Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Deconstructing the Fort — The Role of Postmodernity in Urban Development

Cathy Wilkinson
In medieval times, kings, queens and their court lived in fortified castles. In the late twentieth Century, residential fortification, traditionally associated with these medieval structures of defence, is re-emerging. Fortification is physically manifested in the contemporary built environment by the replication (either directly or in effect) of design elements such as moats, drawbridges, fences, walls, bars, and observation posts. The psychological foundation of fortification is a ‘fortress mentality’ whereby people assume that exposure to difference is ‘more likely to be ...
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Network Review of Books

Australia and Israel: An ambiguous relationship (2002)

Reviewed by Philip Mendes in the July 2002 issue.
Chanan Reich is an Israeli political scientist who has spent much of the past twenty years in Australia. His earlier PhD thesis, for example, analysed the role of the Jewish and Greek communities as pressure groups in the Australian political system. Reich's latest work explores the historical relationship between Australia, Australian Jews, and the State of Israel from 1915-1967. This was a period during which relations were largely assymetrical in that Jews in Palestine and subsequently the State of Israel consistently sought the political support of Australia, whilst Australia neither ... 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.

Departures (2002)

Reviewed by Christine Choo in the June 2004 issue.
An Irish Catholic family living in Bathurst gives up one of its sons to the Junior Noviciate of the Order of Saint Francis of Assisi, where he will begin his journey to Holy Orders. It is a proud moment for the family and a proud yet devastating one for young Barry Hayes who has chosen that path at the end of his primary school years. Departures is the memoir of Barry Hayes in which he chronicles his childhood before and his life after that fateful day when he entered the Franciscan Junior Noviciate at Robertson in New South Wales -- a place shrouded in mist and mystery. To readers raised in ... read more.

Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women (2002)

Reviewed by Julie Ustinoff in the August 2002 issue.
At the risk of sounding trite, Tara Brabazon's Ladies Who Lunge needed to be written. Her humorous evaluation of 'contemporary masculinity ---- and the women who poke, probe and provoke it', gives vent to the frustrations of women who are dissatisfied with the limitations of modern feminist theory and activity. As Brabazon sees it, the majority of today's young women relate more readily to the strong and often 'difficult' females of popular culture than they do to the intellectual theorizing of feminists such as Germaine Greer or Betty Friedan. According to the author, this connection between ... read more.

Ancestral Power: The Dreaming, Consciousness and Aboriginal Australians (2002)

Reviewed by Felicity Jensz in the April 2003 issue.
The Dreaming is an Aboriginal religious concept which extends beyond its limited English translation. Much has been written about the Dreaming, but according to the blurb, Hume`s book 'seeks to further our understanding of human consciousness by looking through a Western lens at the concept of the Dreaming'. She does this by examining existing documentation about the Dreaming and also by comparisons of other cultures� uses of altered states of consciousness. This is no easy task. As Hume herself states, quite often when anthropologists talk about the spiritual as opposed to the empirical ... read more.

Itinerant Blues (2002)

Reviewed by Deborah Hunn in the January 2003 issue.
For his first volume of verse, Of Muse, Meandering & Midnight (2000), Brisbane poet Samuel Wagan Watson received the David Unaipon Award for emerging Indigenous writers. Muse was notable for the sensibility of tough lyricism that its author brought to his central and interconnected themes: the poet's struggle to forge and articulate a hybridised, yet uncompromised vision of the complexities of Australian life in the age of globalisation, in particular as it is viewed through the lens of Aboriginal experience and culture. Wagan Watson's second volume, Itinerant Blues, expands upon these ... read more.

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