Books / Journal Issues by Rachel Franks
Published May 2022 ...
This is the story of Robert Rice Howard (1832–1906), the man known as N... more Published May 2022 ...
This is the story of Robert Rice Howard (1832–1906), the man known as Nosey Bob. It is also an important chapter in the story of the changing attitudes towards capital punishment in Australia, as the country transformed from generally enthusiastic spectators at executions into campaigners for the abolition of the death penalty. These interconnected stories are told through the men, and the one woman, who met Nosey Bob under the worst possible circumstances between his first employment by the Department of Justice in 1876 and his retirement as the executioner for New South Wales in 1904. Once a household name, Nosey Bob was the most infamous public servant in Sydney: a noseless hangman who sparked fear and fascination everywhere he went. Howard has only ever been cast as an extra in someone else’s play, making frightening appearances in a felon’s final scene on the gallows. Here, for the first time, he has taken the lead.
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PhD Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2020
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M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 22 (3): online. ISSN: 1441-2616, 2019
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M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 20 (2): online. ISSN: 1441-2616, 2017
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Crime Uncovered: the private investigator. ISBN: 178-3-20523-7, 2016
The private investigator is one of the most enduring characters within crime fiction. From Dashie... more The private investigator is one of the most enduring characters within crime fiction. From Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade— the hard-boiled loner trawling the mean streets—to Agatha Christie’s Captain Hastings—the genteel companion in greener surrounds—the P. I. has taken on any number of guises. In Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator, editors Alistair Rolls and Rachel Franks dive deep into crime literature and culture, challenging many of the assumptions we make about the hardy P. I.
Assembling a cast of notable crime fiction experts, including Stephen Knight and Carolyn Beasley, the book covers characters from the whole world of international noir—Giorgio Scerbanenco’s Duca Lambert, Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma, and many more. Including essays on the genealogy and emergence of the protagonist in nineteenth-century fiction; interviews with crime writers Leigh Redhead, Nick Quantrill, and Fernando Lalana; and analyses of the transatlantic exchanges that helped to develop public perception of a literary icon, Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator will redefine what we think we know about the figure of the P. I.
Rolls and Franks have engaged here the tension between the popular and scholarly that is inherent in any critical examination of a literary type, along the way unraveling the mystery of the alluring, enigmatic private investigator. Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator will be a handy companion for any crime fiction fan.
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With(Out) Trace: interdisciplinary investigations into time, space and the body. ISBN: 978-1-84888-441-0, 2015
With(out) Trace: Inter-Disciplinary Investigations into Time, Space and the Body, unpacks many of... more With(out) Trace: Inter-Disciplinary Investigations into Time, Space and the Body, unpacks many of the issues that surround the idea of trace: what we intentionally, an unintentionally, leave behind as well as how trace can help us to move forward. In particular this volume looks at how interdisciplinarity can suggest new ways of seeing and, subsequently, exploring interconnections between time, space and the body.
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Welcome to the second issue of "The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction": a project designed to d... more Welcome to the second issue of "The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction": a project designed to deliver exciting and innovative scholarship on crime fiction in Australia and around the world. As Alistair Rolls and Marguerite Johnson note, within this issue: “Crime Fiction is now a more than respectable area of scholarly endeavour” (2015). This journal highlights the diversity of these scholarly endeavours.
We begin with the work of Carolyn Beasley, Craig McIntosh and Jason Bainbridge: '"Social consequences be damned, it was money for jam": The Kennett Era, Shane Maloney and the Writer as Vernacular Theorist'. This work highlights Victorian politics in the 1990s and how this political environment provided a platform for crime fiction writer Shane Maloney. Focusing on the last two volumes of the Murray Whelan series, "Something Fishy" (2002) and "Sucked In" (2007) the paper identifies the ways in which Maloney engages with both the main tenets of Premier Jeff Kennett’s leadership style and the effects of Kennett’s political and social policies on the wider community. By placing Maloney’s work in the broader contexts of Australian crime fiction, the literature of protest and the politics of the Kennett era, this research suggests such works are as capable of critical reflection and insight as more traditional, or culturally legitimate, forms of theorising through the location of vernacular theory in these texts.
Ideas of a killer’s code are taken up by Jason Bainbridge with his article: 'Seduction of the Serial Killer: Representing Justice with Lecter, "Dexter" and the "Death Note"’. Exploring ideas that circulate around the serial killer and how, since Jack the Ripper, the “serial killer has been the monster at the heart of modernity, [a monster that] society has sought to control and understand,” Bainbridge goes on to explore the evolution of this type of murderer and how the serial killer has become increasingly represented as sympathetic, almost seductive. This is demonstrated through an analysis of the serial killer in popular culture, killers almost as well known as Jack the Ripper, such as "Hannibal" (2001), "Dexter" (2006-2013) and the central figure in Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s 2003 manga "Death Note". The central theme is an argument that the serial killer maintains a position emblematic of the contradictions in modernity and speaks to ongoing tensions between law and justice.
Our third article: ‘Getting under the Skin to Read the Signs: The Call of Classical Myths and Mysteries in Leigh Redhead’s "Peepshow"’, comes from Alistair Rolls and Marguerite Johnson. Rolls and Johnson contribute to the debate on the origins of modern crime fiction through an outline of the interconnection of ancient myth and the contemporary crime story. This is achieved through a clever case study of Leigh Redhead’s "Peepshow" (2004) that posits Redhead as “at all times a consummate, and self-conscious, performer of Crime Fiction.” In keeping with the genre of gritty, detective novels, "Peepshow" is a “realistic, colloquial read, complete with lots of sleaze, sex, drugs and thugs.” Yet, as this article demonstrates, the work offers a series of classical references and allusions, some overt and clearly intentional, others potentially more a product of the reader’s imagination or the author’s unconscious. In this way this article asks questions as diverse as: Why crime fiction?; and What’s on the page for the Classically-educated reader?
