Arena Magazine articles from August 2007

Arena Magazine archives from August 2007

Assimilation for the millennium.(Editorial)
August 1, 2007... When the cries of our young bring us together as one; that's Australian. So ends a recent television advertisement for The Australian. It lists a set of feel-good Australian characteristics: hard work (cancer research); common resource...

Election talk and Our values.(AGAINST THE CURRENT)
August 1, 2007... These past few years have been boom times for civic education in this country. Not a month goes by without one or another of our leaders taking to some crudely constructed soapbox to deliver yet another lecture on Our Values: Why and How They...

Reconnecting nature.(AGAINST THE CURRENT)(the importance of biodiversity protection)
August 1, 2007... Speaking at the Senate Inquiry into Australia's Protected Areas last year, Penelope Figgis said that the conservation of biodiversity, the variety of life on earth, should be treated by nations around the world as a strategic objective. 'It is...

Aboriginal land rights and uranium mining.(AGAINST THE CURRENT)
August 1, 2007... The federal government's new policies in relation to Aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory, announced 21 June, have been portrayed by some as a land grab carried out on behalf of mining companies and, in particular, uranium...

Making modernity in Timor-Leste.(AGAINST THE CURRENT)
August 1, 2007... Graffiti on a wall of a burnt-out shop reads 'iha ne'e la simu firaku'--we don't accept Easterners here--as a group of young men sit near the end of a side road made up of burnt-out buildings and car bodies. The young men identify themselves as...

The humourless state.(AGAINST THE CURRENT)(criticism on the policy against impersonating an officer)
August 1, 2007... It was a Saturday night when Annie Britton, famed member of the demimonde, 'decorated her person with military accoutrements' and strolled down Bourke Street in Melbourne. To be precise, it was 10.30 at night on 25 January 1876 when Annie...

From here to eternity? A response to Geoff Sharp.(Letter to the editor)
August 1, 2007... I am ambivalent about addressing the community of Arena in its challenge to science-technology, with its holding pattern of the 'Left' on progress, together with its essential Luddite attitude towards moving out of 'humanism' into the...

Coup d'etat, coup de theatre or cloud cuckooland in the Northern Territory?(Letter to the editor)
August 1, 2007... In Australia, the Northern Territory (NT) Aboriginal organisations and legislators as well as non-Indigenous people have been trying to work openly, intelligently, co-operatively and moderately to devise a new NT constitution to embrace...

Australia: not so innocent in Iraq.(bites: BRIEF NOTES ON NEWS AND VIEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD)(Australia's role in the Iraq war)
August 1, 2007... Despite the ongoing controversy regarding the Howard government's troop deployment in Iraq, there has been remarkably little attention paid to what the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) have actually been doing there. The general perception is...

Industrial relations kiwi-style.(bites: BRIEF NOTES ON NEWS AND VIEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD)
August 1, 2007... As an Australian living in New Zealand I was often asked, 'What's an Aussie doing living here? Usually the traffic is all the other way'. My reply: 'I'm here as part of Australia's aid program to third world countries'. It never got a laugh,...

#489df.(POETRY)(Poem)
August 1, 2007... #489df Full Name: Abu ubdullah al-Sizari Born: September 9, 1983 Birthplace: Salt Desert Region Height: 5'8" Weight: 134 Position: Likely Al-Queda recruit Physical Detail: Left-handed/scar on lower right back approx. 3...

From scholars to entrepreneurs: Simon Cooper discusses academic Darwinism in the age of audit culture.(ESSAY)(Essay)
August 1, 2007... On 4 July The Australian reported that the salaries of vice-chancellors were edging closer to those of the corporate world, with some packages topping a million dollars a year. Some academics might ruefully recall when vice-chancellors were...

Neither liberal nor conservative: Australia's Postmodern Conservatism: Howard's culture wars are integral to economic liberalism, write Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher.(ESSAY)(Essay)
August 1, 2007... The year 2007, it seems, may prove to be the end of the Howard years. If it is, the government's late June intervention in the Northern Territory's remote Aboriginal communities might well be seen by future historians as Howard's peculiar...

