Ross Gibson (1956–1943)

Ross Gibson's brilliant 26 Views of the Starburst World focuses on two notebooks, ninety pages in all, in which William Dawes recorded his notes on the 'language of N. S. Wales, in the neighbourhood of Sydney (Native and English)' in the late 18th century.

Dawes was a marine lieutenant and astronomer who lived in Sydney from 1788 to 1991, years in which the world of the Eora (the people who lived there before the English arrived) changed catastrophically and in which that of the invader–settlers likewise was transformed. These two notebooks were rediscovered in London in 1972. In compiling them, Dawes drew on his relationships with a small group of Eora, including most memorably a young woman named Patyegarang, who visited him at his tiny observatory on the edge of the settlement. They record snippets of conversation, and give sometimes enigmatic glimpses of tiny interactions.

Gibson describes the notebooks as 'fragmented, unfinished, heuristic', with 'a prismatic quality'. And his book might be described in similar terms: it quotes, questions, analyses, peers closely at faint marks, speculates, extrapolates. It comes at the notebooks from, well, at least 26 angles: there's biography, linguistics , psychology, anthropology, the history of colonisation, the history of science (1788 was a time of a high romantic approach to scientific enquiry in England), communication theory, the politics of Rugby League in 21st century Sydney. Apart from Dawes' contemporaries Watkin Tench, David Collins and Arthur Phillip, it quotes Wordsworth, Emerson, Walden, Mallarmé, James Agee, Kenneth Slessor, the 20th century haiku master Seichi – all of them pertinently ... And sometimes it lets the notebooks speak for themselves. Gibson describes his approach as 'roundabout, relational, a tad restless and unruly', and in a slightly less alliterative moment as 'a little like history, a little like poetry, a little maddeningly like a séance.'… (plus d'informations)

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/ross-gibsons-seven-versions/

This book is a meditation on the so-called horror stretch, country north of Rockhampton in central Queensland that has a reputation as the setting for terrible events. Starting with a number of roadside murders in the second half of last century that made headlines all over Australia, Gibson explores the cultural factors, the 'structure of feeling', underlying the general fascination with those crimes. A 'badland' such as this, he says, is a way of localising and mythologising issues that are unresolved in the society in general. This description may lead you to expect something that reads like a bad translation from the French, with lots of impenetrable theory. But it's an engaging read, and becomes compelling as it moves back in time to the terrible first contact between Aboriginal people and settlers, forward again to the ordeals of Melanesian indentured workers in the sugar paddocks, and forward yet again to the White Australia Policy's denial of the extraordinary diversity of the region.

'Sooner or later,' Gibson writes, 'any society that would like to know itself as "post-colonial" must confront an inevitable question: how to live with collective memories of theft and murder. Sooner or later, therefore, acknowledgement and grieving must commence before healing can ensue.'… (plus d'informations)