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Victoria: Flawed jewel in the Labor crown?

Nick Economou and Brian Costar
In every election since the nadir reached in the 1990 contest when it lost nine seats, the Labor Party has, on two party preferred votes, out-polled the Liberal- National Coalition in Victoria. Even the 1996 election in which it suffered one of its worst national defeats, Labor was still able to achieve a majority of the two party vote (50.3%) even though the Coalition won a majority of seats (Economou and Costar 1997, 104). In the lead-up to the 2001 election, commentators and some Labor strategists forecast a strong Labor performance in Victoria. Not only were opinion polls indicating that ...
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Network Review of Books

Sharing Spaces: Indigenous and non-Indigenous Responses to Story, Country and Rights (2006)

Reviewed by Linn Miller in the July 2006 issue.
In regard to sharing stories, spaces and belongings, accounts we are accustomed to hearing in Australia--or want to hear--are often misleadingly simple and one-sided. Sharing Spaces not only succeeds in disclosing and exploring the ground--conceptual, geographical, socio-cultural and political--that connects people to place, past to present and indigenous to settler-Australians, it also acknowledges the complexity of the issues it tackles and respects the multiplicity of their phenomenal expression. Most refreshingly, where and when differing perspectives and understandings exist, and are ... read more.

Beyond Good and Evil? Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region (2006)

Reviewed by Mads Clausen in the May 2006 issue.
Haskell, McKinlay and Rich's Beyond Good and Evil: Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region is borne out of what the authors see as the re-emergence of perilously rigid notions of evil in post-September 11 discourse. The editors see this monolithic conception of evil as 'a theological term of frightening certitude and simplification' particularly evident in the Bush administration's rhetoric, but that it also spills over into other debates about culture and identity, sustaining existing chasms in political and cultural discourse. The collection seeks to query this ... read more.

Network Dialogue

The Australian Public Intellectual Network is conducting a survey on the best minds in the country: these might include academics, writers, activists, professionals, religious leaders, politicians, community leaders, etc. The API Network keen to know who you might rank as the ten most influential and/or important thinkers in Australia at this present moment? You may want to make a distinction between importance and influence in compiling your list. Are there reasons for your selection?
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Network Books
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Comic Commentators: Contemporary Political Cartooning

Edited by Robert Phiddian and Haydon Manning
Anyone who reads a newspaper reads the political cartoons. Each is an island of condensed visual humour in a sea of print. For more than a century, Australia has had a particularly potent and much-loved cartooning tradition, but we have only a limited understanding of how cartoons work and what they really do. As the response to the Danish Mohammed cartoons and the debate over the 2006 Sedition laws suggest, there is a growing sensitivity to cartoons' potential impact in public ... ($34.95) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

ACH 26: Australian Television History

Edited by Liz Jacka
In 2006, Australia commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of television in Australia.� This led to a flurry of celebrations by the various free-to-air networks, but it also provided the occasion for renewed academic attention to the history of television in Australia, an area, it is quickly discovered, that has been almost shamelessly neglected by historians and media scholars, with a few honorable exceptions.� In the year leading up to the anniversary a number of media academics and historians joined ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

Australian Rock: Essays on Popular Music

Jon Stratton
"Stratton has been writing authoritatively on aspects of Australian popular music for a number of years. This book brings together for the first time some of his most important work in this under-represented field of popular music studies.An absolutely essential read for all those with an interest in the highly complex interplay between popular music, space and place." (Andy Bennett, Professor of Cultural Sociology at Griffith University. Author of Popular Music and Youth Culture and the ... ($34.95) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

Big Stars

John Castles, with afterword by John Frow
Why does the crowd scream when the star appears? They can hardly be surprised. Nor can they be registering critical approval for a performance that has not begun. Rather, they are performing the essential task of making themselves into a crowd, which then tumbles down into the star figure who absorbs it and can then give it back or withhold it. The star is like a black hole. His appearance creates a massive object, the crowd, which experiences itself moving, tumbling towards an ... ($34.95) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

