Burning Questions and the Creative Imaginary: Our Humanities in Australian Regional Communities

• Published in: Australian humanities review no. 73; pp. 169 - 187
• Main Author: Noble, Alistair
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bundoora Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) 01.02.2025
• Subjects: 20th century; Aboriginal Australians; Humanities; Music; Native peoples; Oppression; Political power; Politics; Questions; Social sciences; Teaching; Australia; New South Wales Australia
• ISSN: 1325-8338; 1325-8338
• DOI: 10.56449/14677833

The ancient beauty of our view across the valley towards the mountain is endlessly fascinating as the 1 An early form of this article was given as a keynote speech on Yirrganydji Country at the Symposium 'Regions, Humanities, Wellbeing: The Relationship Between Humanities and Communities in the Regions', James Cook University, Cairns, 19 July 2024.1 thank Sarah Lawrence and Adrian Walsh for constructively critiquing the draft of this written version. weather, sun, moon, and stars change around us, reflected in the dams below.2 However, this extraordinary Country, maintained in careful equilibrium for tens of thousands of years by Indigenous Australians, is now alarmingly fragile and, in many respects, badly damaged.3 Kathryn Coff, a Yorta Yorta educator, concluded her 2021 essay 'Learning on and from Country: Teaching by Incorporating Indigenous Relational Worldviews' by posing four reflective questions for teachers: 1. There is a reason why, even in an Australian culture that we imagine to be relatively free, political powers are often at pains to diminish or sideline the standing of the arts in (or as) public discourse, with the double-edged sword of government funding a key instrument for the exercise of political power. Moving beyond Bourdieu's suggestion in The Field of Cultural Production that the artist's 'position-takings arise quasi-mechanically-that is, almost independently of the agent's consciousness and wills-from the relationship between positions' (59), Ariella Ai'sha Azoulay has more recently argued for a sense of art that is 'conceived as partaking in world building with others rather than the creation of discrete objects' (104). While some artistic statements might serve to reify existing social, political, and economic paradigms-especially, as Walter Benjamin warned in 1935, in an age of technological reproduction6-nevertheless, the possibility remains that an unexpected position-taking may disturb the framing structures of our collective experience in constructive if sometimes uncomfortable ways.7 In order to pass through the oppression of anxieties across all our areas of work in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, we need to figure out the crucial questions that we must ask of our time and place (from our position in the 'field')-and how best to ask them.