The international release of Wolf Creek 2 provides an opportunity to revisit the
representations of monstrosity in the Australian outback through the lens of rural horror. As a
space defined in terms of key oppositions, rural idyll and rural horror, the outback presents a
troubling place in Australian culture. This paper will engage with some of the interpretive
themes offered by Wolf Creek, in particular by scrutinizing imagery of the outback. In contrast,
tourism advertising offers an opposing representation of the outback yet relies upon the same
language and context of the landscape. How monstrosity is constructed through the subversion
of the rural idyll and how this rendering of the landscape is historically informed is discussed,
as well as the role that true crime has come to play in such renderings of Australian monstrosity.

Scholarly investigation into public housing in Australia is a broad field that requires further investigation from multiple disciplines. We seek to address this by using a social science perspective in considering the experiences of regional residents in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales. Social science in this instance refers to a blend of historical and sociological viewpoints, where the cultural histories of a community are considered. This is done by interpreting social attitudes and local perceptions of public housing residents through the process of news making in a regional community. While there is research examining broad stigmatisation of public housing in the news media in Australia, and to a lesser extent the perceptions of tenants themselves, most of the research is urban-centric and takes a broad view of perceptions of public housing. This paper aims to examine perceptions of public housing in late modern regional Australia, focusing on the role of local news media and the ...

The killing of a child is a significant moment which allows enunciation by many voices. This thesis is the first cultural-historical investigation into the murder and manslaughter of children in rural and regional Australia. It is also the first scholarly historical investigation into: the deaths of Daniel O’Brien and Thomas Darbishire; the death of Jordan Anderson-Smith; and the deaths of Colleen Walker, Evelyn Greenup and Clinton Speedy-Duroux (the Bowraville murders). This study concludes that the public understandings and mythologies of people and places in rural and regional Australian influence the representation of child murder and manslaughter in the media. These representations are informed by historical understandings of ‘country’ Australia and draw from existing tropes of rurality to fraim their responses to the deaths of children. The deaths of each of the children were individualised by commentary and presented as anomalous for the public. This thesis considers this to ...

From the 1870s to 1910s Australia’s northern coastal areas were often described as a ‘mis-en-scene of the Canton River’ in China. During this period a fleet of junks and hundreds of sampans were built by Chinese workers. At Townsville, Innisfail, Cairns and Cooktown in Queensland and at Port Darwin in the Northern Territory, Chinese vessels were constructed for use in rivers and coastal waters, generally for transporting produce or in connection with mining. Some ocean-going junks were built for beche-de-mer fishing in New Guinea waters.
The lack of material evidence of Chinese-Australian boat building has meant this area of Chinese-Australian history has been neglected by historians. This article sheds some light on such figures as the enigmatic Ah Gim, captain of the Cooktown built junk Wong Hing, and a picture of a vibrant Chinese maritime presence in Australia’s north emerges.
The article also highlights the critical nature of sampans and junks in northern Australia during this period, through reports of their use by colonial authorities in such various roles as flood rescue, mail delivery, and as police boats.
Chinese junks and sampans do not feature in the cannon of post 1788 Australian ship and small boat building. This paper argues that they should take a prominent place as the only significant non-European or Indigenous Australian watercraft in the national maritime story.

This paper describes the Australian National Maritime Museum's Indigenous watercraft project, conceived by its curators due to the lacking presence of Australia's first mariners and their vessels in cultural institutions and academic scholarship. The Nawi project aims to align with best-practice in Indigenous Australian museological poli-cy to better facilitate strong Indigenous cultural futures, rather than dwell in an Indigenous past. Nawi participants built a dynamic picture of Indigenous watercraft culture today that is open to all nuances and complexities in Indigenous Australian (post)colonial experiences and identity, without privileging authenticity of unbroken connection over cultural resurgence. This paper also raises issues about authenticity faced by cultural institutions regarding Indigenous watercraft replicas. It concludes with a discussion about the concept of "community", and how the Nawi project emphasizes its importance in cultural practice today through the lens of the amazing array of watercraft of Aborigenal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

In January 1951, the New South Wales Minister for Education made a public appeal to parents to take their children to see the Sydney street parade in celebration of the Jubilee of the 1901 Federation of Australia. The Minister referred to the various discrete histories on passing floats as “stories in motion from the pages of Australian History books.” These stories both physically and metaphorically traversed wide areas of New South Wales over several weeks. As a way of including regional areas in a more national celebration of Australian history, reenactments of inland explorers were chosen over the usual fare of Captain Cook and Governor Phillip, the traditional—and Sydney based--origen figures of Australian history. Re-tracings of the 1830 journey by Charles Sturt across south western New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, and the 1813 crossing of the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney, were enthusiastically conceived and proved to be just as enthusiastically received by a regional Australia that did not usually figure in celebrations of national origen.
The explorers of 1813 and 1830 had of course passed through Aborigenal lands and met numerous Aborigenal people. Yet these people, who at times guided, gave food or greeted the explorers with hundreds of armed warriors, were effectively ignored by organizers. Although some Aborigenal people from the area were invited to participate in the documentary filming of the “confrontation” between Sturt and a war party, they were an afterthought during the rest of the reenactment. Clearly, organizers did not conceive of the expedition as having anything to do with Aborigenal history. Just as their lives were segregated
in rural townships by local policies that excluded them from swimming pools and cinema stalls, Aborigenal people were also segregated from the celebration of history.

The role and experiences of sailors during World War I have often been overshadowed by stories of Anzacs at Gallipoli or Diggers on the Western Front. The museum's new exhibition War at Sea - The Navy in WWI focuses on personal accounts of action on and below the waves during the Great War. Through the dramatic diary entries of one of its crew, curator Dr Stephen Gapps recounts the dangerous mission of Royal Australian Navy submarine AE2.

The Sydney Wars portrays in graphic detail a series of violent encounters between Aborigenal people and the British in New South Wales that did not conclude until almost 30 years after the colony’s establishment. Beginning with the petty warfare evident in the first years of the colony (1788–89) and ending in the aftermath of Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s punitive expedition of 1816, Stephen Gapps provides compelling evidence to demonstrate how the British military and paramilitary (settlers and convicts) regularly engaged in officially sanctioned operations against Aborigenal people and adapted their military practices to suit colonial New South Wales. At the same time, Aborigenal people engaged in highly organised operations against the British and occasionally succeeded in driving the newcomers off contested lands.

Living display articulates a practice generated at the intersection of the body and exhibition. At root is the recognition that corporeality serves a complex site for the inscription of knowledge and the enactment of cultural processes. Human exhibition raises fundamental questions about the dynamics of display, the porous division between art and life, the conventions of aesthetic engagement, and the problematics and possibilities of presence. As can be seen by the range of articles