Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Dark Tourism and the Celebrity Prisoner: Front and Back Regions in Representations of an Australian Historical Prison

Jacqueline Zara Wilson
Gossip magazines are notorious for their practice of sensationally revealing the mundane side of celebrities’ lives, especially where it is seen to be incompatible with the celebrity’s presentation of their public self. The celebrity’s preoccupation with maintaining an appropriately splendid public image, and his/her concomitant preoccupation with concealing what goes on behind that façade, constitute a personal dichotomy innate to everyone — albeit writ large in the case of the celebrity or public figure. Social psychologist Erving Goffman explains this ...
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Network Review of Books

Journey to the Stone Country (2002)

Reviewed by Paul Genoni in the June 2003 issue.
Winner of the 2003 Miles Franklin Award. Displaced Australians, especially women, overcoming various forms of exile have been a constant in Alex Miller's fiction. In Ancestor Games (winner of the 1993 Miles Franklin award) it was several generations of the Feng family struggling to locate their Chinese roots; and in Conditions of Faith (winner of the 2001 Christina Stead Prize) it was Emily Stanton coming to terms with her place in the world as she is exposed to her ancestral European 'home'. It seems inevitable that Miller would eventually turn his attention, and the joint search for self ... read more.

Writing in Rights: Australia and the Protection of Human Rights (2002)

Reviewed by Katharine Gelber in the July 2002 issue.
The issue of a bill of rights in Australia has spurred a raft of debates and scholarly interventions. Hilary Charlesworth, Director of the Centre for International and Public Law at the Australian National University, is an eminent contributor to this discussion. This volume contains a series of lectures presented by the author in October 2000 in the New College Lectures. The three chapters in the volume examine the historical and existing paucity of explicit human rights protections in Australia, consider the international legal system which informs the human rights debate, suggest linking ... read more.

Trauma Trails: Recreating Song Lines, The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Communities (2002)

Reviewed by Antonia Esten in the November 2002 issue.
Trauma Trails is the result of Judy Atkinson's fifteen-year field and postgraduate research on violence and healing in Aboriginal communities. It brings together diverse knowledges informed by an Indigenous perspective, and presents them in a lucid, exacting and insightful style designed to build bridges with non-Indigenous (as well as Indigenous) readers. Judy Atkinson is of Jiman and Bundjalung descent and Celtic-German heritage, and is Professor of Indigenous Australian Studies at Southern Cross University. Trauma Trails is a remarkable book by any standard. I read it slowly to absorb ... read more.

Arab-Australians Today: Citizenship and Belonging (2002)

Reviewed by Victoria Mason in the June 2002 issue.
With half a million Australians possessing some form of Arab ancestry, this book's straightforward discussion of issues to do with citizenship and belonging for Arab-Australians is long overdue. Arab-Australians Today does great justice to the issues facing the eclectic and diverse Arab-Australian community. In his introduction, Ghassan Hage writes that the book 'aims to offer non-Arab Australians a means of better understanding the specificities of the Arab presence in Australia, and to give Arab-Australians the possibility of critically reflecting on their experience' (1). Arab-Australians ... read more.

Johannes Bjelke-Petersen: The Lord's Premier (2002)

Reviewed by Jim Chalmers in the December 2002 issue.
Central to American political folklore is the story of the 'log cabin' president; the determined, self-made leader who rose from humble rural beginnings, armed himself through education, hard work or both, with the necessary tools for political leadership. These types of characters, the mythology goes, are uniquely suited to the rigours of political life because of their capacity to battle adversity and overcome obstacles threatening the achievement of their goals. In Australia, too, we have leaders who are revered for rising from modest beginnings. Ben Chifley, for example, springs to mind. ... read more.

Chemical Palace (2002)

Reviewed by Dean Durber in the January 2003 issue.
Possibly the most annoying thing about drug tales is not that they are in-your-face, radical and may cause offence to certain viewers -- if they could still manage to do that, they might be a bit more compelling -- there just seems to be too many of them around right now. Like a bag full of little white pills floating past dazed and hallucinating eyes; too many, and yet never quite enough to satisfy generational addiction. McGregor's Chemical Palace reads like it's supposed to: a long night on drugs. It is scatty, disjointed, random, erratic, confusing, and then, in retrospect, totally ... read more.

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