s-50s
Anne Rees, School of History, College of Arts and Social Sciences, The Australian
National University, Canberra
[email protected]
In mid-twentieth century Australia, America was both intensely familiar and strangely
remote. Mass-produced American culture – including Hollywood films, advertising and
celebrity magazines – permeated daily life, yet the United States itself was rarely considered
as a travel destination. Many women undertook pilgrimages to Britain – the ‘Mother Country’
– or gravitated towards the Old World refinement of Europe, but the United States lacked
such familial or historic resonances and therefore relatively few Australians sought to cross
the Pacific. Yet the international clout of America proved magnetic, and by accident,
invitation or directive, a growing number of antipodeans found themselves Stateside. Once
there, these visitors often struggled to reconcile the America they now encountered with an
America previously accessed through the silver screen, and this paper examines how three
women found their travel experiences mediated by previous exposure to the exported culture
of Hollywood. In the 1930s journalist Marjorie Quinn debunked the mythology of Hollywood
but also reproduced its vocabulary of glamour and celebrity, hinting at the heady intoxication
with American modernity inspired by the first decade of the ‘talkies’. Twenty years later,
however, travel writer Peggy Warner was reassured by the divergence between the glamorous
representations of America and her more banal personal experience, pointing to anxieties
about the pernicious effects of American affluence and materialism. Meanwhile, her
contemporary, Columbia student Ruth Fink, was horrified to discover an underclass of
citizens whose plight was elided within the white, affluent world of cinema, a response
implying that Hollywood itself was disingenuously banal. Taken together, these examples
suggest that three decades of film-going had rendered Australian women travellers
increasingly inured to the delights of American modernity, prompting an initial infatuation
with its promised pleasures to subside into a more measured appraisal of a headlong thrust
into the new.
ROBINSON, SHANNA
Nostalgia, Journeying and Imagination: An Analysis of Guidebooks to Experimentation
Shanna Robinson, Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney
[email protected]
Travel guidebooks are often the first port of call when considering a vacation. They are also
often taken along when we travel to ‘elsewhere’ – something physical and tangible that
journeys alongside us. And they are a reference when years later, fact and memory blur,
indistinctly. But more than just a useful and useable material object, guidebooks invite us on a
different kind of journey. Evocative textual descriptions of otherness and difference abound in
travel guidebooks: photos of exotic cultures, people, nature, offer a static glimpse of
possibility. Indeed, in a sense, travellers have often visited the destinations that they holiday
in, long before they actually make the physical trip to the place.
While the idea that reading guidebooks and travel fiction can constitute a journey in its own
right is not an entirely new idea (see Morkham & Staiff, 2002), the multitude of possibilities
this opens up within tourism scholarship is yet to be examined in any depth. Drawing on
Urry’s (2007) conceptualization of imaginative travel and mobilities, this paper will present
the argument that travellers can use guidebooks to enable an imaginative exploration of the
possibilities of experience, choreographing performances whose enactment may not actually
ever take place. I will draw on examples from The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental
Travel (Antony & Henry, 2005), A Mis-Guide to Anywhere (Wrights&Sites, 2006) and An
Exeter Mis-Guide (Wrights&Sites, 2003), discussing how these unconventional guides
engage with the idea that to travel or journey extends far beyond the physical, while
highlighting the themes of nostalgia, memory and imagination. By framing the interaction of
travellers with guidebooks as a form of imaginative travel, I hope to articulate the ways in
which the process is mobile and fluid, and how this imaginary process in the case of nonconventional guides is applicable more broadly to travel guidebooks and to tourism
behaviour.
ROSALDO, RENATO
Travelers by other names
Renato Rosaldo, Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Cultural and Social
Anthropology, New York University
Bali has been a magnet for prominent ethnographers: Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson,
Miguel Covarrubias, Clifford Geertz, Fredrik Barth. This paper views them as members of a
bohemian expatriate community that has dwelt in Bali, merging the subject positions of
ethnographer and traveler. The paper will consider ethnographic, visual, and operatic works
by and about the expats in Bali.
RYAN, SIMON
Mobility, Memory and Dwelling in the Photo-Notebooks of Gerhard Roth
Simon Ryan, Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Otago
[email protected]
In the Photo-Notebooks (Fotonotizbücher) of the Austrian writer, journalist and photographer,
Gerhard Roth, the gesture of photography, the desire to travel as a literary tourist, the need to
reflect in stillness on the images appropriated, and the process of literary creation intersect
both consciously and unconsciously. Roth’s work opens up an interesting field in which to
explore tensions between literary Kopfreisen (imaginary or armchair travels), Kopfbilder
(images in memory) and the many thousands of photographic images that he has made while
travelling abroad or investigating Vienna or the Austrian hinterland. Many of these
photographs have been exhibited and published in book form over the last three decades. At
the centre of Roth’s photographic work is the figure of the observer, aware of its own
fallibilty, mortality and isolation but also of its need to communicate with others. At different
times in his career, Roth has reflected on this figure in its various guises as memorialist,
voyeur, collector, documentarist, archivist and social commentator. From this multiplylayered subjectivity radiate the numerous trajectories of the desire to engage in the
photographic gesture that have continually prompted his mobility in diverse forms. But for
Roth there is always also a sense of returning “home”, of dwelling in a particular place and
time, that he never quite abandons: recently he has written of his many photographic
expeditions to Venice that they are intended “to build up an archive for the time when I won’t
be able to travel any more”. This paper will examine with reference to recent developments
in the theory of photography and mobility studies some of the tensions between mobility,
memory and dwelling in Roth’s literary-photographic project.
