Speakers

Jon Altman is foundation director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the ANU. He has worked with Kuninjku people since 1979 and has written widely on themes as diverse as their hybrid economy, their art and their relations with the state.

Diane Austin-Broos

Ros Bandt is an internationally acclaimed sound artist, composer, researcher and scholar. Since 1977 she has pioneered interactive sound installations, sound sculptures, and created sound playgrounds, spatial music systems, and some 40 sound installations worldwide. She has curated many sound performances, exhibitions and events. Her original works are recorded on New Albion Records (USA), Move Records (Melbourne), EMI/ABC, and Wergo (Germany). She collaborates with many interdisciplinary artists and has been a founding member of three ensembles: La Romanesca early music ensemble, the cross-cultural Back to Back Zithers, and the improvisatory LIME. Bandt is a prolific writer on sound and her book Sound Sculpture: Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks (Fine Arts Press) is the first audio visual profile of Australian sound art. She teaches sound art studios at the VCA and RMIT and is an honorary senior research fellow at the Australian Centre, the University of Melbourne, where she directs 'The Australian Sound Design Project', the first on-line soundart gallery, searchable data-base and web site merging soundart practice with academic research.

Jennifer L. Biddle is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology in the Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy, Macquarie University. She conducts research with Warlpiri women in Lajamanu, and writes on language, affect and cultural difference; postcoloniality; translation, art, aesthetics and the politics of interpretation; Central Desert writing and art. She has also published on her own experience with a certain Toyota Hilux in The Anthropologist's Body or What it Means to Break Your Neck in the Field The Australian Journal of Anthropology, and Anthropology as Eulogy: on loss, lies and license, Jill Bennett and Roseanne Kennedy (eds), World Memories:Personal Trajectories in Global times. She is currently conducting a 3 year ARC research project (with Associate Professor Robyn Ferrell) on the relationship between feminist aesthetics and indigenous art.

Christy Collis is a cultural geographer with a particular interest in Australian and Canadian cultural technologies of spatial possession. She has published articles on walking, four-wheel driving, camel trekking, and polar skiing as mobile technologies of spatial production and possession.  She is currently writing a book on the spatial history of the Australian Antarctic Territory. She drives a Volkswagon kombi.

Bill Fogarty is a researcher at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) at the Australian National University and has recently completed a Masters in Applied Anthropology (ANU). He has 9 years experience in Indigenous Education and policy, the bulk of this working with the Kuninjku, Djinang, Burarra, Kune and Rembarrnga peoples in the Homelands surrounding Maningrida in Arnhemland. His research interests include Indigenous education, literature, Indigenous art, customary based land management, CDEP and fisheries.

Ursula Frederick is interested in art, archaeology, cultural heritage and material culture: the contexts within which they are produced and the socio-cultural meanings they generate. Her earliest memory is identifying the taxonomy of clouds through the backseat window of a station wagon on the road to Derby, WA. She is currently making a film about car-culture in Canberra and writing about expressions of mobility in rock art. She got her first car at the age of five, a fully motorised miniature model T ford but her pride and joy is a '58 Chrysler Imperial just like this one.

Alison French works in interfaces between central Australia - her home for the last ten years - and those places and people outside the centre that have custody of its cultural heritage. She is currently based in Canberra at the Australian National University's Centre for Cross - Cultural Research, where she wrote Seeing the Centre: the art of Albert Namatjira 1902 - 1959 , during her appointment as the Darling Author Fellow. Alison worked for nine years at the National Gallery of Australia, initially curating exhibitions in the Education Section. In her later years at the NGA she created its Travelling Exhibition Program. This work took her to the Araluen Centre in Alice Springs. Her subsequent appointment as the Centre's Curator introduced her to the complexity and clarity of Namatjira's vision. Alison has recently commenced an ARC funded research project 'The art of Albert Namatjira: cultural legacy and artistic translation'. A major biography and a book for children are two projected outcomes.

Glen Fuller is a PhD student at the Centre for Cultural Research, University
of Western Sydney, and his research examines contemporary modified-car
culture. He has worked as a freelance writer in the car enthusiast
magazine industry and has been described in the media as a "former self-
confessed hoon." He drives a hotted up Ford.

Melinda Hinkson teaches anthropology at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, ANU. She received her PhD from La Trobe University in 2000. As well as undertaking a biographical treatment of the life work of eminent anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner , Melinda's research interests include Aboriginal Australia; history of anthropology; cultural transformation; anthropology of globalisation and media; theories of culture and personhood.

Vivien Johnson Since 2000 Vivien has been a senior ARC Research Fellow working on her ARC project: The History and Repercussions of Western Desert Art . Prior to this she had been a lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney, since 1980. Vivien obtained her doctorate in Sociology from the University of New South Wales in 1982 with a thesis entitled A Partisan Account of Marrickville Women's Refuge. Her research interests include Aboriginal art, especially Western Desert art, which she has been studying since the late 1970s; Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights; copyright and cultural integrity issues in the merchandising of indigenous imageries (Australian and Native American).

