Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

9B
Place, Text, Materiality (Chair, Katrina Schlunke)
Kirsten Seale & Emily Potter*
Inner North
Place and the Literature-assemblage: Helen Garner, Monkey Grip, Melbourne’s
This paper uses Bruno Latour’s work on Actor-Network Theory to theorise a literature-assemblage that takes
into account, and can account for, complex connections between literature and place. We are interested in
rethinking the network of literature and place, not as something where literature reproduces place as
mimetic representation, but as something which acknowledges that the agencies, intensities, flows, and
iterations of the literature-assemblage can produce place in a material sense. By way of a case study, we
look at Helen Garner’s 1977 novel Monkey Grip and its relationship with place in Melbourne’s innernorthern
suburbs of Fitzroy and Carlton. We explore, particularly, the way in which the literature assemblage
that is Helen Garner’s writing Monkey Grip can be understood as reflexively participating in processes of
gentrification in these suburbs that, in turn, feed back into the worldly life of the text.
Jennifer Hamilton
The Poetics of Stormwater Infrastructure in Inner Sydney
Human relationships with wet weather – one of the more mundane albeit vexing aspects of our
contemporary earthly condition – are literally designed, built and maintained in wealthy cities. If one of the
aims of the environmental humanities is to theorise ways of responding differently to the more-than-human
world, then, for a variety of embodied and socio-political reasons, we need to account for the ways in which
stormwater infrastructure complicates attempts to transform our relation with weather. Although
stormwater drains are often made of steel and concrete, Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder remind us
that infrastructure is paradoxical because it is both “engine and barrier for change, both customizable and
rigid, both inside and outside organisational practices” (2016, 378). In order to open up a critique into the
entanglement of concrete, pipes, thunder, rain, broken umbrellas and bodies that is a Sydney storm, I will
characterise a poetics of stormwater infrastructure. By considering the materiality of inner Sydney’s
stormwater management systems alongside a series of creative works that represent people and harbourside
dwellings, shops, drains and roads amidst non-disastrous storms.
Brigid Magner Reading Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Grave
“To read is to conjure up the dead; to tour a gravesite is to read.” (Paul Westover, Necromanticism:
Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750-1860, 2012) In her essay, “At the Henry Parkes motel”, Meaghan Morris
has shown how Australian “Legends” such as Henry Parkes are used to engender “effects of place” which
shape the experience of residents and visitors (Morris 1988). This paper explores the practices associated
with the grave of literary “Legend” Adam Lindsay Gordon, contemporary of Henry Parkes, cousin of Lord
Byron and the only “Australian” poet to be represented in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey. Although
Adam Lindsay Gordon is associated with a range of places in the United Kingdom and South Australia,
Brighton was where he suicided in 1870, transforming it into a site of great significance for “Gordon Lovers”.
The poet’s grave was the focus of the first organised Australian literary “necrotouristic” pilgrimages from
1910 onwards. Today necrotourism is less popular – and Adam Lindsay Gordon’s reputation has waned —
yet a reading of his grave offers insights into the interplay between the author’s bodily and textual remains
and local practices of commemoration, both past and present.
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