SAIDI, HABIB
Traveling into the Maze of the Collective Self: the Rediscovery of Tunis after the Jasmine
Revolution
Habib Saidi, Department of History, Université Laval, Canada
[email protected]
According to high-profile media coverage in the international tourism markets, the Arab
spring has paralyzed tourism in countries where it has lasted for more than a year. However,
the facts on the ground in these countries tell a different story. Although they confirm the
gloomy nature of this period due to the downturn in international tourist arrivals, they
nonetheless announce the emergence of a new tourism which could become the most popular
product in the region. I am thinking of what could be called revolutionary tourism, or the
tourism of social and political demands, which will be studied here from the angle of the
major events underlying the revolutions and the emblematic places where they took place.
Indeed, based on preliminary results from field research in Tunis after the January 14, 2011
revolution, I will consider in this presentation the renewed tourism approach of the city of
Tunis as the capital of the Arab Spring and a place of non-stop political activism since the
outbreak of this event. In keeping with Michel de Certeau’s perspective, I will focus on the
urban landscape, including the street, as a palimpsest on which people are recording the city’s
new history. My reflection will focus on cultural activities such as street exhibits, book
festivals, urban entertainment, etc. which, alternating almost daily with other political parades
and protests, invite Tunisians to explore the city as if visiting it for the first time. In other
words, these activities encourage Tunisians to see their city and themselves with new eyes by
traveling into the maze of the collective self. This self, through the influence of the Jasmine
Revolution, is increasingly embodied by the places they are rediscovering, appropriating,
monumentalizing and transforming into tourist attractions, for themselves and for others.
SANADA, SATOSHI
Belonging: Theorising transnational identities in contemporary Australia through a study
of migrant teacher experiences
Satoshi Sanada, School of Education, James Cook University
[email protected]
My presentation is informed by the PhD study that I am currently conducting on migrant
teachers’ experiences in Australia. My interviews with teachers highlight the limitations of
existing theoretical perspectives (e.g., critical race theory, postcolonial theory), and indicate
the potential spaces for new modes of analysis, such as post-race theory. Using the narratives
of their relocation to Australia and teaching in Australian schools, my aim is to provide a
snapshot of transnational identities and experiences in Australia that can inform contemporary
debates on cultural hybridity and cultural diversity.
SCHORCH, PHILIPP
Te Papa Travel Stories: Contact, Translation, Dialogue
Philipp Schorch, Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia
and the Pacific, Deakin University, Melbourne
[email protected]
Tourism has evolved as a major political, economic, social, cultural and environmental
phenomenon with a global scope. It is an industry with far reaching impacts on any sphere of
life in any part of the world. In fact, the field of tourism is inextricably linked to the dynamics
of identity formations, articulations and contestations. Although it has experienced an
explosion of significance over the last decades through major technological advances in
communication and transportation, it is important to note that tourism as a particular kind of
travel is not a modern invention. Instead, the current era only witnesses new dimensions of a
historically grounded human process.
Museums have always been entangled with the cultural praxis of ‘traveling cultures’ and
‘contact zones’ as particular places and spaces of encounter. ‘Cosmopolitanised’ contacts
have shaped the cultural institution ‘museum’, which inherently depends on the
contextualisation, de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation of cultures, people and
objects through different forms of travel and cross-cultural engagements. Tourism and
museums, as interrelated fields of human action, produce arenas which host the clash of
cultures.
This paper approaches tourism as particular cultural praxis and medium for the dynamic
interaction and transfer between cultural worlds of meaning. The Museum of New Zealand Te
Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) is investigated as a specific ‘contact zone’ of cross-cultural travel
encounters. Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to Te Papa, this paper
offers a hermeneutic exploration of travel experiences as interpretive engagements and
discursive negotiations. These are stories of cross-cultural contact, translation and dialogue.
