Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

'That Critical Juncture': Maternalism in Anti-Colonial Feminist History

Nicole Moore
Recent feminist theorising and cultural analysis has been said to involve a return to history, as Rita Felski argued in her attention to the gender of modernity. What kinds of history might this be? What temporal structures are inhabitable in this ‘return’? Felski’s question posits that challenges to ‘epochal unity’ and ‘unilinear narrative’ are the largest ones with which feminist history should have to deal:1 but there are multiple feminist historiographies which have reformulated the historical project via precisely these challenges, and indeed may ...
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Network Review of Books

Skins (2002)

Reviewed by Marion May Campbell in the March 2003 issue.
It takes some courage to choose as material for a first work of extended fiction the survival narrative of a handful of marooned characters and their captive women, who, except for one delicate Englishman, are brutalised, brutal, illiterate, or all three. Sarah Hay gives this situation austere and potent handling in her Vogel Prize-winning novel, Skins. The title evokes more than sealing or skin colour, although both senses are foregrounded in the book; it is fundamentally concerned with the behaviour of humans in naked need, whose circumstances are so circumscribed that only crude choices ... read more.

More Than Refuge: Changing Responses to Domestic Violence (2002)

Reviewed by Christine Choo in the July 2003 issue.
As Suellen Murray states, the history of responses to domestic violence in Australia in the late twentieth century has been largely undocumented. Murray's timely book, More than Refuge, has a dual function: it documents the history of Nardine Women's Refuge and in doing so, places this history in the wider context of the history of the women's liberation movement in Western Australia. This history draws strongly on reminiscences and personal (oral) accounts of refuge workers and residents in Nadine, politicians and bureaucrats who were involved in the women's movement and responses to domestic ... read more.

Magpie Mischief (2002)

Reviewed by Strephyn Mappin in the July 2002 issue.
While growing up in the Western Australian suburb of Dianella, I got to know magpies quite well. The long walk to primary school took me along the edge of a swamp, and during nesting time it was common to be dive-bombed by these black and white missiles. Occasionally, someone would get hit. The resulting wound was small and always treated by the school nurse with a dab of Mercurochrome. Though ridiculous to look at, a purple patch on the skull was worn with pride; proof that you'd run the gauntlet. The school, of course, would contact the council and a ranger would be dispatched to shoot the ... read more.

Adventures in Pop Culture (2002)

Reviewed by Dean Durber in the March 2003 issue.
The term 'Australian Literature' makes my skin grow cold. Whenever I hear the term my head fills up with painful images of dusty homesteads, dusty men on horses and dusty dust beneath the harsh summer sun. It is this kind of (outback?) out-land-ish setting that seems to get all the attention in the most prestigious reviews and awards for fiction in this country. It's the type of image you can see on the front cover of all the Australian 'best-sellers'. It connotes a world not quite relevant to the present; some ideal place of never-never. Perhaps that is the reason, then, why this recent ... read more.

MamaKuma: One Woman, Two Cultures (2002)

Reviewed by Sue Bond in the March 2003 issue.
I read MamaKuma: One woman twocultures in one sitting, so enthrallingwas the story of this courageous, lovingwoman and her bridging of the twoworlds of black and white in the NewGuinea Highlands. It is, at first sight, abeautifully produced book, with adetail from a photograph of DeborahCarlyon in ceremonial headdressforming the front cover, and thebroadly smiling face of hergrandmother, Kuma Kelage, on theback. There are line drawings by theauthor and photographs of her relativesincluded within the text. Kuma Kelage, who was lovinglycalled Mama Kuma by everyone, wasborn in about 1928 in the ... read more.

Lighting the Way: Reconciliation Stories (2002)

Reviewed by Antonia Esten in the issue.
Dianne Johnson, a [non-Indigenous Australian] anthropologist, has written 23 stories of cross-cultural [Indigenous and non-Indigenous] collaboration on reconciliation projects across Australia. The foreword and jacket blurbs hail the stories as surprising and delightful, compelling, engaging, heartwarming and uplifting; as capturing the strength, trust and humility of the reconciliation process, stirring us to action and optimism and generally inspiring ideas of what can be done. All this is true. The accounts of coming together on a series of imaginative projects, big and small, achieve an ... read more.

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