Phryne Fisher and other Fantasies: The Female Detective in History
In addition, this issue of "The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction", presents two papers, which resulted from the inaugural Historical Novel Society Australasia conference held this year in Sydney. Supported by Swinburne University, this conference saw a panel of academics (Wendy J. Dunn, Kelly Gardiner, Rachel Franks, Rachel Le Rossignol and Diane Murray) discuss the honorable Miss Phryne Fisher and the female detective in history. During a lively panel discussion, expertly chaired by Diane Murray, Rachel Le Rossignol established that the female detective in history was well and truly rooted in reality whilst Rachel Franks and Kelly Gardiner offered a first taste of papers now published in this journal.
Rachel Franks’ paper, co-written with Toni Johnson-Woods, entitled: ‘Phryne Fisher: Feminism and Modernism in Historical Crime Fiction’, sets out the history of the unforgettable and delightful Miss Fisher, from the time this liberated, sensual, slender, stunningly dressed woman – red woollen coat with an astrakhan collar, Russian leather boots and gloves – first stepped into Kerry Greenwood’s imagination, becoming a vivid construction of the written word in twenty novels, to her later rebirth in the media of television. Franks and Johnson-Woods reveal Miss Fisher as "quintessentially Australian". Perhaps this is not surprising when you consider that Miss Fisher birthed into her author’s mind on a Melbourne tram.
Kelly Gardiner sets out another type of overview – how Greenwood’s construction of Miss Fisher can be identified as fulfilling one of the vital archetypes in crime and mystery writing: ‘The Female Gentleman’. ‘The Female Gentleman’ breaks through the glass ceiling of a male-dominated world, with Gardiner proving: “that female sleuths could be rational and effective – and equal in intellect to their male counterparts. Her most adventurous, effective, ironic, and impeccably dressed descendant is, of course, Phryne Fisher. She smokes, drives, enchants, rescues damsels in distress (and herself), follows her own code of honour, and banters with artists as well as sportsmen and police officers”.
The Honourable Miss Fisher is an unforgettable, indomitable character, loved by readers since 1989. As these two essays demonstrate, she also a subject we can learn much from through academic study.
In Conversation
The articles outlined above are supplemented by several interviews. Angela Savage talks to Nick Temelkovski about the themes and research in her novel "The Dying Beach". Carolyn Beasley interviews the increasingly popular Lenny Bartulin. And Amanda Frost catches up with David Whish Wilson, writer of the Frank Swann series and Elizabeth Heiter creator of the Profiler series, featuring protagonist Evelyn Baine.
So – via a significant politician, serial killers, strippers, a dashingly dressed Lady Detective/Female Gentleman and several popular crime fiction writers – this issue of "The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction" demonstrates the diversity of scholarship in this continually expanding, and always fascinating, field of fiction.
Rachel Franks and Wendy J. Dunn
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M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 18 (6): online. ISSN: 1441-2616, Dec 2015
To re-imagine can, at one extreme, be a casual thought (what if I moved all the furniture in the ... more To re-imagine can, at one extreme, be a casual thought (what if I moved all the furniture in the living room?) and, at the other, re-imagining can be a complex process (what if I adapt a classic text into a major film?).
There is a long history of working with the ideas of others and of re-working our own ideas. Of taking a concept and re-imagining it into something that is similar to the original and yet offers something new. Such re-imaginations are all around us; from the various interpretations of the Sherlock Holmes stories to the adjustments made, often over generations, to family recipes.
Some of these efforts are the result of a creative drive to experiment and push boundaries, some efforts are inspired by changes in society or technology, yet others will be born of a sense of 'this can be done better' or 'done differently'.
Essentially, to re-imagine is to ask questions, to interrogate that which is often taken for granted.
This issue of M/C Journal seeks to explore the 'why' and the 'how' of re-imagining both the everyday and the extraordinary. In a reflection of the scale and scope of the potential to re-imagine all that is around us, this issue is particularly diverse. The contributions offer explorations into varied disciplines, use a range of methodological lenses, and deploy different writing styles.
To this end we present a range of articles—some of which contain quite challenging content—that cover copyright, crime fiction, the stage, the literary brand and film, horror and children’s film, television, military-inspired fashion, and a piece that focuses on events leading up to September 11, 2001. We then present three, quite different, works that explore various aspects of Australian Indigenous culture and history.
We begin with our feature article: “‘They’re creepy and they’re kooky’ and They’re Copyrighted: How Copyright Is Used to Dampen the (Re-)Imagination”. In this work Steve Collins explores important issues of copyright in the re-imagining and re-purposing of content. In particular, this article unpacks—using examples from the United States—how copyright legislation can restrict the activities of creative practitioners, across varied fields, and so adds to the debate on copyright reform.
In our lead article “The Re-imagining Inherent in Crime Fiction Translation”, by Alistair Rolls, ideas of re-imagination, language, and the world’s most popular genre—crime fiction—are critically appraised. Rolls looks at a suite of issues around imagining original and re-imagining, through translation, crime fiction texts. These two forms of creativity are essential to the genre's development for, as Rolls notes, this type of fiction was born, “simultaneously in France and America but also in the translation zone between the two.”
Amy Antonio re-imagines the femme fatale. Antonio acknowledges the centrality of the femme fatale to the noir tradition and re-imagines this iconic figure by positioning her on the Renaissance stage, explaining how the historical factors that precipitated the emergence of the noir femme fatale in the years following World War II, similarly existed in the sixteenth century and, as a result, the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays.
The articles in this issue turn from fiction, to theatre, and then to film with Leonie Rutherford embarking on a “Re-imagining the Brand” exercise. Through two, very informative, case studies—Adventures of Tin Tin and Silver, Return to Treasure Island—Rutherford engages with issues of re-imagining classic literary texts as big-screen blockbusters. This article addresses some of the complexities associated with the updating “of classic texts [that] require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the ‘original’.”
