Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Bad Blood: The Contamination of Australia's Blood Supply and the Emergence of Gay Activism in the Age of AIDS

Paul Sendziuk
In May 1983, gay activists picketed Red Cross House in Sydney. They were protesting against a public call by Dr Gordon Archer, director of the Sydney Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service (BTS), for ‘promiscuous homosexuals’ to desist from donating blood. The protestors were understandably incensed at the way that Archer’s call, the first of its kind in Australia, stigmatised gay men by directly linking their community with AIDS (and promiscuity), and by implying that all gays had ‘bad blood’.1 Their actions in picketing the Red Cross, however, led to claims in the ...
Click here to read more.

Network Review of Books

Mariners are Warned! John Lort Stokes and HMS Beagle in Australia 1837-1843 (2002)

Reviewed by Peter Stanley in the August 2004 issue.
Marsden Hordern's complementary works on two British naval surveyors of the Australian coast have been reprinted after gaining a state history prize apiece. They describe the work of Phillip Parker King and John Lort Stokes who, twenty years apart, led a succession of naval missions to explore and chart the coasts of northern Australia. Hordern's books deserve both the accolade and the fresh circulation following the new editions. The prizes suggest that the popular taste inclines more to what might be regarded as old-fashioned narrative history rather than the clever but esoteric expressions ... read more.

Fever Hospital: A History of Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital (2002)

Reviewed by Maggie Tonkin in the March 2003 issue.
Fever Hospital ought to be read by all those opposed to immunisation, for this history of Australia's foremost infectious diseases hospital reveals much about the terrible history of infectious disease in Australia. Under its original name of Queen's Memorial Infectious Disease Hospital, Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital was opened in 1904 as a result of a public and municipal fund raising effort. The impetus for the establishment of an infectious diseases hospital came from the epidemics of diphtheria, typhoid, scarlet fever and other infectious diseases that had swept the Port Phillip ... read more.

The Oromo in Exile (2002)

Reviewed by Bethaney Turner in the November 2002 issue.
Greg Gow achieves two remarkable things in this text. First, his detailed and lengthy research into the exiled Oromo community in Melbourne is groundbreaking in both its subject matter and scope. Second, he challenges the methodological boundaries of his chosen field of ethnography by employing postmodern and postcolonial theories to analyse the Oromo's performance of traditional practices in their state of exile. While both of these achievements are admirable, it is difficult to fully realise such an ambitious project in a 149 page text. One imagines that Gow battled to condense and rework ... read more.

Daughters of the Dreaming (2002)

Reviewed by Rebekah Crow in the January 2003 issue.
This is the third edition of Daughters of the Dreaming, originally published in 1983. The book began its life as Diane Bell's doctoral thesis, based on extensive fieldwork in Warrabri (now Ali-Curang) in central Australia. Bell has carried out a systematic ethnography of the ritual lives of Kaytej women living in the central desert in the 1970s. Reading the book twenty years later I am struck by the power of the women whose lives are shared here. That it has remained in print for so long it testimony to the relevance of its message, especially given the continuing lack of acknowledgement of ... 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.

Sexual Politics and Greedy Institutions: Union Women, Commitments and Conflicts in Public and in Private (2002)

Reviewed by Julie Ustinoff in the August 2002 issue.
For anyone who has ever looked at one of the few females who hold a prominent position in the Australian trade union movement and thought, she must be tough -- Franzway's book will convince you that you are right. Unions are tough environments in which to work, and they are even tougher environments in which to succeed, especially for women. Much of this harshness derives from what Suzanne Franzway argues is the status of unions as 'greedy' institutions; so named because of the high demands they make upon officials in terms of commitment, loyalty, time, and energy. For women though, active ... read more.

Need to Contact Us?