SCOTT, DAVID & SPEARRITT, PETER
The Imperial Sky: trajectory and destination in airline posters
David Scott, Trinity College, Dublin, & Peter Spearritt, University of Queensland
[email protected]
[email protected]
Most airline posters combine a pictorial image and a fragment of text which usually includes
the name of the airline, its logo and any slogan associated with it. Additionally, in the early
days of commercial flying (from the 1920s to the 1940s) focused on here, it was usual to
include the image of an aircraft or flying boat. This aircraft image would either be sited in the
sky of the advertised destination or on approach to it or at the point of take off; alternatively,
it would itself provide the context from which the destination or the approach to it could be
viewed. This paper will focus in particular on the use in early airline posters of these two
indexical strategies to show both the tension between information and desire inherent in the
poster image and the way the inclusion of the aircraft as viewed, or as vantage point for
viewing, became an important part of the poster’s persuasive strategy.
The paper will also
investigate the way airline travel posters, like other western representations of exotic
destinations or objects of desire, are guilty of the essentialisation that seems unavoidable
when one culture attempts to represent another, especially for commercial purposes. From a
post-colonial perspective, some of the posters studied here appear ideologically problematic
in the way they glamorize, caricature, falsify or misrepresent aspects of the target culture.
They might by the same token be judged guilty of orientalism as defined by Edward Said
(1979), in that they represent another culture better to possess, exploit or dominate it in
commercial, political or other ideological terms. The main western airline posters studied
(Imperial Airways/BOAC; Air Orient/Air France) were founded as part of an imperialist
project whereby the rapid movement of people, post, goods and other commercial elements
strengthened the power and influence of western nations in other parts of the world, in
particular Africa and the Middle and Far East. In this way, western modes of representation
become part of the imperialist strategy, strengthening its persuasiveness by the very
attractiveness of the propaganda it produced.
SEXTON, AMIE
Bordeaux Wine: maintaining the image
Amie Sexton, French Studies, University of Melbourne
[email protected]
In the world of wine, Bordeaux is considered by many to be the finest producer of red wines
in the world. While this view is contestable, there is no doubt that the status of Bordeaux wine
in the global market ranks it amongst the top few regions. The prestigious image of this wine
is presented by the châteaux and digested by consumers all over the world, who are prepared
to pay large amounts of money for this illustrious product. It is a complex image based on
historical value, the notion of terroir, an official classification, trading traditions, and
represents a social hierarchy as much as an indicator of wine quality.
This paper discusses the image of Bordeaux wine and its importance in marketing the region
and its products for tourism. Focussing on the grands crus of the Médoc region north of
Bordeaux it investigates how and why this reputation is employed in the tourist industry: from
marketing tool and marker of quality to social symbol and indicator of taste.
SHANNON, WILLIAM
Broadened Horizons? Australian and New Zealand Students searching for authentic
experiences in Europe
William Shannon, Australian National University
[email protected] Hans Georg Gadamer asserted: “a horizon is not a rigid frontier, but something that moves
with one and invites one to move further.” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 217). The limit of
our existing understanding of the world is determined at least in part by the degree to which
our existence has been confined to a particular geographic place characterised by a distinct
culture and history. To spend a study period abroad as part of a university education at home
provides the opportunity for the individual student to experience and learn about a different
place. It provides the opportunity to gain an insight into its culture and history. And in this
way, it provides the opportunity to learn more about the world and to develop a broader
horizon. The concept of a broader horizon is both a travel and educational ideal, albeit one
that is often referred to without being given any further meaning. This paper seeks to unpack
this concept in more detail, before asking what actually happens through the course of
spending a study period abroad. In doing so, it focuses in particular on the issue of
authenticity of experience. It concludes by presenting some preliminary findings from a
doctoral project that seeks to tell the stories of a particular cohort of presently mobile
undergraduate students who normally study in and are the long-term residents of either
Australia or New Zealand and who are spending at least a semester on exchange in Europe.
SMITH, KRISTEN D.
Taking Flight for Health: Neocolonialism and Medical tourism in India
Kristen D. Smith, Centre for Health and Society, University of Melbourne
[email protected]
The past two decades have seen the extensive privatisation and marketisation of health care in
an ever reaching number of developing nations. With its heaving population, India is weighed
down with issues of widespread poverty and cavernous divides along the interwoven lines of
caste, class and religion. Local populations face critical health issues, where social, cultural
and economic inequities are widening in terms of access, cost and quality of health care. In
this context, the private health care sector is experiencing virtually unfettered expansion
alongside a flailing and underfunded public sector. High hopes are being placed upon the
emergence of medical tourism, or what many in the industry are calling ‘medical value
travel’. The idea of governments and corporations pursuing commercial health for
comparatively wealthy foreigners in a country where almost a quarter of the local population
go untreated for illness due to indebtedness may seem incongruous on external examination,
but forceful arguments of economic rationalism drive both local and international support of
this industry. This paper will discuss, from a critical medical anthropology perspective, the
political economy of India’s medical tourism industry across local, national and international
levels. It will draw on ethnographic material from the recent multi-sited, hospital study I
carried out in Mumbai over the course 2009-2010, in five different private hospitals in the
city. The paper explores the ways in which a local study of biomedical tourism provides a
window on the wider processes of health care service commercialisation in the macro-context
of the capitalist world-system, and its inevitable links to neocolonialism.