Erin Hawley also looks at film, through a lens of horror, in “Re-imagining the Horror Genre in Children’s Animated Film”. Hawley explores how animated films have always been an ambiguous space “in terms of age, pleasure, and viewership.” Hawley goes on to challenge common assumptions that “animation itself is often a signifier of safety, fun, nostalgia, and childishness; it is a means of addressing families and young audiences” and outlines how animation complements horror where, “the fantastic and transformative aspects of animation can be powerful tools for telling stories that are dark, surprising, or somehow subversive.”
Issues of the small screen, and social media, are reviewed by Karin van Es, Daniela van Geenen, and Thomas Boeschoten in their work of “Re-imagining Television Audience Research on Twitter”. In particular, this work highlights issues with how audience research is undertaken and argues for new ways forward that adapt to the changing viewing landscape: one that features social media as an increasingly important tool for people to engage with more traditional types of entertainment.
Fashion, too, features within this special issue with the work Emerald L. King and Denise N. Rall, “Re-imagining the Imperial Kingdom through Japanese Schoolboy Uniforms”. King and Rall present their research into the significant re-imagining of Japanese cultural and national identities, which are explored in this work through the cataclysmic impact of Western ideologies on Japanese cultural traditions.
The idea of re-imagining is challenged by Meg Stalcup through her article “What If? Re-imagined Scenarios and the Re-virtualisation of History” which looks at several events that took place in the lead up to September 11, 2001. Several of the men who would become 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. Police officers in the United States replayed these incidents of contact, yet their questioning “what if?” asked not only if those moments could have revealed the plot of that traumatic day, but also places alternate scenarios into play.
John C. Ryan, Danielle Brady, and Christopher Kueh guide us through a geographical re-imagining of one of Australia’s capital cities in “Where Fanny Balbuk Walked: Re-imagining Perth’s Wetlands through Digital Modelling”. This re-imagining of a major city’s natural environment calls “attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities.” Moreover, this work highlights the value of re-imagining a city anew as well as re-imagining the original after a process of considerable change.
Rachel Franks traces the history of an effort to communicate the concept of equality under the law, to the Indigenous peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), in “A True Crime Tale: Re-imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board for the Tasmanian Aborigines”. This article provides an overview of some of the various re-imaginings of this Board—including the re-imagining of the Board’s history—and also offers a new re-imagination of this curious, colonial object; positing that the Board serves as an early “pamphlet” on justice and punishment.
Brooke Collins-Gearing, Vivien Cadungog, Sophie Camilleri, Erin Comensoli, Elissa Duncan, Leitesha Green, Adam Phillips, and Rebecca Stone take a very different, and rather creative, approach to re-imagining with “Listenin’ Up: Re-Imagining Ourselves through Stories of and from Country” a work that explores Western discourses of education; and looks at ways to engage with Aboriginal knowledge through the pedagogical and personal act of listening. These authors attempt to re-imagine “the institutionalised space of our classroom through a dialogic pedagogy.”
These articles are, necessarily, brief. Yet, each work does provide insight into various aspects of the re-imagining process while offering new perspectives on how re-imagining takes place—in material culture, learning practices, or in all important media re-interpretations of the world around us.
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The Letter of the Law: contemporary debates on language, dignity and the punished body. ISBN: 978-1-84888-265-2, 2014
Ideas about good and evil were first articulated in ancient times, generating a discourse around ... more Ideas about good and evil were first articulated in ancient times, generating a discourse around the punishment of wrongdoers. From the earliest spectacles of punishment to the most contemporary displays of the punishers and the punished, societies have realised and have reimagined an incredibly diverse range of ways to punish human beings. Superimposed upon the practices of punishment are the debates around the purpose of punishment as well as the types of punishments utilised and the severity of those punishments. This volume, through an inter-disciplinary approach, explores the concepts that surround punishment focusing on the language of punishment, the dignity of those being punished and the different ways in which the human body is traumatised through punitive practices some of which are inflicted by others and some of which are self-inflicted. The result of this inter-disciplinary approach is a text that provides both students and scholars with opportunities to engage with a well-known set of ideas from a range of new perspectives.
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The Real and the Reflected: heroes and villains in existent and imagined worlds. ISBN: 978-1-84888-106-8, 2012
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PhD Thesis, Central Queensland University, 2011
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Chapters by Rachel Franks
Mothers Who Kill (pp. 125–144), 2022
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Dictionary of Sydney (Online), 2019
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Dictionary of Sydney (Online), 2019
It was several years, after the First Fleet arrived in Port Jackson in 1788, before the colonists... more It was several years, after the First Fleet arrived in Port Jackson in 1788, before the colonists in New South Wales started killing each other.
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Dictionary of Sydney (online), 2019
Convict Joseph Luker placed his past firmly behind him when he decided to pursue a career as a po... more Convict Joseph Luker placed his past firmly behind him when he decided to pursue a career as a police constable in colonial Sydney. This transition from law breaker to law enforcer would also see him become the first police officer killed in the line of duty in Australia.
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Crime Fiction: A Critical Casebook (pp. 143-156). ISBN: 978-3-631-66229-8, 2018
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Books / Journal Issues by Rachel Franks
This is the story of Robert Rice Howard (1832–1906), the man known as Nosey Bob. It is also an important chapter in the story of the changing attitudes towards capital punishment in Australia, as the country transformed from generally enthusiastic spectators at executions into campaigners for the abolition of the death penalty. These interconnected stories are told through the men, and the one woman, who met Nosey Bob under the worst possible circumstances between his first employment by the Department of Justice in 1876 and his retirement as the executioner for New South Wales in 1904. Once a household name, Nosey Bob was the most infamous public servant in Sydney: a noseless hangman who sparked fear and fascination everywhere he went. Howard has only ever been cast as an extra in someone else’s play, making frightening appearances in a felon’s final scene on the gallows. Here, for the first time, he has taken the lead.