ACH 21: To the Islands: Australia and the Caribbean

Edited by Russell McDougall
Historically, the degree of contact between the West Indies and the Antipodes has been considerable, particularly in the colonial period. But the Empire vestiges of the Caribbean in Australia are now quite eclipsed; and the sum present meaning of the Caribbean for most Australians is probably cricket, rum, exotic holidays and a residual childhood mythology of pirate adventure. This volume seeks to salvage something of the history and meaning of the Caribbean in Australia, simultaneously begging ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 70: Romancing the Nation

Edited by Richard Nile
Contributions include: "Romanticism, Nationalism and Myth" by Andrew McCann; "Subverting the Empire" by Paul Genoni; "Les Murray's Fredy Neptune" by Ian J Bickerton; "Unsettled Country" by Perrie Ballantyne; "Historical Collections" by James Gore; "Remembering Eureka" by Anne Beggs Sunter; "Wild Children" by Lynette Russell; "A Cure for all Seasons" by Peter Davies. ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 75: Country

Edited by Richard Nile
Contributions include: "History in Black and White: a critical analysis of the Black Armband debate" by Anna Clark; "Why We Need Black Armbands" by Adi Wimmer; "A Poetics of Failure is No Bad Thing: Stephen Muecke and Margaret Somerville's White Writing" by Fiona Probyn; "Aboriginal Affairs: Monologue or Dialogue?" by Vanessa Castejon; "Racial Essentialism: A Mercurial Concept at the 1937 Canberra Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 77: Sojourners and Strangers

Edited by Richard Nile
Contributions include: "Australia's New Other: Shaping Compassion for Onshore Refugees" by Sonia Magdalena Tasc�n; "Woomera 2002 Festival of Freedoms: Experiencing community in tragic recognition of the other" by David Monson; "A Fair Queue? Australian Public Discourse on Refugees and Immigration" by Katharine Gelber; "Teaching Democracy and Human Rights: A Curriculum Perspective" by Eva Dobozy; "Rethinking Australian Studies in Japanese Universities: ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 78: Grit

Edited by Richard Nile
Contributions include: "The Dole Wars" by Anthony Yeates; "The Housewives' Wages Debate in the 1920s Australian Press" by Louie Traikovski; "The New Face of Police Governance in Australia" by Beno�t Dupont; "Youth Workers, Professional Identities and Narratives of Workplace Change: A Preliminary Report" by Judith Bessant and Ruth Webber; "The Age of Transition: Nursing and Caring in the Nineteenth Century" by Wendy Madsen; "Nursing Gallipoli: ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 79: Rezoning Australia

Edited by Richard Nile
Contributions include: "Cartography and Native Title" by Alexander Reilly; "Localising National Identity: Albany's Anzacs" by Robyn Mayes; "Tourists and Pilgrims: (Re)Visiting the Rocks" by Grace Karskens; "Selling the Snowy: The Snowy Mountains Scheme and National Mythmaking" by Grahame Griffin; "Imaging a Nation: Australia's Representation at the Venice Biennale, 1958" by Sarah Scott; "Queensland Shows the World: Regionalism and Modernity at ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 81: Colonial Post

Edited by Richard Nile
Contributions include: "Myths and Non-Myths: Frontier 'Massacres' in Australian History -- The Woppaburra of the Keppel Islands" by Michael Rowland; "The 'little empire of Wybalenna': Becoming Colonial in Australia" by Anna Johnston; "Develop the North: Aborigines, Environment and Australian Nationhood in the 1930s" by Russell McGregor; "'Their Ultimate Absorption': Assimilation in 1930s Australia" by John Chesterman and Heather Douglas; "Beyond Orality ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 82: Colour

Edited by Richard Nile with Denise Tallis
Contributions include: "Dark Tourism and the Celebrity Prisoner: Front and Back Regions in Representations of an Australian Historical Prison" by Jacqueline Zara Wilson; "The Tempest: Creating dialogue from points of difference" by Angela Campbell; "'It pulsates with dramatic power': White Slavery, Popular Culture and Modernity in Australia in 1913" by Jeannette Delamoir; "Understanding History as a Rhetorical Strategy: Constructions of Truth and ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

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