Prosthetic gods: the Australian colonial body and Melanesia 1930-1950

Prosthetic gods: the Australian colonial body and Melanesia 1930-1950

Taking Elizabeth Grosz's theory of the body image as its starting point, this paper seeks to develop a theory of how the body image of Australian modernity was sculpted by the experience of colonialism, especially in Melanesia in the 1930s. The body so formed can be understood as a hinge between the key discourses of nation and gender, primitivism and modernity. Taking as case studies two noted Australian travellers in Papua New Guinea, the prospector Michael Leahy and the travel writer Frank Clune, the paper outlines a poetics of colonial spaces and bodies which remains a powerful influence in contemporary regimes of representation.