Assembling a cast of notable crime fiction experts, including Stephen Knight and Carolyn Beasley, the book covers characters from the whole world of international noir—Giorgio Scerbanenco’s Duca Lambert, Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma, and many more. Including essays on the genealogy and emergence of the protagonist in nineteenth-century fiction; interviews with crime writers Leigh Redhead, Nick Quantrill, and Fernando Lalana; and analyses of the transatlantic exchanges that helped to develop public perception of a literary icon, Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator will redefine what we think we know about the figure of the P. I.
Rolls and Franks have engaged here the tension between the popular and scholarly that is inherent in any critical examination of a literary type, along the way unraveling the mystery of the alluring, enigmatic private investigator. Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator will be a handy companion for any crime fiction fan.
We begin with the work of Carolyn Beasley, Craig McIntosh and Jason Bainbridge: '"Social consequences be damned, it was money for jam": The Kennett Era, Shane Maloney and the Writer as Vernacular Theorist'. This work highlights Victorian politics in the 1990s and how this political environment provided a platform for crime fiction writer Shane Maloney. Focusing on the last two volumes of the Murray Whelan series, "Something Fishy" (2002) and "Sucked In" (2007) the paper identifies the ways in which Maloney engages with both the main tenets of Premier Jeff Kennett’s leadership style and the effects of Kennett’s political and social policies on the wider community. By placing Maloney’s work in the broader contexts of Australian crime fiction, the literature of protest and the politics of the Kennett era, this research suggests such works are as capable of critical reflection and insight as more traditional, or culturally legitimate, forms of theorising through the location of vernacular theory in these texts.
Ideas of a killer’s code are taken up by Jason Bainbridge with his article: 'Seduction of the Serial Killer: Representing Justice with Lecter, "Dexter" and the "Death Note"’. Exploring ideas that circulate around the serial killer and how, since Jack the Ripper, the “serial killer has been the monster at the heart of modernity, [a monster that] society has sought to control and understand,” Bainbridge goes on to explore the evolution of this type of murderer and how the serial killer has become increasingly represented as sympathetic, almost seductive. This is demonstrated through an analysis of the serial killer in popular culture, killers almost as well known as Jack the Ripper, such as "Hannibal" (2001), "Dexter" (2006-2013) and the central figure in Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s 2003 manga "Death Note". The central theme is an argument that the serial killer maintains a position emblematic of the contradictions in modernity and speaks to ongoing tensions between law and justice.
Our third article: ‘Getting under the Skin to Read the Signs: The Call of Classical Myths and Mysteries in Leigh Redhead’s "Peepshow"’, comes from Alistair Rolls and Marguerite Johnson. Rolls and Johnson contribute to the debate on the origins of modern crime fiction through an outline of the interconnection of ancient myth and the contemporary crime story. This is achieved through a clever case study of Leigh Redhead’s "Peepshow" (2004) that posits Redhead as “at all times a consummate, and self-conscious, performer of Crime Fiction.” In keeping with the genre of gritty, detective novels, "Peepshow" is a “realistic, colloquial read, complete with lots of sleaze, sex, drugs and thugs.” Yet, as this article demonstrates, the work offers a series of classical references and allusions, some overt and clearly intentional, others potentially more a product of the reader’s imagination or the author’s unconscious. In this way this article asks questions as diverse as: Why crime fiction?; and What’s on the page for the Classically-educated reader?
Phryne Fisher and other Fantasies: The Female Detective in History
In addition, this issue of "The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction", presents two papers, which resulted from the inaugural Historical Novel Society Australasia conference held this year in Sydney. Supported by Swinburne University, this conference saw a panel of academics (Wendy J. Dunn, Kelly Gardiner, Rachel Franks, Rachel Le Rossignol and Diane Murray) discuss the honorable Miss Phryne Fisher and the female detective in history. During a lively panel discussion, expertly chaired by Diane Murray, Rachel Le Rossignol established that the female detective in history was well and truly rooted in reality whilst Rachel Franks and Kelly Gardiner offered a first taste of papers now published in this journal.
Rachel Franks’ paper, co-written with Toni Johnson-Woods, entitled: ‘Phryne Fisher: Feminism and Modernism in Historical Crime Fiction’, sets out the history of the unforgettable and delightful Miss Fisher, from the time this liberated, sensual, slender, stunningly dressed woman – red woollen coat with an astrakhan collar, Russian leather boots and gloves – first stepped into Kerry Greenwood’s imagination, becoming a vivid construction of the written word in twenty novels, to her later rebirth in the media of television. Franks and Johnson-Woods reveal Miss Fisher as "quintessentially Australian". Perhaps this is not surprising when you consider that Miss Fisher birthed into her author’s mind on a Melbourne tram.
Kelly Gardiner sets out another type of overview – how Greenwood’s construction of Miss Fisher can be identified as fulfilling one of the vital archetypes in crime and mystery writing: ‘The Female Gentleman’. ‘The Female Gentleman’ breaks through the glass ceiling of a male-dominated world, with Gardiner proving: “that female sleuths could be rational and effective – and equal in intellect to their male counterparts. Her most adventurous, effective, ironic, and impeccably dressed descendant is, of course, Phryne Fisher. She smokes, drives, enchants, rescues damsels in distress (and herself), follows her own code of honour, and banters with artists as well as sportsmen and police officers”.
The Honourable Miss Fisher is an unforgettable, indomitable character, loved by readers since 1989. As these two essays demonstrate, she also a subject we can learn much from through academic study.
In Conversation
The articles outlined above are supplemented by several interviews. Angela Savage talks to Nick Temelkovski about the themes and research in her novel "The Dying Beach". Carolyn Beasley interviews the increasingly popular Lenny Bartulin. And Amanda Frost catches up with David Whish Wilson, writer of the Frank Swann series and Elizabeth Heiter creator of the Profiler series, featuring protagonist Evelyn Baine.
