Arena Magazine articles from April 2006

Arena Magazine archives from April 2006

The nuclear non-option.(Editorial)
April 1, 2006... If the cover of TIME magazine is any guide, attitudes to global warming have come a long way since it first made the cover in October 1987, when TIME went with the relatively neutral 'How the Earth's Climate is Changing, Why the Ozone Hole is...

From precarity to precarious.
April 1, 2006... In Europe the anti-capitalist/anti-globalist movement is talking of 'precarity'. There is now even a San Precario in Italy. Precarity is the state of being experienced by casual and fixed-term contract workers, whose employment is precarious....

Heinrich Hinze.(Cartoon)
April 1, 2006... New Message Text: wot is a "penalty rate"? Message Received Xtra $$$ we used 2 get 4 workin nites n weekends... New Message Text: wot is a "weekend", dad? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Civilisational chauvinism: with talk of a 'long war', the US has committed itself to a high-intensity, asymmetrical war against civilian populations.
April 1, 2006... Historians of the future--who may well be writing their chronicles by candlelight--may come to record that the Third World War began last month, when President George W. Bush announced a nuclear sharing deal with India--a country that has built...

Stolen harvest: the AWB scandal is merely indicative of the tactics adopted by the Australian government's in helping to ensure Western control over Iraqi agriculture.(Coalition Provisional Authority)
April 1, 2006... With the arguments for the Iraq War so thoroughly discredited three years after the invasion, John Howard's justification for Australia's participation now rests on 'liberating' the Iraqi people and helping them establish democracy. But far...

Shaping the future: social services & solutions for tomorrow (WACOSS Conference 2006).
April 1, 2006... A look at current challenges and opportunities for the social services sector in the pursuit of effective service delivery and positive social change. At the broadest levels, ideological and political orientation of Governments, changing...

2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art.
April 1, 2006... A large survey of current Australian art inspired by modernism, this Biennial registers a shift away from the melancholic collapse of certainty that underpinned postmodern art. Artists respond to the collaborative, experimental or utopian...

March of the Penguins (G).(FILM)(Movie review)
April 1, 2006... Each winter, alone in the pitiless ice deserts of Antarctica, deep in the most inhospitable terrain on Earth, a remarkable journey takes place as it has done for millennia. This Oscar-winning documentary tracks Emperor Penguins in their...

This Is How It Goes.(Theater review)
April 1, 2006... Red Stitch Actors Theatre presents the Australian premiere of Neil La Bute's play about the dark side of individualism. Dealing with issues of race and class difference, the play highlights the messy and contradictory emotions that fuel hatred,...

Saving Henry (Version 5).
April 1, 2006... TILT (an Arts Centre initiative supporting new works by independent artists) presents another powerful solo performance by writer/performer Angus Cerini. Having toured Europe to critical acclaim in 2003, Saving Henry asks:What happens when you...

Inconvenient facts: denigrating aboriginal outstations as 'cultural museums' ignores the facts.
April 1, 2006... In her last major speech as Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Senator Amanda Vanstone addressed the Australia and New Zealand School of Government at the Australian National University in December 2005. Titled 'Beyond Conspicuous Compassion:...

Zimbabwe's curse: a hopeful future lies ahead for Zimbabwe, writes John McFarlane, but first the present regime and everything it stands for needs to be ousted.
April 1, 2006... At the time of its independence in 1980, Zimbabwe was a country that had everything going for it. The new government led by then-Prime Minister, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, had ousted the white minority government led by Ian Smith. Mugabe was seen...

The long battle against neo-liberalism: despite appearances, the G-20 trade group, which meets in Melbourne in November, does not signal a new or more inclusive approach to world trade.
April 1, 2006... Somewhat incongruously, an image of Uluru adorns the Group of Twenty homepage to signify that Australia is chair for this trade grouping for 2006. Below Uluru is an image of something that seems almost as permanent and immovable: Federal...

... And amassing a huge fortune.(Richard Branson)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... 'To me, business isn't about wearing suits of pleasing stockholders. It's about being true to yourself, your ideas and focusing on the essentials.' Richard Branson, Chairman of Virgin and inspired world traveller (as described by the...

