Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

It’s a Fair Cop, Guv: Australian Fans of The Bill

Margaret Rogers
The British serial The Bill holds a special position within the television police genre, not only because of its longevity in Britain and Australia but also due to its ability to adapt to the changing demands of industry and audience. Since its inception The Bill has continually renegotiated the boundaries of the television police genre through innovative production techniques, characterisation and the creation of an active fandom. First broadcast in Britain in 1984 as an example of the police procedural category of the television police genre, it was hailed by critics and audience for its ...
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Network Review of Books

Reconciliations (2005)

Reviewed by Anna Trembath in the November 2005 issue.
Reconciliation has struggled to retain a consistent place in Australian public discourse. When the question of reconciliation has dominated the recent public agenda, there has seemingly been little to celebrate: the death of an Indigenous youth igniting some communities, other communities entering into controversial 'deals' with governance bodies, extreme levels of poverty and lack of material resources continuously exposed, white historians battling over the truth of Australia's colonial past, and an Indigenous leader walking for hundreds of kilometres to discuss reconciliation with the Prime ... read more.

Freehold: Verse Novel (2005)

Reviewed by Adam Atkinson in the January 2006 issue.
Geoff Page's Freehold: Verse Novel attempts to negotiate the different modes in which white and Aboriginal Australians connect to land and country and to counteract the forgetting of historical wrongs perpetrated against Aboriginal communities and 'justified' by white understandings of land ownership. Despite the back cover's claim that 'nothing is black and white', Page reveals that, like the Clarence river which repeatedly cuts into the novel, a sharp divide exists between black and white cultural understandings of land use. This divide in turn, serves to make Aboriginal culture transparent ... read more.

Remnants (2005)

Reviewed by Tony Smith in the October 2005 issue.
In telling stories of specific individuals in unique situations, novelists illumine important aspects of the general human condition. Nigel Featherstone does this very well in Remnants, a novel that relates directly the post-retirement discoveries of successful Sydney barrister Mitchell Granville, while prompting the reader to consider serious broader questions about all lives, their origins, purposes, justifications and relations. Following the death of his beloved wife Irma, Granville has resigned himself to living out the rest of his days in Bellstay Green, the rural seat of his ... read more.

Someone Else's Country: A fearless, funny and profoundly moving Australian story (2005)

Reviewed by Jeannie Herbert in the October 2005 issue.
Fast moving, full of action and energy, Someone Else's Country enables the reader to get a 'taste of life' as it really is for many Indigenous Australians. The author has chosen to structure the book using short chapters and a sparse, almost staccato style of writing, providing a series of brief glimpses into modern Aboriginal lifestyles. The ease of reading enables the reader to make rapid progress into the book. Initially there is an impression of skimming across the surface of life, not unlike the way in which many of us increasingly live our lives -- our knowledge of others being gleaned ... read more.

Black and White Together: FCAATSI The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders 1958-1973 (2005)

Reviewed by David Ritter in the July 2006 issue.
Founded in 1958, the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders was the principal national body campaigning for greater rights for Indigenous People in Australia in the latter part of the assimilation era. FCAATSI expressly rejected the prevailing Commonwealth policy, preferring, in Sue Taffe's words, 'the vision of an integrated Indigenous population which maintained its own culture and was developing its own priorities in the fight for recognition as a people' (82). Taffe, a post-doctoral fellow at Monash, argues that '[m]yth and silence' have come to ... read more.

Islands in the Stream: Australia and Japan face globalisation (2005)

Reviewed by Rhian Healy in the April 2006 issue.
This book is a collection of articles about the issues that Australia and Japan, as island nations, are facing with the process of globalisation. The problem with a collection of articles based on an illusive and politically fraught term like globalisation is the possibility of confusion as to what exactly the term means, or at least differences between what each of the individual authors interpret globalisation to be. Perhaps this is why the introduction states what globalisation is not rather than what it is. The lowest common denominator in this case is that globalisation is any process ... read more.

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