Kiera Lindsey read Theology and graduated with Arts Hons from University of Melbourne in 1995. She worked in the Australian fashion and film industries for six years before returning to postgraduate studies at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne where she is completing her postgraduate thesis on the Hume Highway, entitled A Quick Boring Route. Kiera's interest in roads may have been pre-ordained for following her undergraduate studies she worked for a range of businesses including Country Road, Village Roadshow and the Australian Film Institute where she took a festival of Australian road movies on the road throughout Australia. Perhaps all roads lead to yet another road...In 2000 she won a Triple J scriptwriting competition, and produced/directed a film-clip for David Bridie. Since 2001, she has tutored and guest lectured in gender and cinema in Australia society and published articles in a range of academic and non-referreed journals. In 2004 she co-edited an extensive online publication with Stuart Macintyre, Pat Grimshaw and Kate Darian-Smith and is currently funded by DFAT to write and edit four Australian Studies textbooks with historian Associate Professor Kate Darian-Smith. An interest in the poetics of Australian roads and in the power of storytelling has lead Kiera to explore the notion that the road maybe considered a narrative that is inscribed with multiple traversings and stories. This is the focus of her current research on The Hume Highway which is particularly interested in both the coming into being of this road as well as its current existence in the here and now.

Jeremy Long

Susan Luckman is a Lecturer in the School of Communication, Information and New Media at the University of South Australia who teaches and researches in the fields of communication, media and cultural studies. She has authored publications on youth cultural practices, creative industries and cultural policy, new media, the Internet and advertising, digital music cultures, subcultural theory, and contemporary cultural studies. She is Secretary of the Cultural Studies Association of Australiasia (CSAA), Node Co-Convenor (Early Career Researchers and Post graduates) for the ARC Cultural Research Network, and Co-Convenor of the Cultures of the Body Research Group at UniSA.

Hamish Morgan is completing a PhD through the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash University. The direction of his research is to focus attention on the problematic of writing and representation within the field of Indigenous studies. He is especially interested in the issues and ethics that inform and produce the practice of inter-cultural representation. Hamish is interested in French ‘post-structuralist’ philosophy especially the work of Derrida, Deleuze, and Bourdieu. Much of his work is concerned with how to make use and ground these theorists’ thinking on writing/representation; of how to use them to think about, and to write about, living in an Aboriginal community. He is also interested in a kind of ‘poetics of writing’ - the things it pushes, opens, the affectivity it traces, the collapse of neat distinctions it promotes. In short, just how do you write theory, experience, the inter-cultural exchange, without succumbing to the anxieties of orthodoxy.

Howard Morphy has been Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, ANU since 1999. He is also honorary Curator of Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and Adjunct Curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Research Centre, University of Virginia. His areas of research and interest entail the anthropology of art and aesthetics, material culture, landscape, visual anthropology and ethnographic film, globalisation, museums and performance, cross-cultural categories, aboriginal religion, kinship, human adaptation and the evolution of culture, the history of anthropology and anthropological history. His major current research project is a biography of the Yolngu artist Narritjin Maymuru, which he intends to produce in print and multimedia form.

David Nash

Noah Pleshet "To date my involvement in cars has been exceptionally limited. On reaching licence age in November 1995 I obtained my learner licence and practised only a little before it expired. By 1998 I had left Mudgee in the Central West of NSW to commence study at Sydney University. There I remained without car or drivers licence throughout the entire period of my undergraduate study. I focused on economics and anthropology completing two bachelor degrees over five years. At one stage I owned a small boat with registered trailer, but in all other respects I suffered little inconvenience. During 2004 I worked as a research assistant to Professor Diane Austin-Broos who had supervised my anthropology honours project in the previous year. My thesis was entitled Value In and Out of Place: On the viability of Indigenous Australian economies. Its concerns grew out of my interest in the problematic of value both within the heterodox economics and anthropology literatures. Its ethnographic focus was central Australia. In late 2004, on acquiring a job in Alice Springs and some conceptual interest in cars, I had incentive for action. I presently hold a NSW provisional driver's licence and a half share in a 1990 EA Falcon wagon. The licence was obtained on the morning of Wednesday the 9th of February 2005. I purchased the Falcon from an Israeli backpacker known to my father on the 15th, set out for Alice on the 19th , and commenced work on the 28th of February. I am presently working at the Centre for Appropriate Technology as part of the Desert Knowledge CRC and will commence doctoral study at NYU later this year."  