So – via a significant politician, serial killers, strippers, a dashingly dressed Lady Detective/Female Gentleman and several popular crime fiction writers – this issue of "The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction" demonstrates the diversity of scholarship in this continually expanding, and always fascinating, field of fiction.
Rachel Franks and Wendy J. Dunn
There is a long history of working with the ideas of others and of re-working our own ideas. Of taking a concept and re-imagining it into something that is similar to the original and yet offers something new. Such re-imaginations are all around us; from the various interpretations of the Sherlock Holmes stories to the adjustments made, often over generations, to family recipes.
Some of these efforts are the result of a creative drive to experiment and push boundaries, some efforts are inspired by changes in society or technology, yet others will be born of a sense of 'this can be done better' or 'done differently'.
Essentially, to re-imagine is to ask questions, to interrogate that which is often taken for granted.
This issue of M/C Journal seeks to explore the 'why' and the 'how' of re-imagining both the everyday and the extraordinary. In a reflection of the scale and scope of the potential to re-imagine all that is around us, this issue is particularly diverse. The contributions offer explorations into varied disciplines, use a range of methodological lenses, and deploy different writing styles.
To this end we present a range of articles—some of which contain quite challenging content—that cover copyright, crime fiction, the stage, the literary brand and film, horror and children’s film, television, military-inspired fashion, and a piece that focuses on events leading up to September 11, 2001. We then present three, quite different, works that explore various aspects of Australian Indigenous culture and history.
We begin with our feature article: “‘They’re creepy and they’re kooky’ and They’re Copyrighted: How Copyright Is Used to Dampen the (Re-)Imagination”. In this work Steve Collins explores important issues of copyright in the re-imagining and re-purposing of content. In particular, this article unpacks—using examples from the United States—how copyright legislation can restrict the activities of creative practitioners, across varied fields, and so adds to the debate on copyright reform.
In our lead article “The Re-imagining Inherent in Crime Fiction Translation”, by Alistair Rolls, ideas of re-imagination, language, and the world’s most popular genre—crime fiction—are critically appraised. Rolls looks at a suite of issues around imagining original and re-imagining, through translation, crime fiction texts. These two forms of creativity are essential to the genre's development for, as Rolls notes, this type of fiction was born, “simultaneously in France and America but also in the translation zone between the two.”
Amy Antonio re-imagines the femme fatale. Antonio acknowledges the centrality of the femme fatale to the noir tradition and re-imagines this iconic figure by positioning her on the Renaissance stage, explaining how the historical factors that precipitated the emergence of the noir femme fatale in the years following World War II, similarly existed in the sixteenth century and, as a result, the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays.
The articles in this issue turn from fiction, to theatre, and then to film with Leonie Rutherford embarking on a “Re-imagining the Brand” exercise. Through two, very informative, case studies—Adventures of Tin Tin and Silver, Return to Treasure Island—Rutherford engages with issues of re-imagining classic literary texts as big-screen blockbusters. This article addresses some of the complexities associated with the updating “of classic texts [that] require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the ‘original’.”
Erin Hawley also looks at film, through a lens of horror, in “Re-imagining the Horror Genre in Children’s Animated Film”. Hawley explores how animated films have always been an ambiguous space “in terms of age, pleasure, and viewership.” Hawley goes on to challenge common assumptions that “animation itself is often a signifier of safety, fun, nostalgia, and childishness; it is a means of addressing families and young audiences” and outlines how animation complements horror where, “the fantastic and transformative aspects of animation can be powerful tools for telling stories that are dark, surprising, or somehow subversive.”
Issues of the small screen, and social media, are reviewed by Karin van Es, Daniela van Geenen, and Thomas Boeschoten in their work of “Re-imagining Television Audience Research on Twitter”. In particular, this work highlights issues with how audience research is undertaken and argues for new ways forward that adapt to the changing viewing landscape: one that features social media as an increasingly important tool for people to engage with more traditional types of entertainment.
Fashion, too, features within this special issue with the work Emerald L. King and Denise N. Rall, “Re-imagining the Imperial Kingdom through Japanese Schoolboy Uniforms”. King and Rall present their research into the significant re-imagining of Japanese cultural and national identities, which are explored in this work through the cataclysmic impact of Western ideologies on Japanese cultural traditions.
The idea of re-imagining is challenged by Meg Stalcup through her article “What If? Re-imagined Scenarios and the Re-virtualisation of History” which looks at several events that took place in the lead up to September 11, 2001. Several of the men who would become 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. Police officers in the United States replayed these incidents of contact, yet their questioning “what if?” asked not only if those moments could have revealed the plot of that traumatic day, but also places alternate scenarios into play.
John C. Ryan, Danielle Brady, and Christopher Kueh guide us through a geographical re-imagining of one of Australia’s capital cities in “Where Fanny Balbuk Walked: Re-imagining Perth’s Wetlands through Digital Modelling”. This re-imagining of a major city’s natural environment calls “attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities.” Moreover, this work highlights the value of re-imagining a city anew as well as re-imagining the original after a process of considerable change.
Rachel Franks traces the history of an effort to communicate the concept of equality under the law, to the Indigenous peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), in “A True Crime Tale: Re-imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board for the Tasmanian Aborigines”. This article provides an overview of some of the various re-imaginings of this Board—including the re-imagining of the Board’s history—and also offers a new re-imagination of this curious, colonial object; positing that the Board serves as an early “pamphlet” on justice and punishment.
Brooke Collins-Gearing, Vivien Cadungog, Sophie Camilleri, Erin Comensoli, Elissa Duncan, Leitesha Green, Adam Phillips, and Rebecca Stone take a very different, and rather creative, approach to re-imagining with “Listenin’ Up: Re-Imagining Ourselves through Stories of and from Country” a work that explores Western discourses of education; and looks at ways to engage with Aboriginal knowledge through the pedagogical and personal act of listening. These authors attempt to re-imagine “the institutionalised space of our classroom through a dialogic pedagogy.”
