Annabelle Collett

Annabelle Collett (1955-2019) was a South Australian designer and artist whose work embraced art, design and craft. Her fashion designs and particularly her dramatic knitwear produced under the Ya Ya Oblique Clothing label attained international recognition. Her work also encompassed furniture design, graphics, costume and interior design, public art and environments. From the early 1990s Annabelle concentrated on making sculptural art pieces about the human form and its coverings, looking at the function and cultural meaning of attire with reference to ideas about gender, the body and sexuality. In more recent years Collett also investigated notions of camouflage, disguise, pattern and the affect of disruptions to pattern. She is also known for a series of works with recycled and found plastics that focussed on repurposing waste and challenged the widespread adoption of single-use plastics. Having been based in Adelaide most of her career, in 2009 she moved to Clayton Bay where she enjoyed a rich collaboration with communities in the Alexandrina region as well as pursuing her own practice.

This edited collection aims to respond to dominant perspectives on twenty-first-century war by exploring how the events of 9/11 and the subsequent Wars on Terror are represented and remembered outside of the US framework. Existing critical coverage ignores the meaning of these events for people, nations and cultures apparently peripheral to them but which have - as shown in this collection - been extraordinarily affected by the social, political and cultural changes these wars have wrought. Adopting a literary and cultural history approach, the book asks how these events resonate and continue to show effects in the rest of the world, with a particular focus on Australia and Britain. It argues that such reflections on the impact of the Wars on Terror help us to understand what global conflict means in a contemporary context, as well as what its representative motifs might tell us about how nations like Australia and Britain perceive and construct their remembered identities on the world stage in the twenty-first century. In its close examination of films, novels, memoir, visual artworks, media, and minority communities in the years since 2001, this collection looks at the global impacts of these events, and the ways they have shaped, and continue to shape, Britain and Australia’s relation to the rest of the world.