Journal of Australian Studies articles from September 1997

Journal of Australian Studies archives from September 1997

An anxious society fears the worst. (Battlers and Stirrers)(Editorial)
September 1, 1997... As a recently established immigrant society, Australia quickly developed anxieties about its national identity and place in the world. Many looked elsewhere for memories of a childhood `home'. Many feared the huge numbers of Asia, while...

From bush battler to city editor: Louisa Lawson and the 'Dawn.'(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... Louisa Lawson was formidable. She had to be. She was born into grinding poverty in rural New South Wales, where her parents ran a shanty house and her father was a drunkard. From an early age both parents urged her into marriage as a...

Following David Unaipon's footsteps. (Aboriginal author)(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... David Unaipon was born in 1872. His aspirations led him in many directions. He retained a lifelong fascination with science, working until his death on the scientific holy grail, a perpetual motion machine. Press articles labelled him...

Jean Devanny: romantic revolutionary.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... This paper looks at the situation of a woman revolutionary in the Australia of the 1930s and 1940s. It investigates aspects of the life of Jean Devanny -- her position as woman, woman novelist and writer, public speaker and orator and...

Socialist realism in the Australian literary context: with specific reference to the writing of Katharine Susannah Prichard.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... On 26 December 1933 Katharine Susannah Prichard, ill and thin, was helped down the gangplank onto the Fremantle wharf. Earlier, in London during her return trip from a voyage to the Soviet Union, she had learned from a newspaper headline...

Fred Paterson - the people's champion.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... By now, most students of Australian history know that the ex-divinity student, Rhodes Scholar and radical barrister, Frederick Woolnough Paterson, the MLA for Bowen from 1944-1950, was Australia's first and only communist member of...

"Dreamtime", who's time?: A.P. Elkin and the construction of Aboriginal time in the 1930s and 1940s.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... Our sense of the primitive impinges on our sense of ourselves - it is bound up with the selves who act in the `real', political world. Freud's map of the Psyche placed the ego... at a point that mediates between the ...

'That shy mysterious poet Arthur Stace.' (graffiti)(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... It would be a fair generalisation to say that most academic discussion of graffiti seems to focus on either sociological visual semiotics as `street art', or else some combination of these two approaches. I want to open up a discussion...

Frank Hardy: the world's greatest hoaxter.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... The 1990s could be fairly described as the decade of the hoax. During this time a number of Australian writers and artists have adopted different personae for a variety of reasons.(3) In the literary world the most controversial case is...

Antagonism as an art form: Brian Penton and the politics of provocation.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... David McNicoll -- not one of Australia's better-known stirrers -- tells the story of a dinner party at Frank Packer's Sydney home in 1946 with Brian Penton, then editor of the Daily Telegraph, and other Consolidated Press management...

Manning Clark and the ratbag tradition.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... In 1996, five years after his death, Manning Clark was again the headlines. A Brisbane Courier-Mail journalist cited Les Murray, the poet, and Geoffrey Fairbairn, a historian from Clark's own Australian National University, as having...

'Out of hand' - the battles of Neville Bonner.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... `Stirrer' suits Neville Bonner insofar as it minimises any claim to political consistency and captures his theatrical quality. Yet Bonner's deference to authority is hardly befitting of a stirrer. A `battler' perhaps? That's a lable many...

Edward Koiki Mabo: the journey to native title.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... Edward Koiki Mabo preferred his Murray Islander name, Koiki, to the colonialist, Eddie, by which he was known to the Australian public. Koiki was the name used by other Murray Islanders and by those white Australians who had become close...

Interview with Phil Cleary. (politician)(Interview)
September 1, 1997... Phil Cleary is in the process of writing an autobiography. Apart from it being a particularly readable narrative, I suspect it will make a contribution to the literature of Australian history. Phil's early life is typical, in many ways,...

Veronica Brady.(Battlers and Stirrers)(Interview)
September 1, 1997... Veronica Brady's long and distinguished career as a critic and teacher of Australian literature has been marked by a level of political commitment practically unmatched in the Australian academy.(1) As critic, teacher and member of the...

The politics of tariff formation: the case of the iron and steel industry, 1900-1926.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... Australia's Policy of tariff protection was formulated in the years after federation. As a part of this process the steel industry was granted significant protection from import competition during the 1920s after receiving little support...

Communism, security and the cold war.(Battlers and Stirrers.)
September 1, 1997... This article seeks to challenge the accepted interpretation of labor's anti-communism during the early years of the cold war. That interpretation assumes first, that the ALP was contaminated by a paranoid mentality and second, that the...

National complacency? Australia in the later Menzies years: the evidence of 'Prospect,' 'The Observer' and 'Nation,' 1958-64. (Robert Gordon Menzies)(Battlers and Stirrers.)
September 1, 1997... Nineteen fifty eight witnessed a minor renaissance in Australian intellectual life. The Bulletin, by now something of an anachronism (with its banner `Australia for the White Man' not yet removed by Donald Horne) was joined by a number...

'Easter 1916' in Dublin and the Australian press: background and response.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... The Irish easter rising of 1916 evoked both severe condemnation and rousing expressions of imperial loyalty from Irish-Australians in the secular and church press. A study of the major secular newspapers in the period shows uniform...

