This thesis, which consists of a creative component (a novel) and a dissertation, engages with creative arts practice understood as hermeneutical process, that is, as 'fluid, repetitive and continuous "a kaleidoscope of everchanging reflections, revisions, false starts and backtracking' (Snodgrass and Coyne 2006: 46). It brings into intimate proximity Australia and Australians, Indonesia and Indonesians, and considers the transformative process of writing the cross-cultural novel as an act of interpretation, where the embodied writer engages in a process of understanding with the self, and with the text as it is being written. The context for 'The Colour of Dissonance' "" both the novel and the dissertation "" is the web of affiliations that informs the relationship between Australia and Indonesia. In the novel the central character, Iwan, is an Indonesian young man who travels from Central Java to Sydney in 1997 to study art. After graduating from art school he marries an Australian and begins a career as a visual artist. Themes explored in the novel include migration and cross-cultural encounter, creative arts practice as a way of life, the giving and receiving of hospitality, situated knowledges, and the impacts of social, cultural and political change (local and geopolitical). The dissertation draws on Adrian Snodgrass and David Coyne's (2006) application of Hans- Georg Gadamer's hermeneutical theory to the architectural design studio to argue that to write across cultures is to engage in a process of understanding with difference and an unfamiliar other. By adding shame, terror and fear of failure to this process of interpretation I illuminate their potential for sustaining cross-cultural writing that remains ethically and responsibly engaged even as it crosses borders "" where the horizon of the writer 'fuses with the horizon of the text' and the text 'unhinges' our prejudices and suggests its own' (Snodgrass and Coyne 2006: 43). It is in this spirit, I argue, that the novelist is able to understand her or his character 'from within, as it were, but must also perceive it as other, as apart from its creator in its distinct alterity' (Ashcroft et al. 2007: 9). As a way of situating the author, each chapter in the dissertation is framed by paintings from an exhibition by Ida Lawrence, (n)desa/bloody woop woop, stories from Kliwonan, Barmedman and between (kisah dari Kliwonan, Barmedman dan kisah di antaranya) (2012). Following the above epigram, both the dissertation and novel are an experimental first step in developing 'an inventory' of the 'infinity of traces' deposited in 'I/we/Australia' in relation to Indonesia in the Australian imaginary. For Edward W Said (1978/2003, 1998) the compilation of such an inventory "" including the deposits of family, collective and national histories that make up the self "" is essential to the task of interpretation and 'critical consciousness' (26). Not only does it enable one 'to understand one's own history in terms of other peoples' history, the relationship between ourselves and another, it also allows one 'to transform from a unitary identity to an identity that includes the other without suppressing difference' (Said 1998). The dissertation reviews a well-documented lack of alterity in Australian literary representations of Indonesia and Indonesians (Vickers 1998, Reeve 1998, Tickell 1998, and Rankin 1999) and, in order to highlight this lack, considers several non-fiction texts that explore little known historical and contemporary interactions between Indonesians and Australians (Hardjono 1993, Lingard 2009, Balint 2005, Crosby et al. 2008). It also draws on Terry Smith's (2011) Contemporary Art: World Currents which identifies an emerging current in contemporary art today "" one shaped by a changing 'mix of cultural, technological, social and geopolitical forces' "" to imagine an evolving context for the work of three contemporary Australian writers in different genres "" novel, novella and long poem (De Kretser 2012, Chi Vu 2012, Mackenzie 2009).
| Date of Award | 2014 |
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| Original language | English |
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