Arena Magazine articles from June 1998

Arena Magazine archives from June 1998

Bodies on the waterfront: and consultants in the dock. (Australian stevedore dispute)(Editorial)
June 1, 1998... There is nothing quite so enlivening as standing with others in common purpose. Over the last few weeks the press of bodies, the linking of arms, the passionate mutuality of strangers unself-consciously change simple rhyming slogans, MUA, here to...

Seagulls of Swanson Dock. (Australia wharf workers)(Interview)
June 1, 1998... East Swanson Dock was the crunch point of the Melbourne wharf struggle. Media reports gave little space to the extraordinary social diversity of the people who put their bodies there between the gates and the various unwanted seekers of entry,...

A victory of sorts: did the MUA and the unions win? (Maritime Union of Australia)
June 1, 1998... Whatever the final outcome of the MUA's battle with Patrick Stevedores and Workplace Relations Minister Reith, its victories to date have undoubted significance. That the police took a low-key role over the pickets was itself recognition of a...

Clenched flippers: talks scuttled as militant birds waddle off job. (labor strike satire)
June 1, 1998... Phillip Island's fairy penguin population's refusal to parade as scheduled over the crucial Easter holiday weekend was described by the Premier, Mr Kennett, today, as `a despicable act of betrayal towards all shareholders in the Victoria...

Democracy for Indonesia: well maybe....
June 1, 1998... Even given the collapse of public confidence in the Australian Nation, and the insecurity which so many people now experience in their personal lives, the sense that we live in a firmly anchored democratic system remains strong. Evidence to the...

I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess: avoiding difficult questions. (ethics)
June 1, 1998... Donna Haraway, US historian of science and `cyber-feminist', recently passed through Melbourne, attracting large audiences at her public appearances. Best known for her provocative essay `A Manifesto for Cyborgs', written in the late eighties,...

McGuinness' Quadrant: straw targets and rationalism. (Australian periodical editor Paddy McGuiness)
June 1, 1998... Several issues of Quadrant have now come out since Paddy McGuinness stated his aim of re-establishing Quadrant as `one of the leading magazines of ideas in Australia'. Despite its increased circulation and prominence in cultural debates in recent...

Jabiluka: alarming precedents are being set. (Australian land rights and mining)
June 1, 1998... A renewed and reinvigorated antinuclear movement is emerging around Australia in response to the Federal Government's aggressive push to expand the uranium industry. Thousands of people in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, and Brisbane have been...

Meanings for a millennium. (Australian socioeconomic issues)
June 1, 1998... Australia's 2000 Sydney Olympics and 2001 Constitution centenary may save the government the embarrassment of doing something about the Millennium. The Millennium is not a foreign fad. It is a cultural metaphor--admittedly an arbitrary one....

Iconoclastic feminists.
June 1, 1998... Difficult women? Feminists have for a long time been pleased to embrace the epithet. Far from the nineteenth-century stereotype of female domesticity and compliance, which seemed still to have a hold in the bright, modern, post-war kitchens of...

Censoring the female body: why the pornographic imagination would do it.
June 1, 1998... Nothing reveals the deceit of claims by the mainstream porn industry that it has `liberated' women's bodies into cultural acceptance, and thus brought us out from under the veil of Victorian prudery into unbounded pleasure, more than the reaction...

A question of violence: women raping men.
June 1, 1998... There's two parts of me, one that says turn the other cheek and you forgive and forgive and forgive the actions of mankind... and yet there's another part of me that thinks `enjoy the reversal of the roles' and `enjoy the reversal of what has...

Not a male affair: women and conflict in South Africa.
June 1, 1998... Is war a male affair, with women cast in the supporting roles of lovers or mothers waiting at home for their men to return? The passive victims as opposed to the aggressive combatants? While this is often the image presented of women in...

The end of feminism: or feminism as we knew it.
June 1, 1998... Veteran women's rights activists have recently expressed dissatisfaction with contemporary interpretations of feminism. To their frustration, few young Australian women currently describe themselves as feminists; even fewer believe in the...

The cunning of nature: worldwide emasculation. (pollution and sperm count)
June 1, 1998... Today, a quarter of a century after Rachel Carson first published Silent Spring, the consequences of the chemical soup in which we now move, live and have our being are beginning to appear even more diabolical than Carson could have foreseen. Yet...

The edge of absence. (poem)
June 1, 1998... In old notes, random images Jostle scribbled pages. Old dreams, stale pain Between words I find the poem where a word was lost. I cry for absence. The hand held link Cracks, opens. A chasm spreads...

Radical politics: the falterings of a third way. (Australia's Rainbow Alliance)
June 1, 1998... The recent passing away of two antithetical organisations that were indirect offshoots of the 1960s signifies not the end of Communism, but the end of the post-Stalinist New Left and new social movement political era. In Germany the dissolution...

Rolling back the stone: the Northern Ireland Peace Accord and post-nationalism.
June 1, 1998... The Peace Accord, signed on Good Friday at Stormont in Northern Ireland, may signal a new beginning in Irish politics. It may also present a blueprint for the settlement of irredentist disputes in a united Europe. The symbolism of rebirth after...

Section 70 and the nomads: a one per cent solution? (Australian Aboriginal welfare)
June 1, 1998... Some political `problems', in spite of decades of manoeuvring, just do not go away. For the government of Western Australia, section 70 of the Western Australian Constitution and the Aboriginal Nomads group are two such `problems'. One hundred...

But they go hungry: the French unemployed refuse to be poor any longer.
June 1, 1998... `There is no organised protest behaviour among the unemployed. In general, they have no means of taking collective action, and all attempts at organizing unions for the unemployed have failed.' Alain Touraine's 1991 declaration was recently...

The Mask of Motherhood: How Mothering Changes Everything and Why We Pretend It Doesn't.
June 1, 1998... Susan Maushart, The Mask Of Motherhood: How Mothering Changes Everything and Why We Pretend it Doesn't, Vintage, 1997. What knowledge is this which kidnaps new mothers for that haggard underworld: the reign of the womb. What...

Bodyjamming: Sexual Harassment, Feminism, and Public Life.
June 1, 1998... bodyjamming: sexual harassment, feminism and public life, Jenna Mead (ed.), Vintage, 1997. In recent times the issue of sexual harassment has become inextricably associated with the media hoo-ha over the most powerful man in the world's...

The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City.
June 1, 1998... The New Urban Frontier--Gentrification and the Revanchist City, Neil Smith, Routledge, 1996. Revanchist? Well, it could be the latest town planning by-word from academe, or perhaps a convenient neologism concocted by the theory literati,...

Lemons are heavy. (poem)
June 1, 1998... Lemons weigh down my tree. It bows in wind gusts, Swings its recovery. Next door a dark rose Overloads its cane. Twists wildly in its circle. The wind does as all winds: Catches the unbalanced branch, ...