SMITH, TAMMY
The journey into liminality
Tammy R Smith, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne
[email protected]
The life changing claim related to volunteer travel experiences has been featured in the
literature relating to both short term mission (STM) and volunteer tourism (VT). Previous
Thailand Mission Awareness Tour (TMAT) participants have reported their experience as life
changing. What is it that brings about this claim or change?
TMAT participants took part in an ethnographic study whilst living their intercultural
volunteer tour program experience Interviews, journals, participant observation and a focus
group were analysed to better understand the intricacies of their journey. These methods aided
in identifying liminality as an important aspect of the journey for participants, and as an
important aspect in the claim to a life changing experience.
This paper explores the complexity of what participants experience physically and
perceptually before, during and after they travel. This is discussed in terms of being part of a
liminal process; a transformational and educational experience for participants.
Liminality is not always a comfortable space, however it is transformational. Findings suggest
that transformation occurred for participants. During their journey they were no longer part of
Australia as they had been before leaving, and they had not yet returned in order to experience
Australia with their newly acquired perceptions. The life and society with which they were
previously extremely familiar looked different upon return when viewed in a new way. They
had been part of a liminal process.
As tour organizers become aware of this process and its implications for their participants and
programs, the challenge will be to utilize and actively integrate it into the preparation,
experience and post travel debriefing.
SOBOCINSKA, AGNIESZKA
‘The most genuine way of travel’: authenticity and the hippie trail in Asia
Agnieszka Sobocinska, National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University
[email protected]
During the 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands of young people travelled overland from
Europe to Asia on what came to be known as the hippie trail. Many of those travelling the
trail identified with the transnational youth counterculture, which was broadly premised on
dissatisfaction with the consumerist and conservative values of middle-class culture in the
West. Recoiling from the West, many young people sought to live out their ideals while
travelling across the East. In crash pads and cafes across the Middle East and South Asia, they
developed a complex culture premised around an ideal of ‘authentic’ travel, by which one
travelled as cheap as possible for as long as feasible. Building on the long-established
distinctions between ‘travellers’ and ‘tourists’, this travel culture privileged certain
destinations, experiences and commodities above others. This paper will examine the ideal
countercultural traveller, asking how the image of the ‘authentic’ travel experience arose, and
what it signified. It will analyse the clothes, drugs and talk that characterised the hippie trail
experience, probing at the ideas about the ‘East’, and the role of travel, that they contained. It
will also investigate how travellers attempted to accrue countercultural status by performing
their ‘authenticity’ as travellers. Finally, this paper will show how this travel culture,
structured around the ideal of ‘authentic’ travel, inspired future generations of ‘alternative’
travellers, including backpackers. As such, it argues that the hippie trail had a fundamental
influence on the development of contemporary travel culture, helping structure the experience
of travel and tourism for millions of travellers across Asia.
STEWART, JEFF
Arrival, Slowness and Attention
Jeff Stewart, Monash University, Australia
[email protected]
Slowness experienced after arrival; from Melbourne to Alice Springs, from Alice to Ptjarra,
Tyirrkali and finally, Warburton, Western Australia, one of the remotest communities in
Australia. This paper is a descriptive reflection of a brief visit to the Aboriginal community of
Warburton, which attempts to say the enigmatic temporality of leaving home and arrival at a
perhaps unknowable destination. A leaving and arrival that reveals itself initially as anxiety,
which will be discussed briefly via Heidegger’s Being and
Time, which then gradually reveals itself as shyness, allowing for the slight touch of a caress.
The recognition or becoming aware of slowness happens here through reflection, which ‘is
one of the ways in which life manifests itself,’ through which I am drawn near to the
happening of the event itself, ‘linked, as bone is linked with bone in the human body, to living
personal experience.’ Through description, slowness and attentive reflection, I am located in
place, and a being-with is revealed that each time is unexpected. This presentation is simply
the attempted saying of this revealing slowness through an attentiveness that has also arisen
while stranded at an airport in Burundi, while living in the populous city of Shanghai,
the country town of Daylesford in Victoria, or walking in the summer heat down the Avenue
Revolution in Kigali, Rwanda. Leaving and arriving, each time new, each time the world
displacing attention reminiscent of living with the death of a loved one, or the shocking caress
of birth. But this time from Warburton the everyday saying of slowness unfolds.
