Arena Magazine articles from December 1998

Arena Magazine archives from December 1998

THE RISE OF BOUTIQUE FOOTY.(football)
December 1, 1998... The creation of Australian football stadiums in the latter stages of the nineteenth century proved to be a significant starting point in the professionalisation of the sport. The football arena changed forever the physical dimensions and...

DEVELOPING MILLENNIUM MOMENTUM.(plans for Australian government to reconcile with aborigines)
December 1, 1998... OR JUST MORE OF THE SAME, ASKS CHRIS INGHAM. John Howard has promised to be a different Prime Minister in his second term. His priorities, he tells us, will be different, and things will change. As part of this rebirth, the government will...

LET A THOUSAND CHANNELS ...(influence of digital television)
December 1, 1998... CHOOSE YOUR WORLD THROUGH DIGITAL TV. Digital TV was officially launched in the US last week -- immaculately timed so that the first image to materialise on the digital screen would be the launch of the space shuttle Colombia. This was...

PORTRAIT OF A KILLER.(Ariel Sharon)
December 1, 1998... THE NEW ISRAELI FOREIGN MINISTER HAS A BRUTAL HISTORY. The appointment of Ariel Sharon as Israel's Foreign Minister will have dismayed many Israelis as well as Palestinians, but it is scarcely the first time that someone with a marked...

NOW SHOWING: ABBOTT AND COSTELLO, LONDON STYLE.(slander and libel)
December 1, 1998... LETTER FROM LONDON 3 They're the quintessential London experience, and people queue for hours to get tickets. They cost a fortune to put on, the scripts are silly, the acting appalling, and the costumes as camp as a boy scout jamboree. I...

DIALOGUE FOR RECONSTRUCTION.(political reform)
December 1, 1998... MAMMON'S MALCONTENTS The new creed, `I believe in the dollar almighty', has worked its way into so many spheres of Australian life that one could wonder when those even more persistent values -- liberty, equality, fraternity, and...

AFTER THE JOB NETWORK, THE DELUGE.
December 1, 1998... LIVES WASTED IN THE OVERFLOW Another Liberal employment minister has set an example to employed workers by tranquilly accepting the loss of his job. David Kemp, who owed his position to his predecessor's over-argumentativeness, decided...

THE BEST OF OUR TIME?
December 1, 1998... KING BRAT DOES KING LEAR. The latest Bell Shakespeare production -- Barrie Kosky directing King Lear -- took its final bow in Sydney last month after completing fortnight-long seasons in Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane. Now that the...

AND THE NEXT TOTALITARIANISM?
December 1, 1998... ROBERT MANNE AND HIS BLINDSPOT Roger Markwick makes a number of interesting points in his critique of Robert Manne in the last issue of Arena Magazine (`Robert Manne: Cold War Hangover'). However, I feel he does not put his finger on the...

Evolutionary Tales #1. Flight and distant travel.(poem)
December 1, 1998... From this distance, I'm small and quiet, being all curled up in this poem and waiting inside the woman who lies spread-eagled, silenced by the temperament of generations. Her husband cradles a book, whose contents ...

SIR JOHN MONASH GOES MISSING.(Monash University)
December 1, 1998... 11 September The bust of Sir John Monash, namesake of Monash University, has removed itself from its usual home in the foyer of the administration building at Monash. In its place was left a letter outlining Sir John's despair at the state...

STATE OF DESPONDENCY?
December 1, 1998... A lot of hype surrounded the 11 August announcement by the Prime Minister that the Northern Territory would be granted statehood in 2001, subject to the success of a Territory-wide referendum. In an excellent article in the October/November...

THIRD WORLD NEEDS JUSTICE, NOT MERCY.
December 1, 1998... Aside from devil-like fundamentalists, terrorists, and dictators, the primary images of the other-world outside the United States and Europe are of victims. Victims of butchery, of starvation, of disease, of death squads, and even of genocide....

