Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Idiot Box: Mick Cameron as Yobbo Flâneur

Rebecca Johinke
Campus Lite has obtained an exclusive interview with David Caesar, who will share some insights to his film Idiot Box (1997) with us. Idiot Box is a bleak ‘coming of age’ narrative that presents audiences with a stark but humorous dose of social realism in the ‘backblocks’ in the 1990s. The film pumps with crude, frustrated energy via sharp editing and a frenetic sound track that combines urban cacophony and raw Australian music to create a high-octane feel. [Editor: Just refer them to Goldsmith].1 Idiot Box is set in a desolate and fatherless realm, and investigates ...
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Network Review of Books

Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language (2003)

Reviewed by David Ritter in the March 2004 issue.
Don Watson is an historian who has achieved national prominence beyond the usual boundaries of academia, first as a scriptwriter, then as the chief author of the speeches of the last Labor Prime Minister and, most recently, as the author of the elegiac Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM. Watson's new work, which has augmented his growing status as one of Australia's more prominent public intellectuals, is Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language,1 in which he floridly and vehemently argues that the idiom 'of political and business leaders and civil servants' ... read more.

Tightrope Horizon (2003)

Reviewed by Andrew Johnson in the April 2004 issue.
The New Poets series from Five Islands Press has, with the addition of this group of six, now put fifty-four Australian poets into print. The 'new' of the series title might suggest to some that the poets presented are young, and if not previously unpublished at least relatively unknown in print. Neither of these assumptions is correct. All of the poets have appeared, frequently, in print in a variety of Australian and international journals, magazines and daily papers, and while it is irrelevant as a category for judging the merit of the poetry, or much else for that matter, it might also be ... read more.

Partnership at Work: The Challenge of Employee Democracy (2003)

Reviewed by James Haughton in the July 2003 issue.
When I commenced reading Partnership at Work, I was unexpectedly reminded of an occurrence during my undergraduate years. Having a longstanding interest in theories of industrial democracy and representation, particularly in application to developing countries and areas, I was very interested when a friend informed me that the University of Melbourne law school, at which she was a student, included a discussion group dedicated to that very topic, of which she was a member. I inquired whether I might join the discussion group, and was told that they were not really interested in hearing from ... read more.

America's Pie: Trade and Culture After 9/11 (2003)

Reviewed by Melissa Gregg in the March 2004 issue.
Deceptive in its brevity, this significant text begins with a wry observation. Since 9/11, the Statue of Liberty has been closed 'for security reasons'. The symbol of freedom so treasured in the Home of the Brave is now hidden for fear of attack. In one of many historical insights which suffuse this book, Jock Given's introduction notes the importance of the statue as a gift from the people of France, affirming friendship and shared values between two nations. At the time, the author writes, the gesture symbolised both states' commitment to the ideals of freedom and autonomy enshrined in the ... read more.

The Boy in the Green Suit: A Memoir (2003)

Reviewed by Lynne Barwick in the June 2005 issue.
The role of narrative in the construction of self has been debated in the humanities for some time now. For Robert Hillman the centrality of narrative is clear. Throughout The Boy in The Green Suit, Hillman details how stories have defined and propelled his life. He suggests that narrative breeds more of the same: 'Any child can pick up a yarn that draws together fragments of daydream, threads of ambition, only to find much later that it has become the initial paragraph of a life story'. The starting point for Robert's story is a green island his father has described. It is a boy's paradise; ... read more.

Piercing the Ground (2003)

Reviewed by Elizabeth Coleman in the February 2004 issue.
In Piercing the Ground, Christine Watson suggests that Kutjungka contemporary paintings demand a different form of appreciation from a Western audience: they ask us to 'put aside our distanced, primarily aesthetic and conceptual approach to artworks, and to respond more immediately and viscerally to the communication they are making not only visually, but sonically and through the sense of touch' (p 69). I wouldn't recommend this book for its theory of cross-cultural aesthetics. However, I would recommend it highly for the ethnographic and historical data Watson presents, and its portrayal of ... read more.

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