STINSON, EMMETT
Tourism at the End of History: Peter Sloterdijk’s ‘Tractatus Philosophico-Touristicus’
Emmett Stinson, Publishing and Communications, School of Culture and
Communication, University of Melbourne
[email protected]
In his essay, ‘Tractatus Philosophico-Touristicus’ (2003), Peter Sloterdijk proposes a radical
new understanding of global tourism as a phenomenon that cannot be separated from the rise
of what he sees as the distinguishing feature of modernity: the project of artificially
controlling environments for human comfort. For Sloterdijk, the paradigmatic form of
contemporary global travel is ‘climate tourism’, in which individuals travel to ideal physical
environments for the purposes of aesthetic enjoyment by means of the advanced technologies
that enable global tourism. Sloterdijk argues that this new form of travel signals nothing less
than ‘a profound change in human styles of existence’ that ‘could be described as a
disintegration of monolocal ways of life’ (10). This paper will attempt to locate Sloterdijk’s
conception of climate tourism in relation to the larger contours of his thought. Indeed, notions
of human transportation have played a central role in Sloterdijk’s work, not only in the second
volume of his Spheres triology, entitled Globes, but also in his book, In the Same Boat
(1993), which constitutes nothing less than an attempt to understand human history through
changing paradigms and technologies of travel. This paper will argue that Sloterdijk’s
conception of tourism presents significant insight into his larger conception of modernity as a
post-historical, post-political project to accommodate the masses of humanity in an
agglomeration of networked, individual spheres—and that this diagnosis itself cannot
ultimately be separated from a trajectory of right-wing philosophical thinking that—following
Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception—views contemporary humans as instantiations of ‘the last
men’.
SULEYMENOVA, AIDA
Representation of Non-Existing Place: Nature in travel writings of Russian and Japanese
writers and poets
Aida Suleymenova, Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok, Russia
[email protected]
‘Manchuria is still in my heart‘, wrote Nikolay Baikov in 1956. After the long flight from the
Red China in 1945 and the life in transit camps he at last found the quiet refuge in Australia.
But even here he kept remembering his travels around the strange and fantastic land –
somewhere between the Northern China, Korea and coastal waters of the Sea of Japan…
Nowadays the media sources present us the great nature from a certain angle of view – as
something non-discovered, something non-invented but so attractive to go. This point is close
to the obsessive idea of some ideal place to go, some place to explore. Besides the N.
Baikov’s writings, there are numerous evidence of the expansionism in the Northern Asia,
both in Russian and Japanese literary history: Anton Chekhov (The Sakhalin’s Notes) and
Mikhail Prishvin from the mainstream of the Russian literature, Alfred Heidock, Viktoria and
Valery Yankovsky from the side of Russian immigrant writers, Yosano Akiko and Yosano
Tekkan (Travel Notes from Manchuria and Inner Mongolia), Wakayama Bokusui (The
Korean Diaries), Miyazawa Kenji (his own travel diaries), Kitahara Hakushu (Frepps Tripps)
from the Japanese one. All these authors were seeking for the non-existing Great Nature in the
northern Pacifica. There are typical examples of almost scientific description of local
geography and ethnography, but there is also some supernatural animal’s narration in The
Great Van by N. Baikov and the search for a utopian country in the north-eastern Japan in
works of Miyazawa Kenji. The genre of the works has not also been studied yet. The paper
deals
TESTA DE OCAMPO, ANNA MELINDA
The Marvelous Turn in the accounts of the Magellan expedition to the Philippines in the
16th century
Anna Melinda Testa-de Ocampo, Department of English and Comparative Literature,
University of the Philippines Diliman
[email protected]
The element of the marvelous has been an intrinsic part of travel writing since the writings of
Pliny the Elder. In the 16th century, European travel narratives on the Philippines such as
Pigafetta’s account of the Magellan expedition, Maximilianus Transylvanus, Ferdinand
Oliviera and Gines de Mafra show the shift of the marvelous, from the strange and
inexplicable object and event, to the miraculous actions and phenomena attributed to
God. This essay hopes to show that shift in reading the marvelous as the miraculous in these
accounts including that of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, Fr. Pedro Chirino and Fr. Juan de
Plasencia and excerpts of Fr. Colin’s Labor Evangelica from the Blair and Robertson
compilation.
THOMAS, CLAIRE
“A Tolerable Afternoon” – a contemporary creative response to nineteenth-century travel
literature
Claire Thomas, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
[email protected]
This paper is an excerpt from a novel, A Young Lady’s Guide to the Continent, which is the
creative component of a PhD focused on nineteenth-century travel and the fiction of George
Eliot and Henry James. The critical component of the project explores the links between
tropes of travel – seeing, guiding, acquiring –and the ways in which they inform the marriage
plots of the Italian sections in Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda and The Portrait of a Lady.
A Young Lady’s Guide to the Continent reimagines the story of The Portrait of a Lady in the
twenty-first century. Rather than an American woman in Europe, my heroine is a young
Australian, Ivy Parker, grappling with an unexpected inheritance, too many men and the
inflated expectations of a naïve ‘new world’ traveller. “A Tolerable Afternoon” finds her in
Paris where she is following a nineteenth-century guidebook in an attempt to provide an
original edge to her journey.
The excerpt interrogates the cultural ideals, and
disappointments, of travellers via fictionalised encounters with museums, literary texts,
botanical gardens and ‘locals’.