The legend you could come and see: celebrating Phar Lap.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... In his autobiography, Barry Humphries wrote of the Melbourne of his childhood and adolescence: When my father took me into town and he was not on business, we would often visit two places, the Museum and the Aquarium. At the Museum...

New politics and social movements: the ethnic dimension.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... Recent events have underlined the potentially disturbing impact of immigration and ethnicity on national politics. The election of Pauline Hanson in March 1996, with a swing of 19% towards her, followed the appearance at various...

Australian literary marriages.(Battlers and Stirrers.)
September 1, 1997... The stones of several of Australia's best known literary couples, the Palmers (Nettie and Vance), the Essons (Louis and Hilda), the Christesens (Clem and Nina), and one might add eventually the yet no study of the collaboration between H...

Writing from life.(Battlers and Stirrers)
September 1, 1997... I've singled out `from' in this phrase Writing from Life as my stepping-off point. Essentially, `from' is where it's at. `From' is the mediator, the mystery area, a sort of gestalt shangri-la where the important transformations take...

France and Botany Bay: The Lure of a Penal Colony.
September 1, 1997... One of the best outcomes of the bicentennial was the plethora of historical studies of Australia, offering new international perspectives and melding together themes of European exploration of the Pacific with British social history....

The Europeans in Australia: A History, vol. 1.
September 1, 1997... One of the best outcomes of the bicentennial was the plethora of historical studies of Australia, offering new international perspectives and melding together themes of European exploration of the Pacific with British social history....

Knowing Women: Origins of Women's Education in Nineteenth-Century Australia.
September 1, 1997... This book reads very much like a labour of love. Theobald's enthusiasm for her subject, for her sources and ultimately for the women about whom she writes emanates from every page. Having rejected the `overview' approach for its tendency...

With Just But Relentless Discipline: A Social History of Corrective Services in New South Wales.
September 1, 1997... With Just But Relentless Discipline is another contribution to that ever-increasing volume of commissioned institutional histories being produced within the academy -- a collection sure to expand if the comments in the latest issue of the...

The Christesen Romance.
September 1, 1997... Judith Armstrong describes The Christesen Romance as a `double biography... essentially a personal story'. The book traces the lives of Clem and Nina Christesen from Brisbane and St Petersburg respectively, through the tribulations and...

'Black Jack' McEwen.
September 1, 1997... John `Black Jack' McEwen deserves a biography and he has been quite well served by this one by Peter Golding, a very experienced journalist. It is very readable, and while it is not without its weaknesses, it is certainly a praiseworthy...

Fred Paterson, Australia's Only Communist Party Member of Parliament.
September 1, 1997... The Australian upper working class recognises the importance of university education for their children, not just to find employment but also for their upward social mobility. This had not always been the case. Finding an apprenticeship...

On Strong Foundations: The BWIU and Industrial Relations in the Construction Industry, 1942-1992.
September 1, 1997... In 1942 two craft based building trade unions merged to form the building workers' industrial union (BWIU). The union sought to unite various building and construction unions -- in 1957, for example, there were 30 such unions (p. 84) --...

Snake Cradle.
September 1, 1997... What do we make of the first volume of a projected autobiographical trilogy that contains no dates at all, except on the cover which tell us that the author was born in the 1940s? An autobiography of one of Australia's leading black...

A Woman's Voice: Conversations with Australian Poets.
September 1, 1997... A good interviewer replicates the casual shifts and progressions of entertaining conversation. At the same time, it is as shaped, economical and informative as a script. At its best it is a quick graceful creative form, full of...

Daughters and Fathers.
September 1, 1997... In this collection eight daughters write of fathers, and five fathers of daughters. Men take up less space, but women have not fought for it. A daughter begins as a daughter. Her father is a constant, even when absent. These...

Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures.
September 1, 1997... Within its limits this is a lively and engaging book. Those limits are partly acknowledged by Jill Matthews in her introduction, and to concentrate upon them is not to deny the value of some of the writing in Sex in Public. This is a...

Bad Girls: The Media, Sex and Feminism in the 90s.
September 1, 1997... I first encountered this book through the considerable media attention it has received. Like many of my feminist colleagues I rolled my eyes at what sounded like another account of the irrelevance of feminism in the postmodern world, one...

Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia.
September 1, 1997... Seven years ago, the world internationally renowned historian, Eric Hobsbawn, observed that national identity is `the area of national studies in which thinking and research are needed most urgently today'. Since this time, the term...

The Captive Republic: A History of Republicanism in Australia, 1788-1996.
September 1, 1997... A grand tour of two centuries of republican writings, organisations and public murmurings in Australia, this book is both a mine of information and a pleasure to read. We learn that republican sentiment arrived with the first fleet, and...

Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth.
September 1, 1997... Hypertext could be described as the computer's tree of information networking system which arranges information in a non-linear manner `enabling its readers to construct hybrid documents based on associational links...'. (p. 17) It can...

Sport in Australian History.
September 1, 1997... When making judgments about Sport in Australian History, by Daryl Adair and Wray Vamplew, it is imperative to keep in mind the purpose of the book. It is part of a series 'Australian Retrospectives' commissioned by Oxford University Press...