Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Frontier History After Mabo

Henry Reynolds
One evening in 1844 in a bark hut on the outer fringes of white settlement in south Queensland four young men debated the morality and legality of European settlement. They divided on the matter. Two had doubts about the process; two were proponents of colonisation. Henry Mort detailed the arguments in a letter to his mother and sister in England:Had a very animated discussion on the ‘Moral right of a Nation to take forcible possession of a Country inhabited by savages’. John and David McConnell argued that it is morally right for a Christian Nation to extirpate savages from their ...
Click here to read more.

Network Review of Books

Feather-stone (2002)

Reviewed by Enza Gandolfo in the October 2002 issue.
Francie Johanssen's return to Featherstone, the small country town that is the setting of Kirsty Gunn's third novel, is mysterious and unconfirmed. We never meet Francie but her presence (or at least the feeling of it) during one hot summer weekend is unsettling for her uncle Sonny, her ex-boyfriend Ray, and in their friends and neighbours. In Featherstone, Gunn is concerned with longing and desire; with love in all its facets -- sexual, familial and platonic, unconditional, unrequited and obsessive. But the central theme of the novel and the key lesson for the characters is redemption without ... read more.

How Not To Kill Government Leaders (2002)

Reviewed by Mark Mahemoff in the March 2003 issue.
Stephen Lawrence loves words. Particularly uncommonly used scientific ones. This is not entirely a criticism. One of the challenges and pleasures of poetry, indeed, all forms of writing, should be increasing the reader's vocabulary. There's nothing like coming up against a word that you've never seen before or seen but never known the meaning of and trying to define it through context or research. In the book's first poem, 'Flesh Made Wisdom', one of the best of the collection, I feel comforted by a dictionary within easy reach but also that the poem requires these words. It is a highly ... read more.

Mixed Matches: Interracial Marriage in Australia (2002)

Reviewed by Ann Howard in the April 2003 issue.
The cover illustration of June Owen's book is of Barbara Hanrahan's Generations, 1991. It shows happy, unaware, smiling children being carried on symbolic journeys by adults with tears streaming from their eyes. The inside cover is a patchwork of everyday couples, sometimes with children, all smiling contentedly. Living in big cities all my life, used to a cosmopolitan social life, with Hungarian and Japanese daughters--in-law, it did not at first seem unusual to me that the couples were sometimes strikingly physically different. This simple fact has, however often been the cause of deep ... read more.

Under a Bilari Tree I Born (2002)

Reviewed by Christine Choo in the May 2003 issue.
In her opening sentence Alice Smith tells us that her real name is Bilari because she was born under a bilari tree (Acacia Atkinsiana) on Rocklea Station in the West Pilbara. From then we read the sincerely told story of Alice's life lived almost entirely on stations in and around the West Pilbara. Alice tells us that she had a 'whitefella proper father' and an Aboriginal father, 'the one bin married to my mother', both of whom shared her mother as their wife. This was in the time not long after the frontier killings, when Europeans and Aboriginal people began to accommodate each other. She ... read more.

Good Grief (2002)

Reviewed by Corey McHattan in the January 2003 issue.
Dominique Hecq's poetry collection gets off to a tremendous start with the title poem, 'Good Grief'. Elliptical but powerful, elegant yet natural, it represents a remarkable opening gambit, drawing in the reader and promising great things to come. Unfortunately, the standard is not quite maintained throughout, and in fact the eponymous poem is ultimately revealed to be, by a considerable distance, the best thing here. However, there is still much that is creditable in this, Hecq's debut collection of assorted poetry. It is interesting to speculate on how Hecq's French-speaking background has ... read more.

Work the Sex (2002)

Reviewed by Dean Durber in the January 2003 issue.
Coral Hull writes an unusual and alluring narrative of use, abuse, misuse, and manipulation of the female body. Located within the subculture of the hooker's world, her deconstruction (which often verges on the destruction) of the corporeal form is erotically confusing and critically arousing. Is the reader expected to discover/enjoy the whimpering pleasures that these tales of hookers and their sexual encounters might invoke? Or should he be utterly ashamed by the revelations of his sexual and emotional inadequacies; perhaps angered by the blatant dismissal of his masculinised species as ... read more.

Need to Contact Us?