These articles are, necessarily, brief. Yet, each work does provide insight into various aspects of the re-imagining process while offering new perspectives on how re-imagining takes place—in material culture, learning practices, or in all important media re-interpretations of the world around us.
Chapters by Rachel Franks
This is the story of Robert Rice Howard (1832–1906), the man known as Nosey Bob. It is also an important chapter in the story of the changing attitudes towards capital punishment in Australia, as the country transformed from generally enthusiastic spectators at executions into campaigners for the abolition of the death penalty. These interconnected stories are told through the men, and the one woman, who met Nosey Bob under the worst possible circumstances between his first employment by the Department of Justice in 1876 and his retirement as the executioner for New South Wales in 1904. Once a household name, Nosey Bob was the most infamous public servant in Sydney: a noseless hangman who sparked fear and fascination everywhere he went. Howard has only ever been cast as an extra in someone else’s play, making frightening appearances in a felon’s final scene on the gallows. Here, for the first time, he has taken the lead.
Assembling a cast of notable crime fiction experts, including Stephen Knight and Carolyn Beasley, the book covers characters from the whole world of international noir—Giorgio Scerbanenco’s Duca Lambert, Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma, and many more. Including essays on the genealogy and emergence of the protagonist in nineteenth-century fiction; interviews with crime writers Leigh Redhead, Nick Quantrill, and Fernando Lalana; and analyses of the transatlantic exchanges that helped to develop public perception of a literary icon, Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator will redefine what we think we know about the figure of the P. I.
Rolls and Franks have engaged here the tension between the popular and scholarly that is inherent in any critical examination of a literary type, along the way unraveling the mystery of the alluring, enigmatic private investigator. Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator will be a handy companion for any crime fiction fan.
We begin with the work of Carolyn Beasley, Craig McIntosh and Jason Bainbridge: '"Social consequences be damned, it was money for jam": The Kennett Era, Shane Maloney and the Writer as Vernacular Theorist'. This work highlights Victorian politics in the 1990s and how this political environment provided a platform for crime fiction writer Shane Maloney. Focusing on the last two volumes of the Murray Whelan series, "Something Fishy" (2002) and "Sucked In" (2007) the paper identifies the ways in which Maloney engages with both the main tenets of Premier Jeff Kennett’s leadership style and the effects of Kennett’s political and social policies on the wider community. By placing Maloney’s work in the broader contexts of Australian crime fiction, the literature of protest and the politics of the Kennett era, this research suggests such works are as capable of critical reflection and insight as more traditional, or culturally legitimate, forms of theorising through the location of vernacular theory in these texts.
Ideas of a killer’s code are taken up by Jason Bainbridge with his article: 'Seduction of the Serial Killer: Representing Justice with Lecter, "Dexter" and the "Death Note"’. Exploring ideas that circulate around the serial killer and how, since Jack the Ripper, the “serial killer has been the monster at the heart of modernity, [a monster that] society has sought to control and understand,” Bainbridge goes on to explore the evolution of this type of murderer and how the serial killer has become increasingly represented as sympathetic, almost seductive. This is demonstrated through an analysis of the serial killer in popular culture, killers almost as well known as Jack the Ripper, such as "Hannibal" (2001), "Dexter" (2006-2013) and the central figure in Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s 2003 manga "Death Note". The central theme is an argument that the serial killer maintains a position emblematic of the contradictions in modernity and speaks to ongoing tensions between law and justice.
Our third article: ‘Getting under the Skin to Read the Signs: The Call of Classical Myths and Mysteries in Leigh Redhead’s "Peepshow"’, comes from Alistair Rolls and Marguerite Johnson. Rolls and Johnson contribute to the debate on the origins of modern crime fiction through an outline of the interconnection of ancient myth and the contemporary crime story. This is achieved through a clever case study of Leigh Redhead’s "Peepshow" (2004) that posits Redhead as “at all times a consummate, and self-conscious, performer of Crime Fiction.” In keeping with the genre of gritty, detective novels, "Peepshow" is a “realistic, colloquial read, complete with lots of sleaze, sex, drugs and thugs.” Yet, as this article demonstrates, the work offers a series of classical references and allusions, some overt and clearly intentional, others potentially more a product of the reader’s imagination or the author’s unconscious. In this way this article asks questions as diverse as: Why crime fiction?; and What’s on the page for the Classically-educated reader?
Phryne Fisher and other Fantasies: The Female Detective in History
In addition, this issue of "The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction", presents two papers, which resulted from the inaugural Historical Novel Society Australasia conference held this year in Sydney. Supported by Swinburne University, this conference saw a panel of academics (Wendy J. Dunn, Kelly Gardiner, Rachel Franks, Rachel Le Rossignol and Diane Murray) discuss the honorable Miss Phryne Fisher and the female detective in history. During a lively panel discussion, expertly chaired by Diane Murray, Rachel Le Rossignol established that the female detective in history was well and truly rooted in reality whilst Rachel Franks and Kelly Gardiner offered a first taste of papers now published in this journal.
Rachel Franks’ paper, co-written with Toni Johnson-Woods, entitled: ‘Phryne Fisher: Feminism and Modernism in Historical Crime Fiction’, sets out the history of the unforgettable and delightful Miss Fisher, from the time this liberated, sensual, slender, stunningly dressed woman – red woollen coat with an astrakhan collar, Russian leather boots and gloves – first stepped into Kerry Greenwood’s imagination, becoming a vivid construction of the written word in twenty novels, to her later rebirth in the media of television. Franks and Johnson-Woods reveal Miss Fisher as "quintessentially Australian". Perhaps this is not surprising when you consider that Miss Fisher birthed into her author’s mind on a Melbourne tram.