A perfect storm of dots: animal organ donation is now being advanced as a serious solution to organ shortages, but mixing species in the name of health is like scattering landmines in the name of peace.
April 1, 2006... On March 6, 2006, the Associated Press's Alexander G. Higgins reported from Geneva: The lethal strain of bird flu poses a greater challenge to the world than any infectious disease, including AIDS... the World Health Organization said...

History according to the new left.(Cold War, 1945-1991)
April 1, 2006... In the late 1990s, the United States Congress passed legislation that directed the Department of Defense to design and distribute a Cold War certificate of recognition to the estimated twenty-seven million American veterans and countless...

Surf shops and cult wars.(//bites: BRIEF NOTES ON NEWS AND VIEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD)(Personal account)
April 1, 2006... Late in January, a small slip advertising a sale in a local surf shop appeared in my mailbox at home in Torquay. It was one of those cheap photocopied ads that you usually throw in the bin before it comes into the house. This one caught my eye...

Playing the dane: the language of freedom has been harnessed to legitimise the war on terror.
April 1, 2006... The recent controversy over the 'Danish cartoons' affair--cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed as a terrorist--largely became (in the Western press at least) a debate over freedom of expression and the degree to which one culture ought...

Faith and credit: the deregulation of the finance sector has us all drowning in debt.
April 1, 2006... Two decades of financial deregulation has unleashed forces whose public effects were not understood at the time. Deregulation has undoubtedly brought benefits. Deregulation of some dimensions (the currency in particular) was inevitable. But the...

The sum of all fears: John Hinkson writes that John Howard's success has been an intuitive and opportunistic grasping within a new kind of society, one that undermines the basic associations central to social life.(Viewpoint essay)
April 1, 2006... Many of the commentaries on John Howard's ten years in power speak of how he has gained commanding authority through the last two election campaigns. These commentaries deal with empirical facts but they do not give a convincing account of the...

The resistable rise of postmodern neo-fascism: 1930s-style Fascism has been replaced by a species of postmodern neo-fascism, writes Geoff Boucher. Familiar with the fascism of the past, today's Left has so far failed to find an effective response.(Neo-Fascism)(Viewpoint essay)
April 1, 2006... It seems that fascism is everywhere in decline in the industrialised democracies. Openly corporatist parties that are organised for political violence and claim a lineage from movements of the 1930s, such as the British Nationalist Party (BNP)...

Cargo cult: imported from the United States, the culture wars in Australia are about displacing economic anxieties into the cultural realm.(Culture Wars)
April 1, 2006... With the din of Mr Howard's ten year celebrations still in the air, March 2006 saw the announcement of the government's next round of sweeping legislative changes--those governing Australian media ownership. As predicted, the proposals...

Overland 182 (April, 2006).(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Like Matthew Sharpe in this edition of Arena, Overland takes up a discussion of the Culture Wars in Australia. In discussing publishing and fiction in Australia, writer Malcom Knox points to the confused status of 'standards' and political...

Chain Reaction 95 (Summer 2005-2006).(Cam Walker )(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Headed 'Activism in Australia 1995-2005', this Chain Reaction seeks to draw together some threads in local activism over the past decade. Cam Walker writes in his editorial that it 'does seem that the next few years really will represent a...

New Internationalist 385.(Magwatch)(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... This number of New Internationalist is centred on the idea of 'Justice After Genocide'. In response to this theme, the writers go to every point of the compass: Sudan, Chile, Argentina, Rwanda, Srebrenica, El Salvador and Iraq. An unattributed...

Hecate's Australian Women's Book Review, 17.1.(Magwatch)(Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market)(Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife)(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... This is 'the only Australian review of books by women', and an outcrop of the feminist journal Hecate. Evelyn Hartogh reviews Elisabeth Wynhausen's Dirt Cheap: Life At The Wrong End of the Job Market. With a title taken from Lefebvre, Lesley...

Being abnormal in normal: meeting the novel challenge of global terrorism requires reconsideration of long-standing views, including our knee-jerk dismissal of pacifism.
April 1, 2006... On a crisp autumn morning nearly two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, less than two dozen students, faculty and community members calling themselves the 'Peace and Justice Coalition' gathered on the campus of Illinois State University...

