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From Text Publishing Website: “Our Shadows tells the story of three generations of family living in Kalgoorlie, where gold was discovered in 1893 by an Irish-born prospector named Paddy Hannan, whose own history weaves in and out of this beguiling novel.

Sisters Nell and Frances were raised by their grandparents and were once closely bound by reading and fantasy. Now they live in Sydney and are estranged. Each in her own way struggles with the loss of their parents.

Little by little the sisters grow to understand the imaginative force of the past and the legacy of their shared orphanhood. Then Frances decides to make a journey home to the goldfields to explore what lies hidden and unspoken in their lives, in the shadowy tunnels of the past”.

Further details, including reviews, here.

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It is a collection of essays, stories, poems and artworks with contributions from Coetzee’s friends and contemporaries.

Post Image Credit: John Coetzee, Adam Chang, 2011. Oil on canvas, 240cm x 310cm. C Adam Chang. Photo AGNSW.

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As part of the Writing and Society Research Centre’s Other Worlds project, the eminent Waanyi novelist Alexis Wright, along with Ben Denham, Ben Etherington, and Anthony Uhlmann, travelled to Doomadgee, a community on Gangalidda country in the Gulf of Carpentaria where they spent several days collaborating with activist and community elder, Clarence Walden. They recorded his gripping story of growing up in brutal conditions on the Doomadgee mission in the 1960s and his emergence as a staunch leader of his people through the 1980s and 90s. From this material, Etherington and Wright produced the feature radio documentary Nothing but the Truth for ABC Radio National’s AWAYE! program. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/awaye/nothing-but-the-truth/10945938

The radio documentary was launched by Michelle Trudgett, Western Sydney University’s new PVC Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Strategy and Consultation, and sections of the documentary were played, along with a slideshow of images from the mission archive and trip. This was followed by a conversation and questions with Walden, with a particular focus on his experiences growing up on a mission and his battles, both current and past, against mining companies operating in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

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The film documentary was premiered at the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Art and Social Science’s ‘World Literatures and the Global South Conference’ (23-25 August, 2019). The documentary premiere was preceded by a Keynote address by Alexis Wright, ‘A Self-Governing Literature: Who Owns the Map of the World?’, and followed by an Address and Q&A with Clarence.

For full details of the project see Telling the Story of the Gulf.

The post Straight from the heart: film DOCUMENTARY PREMIERE AND Q&A WITH GANGALIDDA ELDER CLARENCE WALDEN appeared first on Other Worlds.

Friday 23 August, 2019, Female Orphan School, Western Sydney University, 11:00-12:30pm

The past half-century has seen the rise to prominence of the concept of the event. This introduces a crucial element of groundlessness, chance, the aleatory, non-necessity into being. The world comes about as it is, not on the basis of prior determinations, as above all in theology and conservative politics, but on the baseless basis of the void. Here, however, I’ll start out, not from philosophies of the event qua philosophies, but from the event as cultural symptom; a symptom that also has its counter-symptom. We might put the point like this: the concept of the event has had a certain currency in the culture over the past three or four decades or more; this, not only in philosophy and theory and criticism, but in the arts, and even in certain specific forms the sciences. But elsewhere or in the larger culture, we have seen the effective growth of a formidable resistance to the concept, if a resistance that is largely implicit, not articulated as such, even in large measure unknowing. Our period might actually seem to be strikingly obtuse to the event or the conditions of the event, and much inclined to disbelieve in or even discredit them. The concept of the event comes philosophically to the fore and is properly formalized precisely in an age notably and even intransigently hostile to events as such. The resistance has many aspects, ranging from the effects of the wholesale mediatisation of culture to the massive growth of the culture of security to the new technology spreading new forms of control of the alea to that minor variant, the `anti-evental’ backlash in literary theory and criticism. A major if not the principal form of it, however, as is becoming clear to us from some admirable work (Enteman, Locke and Spender, Klikauer) is managerialism or managerial reason.

This talk gets its orientation from one question: where does the most significant English-language novelist of the period stand in relation to the structure of opposition (and the paradoxes) I have outlined? In a very interesting and complex position, I’ll suggest, that is all his own. I’ll give a very brief survey of the two sides of contemporary culture’s paradoxical relation to the event. I’ll also very briefly place my own case in relation to Derek Attridge’s concept of Coetzee and the event in his notably important and influential book J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Coetzee’s treatment of the possibility of the event in my sense is oblique, indirect, multi-faceted, very subtle but very slight. I don’t expect to be able to sum it up or even adequately represent it here. I’ll aim however to talk about two aspects of it, both of which in effect involve taking a position relative to the contemporary paradox and institute a more or less devastating critique of managerial reason. I will particularly look at the first part of Dusklands, and the relation of Eugene Dawn to the American military’s OR (Operational Research), now credited with being one of the origins of contemporary theory of management; and at The Childhood of Jesus, looking particularly at the relevance to it of a reading of Leibniz on the one hand, and Miguel de Unamuno’s reading of Don Quixote on the other.

ANDREW GIBSON is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has held visiting professorships and honorary appointments at the College Internationale in Paris, Northwestern University in Chicago and Tokyo University among other institutions. He’s currently a Visiting Professor to the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, where he is giving a series of masterclasses on the fiction of J.M. Coetzee. Andrew is a permanent advisory editor to the James Joyce Quarterly and was recently appointed Associate Member of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading.

All welcome. info: writing@westernsydney.edu.au

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