ABSTRACT

Cultural Complexes in Australia: Placing Psyche is the first in a series of books that will explore the notion of cultural complexes in a variety of settings around the world.

The continent of Australia is the focus of this inaugural volume in which the contributors elucidate how the unique geography and peoples of Australia interact and interpenetrate to create the particular "mindscapes" of the Australian psyche. While the cultural complexes of Australia are explored with a keen eye to the specificity of place, history, context, and content, at the same time it becomes obvious that these cultural complexes emerge out of an archetypal background that is not just Australian but global.

This volume shows how cultural complex theory itself mediates between the particularity of place and the universality of archetypal patterns.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|20 pages

The Contact Zone as Imaginal Space

The Nullarbor in the Non-indigenous Australian Imagination

chapter 2|25 pages

The Lemon Tree

A Conversation on Civilisation

chapter 3|14 pages

The Rapture of “Girlshine”

Land, Sacrifice, and Disavowal in Australian Cinema

chapter 5|29 pages

Finding the Fish

Memory, Displacement Anxiety, Legitimacy, and Identity: The Legacy of Interlocking Traumatic Histories in Post-colonial Australia

chapter 6|9 pages

Lost for Words

Embryonic Australia and a Psychic Narrative

chapter 7|19 pages

Language Is My Second Skin

Speaking and Dreaming between Germany and Central Australia

chapter 8|26 pages

Taking It with Me

A South African's Cultural Complex in Aotearoa New Zealand

chapter 9|22 pages

A Question of Fear

chapter 10|19 pages

Sorry, It's Complex

Reflecting on The Apology to Indigenous Australians

chapter 11|19 pages

The Australian Resistance to Individuation

Patrick White's Knotted Mandala

chapter 12|19 pages

Sydney—“A City of Truant Disposition”

East West 101 (the 2008–2011 Knapman Wyld Australian TV Series)