Peter Read holds postgraduate degrees in history (ANU, Toronto), diplomas in education (Sydney Teachers College) and in Radio Film and Television (Bristol). He has worked extensively in the history of Aboriginal Australia since the mid 1970s, and in 1980 he helped found the organisation Link-Up, which helps to get the stolen generations back home to their families. His interest in oral history has led him to a collection of over 1500 interviews, many of which are held in the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies His current interest is in how Australians feel that they belong to certain places and sites. He has presented and published several books on the matter.

Tony Redmond is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at ANU. He has conducted both academic and applied research in the northern Kimberley (WA) since 1994. This included research for his doctoral dissertation, "Rulug Wayirri: moving kin and country in the northern Kimberely", which explored bodily imagery in Ngarinyin people's inter-relationships with country, each other and ancestral forces. He also conducted the anthropological research, along with Alan Rumsey, on the Wanjina Wunggurr Wilinggin Native Title claim (Neowarra vs. WA). His interests include phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches to bodily experience and intersubjectivity, Indigenous Kimberley sociality, mythology and religion, experiences of work, dependency and violence, Native Title and other mediated relationships with the state, and contemporary expressive cultural production.

Benjamin Smith is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University (CAEPR). He is currently working on an ARC-funded research project on 'Outcomes for Aboriginal People from Land Claims, Transfers and Purchases in Central Cape York Peninsula'. Benjamin has carried out both academic and applied research with Aboriginal people in Cape York Peninsula and other locations across northern Queensland. His research interests include Aboriginal Australia (particularly Cape York Peninsula and northern Queensland); systems of land tenure; place and sociocultural production, land rights and native title; the anthropology of the state; anthropological theories of subjectivity; 'Diaspora' and 'local' Aboriginal communities; population mobility and decentralisation; anthropology and development in Australian and overseas contexts; social change and 'intercultural' processes; photography and anthropology; yoga in India and Australia.

Lisa Stefanoff is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the ANU Centre for Cross-Cultural Research. Since 2002 Lisa has been living, researching and working towards her Ph.D. in Alice Springs, on a project based at the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) and funded by AIATSIS and the Wenner Gren Foundation.

The first film that Lisa worked on as part of her fieldwork at CAAMA was ‘Cold Turkey’(2002), a 50 minute road movie directed by Steve McGregor. Since that time she has developed some thesis themes about the aesthetic and social relationships between Aboriginal road movies, country music and the role of cars in the production of desert cultures. Cruising Country grew out of conversations with co-convener Ursula Frederick, and others, about these themes. Most recently Lisa has begun research on the modernity of T.G.H. Strehlow’s road movies and his love of his vehicles.

Lisa’s back, right shoulder and head sometimes remind her of the three major car-accidents she survived between 1980 and 2001. Dorothy Porter’s poem ‘Driving Too Fast’ is one of her favourites. Lisa’s first car was a grey 1964 Morris Major Elite with a red leather front bench seat that rusted and collapsed in Bondi in 1995. Lisa's current car is a 1978 Red 2-Door Hondamatic Hatchback called The Tomato. Some local Eastern Arrernte kids call it 'Cockroach'.

Catherine Summerhayes is a Lecturer in Film Studies and the Centre for New Media Arts, ANU and the founder of AD - Art of the Documentary Film Competition . Her research interests include documentary film; film as cultural performance; Australian cinema; Indigenous cinema; performance studies; new media art; animation; cinemedia: screen based media studies; and photomedia.

Katharine Willis is an architect, artist and researcher whose focus on exploring ways in which we interact with our spatial environment. This work has included installations, temporary and permanent public artworks in UK and Europe. In particular she has been researching and creating installations which adopt new approaches to understanding how we can create legible environments. These projects investigate navigation, wayfinding and identity and the transformative possibilities of locative technologies. She is currently a researcher in the Spatial Cognition program at the University of Bremen, Germany. She is also a visiting lecturer at University of Manchester, UK and in 2004 worked on an innovative education project with the Whitechapel Art Gallery, UK. Katharine’s background and training is in architecture, and she is registered as a qualified Architect in the UK and Germany.

Bronwyn Wright is an artist-photographer who has a long association with The Swamp on the edge of Darwin. In addition to a number of solo and group exhibitions, in 2004 Bronwyn exhibited 'Swamp Dynamics' at the IMA in Brisbane, 'Vanitas' at the Charles Darwin University Gallery, was included in the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art and ‘Suburban Edge' & 'Zeitgeist' at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney and 'Written with Darkness' UTS Gallery, Sydney. In 2003 she won the ENERGEX Arbour Contemporary Art Prize. Bronwyn is currently enrolled in an MFA with Monash University. She has lived in the Northern Territory for twenty years and is Lecturer in Graphic Design in the School of Creative Arts and Humanities at Charles Darwin University.

Louise Yabsley is a Bachelor of Liberal Studies student currently completing her History Honours thesis on Australian Motoring Holidays in Retirement at the University of Sydney, under the supervision of Richard White.