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Inspired by Benjamin's exuberance for weaving haunting sonic textures into his renowned style of snappy passages and his own sense of writerly intentionality, this paper describes an ongoing research project concerned with the collection of sound bytes using a sound archive and interface (sonification). The archive records my recollections of an earlier life reimagined as 'Scenes' from a Childhood, Village Life and Songs of Resistance. The recollections, rendered in Scene I, materialise as a textual street-sketch using a manually-generated word cloud with childlike doodles to disrupt the oneiric rhetoric of national boundaries and régimes of memory. The work blends creative writing (Scene II) with digital art (Scene III) and reflects my fascination with the built and the natural, home and host, the ear as 'prompt' for and 'prop' in practices of the imagination. The larger cartography of linked digital designs acts as a literary device (ekphrasis), an organising tool that accents the possibilities and impossibilities of listening techniques, while connecting me to the collective voices of what Deleuze and Guattari call a minor literature. The sound archive contains noise that is simultaneously recognisable and alien. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arcades Project evokes a dreamy vision of the seduction of Paris in the 1930s as the city is transformed into a world of decadence, depravity and escape. Benjamin's writing takes us to the Oneiropolis, a social ecosystem saturated by the déluge of a 'dreamy tide of bad taste' bathing citizens and tourists in the narcotic waters of spectacle. Even today, as we read Benjamin's disjointed yet baroque reflections on this Paris, we are pushed benevolently into a labyrinth populated by familiar characters, like the flâneurs, gamblers, collectors, feuilletonists, prostitutes, fashion creatures and fellow dreamers, all of whom energise an ever-present mood of foreboding, waste and collapse with loaded tropological questions about life, modernism and modernity. 'What was gathering there?' 'Where was the light coming from?' Indeed, what would the darkness illuminate? For light and darkness themselves have entered a chiasmus only poetically to exchange properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses some critical issues in the research environment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander candidates at Australian universities. It will be useful to non-Indigenous supervisors of Indigenous students, as well as Indigenous students considering the different kinds of creative practice projects possible at postgraduate level. The article examines the nexus between Indigenous knowledge and creative practice research. The significance of this relationship becomes more apparent with increasing participation of Indigenous creative practitioners in postgraduate education. By drawing on our experience as supervisors of PhD- and MA-level higher degrees with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander candidates, we discuss some of the issues that may arise for supervisors and Indigenous researchers in creative practice research environments. Through Indigenous candidates’ creative projects, we argue these works provide insights into the existing conventions of practice, knowledge and research in Western education. Thus, we demonstrate how Indigenous knowledge has contributed to creative practice research, and broadened its horizons and methods of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Some stories are hard to swallow. They contain material that is taboo and some would say the taboo is forbidden territory. Most of us want stories that are neatly packaged complete with the fairy tale happy ending. Most of us want stories that make us laugh and coat us with a good dose of feel good fuzziness. Not many of us want another ‘misery memoir’. So what if the subject matter is ‘difficult’ or disturbs uneasy memories? What happens when the story involves suicide, murder, crime, war, death, incest or rape? What if these were part of our family stories? And as writers, what do we ‘do’ with these difficult memories? While we might deceive ourselves by remembering ‘only the good times’, memories attached to taboo issues are often the hardest to write about. This paper reflects on some of these challenges and how we consider them in the light of our own family stories. We explore the tensions between fact and fiction in story telling, and the role that memory, imagination and reflection play in broaching taboo issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]