Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

'Fuck All Editors': The Ern Malley Affair and Gwen Harwood's Bulletin Scandal

Cassandra Atherton
Until the 1990s and Helen Demidenko, there have been only been two Australian literary hoaxes. The first was the Ern Malley Hoax; the second Gwen Harwood’s Bulletin scandal. James McAuley and Harold Stewart were the two poets behind the creation of the ‘great aussie battler’ Ern Malley and Gwen Harwood was the quaintly titled ‘lady poet’ behind the suave European Walter Lehmann. McAuley, Stewart and Harwood are important figures in Australian literature, not just for their individual contributions to Australian poetry but for their construction of enduring ...
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Network Review of Books

Strata: Deserts Past, Present and Future. An Environmental Art Project about a Significant Cultural Place (2005)

Reviewed by Lynne Barwick in the October 2005 issue.
Strata was a project that consisted of an expedition, an art exhibition and a resulting publication that outlines its rationale, methodology and practice. The environmental artist Mandy Martin collaborated with archaeologist Mike Smith and environmental historian Libby Robin, along with pastoralist Guy Fitzhardinge and ecologist Jake Gillen. The group travelled to the Cleland Hills in the Northern Territory and were based at a rock shelter, Puritjarra, where Smith made significant archaeological finds in the 1980s proving 35,000 years of continuous desert dwelling. The publication documents ... read more.

Civil Rights: How Indigenous Australians won formal equality (2005)

Reviewed by Ravi De Costa in the October 2005 issue.
A number of Australian historians working on indigenous topics have recently re-examined the 1950s and early 1960s in an effort to consider the consequences of this gilded age specifically for indigenous Australians. Sue Taffe's excellent Black and white together examined the cooperative politics of FCAATSI's heyday. Marilyn Lake's biography of Faith Bandler emphasised the importance of the era and another central figure in the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, Jack Horner, has recently provided a pithy memoir of the period called Seeking racial ... read more.

Liverpool of the South Seas: Perth and its Popular Music (2005)

Reviewed by Daniel Herborn in the April 2005 issue.
Initially, it seems the timing of Liverpool of the South Seas could not be better: Perth bands are riding high at present, with the likes of The Sleepy Jackson, The Hampdens, End of Fashion, Downsyde, Little Birdy, The Panics and The Fergusons all enjoying success. So the time would seem right for the release of Liverpool..., a collection of essays from students from the Popular Culture Collective, to appear and to examine the scene, to provide some insight and some context. Well, that was the plan. What transpires is rather different and causes one to wonder whether the book was rushed into ... read more.

Old Bush Songs: The centenary edition of Banjo Paterson's classic collection (2005)

Reviewed by Tony Smith in the July 2006 issue.
While folklore enthusiasts never tire of bush poems and songs and skilled commentary by experienced scholars, it is necessary to ask whether Australia was ready for yet another revised edition, perhaps the fifteenth, of Banjo Paterson's Old Bush Songs, first published in 1905. In their introductory remarks, Warren Fahey and Graham Seal clearly explain why this edition is justified on the grounds of historical development -- the Centenary Edition celebrates the original; it includes historiography and bibliographic information that augments previous editions; and it modernises and updates the ... read more.

Cleared Out: first contact in the western desert (2005)

Reviewed by Kathleen Broderick in the July 2006 issue.
It is a rare non-fiction book that maintains momentum when read cover to cover. Cleared out proved such a rare work. It masterfully captures the first contact of a group of Martu women and children with white men. In doing so, it also explains the varied perceptions of 'tribal' peoples in the 1960s and the events that lead to the detribalisation of a group of Indigenous people in the Western Desert. Of particular interest in this story is the role of a developer, in this case the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE). The WRE employed native patrol officers Walter MacDougall and Robert ... read more.

Westminster Legacies: Democracy and responsible government in Asia and the Pacific (2005)

Reviewed by Paul A Pickering in the April 2006 issue.
In 1934 five young Nepalese men met to establish the country's first political party and to imagine a political future for their nation beyond the oppressive hereditary prime ministership of the Ranas under which they lived. Among the five were graduates of Nepal's only High School where they had been taught 'British history' and on the basis of this the political future they envisioned for their nation was as a parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarch -- a Westminster system. Following the overthrow of the Ranas, the services of Sir Ivor Jennings, a leading scholar of British ... read more.

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