This symposium focused on the postwar historical evolution of Japan-Australia relations, with the special attention to the period between 1957 when the Commerce Agreement brought forward the 'economic rapprochement' between the former enemies and 1976 when the two countries concluded the Basic Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, the so-called NARA Treaty. Teruhiko Fukushima looked into the negotiation process of the Commerce Agreement, where the Australians sought after the right to invoke selective import controls and Japanese assurance of purchases of their agricultural commodities and the Japanese side persisted in the anomalous surplus disposal agreement with US to the detriment of the sales of Australian wheat on a commercial basis. However, both parties eventually agreed to reject these bilateral deals and endorse the principle of nondiscriminatory trade on a multi-lateral basis under GATT. David Walton (University of Western Sydney) highlighted the Australia-Japan regional cooperation during the 1960s when Canberra came to regard Japanese relations as role models for Australia's approach to the Asia-Pacific region. He drew our attention to the fact that the Japanese diplomats provided the Australian counterpart with the useful information about South East Asia, especially about Indonesia during the fall of the President Sukarno in 1965, to promote a sense of mutual confidence between the two governments. Christopher Pocarier (Waseda University) dealt with the problem of the rise of Japanese investment in Australian mines and increasing concern about Japanese presence among the Australians during the 1970s. Although both the Whitlam Labor government and the Fraser Coalition government were quite enthusiastic about strengthening Japanese relations by bringing forth the Australia-Japan Foundation and the NARA Treaty, such national mood drove both governments into regulation of Japanese investments. By these days, however, the enormous benefits of economic relations with Japan were recognized by the Australian public so well that the short-term anxieties about being swallowed by Japanese money did not affect the overall bilateral relations. Minister Bruce Miller (Australian Embassy, Tokyo) emphasised the symbolic significance of the landmark events such as the Commerce Agreement in that they promoted national mood for mutual confidence, thus pumping 'ballast' in Australia-Japan relations so that they would restore quickly even when toppled. Professor Yoshihiro Toyama (Otemon Gakuin University) provided statistical figures to support his argument that the NARA Treaty was historically significant in that Japan and Australia made commitment to deepening mutual understandings by overcoming the so-called economic frictions of the early to mid 1970s.

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One of the leading challenges for contemporary anthropology is to try to contribute to an understanding of continuity and change of culture and society, especially at the conjuncture of colonial and post-colonial contact situations. This paper explores variation and change in Aboriginal people's definition of Aboriginal culture, as a function of their differential historical relationship to their primordial past, or their sense of attachment to the ritual sites, their community and their own people. Among Bundjalung people who have maintained the all-Aboriginal Pentecostal Christian fellowship for three quarters of a century in rural New South Wales of Australia, Christians who keep to the strict Pentecostal doctrines reject Aboriginal "culture". The term "culture" is two-fold in its usage among them. Within the Aboriginal domain, culture means witchcraft practised on the basis of the traditional Aboriginal knowledge of "clever men" or witch doctors, which they strongly reject and fear. On the other hand, the Bundjalung Christians are familiar with the national discourse of Aboriginal culture that is a channel to self-empowerment and material benefits. This category of "culture", however, is also of great concern to the Bundjalung Christians, as Pentecostals regard desires for secular success and material benefits as the channel through which the Devil insinuates into people's everyday life. Hence they reject revitalisation of Aboriginal culture, as well as traditional cultural knowledge. However, the practice is not the rejection of Aboriginality. In Bundjalung society, Christianity is needed by those who are deeply embedded in the lived reality of everyday life in the Aboriginal social domain that is based on the blackfellas mode of thought. The Bundjalung Christians' emphasis is always on each individual's spiritual warfare against the Devil. Fear urges them to renounce "culture" which falls into two categories as mentioned above. Loss of knowledge related to the djurebil (sacred places), at which both beneficent magic and destructive magic used to be performed, has enhanced fear as generations have passed. Throughout the process of the collapse of traditional social institutions, especially rites related to localised spiritual beings, Christianity has functioned as protection against evil spirits which are considered to have been left intact. This paper seeks to develop discussion of such variation and the historical processes involved. The Bundjalung case brings into focus the process in which conquered indigenes try to redefine their own self to bring the devastating effects of the colonial contact under their control by accepting the exogenous God.

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Born in 1943, Robert Adamson is one of Australia's leading contemporary poets. Since the late 1960s, Adamson has published more than fifteen collections of poetry and has been the recipient of many awards and prizes - including the National Book Council's Banjo Award, the New South Wales Literary Awards' Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for poetry, and the F.A.W. Christopher Brennan prize in 1994, for lifetime achievement in literature. This essay examines Adamson's twelfth collection of poetry, Waving to Hart Crane in light of the influence of French poet Yves Bonnefoy's examination of poetics and negativity on Adamson's poetics. Proceeding through close readings of individual poems and reference to secondary critical material and interviews, this essay examines the development of Adamson's poetic following the naturalism of the award-winning collection The Clean Dark to a more troubled interrogation with the negativity of poetic language and the representation of the natural world.

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