Edited by Anita Archer, Aaron Corn, Frederic Kiernan, Peter Otto and Anthea Skinner, Unlikely Publishing

An academic book titled Varieties of Imagination, Creativity, and Wellbeing in Australia (VICAW) might typically elicit expectations of a neat, conventional summary of Australian cultural life, ready to be carried away in one bag by readers. This new eBook, however, immediately subverts those expectations, by serving not as an overview but an invitation into a dynamic, complex, and ongoing conversation.

VICAW is fundamentally concerned with challenging the monolithic frameworks and dominant frames of reference through which creativity, imagination and wellbeing are often viewed. By integrating diverse perspectives from Indigenous, disabled, and European/settler traditions, the book attempts to re-envision these phenomena in a way that respects their multiplicity in contemporary Australia, across about 450 pages of essays, critiques, visual artworks, photography, poetry, and much more.

It is useful to think about the theoretical approach deployed by VICAW in terms of the “archipelagic thought” of Édouard Glissant[1]. This contrasts sharply with what is called “continental thought”, which attempts to see the world as a singular, imposing synthesis, a bloc “taken wholesale, all-at-once”, like viewing a landscape from an aeroplane window[2].

In contrast, archipelagic thought embraces the multiplicity and non-hierarchy of intersecting domains. If continental thought provides the distant, abstract overview, archipelagic thought attends to the rivers, the rocks, and the trails not seen from high above. It emphasises that we dwell in a world where human cultures are simultaneously “put in contact and in effervescent reaction with one another”, meaning there is no single “legitimizing transcendence”, no sole point from which the whole can be definitively ordered[3].

By adopting this perspective, VICAW allows its core terms—imagination, creativity, and wellbeing—to be recognised as multiple rather than singular, and always in dynamic tension with one another. For readers steeped in the habits of continental thought, this emphasis on non-resolution and ambiguity can intentionally prompt a degree of anxiety, and perhaps even hostility. Yet, the goal is to open the possibility of seeing the world as a “dynamic totality of interacting communities, all aware of each other and constantly changing.”[4]

The book argues that standard Western notions of creativity often reflect modern doxa and commercial interests, leading to what some scholars call the “creativity complex”[5]. Creativity has become something of an orienting ideal since the 1950s, and dominant academic approaches typically emphasise the importance of a mix of originality/novelty and usefulness/appropriateness. 

VICAW points out that this somewhat narrow view often obscures historical complexity, assumes able-bodied agents, and downplays non-Western contexts. Furthermore, this focus on efficiency and adaptability aligns creativity with neo-liberalism and the market, resulting in a type of social organisation where efficacy is paramount over interactions rooted in recognition or liberty. The book seeks to move beyond this by highlighting the varieties of imagination that continue to operate in everyday life, focusing on the traditions, contexts, and manifold ways in which different understandings overlap and interact with each other.

The VICAW project itself was built on the foundation of conversation, a deliberate choice intended to avoid the immediate abstractions of continental thought. The collaboration was formed in 2021 between the Creativity and Wellbeing Research Initiative (CAWRI), the Indigenous Knowledges Institute, Disability Studies, and the Research Unit in Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture (ERCC). The aim was to explore what imagination, creativity, and wellbeing mean across different Australian traditions and contexts.

The first stage involved three separate group discussions, drawing together people living with a disability, First Nations Australians, and academic experts in the arts, all asking two crucial questions: “What topics are crucial for a conversation about imagination, creativity, and wellbeing?” and “What do you want to share with others in this larger discussion?” These discussions culminated in a roundtable held on December 9, 2021, which focused on traditions, representation, archive/memory, and futures in a world disentangling from colonial imaginaries and threatened by climate change.

The methodology sought to establish a research environment based on exchange rather than the extraction of knowledge, emphasising listening, trust, mutual understanding and the embrace of tension. Crucially, each participant was considered a “chief investigator” who owned their own story, and there was an agreement not to publish what was said by others, fostering an unusual sense of active generosity and intimacy. The final eBook, which was designed by the Practice Lab graduate design studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music to house a variety of voices and evoke the roundtable conversation, aimed to capture, aesthetically, the paradox of an investigation that is at once finished and forever-in-draft.

Four main themes or areas of significance emerged in this research and are represented in the eBook: Traditions (e.g., varieties of imagination in Enlightenment thought); Archive/memory (e.g., creating an archive that centres the legacy of artists with disability); Opening spaces/worlds/possibilities (e.g., the relationship between loneliness, music, and gay men), and, Futures (e.g., Lumbung as a method for community wellbeing).

VICAW does not offer a comfortable summary; it offers a journey. Readers are warned that entering the space opened by this volume—the space that lies midway between the arbitrary and the absolute—“may have severe side-effects, including drastic reorientation”[6]. It is an invitation to acknowledge complexity, embrace dialogue, and fundamentally re-evaluate how we understand the creative forces shaping Australia today.

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 [1] Édouard Glissant, Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, trans. Celia Britton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 58.

[2] Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation. Poésie en étendu (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 45, as translated by Michael Wiedorn in “On the Unfolding of Édouard Glissant’s Archipelagic Thought,” Karib–Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies 6, no. 1 (2021), 1–7: 3

[3] Édouard Glissant, “The Cry of the World,” in Treatise on the Whole-World, by Édouard Glissant, trans. Celia Britton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 7–20: 13.

[4] Celia M. Britton, “Globalization and Political Action in the Work of Edouard Glissant,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 13, no. 3 (2009): 1–11: 1

[5] Timon Beyes and Jörg Metelmann, “Introduction,” eds, The Creativity Complex: A Companion to Contemporary Culture, trans. Erik Born, et al (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2018).

[6] We are quoted from and paraphrasing the last paragraph of Nelson Goodman’s “Foreword” to Catherine Z. Elgin, With Reference to Reference (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 1–2: 1. The notion of a space between the absolute and the arbitrary, first introduced in Romantic thought, is here in part indebted to Elgin’s Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).

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