The Australian Journal of Politics and History articles from March 2003

The Australian Journal of Politics and History archives from March 2003

Melancholy and amnesia: Tocqueville's influence on Australian democratic theory.
March 1, 2003... Australian democracy is pragmatic, materialistic and utilitarian, its egalitarianism indifferent to ideas or ideals. At best Australian political thought is derivative, at worst non-existent. This understanding of democracy has sustained and...

Reclaiming community? From welfare society to welfare state in Australian Catholic social thought.
March 1, 2003... Introduction (1) How should states, markets and civil society combine in the delivery of social services? This has become a key theme in Australian welfare reform with the communitarian revival on the left and right of Australian politics....

A "civilised amateur": Edgar Holt and his life in letters and politics.(Biography)
March 1, 2003... Until the recent appearance of Ian Hancock's fine history of the federal organisation of the Liberal Party, (1) Edgar Holt's name was all but absent from works of Australian journalistic, cultural and political history. And yet, in the 1930s...

The Department of External Affairs, the ABC and reporting of the Indonesian crisis 1965-1969.(Australian Broadcasting Commission)
March 1, 2003... "Our aim [...] is not to be impartial for the sake of impartiality but to have the appearance of impartiality so that the message we want to deliver will be delivered successfully." Paul Hasluck, Australian Minister for External...

Uncertain climate: the recent history of drought policy in Australia.
March 1, 2003... As much of eastern Australia experiences the impact of another El Nino event, it is perhaps timely to consider the recent history of drought policy in Australia and identify the obstacles that appear to prevent the development of a...

A rising tide for Jean-Marie, Jorg, and Pauline? Xenophobic populism in comparative perspective (1).
March 1, 2003... Xenophobic, Exclusionary and New Right Populism A few years can be a long time in the politics of xenophobic, exclusionary populism. As recently as 1998, new right-wing populist parties were spreading from country to country, growing...

Tasmania and the secret ballot.(first use of secret ballot)
March 1, 2003... Citizens in democracies take the secret ballot for granted. But if investigated, the Victorian Parliament in Australia will be found to have been the first to abandon the "show of hands" method of electing MPs in 1856. (1) Although the ballot...

Dot.con: the dangers of cyber crime and a call for proactive solutions.(The Transnational Dimension of Cyber Crime and Terrorism; Fraud 101: Techniques and Strategies for Detection; Dirty Dealing: The Untold Truth About Global Money Laundering; Transnational Dimension of Cyber Crime and Terrorism; Money Laundering: A New International Law Enforcement Model)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Howard R. Davia, Fraud 101: Techniques and Strategies for Detection. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000). 245 pp. cloth. US$39.95. William Hutchinson and Matthew Warren, Information Warfare: Corporate Attack and Defense in a Digital World....

Sources of reform in Britain: a review article.(History of Suffrage 1760-1867; The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838-1850)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... History of Suffrage 1760-1867, Ed. Anna Clark and Sarah Richardson, 6 vols. (London: Picketing & Chatto, 2000) 495.00 [pounds sterling]. The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838-1850, Ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Picketing & Chatto, 2001)...

Ecological Pioneers: a Social History of Australian Ecological Thought and Action.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Martin Mulligan and Smart Hill. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 336 pp. Illustrated. $39.95 (Pb). Recent monographs by Tim Bonyhady, Roslynn Haynes, Tom Griffiths and others have animated the study of the cultural...

Anglicanism in Australia: a History.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Edited by Bruce Kaye, Tom Frame, Colin Holden and Geoff Treloar. (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2002), pp. xvii+ 408. Illustrated. $69.95. From the arrival of the First Fleet and its early claims to be at least a...

Church in a Landscape: a History of the Diocese of Wangaratta.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Colin Holden. (Melbourne: circa books, 2002). Pp xix + 324. Paperback $29.95. A work on the history of a rural Anglican diocese may not seem likely to command wide interest, but this is a special one. It quickly becomes clear that we...

Blood, Sweat and Welfare: a History of White Bosses and Aboriginal Pastoral Workers.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Mary Anne Jebb. (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2002), pp. xiv + 364. Illustrated. One map. $34.95 (Pb). The northern ranges of the West Australian Kimberleys were immortalised in Ion Idriess's 1937 novel, Across the...