Everybody hates television: for critics on the Left and the Right, television is responsible for everything from creating apathetic citizens to assaulting family life. Catharine Lumby looks at how and why we project our anxietites onto the small screen.
April 1, 2006... If Gustave Flaubert were alive today, I'm betting a new entry in his Dictionary of Received Ideas would read: TV: A device invented in the earlier part of the twentieth century that precipitated the end of civilisation. After the advent of TV,...

The emotional climates of globalisation: the cult of short-termism characteristic of the contemporary era of globalisation has produced a code of self-analysis riddled with contradictions.(The New Individualism)(Excerpt)
April 1, 2006... He was always punctual and approached psychotherapy as though it were simply one of the many business transactions he conducted daily. A good-looking man, a forty-eight-year-old high-tech computer whiz, Larry had accumulated buckets of money...

Drum Roll.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... Drum Roll Seven drops on a cigarette paper that's when the men stop work sit on their Eskies cook crumpets on a shovel over the tailings fire in the lea of the Portaloo. Seven drops fell yesterday hit...

Knowing Your Place.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... Knowing Your Place Putting the labels on things in the factory is his least favourite job; he hates the way the glue sticks on his fingers for days after, but he doesn't mind stacking boxes. It's boring but he...

And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Aboriginal myths for white voters.(Indigenous peoples)
April 1, 2006... Prime Minister John Howard moved indigenous affairs from the Immigration portfolio in late January, placing it 'more appropriately' in the Department of Family and Community Services. 'It reflects a continued determination of the Government to...

Belinda Smaill on passion and politics in documentary film.
April 1, 2006... For anyone who regularly attends the cinema it is difficult to ignore the sharp rise in the number of feature length documentaries making it to movie theatres. An overwhelming number of these documentaries have a social agenda and are concerned...

Andy Scerri on throwing out the baby with the bathwater.(Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Nation of Rebels; Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, HarperCollins, 2005 (The Rebel Sell in the USA and Canada, 2004). Canadian philosophers Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter sent a ripple across North...

Tony Birch, Shadowboxing (Scribe, 2006).(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... A collection of ten linked stories in the life of a boy growing up in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy in the 1960s. Shadowboxing is a riveting story of loss and permanence, power and weakness, stoicism and resistance. In the tradition of...

The MUP Masterworks Series (MUP, 2005).(The Lucky Country, The World of the Sixty-Nine Tram, The Cultural Cringe)(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Celebrating distinguished Australian writers and ideas, each volume of this series contains an extract from a literary work of enduring influence and popular appeal. Included in this series: #4 Donald Horne On How I Came to Write 'The Lucky...

Various Authors, Animal Series (Reaktion Books, 2003-2006).(Notable Publications)(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... From rats to cockroaches, snakes to oysters, this new series explores the historical, mythological, religious, literary, artistic, commercial and scientific significance of various animals in their relationship to humankind. The series includes...

Ann-Marie Priest, Great Writers, Great Loves: The Reinvention of Love in the Twentieth Century (Black Inc., May 2006).(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Priest delves deep into the love lives of some of the twentieth century's most prolific writers, including D.H.Lawrence, Virginia Woof, Charmian Clift, Sylvia Plath and Frank O'Hara. She reveals how their personal explorations of new ideas on...

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso, March 2006).(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Mike Davis explores the future of slums as 'a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world'. Describing slums as a form of urbanisation disconnected from industrialisation, Davis considers the rise of the informal urban proletariat to...

Re-imagining Melbourne.(Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne)(City Lost and Found - Whelan the Wrecker's Melbourne)(Fluid City: Transforming Melbourne's Urban Waterfro)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Robyn Annear, Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne, Black Inc, 2005 Robyn Annear, A City Lost & Found: Whelan the Wrecker's Melbourne, Black Inc, 2005 Kim Dovey, Fluid City: Transforming Melbourne's Urban Waterfront, UNSW Press, 2005 All...

Come gel with me: Brilliantine invasion.(hair gels)
April 1, 2006... You will possibly think me insane when I tell you that I finally have proof that adolescents are from another planet, possibly Vartor 9, on the far side of the galaxy--a discovery, I'm sure you'll agree, that explains a lot about human...