Experience the harmony of body and mind at our unique yoga showcase, Yoga with a Twist, presented by the ANU School of Culture, History & Language as part of its annual flagship cultural festival, Immersia. This immersive event combines the launch of Flexible India, the latest book from Dr Shameem Black, a practical postural yoga session conducted by Alan Goode from Yoga Mandir, as well a creative collage-making workshop designed to enrich your understanding of yoga.

 

We will kick off with an invigorating yoga session that will guide you through postures to enhance flexibility, strength, and mindfulness. Following this, we are excited to host the launch of Shameem’s latest book about how yoga is used to negotiate competing ideas in popular culture.

To cap it all off, unleash your creativity in our collage-making workshop, where you can explore and express your personal yoga journey through art.

 

Shameem's work uses critical and creative approaches to analyse twenty-first-century fiction and popular culture from India and its diaspora. Key themes in her work include gender, memory, and cross-cultural practice.

 

Dubbed the “world’s oldest lesbian”, Ethel May (Monte) Punshon (8 November 1882 – 4 April 1989) was a firebrand of her times. She lived in a society where appearances mattered and keeping them up often involved creating silence around ancestral origins, painful memories, and personal desires. Yet, despite growing up in a secretive century, she refused to be labelled.

In a life that spanned more than a century, Monte Punshon witnessed crucial events in Australia's history, and her story shines a light on the hidden corners and complexities of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century society. And it is only fitting that the story of this remarkable woman has been imaginatively narrated in a biography penned by another extraordinary woman: Emerita Professor Teresa Morris-Suzuki.

 

Join us to celebrate the launch of Tessa’s latest book, A Secretive Century: Monte Punshon's Australia, hear the historian’s vision as she shares her experience of penning this biography and a reading of an excerpt from the book. Gracing us on the occasion for a dialogue is Dr Keiko Tamura, a Japanese-born anthropologist whose research focuses on Australia-Japan relations, and Emerita Professor Margaret Jolly, who writes on gender and sexuality in Oceania.

 

Tessa researches the modern history of East Asia, with a particular focus on Japan, Korea and Far Eastern Russia (especially Sakhalin). Her work focuses on migration, borders, ethnic minorities, cross-border history debates and grassroots social movements.

Intercultural marriage is an important part of the personal lives of many Australians in this multicultural society. But pejorative stereotypes endure of marriages between Asian women and ‘Aussie’ men, especially if they have been brokered, or developed through correspondence courtship.

 

Join us for the official launch of a signature, path-breaking book that addresses this theme: Marriage Migration, Intercultural Families and Global Intimacies, authored by CHL's Professor Emerita Kathryn Robinson.

 

The so-called ‘Mail Order’ bride stereotype, and families formed through transnational correspondence courtship, are explored in this book. It begins with an anthropologist’s perspective on the institution of ‘marriage’ and unselected assumptions about its historical and cultural attributes; assumptions that lead to the view of transnational brokered marriages as ‘illegitimate’.

Through this title, Emerita Professor Robinson explores the history of brokered marriage in Australia, beginning with ‘bride ships’ that brought women to the convict settlement of NSW, to correct the sex imbalance of the convict population. This story involves her own family history, and ‘demographic corrections’ have been a feature of immigration policy since Federation and the creation of the nation in 1901.

Ethnographic research reveals the experiences of brokered transnational courtship (these days via the internet) and the dynamics of families and local communities formed through correspondence marriage. While these transnational unions represent ‘adventures in identity’ they also share characteristics with other Australian marriages and families. The stereotypes are a poor basis for understanding the experience of the social actors, but nonetheless the negativity haunts many of the partners.

 

The book will be launched at a panel discussion with the author, led by Professor Kim Rubenstein and Lulu Raspall-Turner, a Filiipina leader in Canberra’s multicultural community, and Indonesian-Australian partners Avi Mahaningtyas and Patrick Anderson.

 

Kathryn's principal research has been in Indonesia, focusing on social issues of mining, everyday Islam, gender relations, youth transitions to adulthood and marriage migration.