In the spirit of self-reflexivity and sharing, I offer my own as yet rather insignificant trans travelogue. Which happened yesterday. So much happened yesterday. Only 48 hours ago it was still Sunday. We were at Club Kooky in Sydney with Liz, Zac, Dan and other spunks, watching a thin man with a straggling long beard rummaging in his handbag as dancers converged on the dancefloor. (“A guru without a cult,” said A.) Yesterday: coffee, packing, a lunchtime meeting with folks from AFTMA, a five minute browse in that bookshop on Oxford St in which I would seriously sweep up whole shelves of books if funds permitted, and since funds don’t permit, I just slaver at. Then to the airport. Sundry farewells. A. went straight home to Melbourne, but me, I flew to Brisbane. I was only there for four hours, not even enough time to bother turning the clock back an hour, but time enough for my purposes.

Brisbane is like no other city I’ve ever been in. I know now why they call it Brisvegas. Not for the tackiness – I was expecting tackiness, and saw none – but for the brash, quite careless throwing of large amounts of money into every public or private facility. Perhaps it was because I was in the wrong suburb, but my only knowledge of Brisbane architecture is the film Praise. Which is not at all representative. Everything in the CBD looks new. The old buildings, at least those I saw, are all refurbished and brimming with ‘exciting’ new bars, etc. Even the foliage I spied from the brand-new “Airtrain” looked like someone had come by a second ago and given it a polish: green grasses and fronded palms, small lakes, flame trees. If the trains are brand-new, then the buses are more so (oddly, however, they look exactly like Sydney buses, but bigger and more shiny, as if Sydney Bus replacements had been diverted to Brisbane by mistake.) (more…)

If you’ve been reading the Archive you may be in need of some commentary on A’s great new Lego-Intellectual, the CultStud Affable Persona™. If you were there, you will get the joke and you may even understand the balloons. If not, read on.

We’ve been at CultureFix, the annual Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference this week, mostly an excuse to use up my postgrad conference junket fund and deliver a paper, see some people in Sydney etc. The first day of the conference was called PreFix (a play on CultureFix) — it was billed as a professional development day for postgrads and ‘early careeer researchers’. Now, my thesis supervisor co-organised and chaired it, which meant that I felt a compunction to go, aside from the chance for anthropological research relevant to the recent cult stud blog wars. And indeed, if I want to have a career as an academic, I should definitely know certain things: like the fact that for employment and grant applications, journals in which one might publish each have a score, and the more obscure or small the journal, the less scores you will pick up.

Anyhow, to the point: the Affable Persona. At PreFix Mark McClelland (whose writing I am rather fond of) gave a spiel about getting postdoctoral fellowships, advising us that you have to play the game, that we should “see and be seen” at conferences, seminars, departmental gatherings et cetera, developing an “affable persona” with which to deliver papers, network, befriend possible mentors, research grant selectors, et cetera. One began to worry about Mark during the course of his talk. He also suggested that any distractions from research — like relationships — were not to be tolerated.

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