AustLit

'Coloured Aliens is slated for production at La Mama theatre in April 2017 as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. These excerpts are from the script-in-development.'

'Robyn Higgins (RH): I’d be interested to start the discussion with asking: what is "cultural work", with this understanding – which I think we all share - that it goes beyond some kind of connection to the creative object/artifact?' (Introduction)

'In his book The perception of the environment (2011), anthropologist Tim Ingold critiques a paradigmatic opposition that has long underpinned modern understandings of western civilisation: the opposition of practices of food production (agriculture) to practices of food collection (hunting and gathering). He points out that underlying this opposition ‘is a master narrative about how human beings, through their mental and bodily labour, have progressively raised themselves above the purely natural level of existence to which all other animals are confined, and so doing have built themselves a history of civilisation' (Ingold 2000: 78). While we now recognise the racist logic of modern evolutionist thought, the systematic domination of land and animals remains central to western schema of modernisation. Consequently, we tend not to see the practices of peoples who survived according to a land-based ethic of interdependency and stewardship as equally constitutive of human history. The central injunction of Ingold’s book, one informed by anthropological analyses of many kinds of societies and that applies to both sides of this opposition, is that we properly recognise the ecological character of human ontology. Notwithstanding our cognitive capacity to objectify and set ourselves apart from our world, our subjectivity is formed through our interrelatedness with the human, non-human and material components of our environment. This means that rather than viewing human history as a process by which we have asserted our reason and will upon nature and the other materials of the earth, Ingold urges us to see history as ‘the process wherein both people and their environments are continually bringing each other into being’ (2000: 87).' (Introduction)

'This hybrid paper of creative work and critical reflections draws on my writing experience and recent poems, largely in the prose poetry form. I describe feelings of lack of identity, of failure, of sometimes being out of place in the world in the struggle to follow one’s vocation. My vocation is to write poetry. This doesn’t fit well with earning a living. I wanted to write from the age of ten. It was short stories at first, and then poetry kicked in at age 14, which I remember as the moment when I started to think for myself. The unhelpful advice of others attempted to steer me away from such a vocation. They meant well. They didn’t want to see me suffer. Teachers at school and older friends said that I should go to University, but they couldn’t give me a reason that I could relate to. I wanted to travel, and to read what I wanted to read – I had discovered reading for pleasure. There were no books in our house, and the fact that I was vaguely academic was a disaster to my family. Writing poetry made one even more suspect, and a sensibility that is perceived as too sensitive can be bullied or ignored. But this vocation is non-negotiable.' (Introduction)