WHO NOTICED THE NOTICE?(Australian billboards)
December 1, 1998... Many of you have seen it on the corner of Punt Road and the South Eastern Freeway. Perched proudly on the Nylex towers, just under the time and temperature which most of us at some time have set our lives by, Foxtel has provided Melbourne with...

WHITE CHRISTMAS.(indigenous politics)
December 1, 1998... In Darwin the high summer -- with its heat, rain, flooded roads, and shutdown of many activities -- has special pleasures. One can get work done. Visitors are few, and even a few days at a resort is affordable. People draw closer and share an...

LEST WE FORGET.(Australia's Anzac Day)
December 1, 1998... RACHEL BUCHANAN AND PAUL JAMES QUESTION THE NEW MEANING OF BLACK ARMBAND NATIONALISM. Nations are still carried forward on the shoulders of the most wretched and partial of memories, a lot of them military. The eleventh hour of the...

PINOCHET: THE ENGLISH PATIENT.(Augusto Pinochet)
December 1, 1998... NOTES ON AN UNFORESEEN AWAKENING The detention of former dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in mid-October has shaken an otherwise-complacent Chilean ruling class and its political face, the Concertacion government of President Eduardo...

HYPE AND HOPE AT VIRTUAL U.(educational technology)
December 1, 1998... TECHNOLOGY, EFFICIENCY AND EDUCATION Discussions about the implications for higher education of digitised and converged communications and information technologies have been premised upon a good deal of hype and hope. The hype has been...

COME TOGETHER.(folk music festival)
December 1, 1998... THE WOODFORD-MALENY FESTIVAL For its organisers, the Woodford-Maleny Folk Festival is `a blueprint of one sort of future that Australia could have'. The festival is held every year in Southern Queensland, not much more than a stone's throw...

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY.(Vietnamese refugees)
December 1, 1998... RELIEF WORKERS IN THE HONG KONG CAMPS Imagine the refugee in flight: a woman with bundles on her head, a baby tied onto her back and a small child holding her hand; a boy running from his newly shelled house; thousands of people trailing...

KING CAR.(social preference for the automobile)
December 1, 1998... ON THE ROAD TO AUTO-UTOPIA In heaven there are no red lights, bumper-to-bumper traffic, raised fists over the wheel, petrol hikes or smog. Heavenly highways are ours alone as we glide, to the sounds of sweet music, through landscapes of...

It's Not the Texture.(poem)
December 1, 1998... but the consistency that determines commercial success. But who's to say what success hangs its hat on? After all, we should be in friendly waters by now, but are foundering in the family lily pond, the object of...

The Grey Lady of Wonaminta.(poem)
December 1, 1998... It is not that she is forgotten, the Women's Weekly ran that article -- wasn't it only ten years back? -- with the grey lady as its centrepiece, she doesn't lack appreciation if that is what you mean. Already though, I...

Culture: A Reformer's Science.(Review)
December 1, 1998... Culture: A Reformer's Science Tony Bennett Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1998. I remember a nice little incident during the 1993 `Speaking Positions' Conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia, held at the Victoria University...

`Against Nature' 1998.(Review)
December 1, 1998... `Against Nature' 1998 In many ways, the television series `Against Nature', shown on ABC TV in July, said more about some aspects of marxist thought than it did about the environment movement. While green organisations went to great...

The Idea of Prostitution.(Review)
December 1, 1998... The Idea of Prostitution Sheila Jeffreys Spinifex Press, 1997. Sheila Jeffreys' idea of prostitution owes much to feminist thought of the 1970s. Her new book opens with its conclusion that `prostitution is a form of male sexual violence...

War on the Wharves.(Review)
December 1, 1998... War on the Wharves Christopher Sheil, ed., Pluto Press, 1998. The wharf dispute was as big an event as we have seen. What was at stake were the sorely tested gains of 200 years. And what was momentously threatened was an employer's...

POSTCARD FROM SPAIN.
December 1, 1998... Barcelona appears to be something of a paradox by comparison with Paris and New York. On the one hand, it seems to be more overtly rooted in pre-modern cultures which still thrive in its narrow streets, while on the other, the city exudes the...