A conference jointly hosted by Transformations and the Bundaberg Media Research Group on 1st and 2nd of December, 2005 at the Bundaberg Campus of Central Queensland University. The Making Badlands Conference website is available on the Transformations site.

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Ross Gibson, New Media and Digital Culture, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney.

Ross Gibson’s book Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (UQ Press, 2002) describes the central Queensland region as haunted by a violent colonial past and fraught with troubling incidents that make it an Australian badland. This conference addressed the concept of an Australian badland — what it means to speak of a space as a badland, its relation to history, the imaginary, and to questions of regionality, representation, myth, archival authority, and the formation of narrative and discursive knowledge.



The conference also examined how imaginary spaces are actively produced through technological, aesthetic, conceptual, visual, audio and other sensory engagements with the materiality of regional contexts, and develop ways in which these may be contested through alternative practices of making that may lead to more progressive and empowering visions of regions.