Professor Ross Gibson

Research Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at UTS, author of South of the West (1992), EXCHANGES: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Australia and the Pacific (1996 edited) and Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002), and films CAMERA NATURA (1985) and WILD (1993)



"Vision and Disintegration"
Thursday 1st May 6pm
The Koorie Heritage Trust: 295 King Street, Melbourne. Tel: 61 3 8622 2600

Europeans colonised Australia at a time when their sense of vision was undergoing extraordinary redefinition. For the white people, vision was being mechanically enhanced and organised for scientific, economic and self-assertive purposes.
There's no denying how damaging the realignments of the senses were for indigeneity -- particularly in the way new regimes of vision locked around Aboriginal people till they became treated as moribund objects rather than dynamic subjects, Even so, amidst the catastrophe, a few people did seem to sense, now and then, the richness and difference of indigenous cognition, especially the multi-sensory perceptions that engendered the nuanced, indigenous understanding of the environment.
In this presentation Professor Gibson will examine a few moments when the possibility of re-integrating vision into the full array of senses was comprehended by some settlers.