So, it's student Friday for Dougie, here at the university of Sydney. We're at the end of a brief Indian Summer (I have no idea what makes such late-season, balmy days Indian). That may explain my lethargy. So too may my bizarre decision to watch online all of Any Coulson's evidence to the Leveson Inquiry in London. It was 2:00 a.m. by the time I reached bed. I was back up at 6:30 a.m. (this being a Friday).
We looked at the two short films of Tracy Moffat in my ten o'clock tutorial: Nice Coloured Girls and Night Cries. Both are intriguing takes on being an indigenous Australian woman at the turn of the Century. NCG, the earlier film, is a more straightforward look at the relationships between European settlers (then and now) and the indigenous peoples of this land. White racism (paternalistic then, more personally vindictive now) pervades the film. Time and power relations are mixed up to make us adjust the way we read the text. It succeeds. The re-framing of testimonies from the past, turning written colonialist evidence into the spoken word while re-telling the testimony of the local population through written extracts (the privileged form) raises questions about reliable / unreliable narration (Among others). Some of the film has not travelled well through time but those drawbacks are minor details about costume, character and mise en scene. The ideas on the screen - to do with gener, race, colonialism, class, wealth and power - retain their power. It's still a thought-provoking piece. The movie NC is much more complex: it's closer to abstracted art and surrealism, inter-textual (as all postmodern texts must be); about and not about aboriginality; about family, women's business and domesticity; deals with mother / daughter bonds; takes apart and relocates Christianity's role in the 20th Century assimilation policies. There's much more. Good stuff.
At Noon I attended a tutorial on Virginia Woolf's Jacb's Room. The discussion was tentative at first but after one woman reported that she's not realised that Jacob dies (until after reading the introductory essay when she'd finished the novel) our conversation picked up with talk of death, loss, fate and absence. Good fun. Excellent novel.
Now - halfway through the 3 to 5 Friday afternoon shift - I'm at a lecture on two Australian post-modern poets,John Tranter and Gig Ryan. We populate the auditorium sparsely, like raindrops spread across a car windscreen just before the storm begins. Dr Lilley, a poet herself, does her best.
We looked at the two short films of Tracy Moffat in my ten o'clock tutorial: Nice Coloured Girls and Night Cries. Both are intriguing takes on being an indigenous Australian woman at the turn of the Century. NCG, the earlier film, is a more straightforward look at the relationships between European settlers (then and now) and the indigenous peoples of this land. White racism (paternalistic then, more personally vindictive now) pervades the film. Time and power relations are mixed up to make us adjust the way we read the text. It succeeds. The re-framing of testimonies from the past, turning written colonialist evidence into the spoken word while re-telling the testimony of the local population through written extracts (the privileged form) raises questions about reliable / unreliable narration (Among others). Some of the film has not travelled well through time but those drawbacks are minor details about costume, character and mise en scene. The ideas on the screen - to do with gener, race, colonialism, class, wealth and power - retain their power. It's still a thought-provoking piece. The movie NC is much more complex: it's closer to abstracted art and surrealism, inter-textual (as all postmodern texts must be); about and not about aboriginality; about family, women's business and domesticity; deals with mother / daughter bonds; takes apart and relocates Christianity's role in the 20th Century assimilation policies. There's much more. Good stuff.
At Noon I attended a tutorial on Virginia Woolf's Jacb's Room. The discussion was tentative at first but after one woman reported that she's not realised that Jacob dies (until after reading the introductory essay when she'd finished the novel) our conversation picked up with talk of death, loss, fate and absence. Good fun. Excellent novel.
Now - halfway through the 3 to 5 Friday afternoon shift - I'm at a lecture on two Australian post-modern poets,John Tranter and Gig Ryan. We populate the auditorium sparsely, like raindrops spread across a car windscreen just before the storm begins. Dr Lilley, a poet herself, does her best.