William Augustus Miles (1796-1851): Crime, Policing, and Moral Entrepreneurship in England and Australia.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By David Philips. (Melbourne: History Department, University of Melbourne, 2001), pp. 216. $22.00. This book forms part of the University of Melbourne History Monograph series. David Philips skilfully pieces together the life of the...

Ancestors in Archives: a Guide for Family Historians to South Australia's Government Archives.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Compiled by Alison Hoyle for State Records of South Australia. (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2000), pp. xvi + 225. Illustrated. $21.95. Created in 1920 under George Pitt, the South Australian Archives, the institution's title for its first...

The Captive White Woman of Gippsland: in Pursuit of the Legend.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Julie Carr. (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2001) pp. xvii + 309. $29.95. Julie Carr's book explores the technique of using a mythological construct as the basis for determining the way Black stereotypes have become...

Good Food, Bright Fires & Civility: British Emigrant Depots of the 19th Century.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Keith Pescod. (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2001), pp. xxii + 216. Illustrated. $30.00. Immigration depots figure comparatively little in the diaries of assisted migrants. For the most part emigrants' eyes were firmly...

Domestic Service in Australia.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By B.W. Higman. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), pp. xvi + 358. $49.95. Domestic service was the most prominent avenue of paid employment for women in nineteeth-century Australia, and indeed sustained an important place in...

The Engine Room of Government: the Queensland Premier's Department, 1859-2001.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Joanne Scott, Ross Laurie, Bronwyn Stevens and Patrick Weller. (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), Pp. xii, 424. ISBN 0 7022 3292 0 (pb) $30.00; ISBN 0 7022 3292 0 (hc) $45.00. There are many histories of government...

The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: Vol. 1 1901-1929.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Edited by Ann Millar. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), xv + 478 pp. photographs, $76.95 (Hb). Collections of potted biographies of members of the several Australian Parliaments are a familiar research source for historians and...

Australia, New Zealand and Federation 1883-1901.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Ged Martin. (London: Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, 2001), vii +163 pp. 10.00 [pounds sterling]. Notwithstanding the huge injection of government funds and accompanying publicity, the Centenary of Federation in 2001 did little...

1901. The Forgotten Election.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Edited by Marian Simms. (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002), xvl + 294pp. $30.00 (Pb). To mark the centenary of federation the National Council for the Centenary of Federation commissioned a study of Australia's first federal...

The German Empire and Britain's Pacific Dominions, 1871-1919: Essays on the Role of Australia and New Zealand in World Politics in the Age of Imperialism.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Edited by John M. Moses and Christopher Pugsley. (Claremont, California: Regina Books, 2000), pp. xviii + 576. Five Maps. US$39.95 (Hb); US$19.95 (Pb). Choice is at the heart of scholarship. Scholars must choose topics to pursue, methods...

A History of the Book in Australia 1891-1945.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Edited by Martyn Lyons and John Arnold. (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001). Pp xix + 444. Illustrated. $50.00 (Hb). This second volume of the ongoing history of Australian Book Project, well presented and illustrated by UQP,...

British Capital, Antipodean Labour. Working the New Zealand Waterfront, 1915-1951.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Anna Green. (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001), pp.202. Illustrated. NZ$39.95. Labour history is not a trendy subject these days. There is also an aversion within New Zealand towards remembering our working class history, let...

The Occupation of Japan: the Rhetoric and the Reality of Anglo-Australasian Relations 1939-1952.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By George Davies. (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), pp. xviii + 391. Illustrated. $34.95. This book is a mixture of military history and international relations. The first section takes an overall perspective of the...

Obliged to Be Difficult: Nugget Coombs' Legacy in Indigenous Affairs.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Tim Rowse. (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.viii +254. $29.95. Tim Rowse's book is a pilot to his forthcoming biography of Dr Herbert Coles Coombs. "Nugget" Coombs, son of a Westralian station master, and a PhD from LSE...

John Gorton: He Did It His Way.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Ian Hancock. (Sydney: Hodder, 2002), pp. xv+446. Illustrated. $50.00. John Gorton was, in the words of Sydney journalist Alan Reid, an accidental Prime Minister winning the job after Harold Holt drowned in December 1967 leaving no clear...

Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: a Portrait of Paul Keating PM.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Don Watson. (Milsons Point: Knopf Australia, 2002), xi + 756 pp. $45.00. Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM, is part personal memoir, biography, history and political analysis. As a...

