Colonialism and its aftermath

The first research seminar for 2001 was held on Friday 16 February at the early colonial homestead of Somercotes, near Ross, in the midlands of Tasmania. See programme and other details about the day.

The second research seminar for 2001, Hybridity and Diaspora, was held on Friday 27th July at the Hobart Campus of the University of Tasmania. See programme and other details about the day.

SOMERCOTES SEMINAR
Friday 16 February 2001

Seminar held at the early colonial homestead of Somercotes, near Ross, in the midlands of Tasmania.

Location Just 4km south of Ross: there is a brown tourist sign marking Somercotes, a right hand exit if travelling from Hobart, a left hand turn if travelling from Launceston.

Programme

9.30-10.00 Essential business items

10.00-12.30 Papers

12.30-2.00
Lunch followed by tour of the property for those who wish to go; others can sit under the trees and chat

Lucy Frost Unearthing Trugernanna: Preliminary Reflections on the Archeology of Memory

Anna Johnston Colonial Textuality and the Conscience of Empire

For further information please contact Anna Johnston, English and European Languages and Literatures, University of Tasmania.

Image courtesy of Julie Gough her Whispering Sands, 1988 series, © Julie Gough. See an online exhibition of art work by Julie Gough.

Somercotes was settled in 1823 by Captain Samuel Horton and is one of a select number of Australian properties that has remained in continual family ownership. Apart from the significant buildings and other artefacts remaining, it is the site of rich personal and cultural history.

As well as the Georgian homestead, the cottages built for the indentured labourers have been preserved and are now available as 4 star colonial accommodation, while the original ticket-of-leave quarters have been restored to serve as a small conference centre where the seminar will be held.

The homestead was built with every possible protection against the danger of attack by Aboriginals or bushrangers. All windows were fitted with a internal and external cedar shutters, the doors and windows were barred, while the courtyard was secured by a high sandstone wall topped with an iron palisade. Nevertheless, in 1843, Somercotes was attacked by the famous outlaw, Martin Cash, and two fellow bushrangers. In the affray a shot was fired that lodged in the architrave of the front door where it can be seen today. A contemporary account of the attack, written by an American convict, Samuel Snow, who was working on a neighbouring property, can be read on the International Centre for Convict Studies site.

All sessions except the last will be held at the Staff Club at the Hobart campus of the University of Tasmania

9.15 -10.35 Session 1
Pam Allen: The enigmatic Indo
The paper examines the status of the Indo (Eurasian) in colonial Dutch East Indies and in postcolonial Indonesia to suggest that the Indos occupy what Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin call the 'psychological abyss between cultures'.

Cassandra Pybus: Gilbert Robertson: that troublesome mulatto
Gilbert Robertson, free settler, radical newspaper editor and Aboriginal conciliator, son of a wealthy West Indian planter and his slave mistress, fitted uneasily into the colonial gentry mould. This paper considers how he embodies both the concept of diaspora and of hybridity.

11.00-12.20 Session 2
Mitchell Rolls: The Meaninglessness of Aboriginal Cultures
This paper considers the issue of cultural identites and whether they fit within deterministic models of identity, or are more fluid and vulnerable to assumption. In pointing to the existence of an Aboriginal diaspora, the paper also considers the sort of cultural identity pursued and privileged by the diaspora.

Julie Gough: The gaze, guise, ruse of 'hybridity'
The paper considers how in current western thinking the 'now' operates within the guise of dealing with the past and how the introduction of terms like 'hybridity' is about obscuring and layering; twisting and binding, and is ultimately distanced from reality.

12.20 -1.00 Session 3
Nigel Penn (University of Cape Town) 'Drosters', 'Bastaards' and 'Oorlams':
Hybrid societies of the Northern Cape frontier zone
The paper will consider the colonial interaction between the Boer settlers and later the British with the imported slave community and the indigenous Khoi and San people of the Cape.

2.00-3.20 Session 4
Kirsty Reid (University of Bristol): It cuts me even to the hart: Love and Separation in the Convict Diaspora
The paper will examine a series of nineteeth century letters from convicts and their families to explore the issues of love and separation generated by the process of penal transportation.

Clare Anderson (University of Leicester): Convict Women and Border Crossings in the Nineteeth Century Indian Ocean World
This paper will explore the context in which women went from Australia to Calcutta and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean and how ordinary working people tapped into the oral culture of the Indian Ocean world, to become part of the flow of people and information crossing the seas.

3.20 -4.00 Session 5
Barbara Hatley: The Tyranny of Authenticity: Female Identity and Women's Writing in Post-Colonial Contexts
The paper will be looking mainly at Indonesian texts in a broad framework exploring the particular way women in colonial/ postcolonial societies experience authenticity and East-West hybridity as putative bearers of authentic cultural tradition.

4. 00 Coffee and discussion of future seminars in this series

5.15 -6.30 Removing the Boundaries at the St Ives Lucy Frost and Susan Ballyn (Barcelona University): Exiles of a Diaspora: the Sephardi Convicts in V.D.L.
On the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, there were claims that the Sephardi were being written out of the record as they had been pushed out of the space half a millenium before. This paper will consider the Sephardi diaspora in London and those transported to Van Diemens Land.

$20.00 for staff and $10.00 for students incl lunch and coffee. Places are limited.