TITLESTAD, MICHAEL
Life behind a trolley: travelling in the post-apocalypse
Michael Titlestad, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
[email protected]
In literary and cinematic representations, the post-apocalypse commonly necessitates a
desperate version of travel structured by the contingencies of survival. Travel ideals are
displaced by the imperatives of flight, evasion and the unrelenting need to salvage the
vestiges of the past.
This paper contrasts two representations of travelling in the post-apocalypse. The first is the
epic journey south in Cormac McCarthy’s speculative, dystopian novel, The Road. In their
endeavour to reach the coast, a father and son push a trolley containing all they have been
able to salvage across the ‘scabland’ of United States, which has been reduced to ashes and
which is inhabited by cults of cannibalistic marauders. The road – frequently associated in
American literature with self-actualization, freedom, cultural expansion and manifest destiny
– has become a site of bare life. The pedestrian travellers have been reduced to the condition
of nomadic hunter-gatherers whose lives consist in constant movement.
Theorists of the apocalypse (among them Richard Dellamora, Evan Calder Williams and
James Berger) have inclined to relativizing the absolute: in their arguments, the ‘apocalypse’
functions as a hyperbolic metaphor for representing a range of destitute and abject conditions,
the breakdown in social cohesion and the destruction of the built environment. There is, in
this strand of evangelical, leftist social theory, ‘apocalypse’ everywhere in the wastelands of
late capitalism – just not everywhere at the same time.
The limits of this metaphorical turn are investigated by considering (in counterpoint with
McCarthy’s vision of homelessness and scavenging) the lives lived behind trolleys in
contemporary Johannesburg. Each day, thousands of people walk from townships and
informal settlements into the city and suburbs to collect recyclable garbage (from rubbish tips
and domestic bins) to sell at depots. Local artists (Vumelani Sibeko, Senzo Shabangu and
Jackie McInnes) have represented these lives and journeys as insinuated resilience; as an
assertive accommodation to a system that ignores and marginalizes the poor.
I argue that these prudential, quotidian journeys can be understood as an ideological
alternative to the (endlessly recycled) myth of the apocalypse; that these everyday practices
are a sobering rejoinder to our tendency to embrace ‘grand narratives’. They do not represent
an ideal, but rather the pragmatic fate of travel in a world in which scarcity compels
individuals to journey in terms of a tactical logic of survival.
In the face of this pragmatism, post-apocalyptic visions – such as that presented in The Road
– might be characterized as paranoid, prophetic chatter in a world that remains
symptomatically cathected onto teleological historiography. Perhaps the journeys to which we
should apply our minds, unclouded by the rhetoric of mystical revelation, are local, prudential
trajectories of recovery.
TOOTH, SARAH
Pursuing Ideals: Gertrude Bell’s travels
Sarah Tooth, School of History, Research School of Social Sciences, College of Arts and
Social Sciences, Australian National University
[email protected]
Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell (1868 – 1926) is most commonly remembered for her early
twentieth century journeys through parts of the Middle East remote to Westerners. However,
her travels also included long, transcontinental tours with family and friends, mountainclimbing adventures in the French Alps, European trips to study the profession of
archaeology, and wartime travel in a diplomatic capacity. In a letter addressed to her father,
dated 18 February 1916 and composed during a return Egypt to India journey, Bell pondered
what she might do following the completion of her journey. She wrote “that hangs on me I
feel – as we have often said, all you can do for people is to give them the opportunity of
making a plan for themselves.” Bell seems to have been driven by a need to succeed and
achieve, and the sentence conveys a strong belief in her personal responsibility to proactively
make the most of her abilities and opportunities. Indeed, an overarching ideal Bell seems to
have pursued through her extensive travels is a pursuit of excellence. A study of Bell’s
travelling life reveals she also pursued varied ideals that were contingent on the nature of the
travel she was undertaking, her company on her journey, the broader historical context, and
the point in her own life history in which she was engaging in travel. The ideals include
broadening knowledge, refining scholarship, excellence in athleticism, information-gathering,
and escapism. An exploration of Bell’s monographs, articles, letters and diaries thus provides
insight to the plurality of (sometimes conflicting) ideals that an individual may pursue
through travel in one lifetime.
