Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback

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Deborah Bird Rose, Richard Davis
ANU E Press, Mar 1, 2006 - History - 206 pages
The frontier is one of the most pervasive concepts underlying the production of national identity in Australia. Recently it has become a highly contested domain in which visions of nationhood are argued out through analysis of frontier conflict. DISLOCATING THE FRONTIER departs from this contestation and takes a critical approach to the frontier imagination in Australia. The authors of this book work with frontier theory in comparative and unsettling modes. The essays reveal diverse aspects of frontier images and dreams - as manifested in performance, decolonising domains, language, and cross-cultural encounters.
 

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Page 150 - The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin.
Page 150 - ... a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him.
Page 24 - American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.
Page 101 - Of all the mammalia yet known, it seems the most extraordinary in its conformation ; exhibiting the perfect resemblance of the beak of a duck, engrafted on the head of a quadruped.
Page 33 - I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians . . . They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.
Page 150 - In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.
Page 49 - Rosenzweig to articulate two main precepts for structuring the ground for ethical dialogue. The first is that dialogue begins where one is, and thus is always situated; the second is that dialogue is open, and thus the outcome is not known in advance.
Page 196 - Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill," in James R. Grossman, ed.. The Frontier in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 27. 13. See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 156-93, on the "red-blooded" school of western fiction; and White, "Turner and Buffalo Bill," 47-52, on the West as a field for the reconstruction of Anglo-Saxon manhood.
Page 126 - Hereafter another great task before the national Department of Agriculture and the similar agencies of the various states must be to foster agriculture for its social results, or, in other words, to assist in bringing about the best kind of life on the farm for the sake of producing the best kind of men.
Page 30 - Each of these mythic icons is in effect a poetic construction of tremendous economy and compression and a mnemonic device capable of evoking a complex system of historical associations by a single image or phrase.

About the author (2006)

Author and journalist Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia on April 18, 1864. After studying at Lehigh and Johns Hopkins universities, he became a reporter and in 1890, he was the managing editor of Harper's Weekly. On assignments, he toured many areas of the world and recorded his impressions of the American West, Europe, and South America in a series of books. As a foreign correspondent, he covered every war from the Greco-Turkish to World War I and published several books recording his experiences. In 1896, he became part of William Randolph Hearst's unproven plot to start the Spanish-American War in order to boost newspaper sales when Hearst sent him and illustrator Frederick Remington to cover the Cuban rebellion against Spanish rule. In Cuba, Davis wrote several articles that sparked U.S. interest in the struggles of the Cuban people, but he resigned when Hearst changed the facts in one of his stories. Davis was aboard the New York during the bombing of Mantanzas, which gave the New York Herald a scoop on the war. As a result, the U.S. Navy prohibited reporters from being aboard any U.S. ships for the rest of the Cuban conflict. Davis was captured by the German Army in 1914 and was threatened with execution as a spy. He eventually convinced them he was a reporter and was released. He is considered one of the most influential reporters of the yellow journalist era. He died in Mount Kisco, New York on April 11, 1916.

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