About Robert Dixon: "RobCon 2019"

Flying foxes coasted at dusk, heavy and low, over Parramatta Road. Everyone in Sydney apologized for the smoke, and everyone added that the fire season was only beginning. In early December, no one yet knew how bad the fires would be, but even so the stores were asking customers to "round up" their purchase sums as donations for wildlife relief. When I took the train to Katoomba, the Blue Mountains unrolled like a Chinese scroll, a few details suggesting an insubstantial world. I had not traveled to Australia for the doom, however—no need, with American production of despair at such high levels—but rather to attend "From Colony to Transnation: An ASAL Conference in Honour of Robert Dixon," at the University of Sydney, 5–6 December 2019. Robert had retired after twelve years as the Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, the fourth person to hold that flag rank since 1962, following G. A. Wilkes, Leonie Kramer, and Elizabeth Webby; the university's widely denounced decision not to appoint a successor hung in the air, part and parcel of our wider habitat degradation. All the same, the conference organized by Brigid Rooney and Peter Kirkpatrick suggested a wider world as well, a model of academic commitment, skill, and generosity. Everyone in Sydney said that too.

In the volume that he recently edited, Richard Flanagan: Critical Essays (Sydney University Press, 2018), Robert characterized much of Flanagan's fiction as intensely Tasmanian: "there is the reverse optic of the edge looking back to the centre; the recovery of alternative stories marginalised by triumphalist national and imperial histories; and the rescaling of imagined communities from nation and empire to the province, the island, and the edge" (22). As a scholar, these have also been Robert's efforts, and many of the conference presentations reflected similar interests. Critically, Flanagan's Tasmanian identity, or its equivalent, proceeds from close, local reading of an area in order to record the density and layering, the subductions and contradictions of its multiple stories, many of which are too small or too fragmented to appear in general histories or overarching narratives. The vitality of such work intensifies with the conviction that it matters, and the papers presented at "RobCon" mattered a great deal.

Contributors submitted enough proposals that the conference had to be scheduled in split sessions. Chronologically, the papers spanned a wide range, from Elizabeth Webby's "Charles Harpur and His Critics," drawing on mid-nineteenth-century archival material, to Meg Tasker's "Two Versions of Colonial Nationalism," comparing nineteenth-century journals, to very new works, albeit by established authors, taken up by Nicholas Birns (Alex Miller's The Passage of Love, 2017), Lydia Saleh Rofail (Gail Jones's The Death of Noah Glass, 2018), and Gillian Whitlock (Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains, 2018). However, the history prize went to Paul Giles for the near-future appreciation "Robert Dixon in 2050," casting Robert as the hero of Australian literature's global triumph. I was happy to find the mid-twentieth century well represented, by Brigitta Olubas's "Shirley Hazzard's Post-War Networks," Melinda Cooper's "Colonial Modernity and Middlebrow Orientalism" in Eleanor Dark, and Tanya Dalziel and Paul Genoni on the friendship of Sidney Nolan and Alan Moorhead that led to a paper titled "From the Aegean to Adelaide via Antarctica."

The title of Dalziel and Genoni's paper also indicated the transnational range of the conference, where Australia is a conceptual center; moving outward, the recording of experience in Australian terms can happen anywhere—doing well, again, by proceeding from that tight observational focus that Dixon finds in Flanagan's Tasmania. My paper, "Douglas Mawson and the Nation of Science," considered geophysical connections claimed by the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14. Looking at the late nineteenth century, Mandy Treagus examined Australia in terms of both expansion and domestic expectation in "White Man, White Knowledge: Louis Becke and the Literary Mapping of the Pacific"; Anne Maxwell viewed representations of the same territory in "Australian Photography and the Pacific World." Both presenters...