TRAPE, ROBERTA
Ideals of Italy in the Eyes of Contemporary Australian Travellers
Roberta Trapė
[email protected]
From the beginning of the 1990s onwards there has been a sizeable output of books by
Australian writers set in or about Italy. This paper aims to examine the question of travel
ideals in contemporary Australian travel literature on Italy. I will concentrate on the
juxtaposition of works by four authors, Jeffrey Smart and Shirley Hazzard on the one side,
and two writers of a younger generation, Robert Dessaix and Peter Robb, on the other. These
I consider to be among the most interesting recent examples of Australians’ continuing
fascination with Italy. In Smart’s autobiography, Not Quite Straight and Hazzard’s Greene on
Capri, in Dessaix’s Night Letters and Robb’s Midnight in Sicily the pursuit of ideals in the
process of travelling will be analysed both as the dream, the idea, and as the object, the
destination; how far does the travel ideal shape the visions and views of the destination? Can
the influence and achievement of the travel ideal be detected and disclosed? In this paper,
drawing on the findings of my recent book, Imaging Italy Through the Eyes of Contemporary
Australian Travellers (1990-2010), I will explore a new direction for analysing those images
of Italy which the writers present in their works, and the ideals the travellers’ gaze reveal on
reaching their destination. I will do this mainly by focussing on the narrators’ descriptions of
Italy and will avail myself of the theoretical discussions of description provided by Gérard
Genette and Philippe Hamon. Examining the ways the four authors and their narrators
describe Italian places, my analysis looks into what it is that continues to attract Australian
writers and artists to the country, and discovers two major images, one of which is new and
starkly different from the one that prevailed in previous writings. The image of Italy that
emerges from the most recent works is, no doubt, a superb picture, not flattering but certainly
not false, of its contemporary times.
TRUONG, HUONG THI MAI
Homecoming: The influence of overseas study on Vietnamese academics’ life and work
Huong Thi Mai Truong, Faculty of Education, La Trobe University
[email protected]
Every year, around 60,000 Vietnamese students go overseas to study; the majority of them
return and settle back in their home country. This presentation is derived from my doctoral
research study, which is based on in-depth qualitative interviews with eighteen Vietnamese
academics who completed their doctoral studies abroad. The study aims to examine the
academics’ overall experience of homecoming, including what motivates them to return, their
readjustments to life in Vietnam, and their perception of the influence of studying overseas on
their current life and work in the home country. Having just returned from conducting
fieldwork in Vietnam, my aim is to present some of my preliminary findings at the
conference.
TUCKER, HAZEL
Minding the ideal gap in tourism encounters
Hazel Tucker, Department of Tourism,University of Otago, New Zealand.
[email protected]
Tourism encounters and relationships are often said to be ‘closely entwined with the imperial
project and colonialism’ (Pritchard and Morgan 2007: 21). In my own research I have also
explored tourism relationships in this way. However, my ongoing study of tourism encounters
in Goreme, Turkey, has led me to consider more closely how our viewing of the tourist as
always locked into a colonial relation with the toured “other” might itself be upholding of an
ideal binary between tourist and toured. This is because thinking about tourism in this way
appears to be premised on an ideal of a neat and fixed separation, or gap, between tourist and
toured “other”. For example, in his latest book The Ethics of Sightseeing, MacCannell begins
his appendix piece entitled ‘The Moral Field of Tourism’ by arguing that all tourism involves
tourists crossing the line (the line crossed being the ‘marked or unmarked boundaries between
normative differences’ (p. 212). Elsewhere in the book, he refers to this line as a gap – the gap
that separates tourists from the other-as-attraction.
What happens to our thinking about tourism encounters, though, if we begin instead from the
premise that this gap, or line, does not exist as such, but rather that there are multiple gaps and
lines which are fluid and continuously crossed and filled? This paper considers this question
and, using examples largely from my Goreme research, not only suggests that the gaps and
lines in tourism encounters are always filled with ambiguities and tensions, but also proposes
a focus on connections and commonalities, as well as difference, in tourism relationships.
WALKER, MARIAN
This is not who we are!: Travellers, truth and the issue of authenticity in regional tourism.
Marian Walker, Honorary Research Associate, School of History and Classics,
University of Tasmania.
[email protected]
In 1970 in the Tasmanian town of Devonport, located 100 kilometres to the northwest of
Launceston, a furore broke out concerning a local government tourism initiative. The
initiative manifested in the form of a proposal to build a large and elaborate monument to the
radical Italian patriot General Giuseppe Garibaldi. The monument was to serve both as a
commemorative gesture to the great Italian freedom fighter as well as an attraction to tourists.
Garibaldi's relationship with Tasmania, however, was tenuous to say the least, being based on
a brief stop in 1852 to collect water at a remote island in Bass Strait while en route from
South America to China. In this respect, it soon became clear that the vast majority of the
local community in Devonport did not identify with Garibaldi or what he stood for and did
not feel that the proposed monument was related in any way to 'who they were'.
Subsequently, the proposal became a matter of contentious public controversy, which
persisted for several years. The issue boiled down to whether it was appropriate for the
municipal council to erect a monument for the purpose of attracting tourists and travellers to
the town when the local people did not identify with it and, further, whether travellers and
tourists would be culturally short-changed by this deception. This paper suggests that the
academic debate as to whether authenticity is still a valid concept in tourism studies is
confirmed by the need for consideration of regional tourism initiatives calculated to attract
tourists over the honouring of local history, identity and community self-knowledge.
WHITE, RICHARD
The ideal landscape: English nature and Australian tourists
Richard White, Department of History, the University of Sydney.