The end of growth: what then? Recognising the pending limits to growth would bring into question the basic assumptions of our social life.(ESSAY)(Essay)
August 1, 2007... Present signs suggest that the Australian public has stopped listening to John Howard and that, mainly by default, Labor may win the coming federal election by a landslide. That would mark a change, but there is no reason to think that it would...

Neo-paternalism and the destruction of CDEP.(Community Development Employment Projects )
August 1, 2007... On 23 July the Howard Government announced its twelfth intervention under its national emergency measures: the abolition of the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme in the Northern Territory. The scheme presently has an...

Gordon Brown: a pastor takes power: the new Prime Minister tends a fragmenting Britain with a neo-liberal gospel.
August 1, 2007... Gordon Brown's entry to No. 10 Downing Street ends one of the strangest episodes in modern European politics. For over three months, the United Kingdom was without true political leadership. Tony Blair indulged in a prolonged farewell...

Aboriginal art--a sacred black cow? Robert Nelson answers critics of 'bad' Aboriginal art.(ARTS & CULTURE)
August 1, 2007... Aboriginal art is hot and the palette of adjectives is lurid: brilliant, magnificent, mesmerizing, exuberant, perfect, sublime, dramatic, lyrical, beguiling, bold and unique. My favourite is 'ineffable', defined as 'defying expression or...

Coercive reconciliation: stabilise normalise, exit Aboriginal Australia.(ARTS & CULTURE)(Brief article)(Book review)
August 1, 2007... On 21 June 2007 a national emergency was declared to combat child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory. In an unprecedented action the Commonwealth would take direct control of communities, overriding the authority of both the NT government...

Australian Indigenous art in Paris: M. C. Dillon reads the significance of Aboriginal art at the new Musee Quai Branley.(ARTS & CULTURE)
August 1, 2007... In a Cambridge second-hand bookshop, I recently picked up a tattered copy of Bronislaw Malinowski's Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Malinowski was one of the founders of modern anthropology. His writing is remarkably cogent, clear...

We thought we were coming to a democracy.(EXTRACT)(Excerpt)
August 1, 2007... Acting from the Heart: Australian Advocates for Asylum Seekers Tell their Stories, edited by Sarah Mares and Louise Newman (Finch, 2007) It was pre-Tampa, pre-September 11, pre-'Children Overboard' and the sinking of the boat known as the...

'The Trap': how freedom took over the world.(Television program review)
August 1, 2007... I have been watching a remarkable documentary series shown on BBC2 in Britain earlier this year: 'The Trap: What Happened to Our Freedom?' Made by Adam Curtis, whose previous work includes 'The Power of Nightmares', about Al-Qaida, and the...

History in film: The Lives of Others and Black Book.
August 1, 2007... About half-way through Night and Fog (1955), Alain Resnais' great film documenting the holocaust, the narrator remarks that 'No description, no picture can restore their true dimension: endless, uninterrupted fear'. All the same, Resnais tried...

Quiet account of violent times a Jerusalem memoir.(It's Easier to Reach Heaven Than the End of the Street: A Jerusalem Memoir)(Book review)
August 1, 2007... Emma Williams, It's Easier to Reach Heaven than the End of the Street: A Jerusalem Memoir (Bloomsbury, 2006) Emma Williams' It's Easier to Reach Heaven than the End of the Street: A Jerusalem Memoir is a sustained masterpiece of the...

Fighting for peace: Alice Coster reports on the conflict between the Shan State Army and Burmese forces.(POSTCARD)
August 1, 2007... The Chairman of the Restoration Council of the Shan State, the political wing of the Shan State Army (SSA), says the alliance of ethnic groups fighting against the Burmese army is 'stronger than ever'. He predicts that in three years they will...

Documenting our forgotten war: Australia in Afghanistan.(ALTERNATIVE MEDIA)
August 1, 2007... When to web publish, when to print? I often find myself talking to friends at Arena about print versus the web. As I write this I am literally surrounded by books, comforting me as I look at them now, shelf by shelf, covers of different sizes,...