Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Towards a Further Redescription of the Australian Pastoral Frontier

Lorenzo Veracini
This article proposes a reading of Aboriginal agency on the Australian pastoral frontier that departs from some of the conventional interpretative patterns.1 It simultaneously constitutes a reinterpretation of the secondary sources published since the late 1960s and a critical analysis of the historical debates on Aboriginal ‘collaboration’ and resistance. The pastoral invasion of Aboriginal districts was the major recurrent form of early invasion, and a common pattern of experience has been identified.2 The notion that Australia witnessed a sometimes determined resistance by ...
Click here to read more.

Network Review of Books

The Home Crowd (2002)

Reviewed by Loma Bridge in the June 2003 issue.
Will George Fielden, commercial lawyer and narrator of this book, choose the homey crowd in Yorkshire or the cappucino crowd in Fremantle for his final resting place? Torn between two women -- fiancee Vanessa in Fremantle and ex-girlfriend Kate in Soppstone, George manages to conflate his feelings for them with perceptions of place. An atavistic longing to sink into bad weather, England, ruins, small towns, cottages, the moors, Manchester United, and stone walls is set against the glaring light of Fremantle, a good job, an impending wedding, and an inheritance which would enable George and ... read more.

Into the Blue: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (2002)

Reviewed by Robert Clarke in the May 2003 issue.
Captain James Cook had a busy year in 2002 with a number of titles about the eighteenth-century British navigator and explorer being released. Amongst them was Tony Horwitz's Into the Blue, which mixes history and social commentary with a fast flowing and at times very funny travel narrative. Horwitz is a US Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of a number of fine travel books including One More for the Road, Confederates in the Attic, and Bagdhad without Maps. In this latest work he sets off on a journey that takes him to Polynesia and the northwestern coast of north America, and ... read more.

The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History (2002)

Reviewed by Jack Bowers in the June 2003 issue.
Wilfrid Prest (ed.)The Kaurna and Peramangk peoples are the traditional owners of the land now known as Adelaide; they are just two of more than fifty Aboriginal groups which comprise South Australia. With The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History, the first such reference book dedicated to the history of a single state, South Australians now have an excellent starting point to learn about and discover their country. The most obvious method of assessment for The Companion is to consider what it includes, what it leaves out, and to expose the biases of the editorial team. Why, for ... read more.

Michael Dransfield: A Retrospective (2002)

Reviewed by Tim Metcalf in the August 2002 issue.
I came to Dransfield with a suspicious mind. I had read some of his poems here and there, and put him in my basket for drug-taking darlings of 'the set'. Here he kept company with Jim Morrison of 'The Doors' and the early Robert Adamson. These young men were allowed liberties in their personal lives and in their writing for the sake of their entertainment value as much as for the scent of the muse they exuded. Adamson alone lived and matured to the clarity of 'The Clean Dark'. Dransfield, I am now certain, was on that same path to a consistently fine poetry. It has long been my habit not to ... read more.

South Australia and Federation (2002)

Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress in the December 2002 issue.
When I opened this book at a coffee lounge an acquaintance, catching the title, said 'That must be pretty boring!' I admit that despite the range of activities supported by Centenary of Federation funding, the subject of Federation probably passed most Australians by. The book might have been called something more captivating and if the casual reader reached the contents page he or she might have been dissuaded from going further. Three chapters in a book of 418 pages is an unusual structure and author, Associate Professor Peter Howell, takes us only as far as 1914. But it is anything but ... read more.

Australia's First Rotary Club: A History of the Rotary Club of Melbourne (2002)

Reviewed by Jennifer Rogers in the July 2003 issue.
This book reads like a blueprint for cooperation between corporate heavyweights, bureaucratic leaders and a vast array of professionals in search of ways to be socially responsible. Despite the aura of elitism aided by its recruitment policy of invitation only, the projects undertaken and the immense contribution the Rotary Club of Melbourne has made to its community deserves to be documented. Parnaby's lovingly researched work details not only the beginnings of the Melbourne branch of Rotary but the genesis of the original organisation in Chicago in 1905. He goes to great lengths to ... read more.

Need to Contact Us?