POLC 4470 Week 3 Assignment

POLC 4470 Week 3 Assignment | Tulane University

What is today Tasmania, a very large island that lies 150 miles south of the even greater continental island of Australia, has been inhabited by Indigenous Peoples for at least 35,000 years. When the British occupation and colonization took place in 1803, its Indigenous population was somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000.

The first reported sighting of the island by a European was in 1642. Dutch explorer Abel Tasman (remember all the Dutch shipwrecks off the coast of western Australia in this period?) first named the island Anthoonij van Diemenslandt after his patron, the Governor of the Dutch East Indies. The Brits shortened the name to Van Diemen's Land.

In 1772, a French expedition, who were also contesting the presence of the British not far from Botany Bay, landed on the island. Even Captain James Cook, maligned by many Indigenous peoples today, sighted the island five years later. The first settlement was by the British in the southern part of the island in 1803 and subsequently became known as Hobart, today's state capital in the federation of Australia. In 1856 the island was officially renamed Tasmania in honor of its first European discoverer.

The penchant in Australia to give cute (perhaps fatuous?) nicknames to places and people has resulted in it being affectionally called "Tassie." The body of water separating Australia from New Zealand is called the Tasman Sea but is sometimes simply known as "The Ditch."

The topographical features of the island are distinctive. Over 20% is designated as the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. The rainforests can be nearly impenetrable as the novelist we are concerned with these next two weeks has depicted. The oldest trees in the world are located here.

The government of this remote Australian state initially took a hard-nosed stand in tackling the Covid-19 pandemic, cutting itself off from the rest of the country. It went four months without local transmission but it led to questions about how unshakeable the federation was. The economic costs for Tasmania were enormous, predictably for the tourist industry where one in five jobs, like the river guide in our novel, were dependent on it. Not just Tassie but many countries across the world were made aware of how precarious their economies were based largely on the influx of tourists.

The Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne concluded this past week, about the same time that Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison kicked off the vaccination drive by inoculating himself and encouraging others to follow suit. On February 22 the Tasmanian government finally announced the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccine; inoculations were to begin in Hobart two days later. Health Department secretary Kathrine Morgan-Wicks remarked that it would be a "slow and steady" rollout, presumably in keeping with the rhythm of the island.

Let's now turn to our next assignment. For the third novel, the submission deadline for which is Sunday March 7, we examine one of Richard Flanagan's many novels, this one titled Death of a River Guide published in 1994. He himself served as a river pilot on the mighty Franklin River.

A Tassie native, in 2014 he was awarded the coveted Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a “magnificent novel of love and war” that recounts the harrowing stories of prisoners and captors in World War II on the Burma railway, commonly known as the "Death Railway," built by Japan in the early 1940s to supply troops and weapons in its military campaign (Flanagan's father had managed to survive the construction of the railroad). Richard became the first Man Booker prize winner after American nominees had become eligible to compete for this literary prize "awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland." In other words, he was the first to beat out competing American novelists.

To learn more about the author, please watch a 20-minute-long closing lecture he gave at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2009 where he unabashedly defended the importance of the writer in Australian culture. (The video comes in two parts but the first is the most essential.) It also anticipates some of the hurdles put in the way of the novelist in other countries like the US and UK: 

Richard Flanagan address (Links to an external site.) 

Another Flanagan novel that I considered using in this course is called Wanting with a 2016 publication date. It's more recent but, like The Secret River, has a non-Australian part to it. In case you are drawn to this novel, here is a brief summary:

Mathinna, an Aboriginal girl from Van Diemen's Land, is adopted by nineteenth-century explorer, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane. Franklin is confident that shining the light of reason on Mathinna will lift her out of savagery and desire. But when Franklin dies on an Arctic expedition, Lady Jane writes to Charles Dickens, asking him to defend Franklin's reputation amid rumors of his crew lapsing into cannibalism.

Dickens responds by staging a play in which he takes the leading role as Franklin, his symbol of reason's triumph, only to fall in love with an eighteen-year-old actress. As reason gives way to wanting, the frontier between civilization and barbarity dissolves, and Mathinna, now a teenage prostitute, goes drinking on a fatal night.

This is the Kindle link to Death of a River Guide (Links to an external site.) - the story of Aljaz Cosini who navigates a tourist group down perilous rapids while simultaneously telling of the tragedies that befall a young Indigene woman from a nearby town who goes to Hobart then home again. Be prepared for a healthy dose of magical realism in, among other story lines, the death of the river guide.

Your assignment:

Choose your favorite citations from the book--it's easy to do on Kindle. Good advice is, once again, to let the text speak for itself--the whole text and not fragments or sections of it.

Delving deeply into symbolism is an option if you feel confident doing it. Try to be ingenious, creative, contrarian, challenging convention. You have two weeks to submit the final paper on Sunday, March 7 by 8pm. 

 Expand AllPanels Collapse AllPanels

Submission Instructions

As the syllabus states, any honest and original attempt to answer the assignment question clearly based on the readings earns full credit, but late work is not accepted. This is one part of your course grade where with timely effort you can count on earning full credit. Click the "Submit Assignment" button and upload your document as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.