When Police Unionise: the Politics of Law and Order in Australia.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Mark Finnane. (Sydney: The Federation Press, Institute of Criminology Monograph Series No. 15, 2002), pp. 264. $33.00. Focusing specifically on the role of police unions, Mark Finnane's book provides a chronological account of the...

Thoughtlines: Reflections of a Public Man.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Bob Carr. (Camberwell: Viking, 2002), xvi + 400 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-6700-4025-8. Bob Carr's Thoughtlines: Reflections of a Public Man is a collection of his speeches, newspaper articles, essays and book reviews spanning four decades. The...

Left Directions: Is There a Third Way?(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Edited by Paul Nursey-Bray and Carol Lee Bachi. (Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2001), pp. 254 + vi. $32.95. This edited collection brings together fourteen papers drawn from a Conference on "Left Directions" held at...

Law and Order in a Weak State: Crime and Politics in Papua New Guinea.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Sinclair Dinnen. Pacific Monograph Series 17. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001). ISBN 0-8248-2280-3; xvi, 248 pages, maps, tables, photos, notes, bibliography, index. US$40. If anyone did not realize that Papua New Guinea was...

Historical Dictionary of Papua New Guinea, Asian/Oceanian Historical Dictionaries No. 37.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Ann Turner. (Lanham (Maryland): Scarecrow Press, 2001). ISBN 0-8108-3936-9. 2nd edition, xxi, 357 pages, chronology, maps, bibliography, appendices. US$85.00 cloth. I must admit being always at a loss when assessing dictionaries,...

Nature, Culture and History: the "Knowing" of Oceania.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Kerry Howe. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), pp. x + 120, bibliography, index. $US17.95 (pb). It is rare that an author warns readers against turning to the last chapter and judging their book by the concluding abridgement...

The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Ed. W.J. Mander, Alan P.F. Sell, et al. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002), 2 vols, pp.xxviii + 1280. 350.00 [pounds sterling]. This is a sequel to the successful Thoemmes dictionaries on seventeenth and eighteenth-century British...

The Ideal of Alexis de Tocqueville.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Manning Clark. Edited by Dymphna Clark, David Headon and John Williams. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), pp. xiv + 185. $27.95 The Ideal of Alexis de Tocqueville was Manning Clark's Master of Arts thesis, begun in Europe...

Tribunes and Amazons: Men and Women of Revolutionary France, 1789-1871.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By R.B. Rose. (Paddington, NSW: Macleay Press, 1998), pp. 383. Illustrated. NPG. Now emeritus professor at the University of Tasmania, Barrie Rose has been one of Australia's foremost scholars of revolutionary France for nearly half a...

Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Ian Hunter. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. xiii + 398. $135.00. Ian Hunter's Rival Enlightenments begins modestly enough with a proposal to recover a lost dimension of eighteenth-century thought, the civil philosophy...

German Federalism: Past, Present, Future.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Edited by Maiken Umbach (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp.xv + 215. US $68.00 cloth. One does not have to share Hagen Schulze's fondness for a kind of geopolitical determinism to agree with him when he writes in the Foreword...

Fighting for Franco: International Volunteers in Nationalist Spain During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Judith Keene. (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2001), pp. viii + 310. Two Maps. US$39.95. This is an excellent book on a much-neglected topic. Where much of the international historiography of the Spanish Civil War...

Mussolini.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By R.J.B. Bosworth. (London: Arnold Press, 2002), pp. xviii + 584. Illustrated. $79.95 It should surprise no one that Richard Bosworth has now produced a biography of Mussolini. Since the 1970s he has sought to draw the attention of his...

Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology: Political and Social Theory from Nietzsche to Habermas.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Edited by John P. McCormick.. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 368. USS 21.95 If the last century was Germany's century, it is because its turbulent political history stands at the centre of what Hobsbawm termed the...

A Theory of Modernity.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Agnes Heller. (Oxford and Cambridge, MA:Blackwell, 2000), pp. xii + 313. $45.00. Agnes Heller somewhat misleadingly presents A Theory of Modernity as the third volume of a trilogy, the first two volumes of which were A Theory of History...

Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Douglas R. Holmes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 280. Cloth US$60.00, Paper US$19.95. In 1989, Douglas R. Holmes published Cultural Disenchantments: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy, based on an...

Dreams of a More Perfect Union.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... By Rogan Kersh. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Pp. vii + 358. US$39.95. Modern scholars seeking to understand and explain the American union have spent much of their energies analysing and dissecting two of the central concepts...