[email protected]
In 1904 Dorothea Mackellar, 19 and homesick in London, penned the classic contrast
between England’s ‘field and coppice’ and Australia’s ‘wide brown land’. Nature has long
been a battleground for such negotiations of nation, empire and Australia’s place in the world.
For the rest of the twentieth century, England drew Australian tourists for longer and more
intense experiences than anywhere else, despite the fact that Asia outstripped Europe as a
destination in the 1970s. They found much to admire and to deprecate in England but nature
there – which most knew intimately if imaginatively from memories of a largely English
literary diet - tended to be beyond criticism once it could be separated from the weather and a
sense of claustrophobia.
This paper examines Australians’ experiences of nature in England, their admiration for
notions of an ideal landscape, for an unchanging village life, for a humanised countryside, for
seasonal variation, for sheer conventionally-defined beauty. Their imaginative reading in
English literature, high, low and middle brow, was validated by being there. At the same time
the nuances with which that admiration was expressed and the shifting negotiations which
allowed attachment to both English and Australian nature show nature in England to mean
more than simply a picture-perfect postcard of a habitual Constable landscape. As the middle brow literary base of much of idealised English nature eroded in Australia, the English
landscape was re-invented for an Australian tourist market and the result was a less emotional
and less sentimentalised experience – and perhaps a less fulfilling one.
WHITTAKER, ANDREA
Outsourced patients: Stories from forced medical travellers.
Andrea Whittaker, School of Psychology and Psychiatry,
Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University,
[email protected]
The common image of medical travel in Asia is one of elective travel for elective surgeries
such as cosmetic surgeries and dental treatments. However, for many the decision to travel for
treatment is not one they choose, but is based upon contractual arrangements between their
employers or governments. Based upon interviews with patients and their families from a
variety of countries in a Thai private hospital, this paper explores the experience of
outsourced patients, many of whom face protracted periods of care away from home. It
highlights the political economy of the trade and the implications for the public health
systems of both the sending and receiving countries. These patients and their families view
themselves as simultaneously privileged to be receiving care overseas and victims of the
inadequacies of their own nations’ health systems.
YOUNG, ALISON & MACDOWELL, LACHLAN
‘Have Art, Will Travel’: Graffiti, Street Art and Contemporary Tourism
Professor Alison Young, School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts , The
University of Melbourne & Dr Lachlan MacDowall, Centre for Cultural Partnerships,
Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne
[email protected]
Over the last decade, graffiti and street art have moved from being regarded as marginal
forms of sub-cultural practice to constitutive of a legitimate global art movement. While still
illegal in its uncommissioned urban form, street art is now also visible in museums and
galleries, with internationally recognised practitioners such as Futura, Banksy, Eine, Swoon,
and Blék le Rat. Certain cities have become renowned for their street art, with travel guides
including details as to how to find street art in London, Berlin, New York, Sao Paulo,
Melbourne, and many more. While the shift from illicit subcultural activity to mainstream art
form has many implications, this paper focuses upon street art and graffiti as they are
constituted in and by tourism and travel. Artists and writers participate in international
networks that allow them to visit cities, paint new locations, network with gallerists and
strengthen connections. Such travel is sometimes sponsored by galleries or corporations (such
as sneaker manufacturers) but can also take place at the artist’s expense. These travel
practices mean that street art and graffiti, while intensely localised in their interaction with
specific urban places, are also highly internationalised phenomena. Practices of tourism exert
similar effects upon street art and graffiti. Some cities (notably Melbourne) have engaged in
promotional branding that draws upon street art as an integral facet of the tourist experience
being offered to visitors, while examination of street art internet sites and blogs demonstrates
that the notion of discovering street art when visiting a city is an enormously appealing aspect
of tourism for many visitors. In this paper, we will examine the ways in which illicit art has
become available for tourist consumption (through guide books, blogs, and walking tours)
and will raise questions about the implications of travelling to and for art, for artists, visitors
and cities.
ZABLE, ARNOLD
Travellers tales: Who is observer, who the observed?
Arnold Zable, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow, University of Melbourne
A good deal of my writing whether in the form of novel, short story, memoir or essay, is
based on observations made during periods of extensive travel, and on journals kept at the
time. Some are told in third person, many in the first person. The first person narrative in
particular presents the writer with a central tension. To what extent can the story be confined
to the first person as witness, as someone who is passing through, and to what extent do we
allow the personal impact of the experience into the writing? As a writer I have drawn on
being both participant and observer, outsider and insider, both witness and subject. Walter
Benjamin’s exploration of two types of storyteller provides another useful distinction between
stories that are told by those who travel, the ‘merchant seaman’ as he calls this type, and the
stories that are told by those who know one place, Benjamin’s ‘resident tiller of the soil.’ I
will explore these tensions by drawing on my work, especially the most recent book, Violin
Lessons, and other works such as Elias Cannetti’s Voices of Marrakesh, a book of stories
based on his travels in Morocco in the 1940s.