Issued by: Laura Hunt 414-229-6447 llhunt@uwm.edu Date: Oct. 19, 2004

Marc Pachter (top) of the Smithsonian Institute's National Portrait Gallery is a frequent visitor to Australia. Australian poet Nicholas Jose (bottom left) and novelist Chris Wallace-Crabbe will read from their work.

UWM Conference Compares the Development of Australia and the U.S.

MILWAUKEE – Social scientists from across the U.S. and Down Under will gather for a conference that compares the development of Australia and the United States, both relatively new societies with complex and ambivalent relations to their founding nations.

The conference, "Australia and America in Global Context," takes place Wednesday-Friday, Oct. 27-29, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). Sessions are held in Greene Hall on Wednesday, Bolton Hall on Thursday, and Curtin Hall on Friday (see schedule at the bottom).

In the United States, and to a lesser degree in Australia, once-colonial societies have grown to become dominant themselves with complex ties to their own minority groups, such as the Aborigines, Afro-Americans, and Latinos. As always, history and geography have played a key role in shaping the cultures of all these emergent societies.

The conference features well-known historians, such as Marc Pachter, director of the Smithsonian Institute’s National Portrait Gallery, as well as poets, literary and film experts, art historians, philosophers and ethnographers to paint a complex picture of how the two countries have differed since their respective post-colonial periods.

An exploration of how minorities in the two countries are treated differently, and how the splintering cultures are expressed in each, is an important theme, says Ihab Hassan, Vilas Professor Emeritus of English at UWM.

In his own presentation on Thursday, "Views of the Void: Painting a Continent," Hassan likens the vast empty spaces still present in modern Australia to those of America’s open frontiers in the 18th century. His talk will be punctuated with a slide show of paintings produced in both countries that illustrate the unpopulated areas, what happened to them, and why.

Ann Marsh of Monash University, Melbourne, will present photographs of Aboriginal life taken by the Aborigines themselves to illustrate how the culture’s pictures of themselves reflect their identity.

And Australian poet and playwright Nicholas Jose compares the Australian ideals about nature and God (referred to as "The Dreaming") to the classical concept of the American Dream.

Wednesday, Oct. 27
Greene Hall, 3347 N. Downer Ave.

4 p.m
Marc Pachter (Smithsonian Institution)
"Larrikins and Wowsers (Rascals and Puritans): Cultural Tilts and Australian/American Relations."

7 p.m.
Nicholas Jose and Chris Wallace-Crabbe read from their work

Thursday, Oct. 28
3:30 p.m.
Bolton Hall, Room B91, 3210 N. Maryland Ave.
Creative Writing Symposium, English Department, with Nicholas Jose and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

4:30 p.m.,
Bolton Hall, Room B52, 3210 N. Maryland Ave.
Anne Marsh (Monash University)
"Displacement and Identity: Contemporary Australian Indigenous Photography"

6 p.m.
School of Continuing Education, 161 E. Plankinton Ave., 6th floor
Creative Writing Seminar

Friday, Oct. 29
Curtin Hall, Room 118, 3243 N. Downer Ave.

1 p.m.
"The Writer’s and Artist’s Perspective"

• Nicholas Jose, "The Dreaming and the Dream: Australia and America"
• Ihab Hassan, "Views of the Void: Painting a Continent"
• Chris Wallace-Crabbe, "Slouching Toward the Nightmare of History"

3:30 p.m.
"Multicultural Australia II"

• Diane Bell (George Washington University), "Engaged Ethnography: A Feminist Exploration of the Politics of Gender, Race and Religion"
• Elizabeth Povinelli (University of Chicago), "Without Shame, The New Cultural Unilateralism"
• Patricia O’Brien (Georgetown University), "White Australia and the Brown Pacific: National Interest and Colonialism in Australia’s Papuan Frontier"

The conference is sponsored by the UWM College of Letters and Science, the UWM Foundation, the Center for International Education, and the Center for 21st Century Studies, with support from the Graduate School and the School of Continuing Education.

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