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This article braids our personal and political narratives to examine approaches to creative ethnography as a technique of writing for activists’ goals. Using autobricolage—mixing art, activism and ethnography—we explore narrative as a decolonising strategy to centre Indigenous ontology. The insights carry implications for how we understand and engage with the experiences of others, particularly marginalised voices. The article also offers reflections on the current climate of protest and its new opportunities for social change and solidarity. These reflections are as important for defenders of climate change as for protesters of BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. Shared histories of colonialism and migration can potentially provide the basis for productive settler-Indigenous social relations among current and future generations. By sharing our experiences as native migrants living in Australia—Harwood from Aotearoa and Guntarik from Borneo—we show how stories reinforce one another, trigger new memories and reveal parallel politics.

With the rise of pervasive games in the last two decades, peaking with Pokémon GO, questions surrounding the perceptions, use, and ownership of public space have rapidly emerged. Beyond commercial and public uses of city spaces, how are such experiences attentive to local, regional, cross-cultural, ancient, and persistent notions of place? How can locative and pervasive experiences respond to local and Indigenous understandings of place? Perhaps most decisively, what is the compatibility of ancient and Indigenous stories of sustainability set within rapidly obsolete frameworks of the latest mobile devices? In considering these questions, this article reviews the current literature on Indigenous pervasive games and discusses an augmented reality audio-game that features Australian First Nations’ stories of land, river, and sky. Players of the game are transformed into wayfarers as they move across the landscape to uncover alternate and pre-settlement cartographies bringing new insights to familiar territory.

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 Onei...

This vignette about experimental participatory art is part of an intellectual foray that criss-crossed Melbourne and Manhattan. As a refusal to form, the intent was to pose more questions than to provide answers on the process of collecting for an archive. The project draws from a site-specific work, and should be read as an ode to Walter Benjamin, providing a poetic description of collecting as method, walking and philosophy.

In 2016, we organized digital storytelling workshops with First Nations1 participants in Melbourne (Australia) to cocreatively “map” sites of historical significance through locative technologies. These digital memory maps allowed participants to share their oral stories about their relationships to different places with broader audiences through a cultural walking trail mobile app from both their individual and their collective perspectives. Functioning much like a museum tour guide in an outdoor setting, we named this app “Memory-scapes,” as it would feature First Nations people's memories of different places, allowing interested members of the public (tourists, students, and educators) to listen to and watch the digital stories as they physically walked the trail. We found that a cocreative archival framework for digitizing these oral histories supported our work with community. Through this project, we illustrate how First Nations people's knowledges are populating the archive in forms that place the control of content back in their hands. These community-driven archives reveal how new archival practices are shifting the media landscape of representational possibilities. While calling attention to the politics of representing place, we also question the emancipatory potential of digital technologies for First Nations people.

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 resea...

This article is about resettled Afghan Hazaras in Australia, many of whom are currently undergoing a complex process of transition (from transience into a more stable position) for the first time in their lives. Despite their permanent residency status, we show how resettlement can be a challenging transitional experience. For these new migrants, we argue that developing a sense of belonging during the transition period is a critical rite of passage in the context of their political and cultural identity. A study of forced migrants such as these, moving out of one transient experience into another transitional period (albeit one that holds greater promise and permanence) poses a unique intellectual challenge. New understandings about the ongoing, unpredictable consequences of ‘transience’ for refugee communities is crucial as we discover what might be necessary, as social support structures, to facilitate the process of transition into a distinctly new environment. The article is based on a doctoral ethnographic study of 30 resettled Afghan Hazara living in the region of Dandenong in Melbourne, Australia. Here, we include four of these participants’ reflections of transition during different phases of their resettlement. These reflections were particularly revealing of the ways in which some migrants deal with change and acquire a sense of belonging to the community. Taking a historical view, and drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic social capital to highlight themes in individual experiences of belonging, we show how some new migrants adjust and learn to ‘embody’ their place in the new country. Symbolic social capital illuminates how people access and use resources such as social networks as tools of empowerment, reflecting how Hazara post-arrival experiences are tied to complex power relations in their everyday social interactions and in their life trajectories as people in transition We learned that such tools can facilitate the formation of Hazara migrant identities and are closely tied to their civic community participation, English language development, and orientation in, as well as comprehension of local cultural knowledge and place. This kind of theorization allows refugee, post-refugee and recent migrant narratives to be viewed not merely as static expressions of loss, trauma or damage, but rather as individual experiences of survival, adaptation and upward mobility.

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 broachi...

