Straight to the Pool Room:
Antipodean Camp and the logics of possession

This is an excerpt from the Art Theory Honours thesis of the same name, submitted to the University of New South Wales in 2022. To access the full paper, please submit an enquiry.

Abstract

The reproduction of Australia as settler colonial nation relies on repeated, performative gestures, which Aileen Moreton-Robinson terms the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty. These gestures have different aesthetic and affective registers, each working to transform the nation from the fantasy of the ‘unknown southern land’ to the reality of the settler colonial state. This thesis contends that the artificial aesthetics of Camp have been used in Australia in the gestures of possessive logics, (re)asserting white possession and creating settler identity. Simultaneously, the aesthetics of Camp are also used to disavow the settler state.

The history of Camp is rich, from its radical origins as a term used by gender non-conforming people in the nineteenth century to its status from the mid-twentieth century as a mercurial term with an ambivalent relationship to politics. Susan Sontag identifies Camp as a mode of aestheticism based on artifice and failed seriousness; Nicholas Perry’s concept of Antipodean Camp analyses the peculiar relationship between Camp and colonial possession. This thesis considers the prevalence of Camp aesthetics in gestures of possession through analysis of a range of cultural artefacts from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The films The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and The Castle (1997), reality television series RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under (2021) and the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, are used to illustrate how the aesthetics of Camp uphold the system of settler possession. The way in which Camp aesthetics are used as a form of disavowal of or reflexiveness towards the settler colony is examined with relation to artworks by Tony Albert and Reg Mombassa. This thesis casts a Camp eye over the logics of possession in Australia, ultimately arguing that a Camp aesthetic can be found in the gestures that (re)produce Australia.

Background

The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz tells the story of Dorothy Gale, an adolescent girl discontent with her life residing on the Kansas farmstead belonging to her aunt and uncle. Alongside her dog, Toto, Dorothy is swept up in a tornado and transported to the faraway Land of Oz. In Oz, she is forced to navigate the foreign and brutal landscape while she journeys to a fabled city. For Dorothy, Oz, with its strange flora and unknown customs, is a land to be feared, but also a cornucopia where magical and exciting things happen. All her encounters of Oz are contrasted with her experiences of rural Kansas. In the film’s final minutes, it is revealed that Oz is merely a figment of Dorothy’s imagination, a place ‘Over the Rainbow’ where her concussed mind takes her.

It would be remiss not to acknowledge the homophonic connection between ‘Oz’ and ‘Aus’ in writing about Camp aesthetics in the Australian imaginary. While this “rib-tickling and ego-stroking” connection is merely coincidental, Oz has been used as an affectionate abbreviation for Australia since the early 20th Century. When Australia is referred to as Oz, I argue that this suggests a subconscious connection between the settler nation state and fantasy. Thus I propose that the nation-state of Australia is a kind of fantasy, transformed into a reality by the logics of white possession.

An oft-quoted passage from Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp reads: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman’. To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” To view things through a Camp lens is to acknowledge artifice. Perhaps, ‘Australia’ should always be seen in quotation marks. As Helen Hughes points out, “‘Australia’ was invented before it was ‘discovered’.” The continent was only officially recognised by the name ‘Australia’ by Britain in 1824, and federated as a nation in 1901. Its namesake Terra Australis Incognita – the unknown southern land – exists not in reality, but in the imagination of pre-Christian European cultures. This hypothetical continent was conceptualised by European geographers of antiquity, based on the idea that the known landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere must have been balanced by a continent of equal mass in the globe’s south. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the popularity of Terra Australis reached its zenith, and searching for the imagined continent justified European exploration and colonial expansion into the Southern Hemisphere. Here Terra Australis underwent a transformation: from myth of the unknown southern land to the establishment of a penal colony on land stolen and claimed for the British Crown. Ultimately, whereas Oz remains a place of fiction, ‘Aus’ continues to be realised through the socio-discursive practices of settler colonialism.

This thesis, ‘Straight to the Pool Room: Antipodean Camp and the logics of possession’, examines the role of Camp in the (re)production of settler colonialism as the structure that underscores Australia. Subject to context, the artifice of Camp can be understood variously as transgressive or reactive, be it used in explicit political parody, ambivalent mocking, or celebratory jingoism. The specific phenomenon of Antipodean Camp points to the prevalence of Camp in Australian settler culture. The title of the thesis quotes the 1997 Australian film The Castle, which I discuss in Chapter Two in relation to representations of settler logics of possession in Australian cinema. Going ‘Straight to the Pool Room’ is an expression used in the film by protagonist Darryl Kerrigan with reference to low-culture collectables which he imparts with sentimental value and treats with reverence. I consider the case studies used in this thesis as having gone to the metaphorical ‘pool room’ of Australian settler culture. 

Madeleine Martin
Bachelor of Art Theory Honours
University of New South Wales (UNSW)
Arts, Design, and Architecture
School of Art and Design
April 2022

Supervisor: Dr. Astrid Lorange