A Pacific Sojourn: Anna Kavan and the New Zealand Connection, 1941–2

Abstract

This article examines Anna Kavan’s sojourn in New Zealand from February 1941 to November 1942 in the company of the pacifist playwright Ian Hamilton. Living in the most remote of the ex-British colonies reinforced Kavan’s ontological sense of homelessness and wish to disidentify from British society, yet the colony’s anglophone orientation offered familiarity within the strange and alien. The geography, landscapes and communities of its Pacific islands encouraged a reshaping of her imaginative engagement with otherness. Referring to Kavan’s recently published diary, ‘Five Months Further or What I Remember ab[ou]t New Zealand’, the essay argues that the New Zealand ‘experience’ encouraged her use of tropes of the Gothic and uncanny as she grappled with issues of distance, homelessness and disjunctive reality. The discussion focuses on the alternative/parallel world that New Zealand represents in stories published in I Am Lazarus (1945). It identifies experimental techniques associated with Gothic fiction by which Kavan registers the overlapping dualisms of war-torn London and idyllic rural New Zealand, and represents memory through framing devices and defamiliarizing rhetorical tropes as a distancing activity interrupting the present moment: dream sequences, irruptions into and splittings of reality, space and time reversals, doublings of self/other, disjunctive non sequiturs and ghostly mirror imaging.     

Research note: Rand's research on terrorism

Repeatedly, during the last few years, small groups of extremists have demonstrated that by using terrorist tactics they can achieve disproportionate effects. They attract worldwide attention to themselves and their causes; they arouse worldwide alarm, and can create international incidents that national governments are compelled to deal with, often before a worldwide audience. To protect against their attacks or to respond to crisis situations they create, they force governments to expend resources—manpower, money, the attention of senior officials—vastly out of scale with the magnitude of the actual threat they pose.¹     

Ten Years On, the ‘Three Circle’ Model of Restorative & Transformative Justice: A Tool to Combat Victimization and Recidivism

This paper had its genesis 10 years ago in the authors’ development of a communitarian ‘three circle’ model of restorative and transformative justice for a pilot restorative justice study used with serious and repeat adult offenders appearing in the Magistrates’ Courts in Western Australia. The model was designed in part to place their crimes within a context, something that rarely occurs within the mainstream adversarial criminal justice system in Australia. The model was primarily designed to provide victims of crime with the best outcome and offenders with the opportunity to provide apology and restitution, as well as take responsibility for their actions. The three circles, each including two facilitators, are: Circle 1: consists of the perpetrator who has pleaded guilty to a specified criminal act together with his/her family and/or friends; Circle 2: consists of the victim(s) of the crime together with their family and/or friends. Circle 3: consists of a combination of the first two circles, tasked to seek, if possible, a mutually agreeable resolution that culminates in a report to present to the Magistrate in court to use in mitigation of sentencing. Importantly, although the 30-month study had socially and economically significant results, 10 years after its completion there is still no restorative justice program in the adult courts in Western Australia. Because of this, the authors also set out to question the state government’s motivation in largely ignoring this successful process.