The CRESC organises regular seminars held by their researchers. It is open to interested staff from the University of Manchester, and on request to interested members of the public. The seminar is followed by a pot lunch which gives opportunity to network.

The next seminar will feature Stewart Muir and discuss the the following:

Healing the nation: Utopianism, Culture, and Aboriginal reconciliation 

This paper draws on research undertaken within the Australian ‘holistic milieu’ – an amalgam of alternative spiritualities, alternative lifestyle groupings, and the shops, workshops, festivals, websites and magazines in which they thrive – in the early to mid 2000s. At this time there was considerable interest, both within and without the milieu, in the redemptive possibilities afforded by the Aboriginal Reconciliation movement. This interest tended towards a kind of aspirational nostalgia in which it was imagined that the persistent sense of the uncanny – the feeling of not being at home when at home – brought about by a shallow national history and the sins of colonial settlement could be healed by absorption of Aboriginal ‘traditional culture’. The hope was that a spiritual and cultural reconciliation (and, in some cases, a political one) could give rise to a more legitimate Australian identity. Ultimately the Aboriginal cure was imagined as a kind of national Gestalt therapy allowing Australians to become at one with their surroundings.

However, this hope for the future was in large part premised on ‘moving on’ from the problems of the past. Moreover, within the holistic milieu at least, it also rested on a static notion of ‘traditional Aboriginal culture’. These were problematic premises to begin with and the optimism they gave rise to has proved vulnerable to the apparent ‘failure’ of Aboriginal people to either become ‘reconciled’ or to conform to their romanticised image. This presentation draws out some of the ways this hope in a new nation was expressed and how both this hope and subsequent disappointments have paralleled more ‘mainstream’ political concerns.