Kelly Gardiner sets out another type of overview – how Greenwood’s construction of Miss Fisher can be identified as fulfilling one of the vital archetypes in crime and mystery writing: ‘The Female Gentleman’. ‘The Female Gentleman’ breaks through the glass ceiling of a male-dominated world, with Gardiner proving: “that female sleuths could be rational and effective – and equal in intellect to their male counterparts. Her most adventurous, effective, ironic, and impeccably dressed descendant is, of course, Phryne Fisher. She smokes, drives, enchants, rescues damsels in distress (and herself), follows her own code of honour, and banters with artists as well as sportsmen and police officers”.
The Honourable Miss Fisher is an unforgettable, indomitable character, loved by readers since 1989. As these two essays demonstrate, she also a subject we can learn much from through academic study.
In Conversation
The articles outlined above are supplemented by several interviews. Angela Savage talks to Nick Temelkovski about the themes and research in her novel "The Dying Beach". Carolyn Beasley interviews the increasingly popular Lenny Bartulin. And Amanda Frost catches up with David Whish Wilson, writer of the Frank Swann series and Elizabeth Heiter creator of the Profiler series, featuring protagonist Evelyn Baine.
So – via a significant politician, serial killers, strippers, a dashingly dressed Lady Detective/Female Gentleman and several popular crime fiction writers – this issue of "The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction" demonstrates the diversity of scholarship in this continually expanding, and always fascinating, field of fiction.
Rachel Franks and Wendy J. Dunn
There is a long history of working with the ideas of others and of re-working our own ideas. Of taking a concept and re-imagining it into something that is similar to the original and yet offers something new. Such re-imaginations are all around us; from the various interpretations of the Sherlock Holmes stories to the adjustments made, often over generations, to family recipes.
Some of these efforts are the result of a creative drive to experiment and push boundaries, some efforts are inspired by changes in society or technology, yet others will be born of a sense of 'this can be done better' or 'done differently'.
Essentially, to re-imagine is to ask questions, to interrogate that which is often taken for granted.
This issue of M/C Journal seeks to explore the 'why' and the 'how' of re-imagining both the everyday and the extraordinary. In a reflection of the scale and scope of the potential to re-imagine all that is around us, this issue is particularly diverse. The contributions offer explorations into varied disciplines, use a range of methodological lenses, and deploy different writing styles.
To this end we present a range of articles—some of which contain quite challenging content—that cover copyright, crime fiction, the stage, the literary brand and film, horror and children’s film, television, military-inspired fashion, and a piece that focuses on events leading up to September 11, 2001. We then present three, quite different, works that explore various aspects of Australian Indigenous culture and history.
We begin with our feature article: “‘They’re creepy and they’re kooky’ and They’re Copyrighted: How Copyright Is Used to Dampen the (Re-)Imagination”. In this work Steve Collins explores important issues of copyright in the re-imagining and re-purposing of content. In particular, this article unpacks—using examples from the United States—how copyright legislation can restrict the activities of creative practitioners, across varied fields, and so adds to the debate on copyright reform.
In our lead article “The Re-imagining Inherent in Crime Fiction Translation”, by Alistair Rolls, ideas of re-imagination, language, and the world’s most popular genre—crime fiction—are critically appraised. Rolls looks at a suite of issues around imagining original and re-imagining, through translation, crime fiction texts. These two forms of creativity are essential to the genre's development for, as Rolls notes, this type of fiction was born, “simultaneously in France and America but also in the translation zone between the two.”
Amy Antonio re-imagines the femme fatale. Antonio acknowledges the centrality of the femme fatale to the noir tradition and re-imagines this iconic figure by positioning her on the Renaissance stage, explaining how the historical factors that precipitated the emergence of the noir femme fatale in the years following World War II, similarly existed in the sixteenth century and, as a result, the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays.
The articles in this issue turn from fiction, to theatre, and then to film with Leonie Rutherford embarking on a “Re-imagining the Brand” exercise. Through two, very informative, case studies—Adventures of Tin Tin and Silver, Return to Treasure Island—Rutherford engages with issues of re-imagining classic literary texts as big-screen blockbusters. This article addresses some of the complexities associated with the updating “of classic texts [that] require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the ‘original’.”
Erin Hawley also looks at film, through a lens of horror, in “Re-imagining the Horror Genre in Children’s Animated Film”. Hawley explores how animated films have always been an ambiguous space “in terms of age, pleasure, and viewership.” Hawley goes on to challenge common assumptions that “animation itself is often a signifier of safety, fun, nostalgia, and childishness; it is a means of addressing families and young audiences” and outlines how animation complements horror where, “the fantastic and transformative aspects of animation can be powerful tools for telling stories that are dark, surprising, or somehow subversive.”
Issues of the small screen, and social media, are reviewed by Karin van Es, Daniela van Geenen, and Thomas Boeschoten in their work of “Re-imagining Television Audience Research on Twitter”. In particular, this work highlights issues with how audience research is undertaken and argues for new ways forward that adapt to the changing viewing landscape: one that features social media as an increasingly important tool for people to engage with more traditional types of entertainment.
Fashion, too, features within this special issue with the work Emerald L. King and Denise N. Rall, “Re-imagining the Imperial Kingdom through Japanese Schoolboy Uniforms”. King and Rall present their research into the significant re-imagining of Japanese cultural and national identities, which are explored in this work through the cataclysmic impact of Western ideologies on Japanese cultural traditions.
The idea of re-imagining is challenged by Meg Stalcup through her article “What If? Re-imagined Scenarios and the Re-virtualisation of History” which looks at several events that took place in the lead up to September 11, 2001. Several of the men who would become 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. Police officers in the United States replayed these incidents of contact, yet their questioning “what if?” asked not only if those moments could have revealed the plot of that traumatic day, but also places alternate scenarios into play.
John C. Ryan, Danielle Brady, and Christopher Kueh guide us through a geographical re-imagining of one of Australia’s capital cities in “Where Fanny Balbuk Walked: Re-imagining Perth’s Wetlands through Digital Modelling”. This re-imagining of a major city’s natural environment calls “attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities.” Moreover, this work highlights the value of re-imagining a city anew as well as re-imagining the original after a process of considerable change.
