Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Secret Envelopes and Inferential Tautologies

Deane Fergie
This paper explores one of the many ironic twists of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Royal Commission. I argue that whereas fabrication of �women�s business� was unequivocally found to have taken place, that finding was itself contingent upon the production of a fabricated account of the �women�s business� in and by the commission itself.1 It was the commission�s own conjecture, based on untested assumptions and false inference, that was examined against the allegations of fabrication. Such an inferential tautology is a fatal flaw at the heart of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Royal Commission. I ...
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Network Review of Books

The Ethics of Waste: How we relate to rubbish (2006)

Reviewed by Lisa McDonald in the May 2006 issue.
I am standing in the local supermarket while renovations are made around me. I scan my list. Things have been moved: shelves, boxes, all kinds of items. Entire walls have disappeared. I stare at grime newly exposed which has set into some type of resin. Its crusty heritage contrasts in silent relief the otherwise polished architecture of supermarket things. A woman walks past and traces the direction of my eye. She winks this at me as I catch hers: 'Tsk'. And all this right here in the aisle of bleach, inside the colony of clean. Waste is nothing if not perverse, I think. I've been reading ... read more.

Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business (2006)

Reviewed by Stephanie Bishop in the July 2006 issue.
Amongst my most enduring childhood memories is one in which I have my small seven year old hand pushed deep into the blue china urn that housed my great grandmother's ashes. I was curious as to how her body came to resemble grey dust, leading my father to explain to me the process of cremation whilst I, excitedly, came upon small bits of bone that I pulled out of the urn as though they were minor trophies in a gothic lucky dip. I seem to remember my father and I marvelling at these tiny fragments together, wondering as to what part of the body they once belonged. By the time she died my ... read more.

Sharing Spaces: Indigenous and non-Indigenous Responses to Story, Country and Rights (2006)

Reviewed by Linn Miller in the July 2006 issue.
In regard to sharing stories, spaces and belongings, accounts we are accustomed to hearing in Australia--or want to hear--are often misleadingly simple and one-sided. Sharing Spaces not only succeeds in disclosing and exploring the ground--conceptual, geographical, socio-cultural and political--that connects people to place, past to present and indigenous to settler-Australians, it also acknowledges the complexity of the issues it tackles and respects the multiplicity of their phenomenal expression. Most refreshingly, where and when differing perspectives and understandings exist, and are ... read more.

Deconstructing Sport History: A Postmodern Analysis (2006)

Reviewed by David Rowe in the May 2006 issue.
The discipline of history and postmodern thought have rarely been happy travelling companions, not least in the subdiscipline of sport history. Without wishing to caricature the latter, or discount its honourable exceptions, much of it has displayed the 'reconstructionist na�ve empiricism' (p viii) bemoaned by Alun Munslow in the Foreword to this book. In sport history, furthermore, the easily obtained 'facts' of who played, lost and won have tended to be accompanied by nostalgic, romantic celebrations of its object. This is, then, not an intellectual space generally much given to ... read more.

Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 (2006)

Reviewed by Adam Atkinson in the July 2006 issue.
As Sherman and Nardin note in their introduction to Terror, Culture, Politics, of all the rhetorical, jingoistic gestures and formulas to emerge from September 11, the notion most in need of critique is that '9/11 changed everything' (p 4). Implicit, of course, is the question for whom precisely 'everything' has been altered. The United States, certainly, has discovered its vulnerability, and its security fears have impacted on the international community in numerous ways. Further, many of America's allies, including the Howard government, seem determined to follow Bush's lead in justifying a ... read more.

The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (2006)

Reviewed by Rosemary Hollow in the May 2006 issue.
The destruction of architecture has regrettably become a regular feature of our daily news, even on the front page at times. We have watched the bombing of the sacred Shiite shrine in Iraq, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes along the West Bank, the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the repeated televised images of the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers. Death does not always accompany the destruction of architecture, but the effect can still be catastrophic and long term. The dismantling and displacement of a community, the removal of centuries-old places of worship, means the ... read more.

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