This article explores the use of mobile eye tracking to provide insights on the dynamics of haptic (touch/sense) and visual experience. We created a digital cultural walking trail (TRACES), designing an app to explore user experiences of their environment, and as a way to reveal the multilayered interactions between places and technology. Using mobile eye tracker technology to trace a person’s place-based engagements, we show how the design of tablet-friendly apps can enrich experience by guiding viewers through an immersive and interactive environment with valuable information. We also highlight how this activity may negatively impact on experience by demanding attention away from real world engagement.

Aboriginal historiographies challenge conventional interpreting of societies and cultures’ histories which are often linear, singular, and excluding of other than dominant narratives. But alternative solutions to conventional history are often binarized as minority or oppositional groups and simply “accommodated” in what continues as the dominant story. The work of Japanese scholar Minoru Hokari from his time with Gurindji people, an Aboriginal Australian group from the Kalkaringi region in northern Australia, is discussed here as an innovative way of re-framing how we think outside such dichotomies. Following Hokari's lead the author's own cross-culture positioning is then used to explore Aboriginal construction of knowledge and history amongst the Ganai/Kurnai, the Aboriginal people originating from the region of Gippsland in southern Australia. This broadens the argument for valuing multiple alternative histories that such lived experience offers for majority and Indigenous peoples alike.

This article examines literature by Asian writers living in Australia. I focus on contemporary Asian Australian writing and how it has been marketed and reviewed. My aim is to present two major issues working against both its reception by Australian and international readers and the ways of thinking about representations of ‘Asia’ in general. The first issue relates to the publishing industry’s tendency to box Asian Australian literature under the rubric of ‘migrant’ and ‘ethnic’ writing. The second issue concerns stereotypes perpetuated about Asian people and culture in both populist media representations and some of the historical literature. Despite a writer’s connections to and/or reflections about specific places in Asia or elsewhere in their writing, Asian Australian literature does not necessarily have to be confined to territory, migration or the ethnicity of the writer in its marketing. The stories contained within this literature can travel across geographic distances and be universal. Universal stories tend to transcend race, class, gender and geographic boundaries, convey a complex of meanings and possess deeper truths that resonate with the general community. This article shows how Asian Australian literature can bring restrictive representations of Asian people and culture into critical play. It suggests that contemporary Asian Australian writing or Asian-themed literature is complex and changing, reflecting the transformations taking place in Asia itself, in the relationship between Australia and Asia, and the ongoing engagements between Asian writers in Australia with Asia.

This article engages with visual media texts to complicate the ways audiences interpret race politics in the light of competing discourses on cultural difference. I adopt a case study approach to examining how value can be ascribed to ethnic cultural knowledge in ways that productively contribute to shaping public engagement with race politics in a contemporary context. How might visual texts work to mediate the invisible dimensions of the socio-political in the teaching of the histories of race? I will offer reflections on this question through two paintings that highlight Aboriginal notions of self in relation to the migrant other in an Australian museum. My aim is to explore some of the pedagogical implications around cross-cultural learning by disrupting orthodox readings of place and race informed by dominant discourses.

Narrative analysis has emerged as a central analytical force in furthering a critique of colonial discourse. This article examines the relationship between narrative and discourse, by offering a comparative analysis of indigenous narrative, in the context of Australian and Malaysian history and contemporary museum practices of representation. I argue that indigenous knowledge is underpinned by narratives that enable a radical reconceptualization of existing epistemological and philosophical practices to viewing the world. This knowledge reflects various narratives of resistance about indigeneity that challenge traditional understandings of difference, revealing the ways indigenous people make sense of the past and construct their own narratives. My intention is to explore the tensions of place, space and memory through a reflection on indigenous resistance narratives. I examine different knowledges of place and “country”, suggesting there are parallels between indigenous people’s cultural knowledge in Australia and indigenous people’s knowledge in Malaysia. Western preoccupations continue to ignore this cultural knowledge and, in doing so, they eclipse broader awareness about issues of significance for indigenous communities.

Early photographic and anthropological processes produced specific forms of colonial knowledge. Images of Borneo captured during the colonial period thus offer a snapshot of the emerging field of anthropology. British explorer A.C. Haddon played a role in shaping early anthropological theory, from his 1898 expedition in Torres Straits and Sarawak to the subsequent analysis of his findings upon his return to Britain. During this time, the study of exotic people and places was the object of a new form of empiricism; the period also coincided with the circulation of a range of images of Asia. These images played a crucial part in constructing popular assumptions about colonized peoples and their social positions in the colonial hierarchy. Haddon's photographic collections were connected to a larger process of colonial knowledge production in which various images -- including other photographs, early film footage, paintings and etchings -- wrestled with competing representations of the region. His photographs of Sarawak convey the struggle in the emerging discipline of anthropology to distil objective 'truths' while competing with the subjective experiences afforded by social relations with local communities.