Rachel Franks traces the history of an effort to communicate the concept of equality under the law, to the Indigenous peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), in “A True Crime Tale: Re-imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board for the Tasmanian Aborigines”. This article provides an overview of some of the various re-imaginings of this Board—including the re-imagining of the Board’s history—and also offers a new re-imagination of this curious, colonial object; positing that the Board serves as an early “pamphlet” on justice and punishment.
Brooke Collins-Gearing, Vivien Cadungog, Sophie Camilleri, Erin Comensoli, Elissa Duncan, Leitesha Green, Adam Phillips, and Rebecca Stone take a very different, and rather creative, approach to re-imagining with “Listenin’ Up: Re-Imagining Ourselves through Stories of and from Country” a work that explores Western discourses of education; and looks at ways to engage with Aboriginal knowledge through the pedagogical and personal act of listening. These authors attempt to re-imagine “the institutionalised space of our classroom through a dialogic pedagogy.”
These articles are, necessarily, brief. Yet, each work does provide insight into various aspects of the re-imagining process while offering new perspectives on how re-imagining takes place—in material culture, learning practices, or in all important media re-interpretations of the world around us.
brought to the crimes played out on the pages of pamphlets, short stories and novels. Thus, readers were given insights into both criminals and the detectives who worked to bring them to justice as well as the societies, in which these pursued and their pursuers, operated. In the
first Australian contributions to crime fiction female characters were extras or stereotypes: women were marginalised on the page much like they were in the home and in the workplace. This work unpacks some of the significant changes in the contributions from, and
representations of, women in Australian crime fiction from Ellen Davitt’s 'Force and Fraud' (1865), the first Australian crime novel penned by a woman, to Marele Day’s great feminist re-imagining of the hardboiled tradition, 'The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender' (1988) and the many novels that are produced today, by men and women, which aim to put women and their labour at the centre of the crime fiction genre. In particular this chapter demonstrates
how ‘women’s work’ has undergone dramatic transformation – from the labour of women being concentrated within the domestic sphere to such labour contributing to every aspect of crime fighting – within Australian crime fiction, so often influenced by the crime fiction produced in Britain and the United States, and the bush and city societies in which these stories are set.
classic crime novel "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" (1926) to look at ideas of the need (or not) to be faithful to an original text. The authors unpack some of the issues that surround the often controversial notion of the “canon” in detective fiction and present the telemovie as an example of the text’s critical difference.
biggest stories of mid-nineteenth-century Sydney. This paper looks briefly at how the story of Knatchbull’s life has been told by the unforgiving newspaper industry that reported on his dreadful crimes and his sensational trial, by an anonymous nineteenth-century chapbook writer, by the felon himself, as well as by a very sympathetic biographer over a century after this gentleman convict shocked colonial Sydney.
that tell narratives about a range of unlawful activities. These institutions also collect
legal texts, papers and records as well as numerous pieces of realia and of art that
record and unpack some of the most horrific incidents in our national history. Crime
has long held a prominent position in the popular imagination; a position supported
by galleries, libraries, archives and museums. From small, incidental collections that
form only one element of a wide-ranging repository to large, significant collections
that focus on the criminal in deed and in impact. This article explores how these
collections assist in informing shared attitudes towards crime through presenting
stories of an extraordinary array of wrongdoers: from largely forgotten convicts, to
well-known bushrangers, to notorious murderers, to those who committed many
different types of crimes. In the Australian context, which features a widely acknowledged tradition of sympathizing with the criminal, some malefactors have disturbed our ideas of right and wrong. Moreover, crime-focused collections can serve to elevate our fear of crime and influence how we feel about different forms of punishment. In this way, cultural institutions demonstrate they play an important role in a field often considered to be the exclusive domain of law makers and law enforcers.
South Wales, in 1788, they transformed the Great Southern Land. This reimagination of the continent was the result of transposing, from the Kingdom of Great Britain to the far side of the world, cultural and social practices as well as ideas of justice and punishment. This paper looks at how the tradition of the public execution was brought to Australia with the First Fleet. This is done through highlighting some colonial experiences—three public hangings and one hanging undertaken behind prison walls—of execution as exhibition. These are: the first man hanged in the new settlement (Thomas Barrett, 27 February 1788); the man they could not hang (Joseph Samuels, 26 September 1803); the man who drew an enormous crowd (John Knatchbull, 13 February 1844); and the most famous Australian man to be hanged (Edward Kelly, 11 November 1880).
Across the GLAM and Tertiary sectors, we love an acronym. Here’s one more! COLLABORATE! A check list for working together. CAMARADERIE is crucial: we’re doing more with less; partnerships are hard up front but make our jobs easier long term. We all work differently; being ORGANISEd minimises stress for everyone. Take on LOW-RISK projects (test, capacity, ideas, processes) then scale up. Set clear LONG-TERM goals, be open about what you can and can’t do. ASK questions, nobody should work in the dark. BENDY-ness can be helpful. OUTREACH and taking stories beyond our own walls is critical; let’s be better storytellers together. We’re more than our stereotypes; we need to RESPECT each other’s individual and professional skills. If we ADVOCATE the benefits of collaborating, it becomes business as usual. TRUSTing others is risky; find people you already trust, or actively build trust with new partners. Numbers are easy but EVALUATEing what you’d do the same and differently is more meaningful. If you’d like more information about this work, let us know. We’d love to hear about what has worked for you in collaborating across sectors.
- How do you conceive of voice in your writing? How does opinion weave its way into argument? And what purpose does opinion play in the scholarly process?
- Where is the line between your voice and the authoritative one? And how do we navigate that line when writing for an academic audience?
- What role does innovation, curiosity and play have in your writing (a.k.a. How to maintain a sense of excitement and quest for knowledge in your writing after editing your paper 50 times)?