"Making Badlands": The conference

"The conference was based around the concept of the "badlands" arising from Ross Gibson's Seven Versions of an Australian Badlands (UQ Press, 2002) which describes the central Queensland region as haunted by a violent colonial past and fraught with troubling incidents that make it an Australian badland. This conference addressed the concept of an Australian badland — what it means to speak of a space as a badland, its relation to history, the imaginary, and to questions of regionality, representation, myth, archival authority, and the formation of narrative and discursive knowledge."--issue 13, September 2006.