Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Two men and some boats: The cartoonists in 2001

Haydon Manning and Robert Phiddian
Australian newspaper cartoonists worked in the shadow of 11 September and the "war against terrorism". It was a dark shadow. In the last couple of elections we have argued that cartoonists have become increasingly disgusted by and disengaged from the process (Phiddian 1998; Manning and Phiddian 2000; Kerr 1999; Seymour-Ure 1997). We must tell a different story for 2001: cartoonists were more disgusted than ever by electioneering but they were certainly not disengaged. The issues that inspired them were the moral question of how we should treat asylum seekers who arrive in boats and ...
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Network Review of Books

Mapping the Landscape (2001)

Reviewed by Marion Spies in the June 2002 issue.
This is a Festschrift in honour of Professor Ian Breward, an eminent Australasian church historian, on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday in 1999. Breward is probably known best to the general public for his comprehensive A History of the Australian Churches (1993), which answers the long disputed question of whether there is an Australian (Anglican) theology and a general religiosity. He answers with a clear 'yes, of course', by showing mainly how Anglicans from Britain (as well as Christians from other European countries) have adapted themselves to a specifically Australian ... read more.

The Life and Soul of the Party: A Portrait of Modern Labor (2001)

Reviewed by Jim Chalmers in the Dec 2001-Jan 2002 issue.
The now vanquished Kim Beazley has been famously described as lacking the 'ticker' to be an effective prime minister. The criticism followed a now familiar theme; that Beazley was not a strong leader, he lacked vision and voters were unsure exactly what he believed in. Regardless of the validity of these claims in relation to Beazley, though many rightly questioned them, such criticisms have also been applied to the Australian Labor Party since the landslide election loss in March 1996 threw the Keating government onto the political scrap heap. What does Labor stand for? How does it respond in ... read more.

Fish Lips (2001)

Reviewed by Zora Simic in the June 2005 issue.
Carolyn Van Langenberg gives good title and it's only now, having just finished her ambitious trilogy of novels -- Fish Lips (2002), The Teetotaller's Wake (2003) and Blue Moon (2004) -- that I fully appreciate this particular skill. Looking back, they tell me everything and nothing I need to know about what happens between the covers. The titles evoke the author's key preoccupations -- families, dreams, cultural encounters, passion, love, sexuality, grief, nostalgia, location, dislocation -- without giving too much away. Indeed, Van Langenberg is all about the slow unravelling of a story, a ... read more.

Ned Kelly (2001)

Reviewed by Graham Seal in the August 2002 issue.
John Molony's Ned Kelly, reissued twenty-one years after its original publication in 1980, demonstrates the changes that have occurred in Australian historical and biographical writing. When first published many were unsure what to make of a work by a historian that imagined the thoughts, motivations and inner churnings of Australia's bushranging icon, as well as those of a large and colourful supporting cast. Was it proper history? Was it biography? Was it creative writing? As we can now see with the benefit of hindsight, it was a bit of all those things. This life of Ned Kelly is an early ... read more.

Hell Has Harbour Views (2001)

Reviewed by Philip Burgess in the November 2001 issue.
Starting in the 1980s the American author John Grisham, a law graduate from the University of Mississippi and sometime law practitioner, has invented and developed a whole new genre of fiction, the legal thriller (The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Rainmaker, The Brethren, etc.). The stories have proved eminently filmable and Grisham has made millions of dollars in the process. Scott Turow, by far the better writer, is another American lawyer turned author (though he still practices) who has done well as a novelist on legal themes. In Australia, another who has sought to do the same is a current ... read more.

Wild Cat Falling (2001)

Reviewed by Greg Hughes in the November 2001 issue.
Wild Cat Falling was a major breakthrough when it was initially published in 1965, hailed as the first Aboriginal novel. Colin Johnson, as Mudrooroo was then known, saw the book republished again in 1992. Despite its age, Wild Cat Falling is still a disturbing story, not least of all because almost forty years after its first appearance, and the improvements in Aboriginal conditions and rights that have occurred, the book still resonates far too strongly with the less than satisfactory current life conditions of a number of indigenous Australians. In the book, an unnamed (this can be read as ... read more.

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