This edition of Philament is launched in the midst of a Federal election campaign in
which the issue of border security has again reared its head. Our desire for and
resistance to space is fraught and complex. Examining the global and the local,
contributors to Borders, Regions, Worlds navigate the unmappable terrain of space (the
last great “frontier”), deciphering the sometimes empty and transparent territory
associated with physical and imagined borders.
Ana Martino’s “Billy Pilgrim's Motion Sickness: Chronesthesia and Duration in
Slaughterhouse-Five” reads Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel alongside Henri Bergson’s
theories of non-linear time, exploring how the novel’s scattered temporality disrupts
and reconfigures traditional notions of consciousness, memory and existential
freedom. Clare Rhoden’s “What’s missing in this picture? The ‘middle parts of fortune’
in Australian Great War literature” examines a collection of WWI narratives,
challenging the convenient but reductive dichotomy of ‘Australian heroic’ versus
‘European disenchantment’ in canonical accounts of the Great War. In “Nemo’s Abyss:
The Deferral of Undecidability” David Prescott-Steed questions whether the absence of
any mention of the hermaphroditic nature of clownfish renders the perennially popular
children’s film Finding Nemo a flagship for heteronormativity.
Our creative “Excursions” pieces highlight the manifold possibilities offered by the
theme. John Ryan’s poem “Katoomba Incantation” recounts a cross-continental train
trip on the Indian Pacific, traversing spaces of memory, sound and ecology. Eleni
Pavlides’ “The Patrimony” uses the writings of Michel de Certeau to interrogate the
meanings of space and place in a world of shifting symbolic, geographical and
gendered borders. Angelina Mirabito’s “Glow in the Dark Stars” similarly addresses
the intersection of gender and race in the construction of personal identity, in the story
of a girl who uses painting to escape her overbearing Italian-Australian family. Phoebe
Poon turns to popular culture in “Crossing the Time Vortex: Retrospective on Doctor
Who”, and examines the 2005 return of the eponymous television series as a prime
example of the resilience of humanistic ideology in television sci-fi. Andre Rangiah’s
“The Art of Fashion Writing” considers the increasing trend of fashion appearing in art
magazines, asking the question: are these platforms really that different?
Many thanks to our contributors, referees and fellow editorial collective members. This
issue would be much impoverished without the diligence and capabilities of each of
you. To the reader, we hope your exploration of this edition is enjoyable and
invigorating.