Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

You Don't Know Jack

Kathryn H Ferguson
Reading newspapers on microfilm is a frustrating business. Sore eyes, a tired back, coughing neighbours and the inevitably mutinous photocopy function all add to the sheer bloody-mindedness of historical newshounds. It all becomes numbingly familiar: quack cures, Ladies’ Auxiliary meetings, discount haberdashery, crime reports, political tomfoolery and society weddings. Inch after gritty inch of type, slowly grating away at patience and expectations. However, perseverance is occasionally rewarded. Such was the case on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday last summer when, while searching ...
Click here to read more.

Network Review of Books

The Captive White Woman of Gipps Land: In Pursuit of the Legend (2001)

Reviewed by Paul Genoni in the October 2001 issue.
Interest in the theme of the white person living with Aboriginals has persisted in representations of colonial Australia, and it shows little sign of abating in the third century of European occupation. There has been ongoing scholarly and popular interest in the stories of those settlers who, for whatever reason, lived for extended periods with the indigenous Australians. The best known of these are Eliza Fraser and William Buckley. Eliza Frazer's healthy afterlife is traced in Kay Schaffer's In the Wake of First Contact: the Eliza Fraser Stories (1995), and in Constructions of Colonialism: ... read more.

Illywhacker (2001)

Reviewed by Melissa Bellanta in the April 2003 issue.
My initial encounter with Peter Carey was decidedly nasty. Some years ago I read The Tax Inspector, and could hardly sleep for days in horror of Benny Catchprice. Carey had drawn Benny with a savage verisimilitude: his pale angel-beauty and violent instability making him almost surreally lifelike, like Martin Bryant walking from a nightmare into Port Arthur's reality. Of course, Benny Catchprice is not Carey's only creation -- nor is nasty his only register. Indeed, now that University of Queensland Press has reissued his back-catalogue (along with a new collection of his stories), one thing ... read more.

Words and Silences (2001)

Reviewed by Clare Johnson in the March 2002 issue.
In Words and Silences Diane Bell asks of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge affair: 'what is one to make of the Royal Commission finding of fabrication?'(138).The Australian Federal Court certainly knows and in its recent, decisive finding vindicating the Ngarrindjeri women accused of that fabrication reminds us that the interpretation of silences is very much a political act. But the court's verdict simply confirms what the essays in this collection by Diane Bell and Deborah Bird Rose both convincingly argue: that the silences of indigenous women do not conceal the absence of knowledge, but instead ... read more.

CY O'Connor: His life and legacy (2001)

Reviewed by Leonora Ritter in the August 2002 issue.
This book tells the story of a man whose genius, achievements, character flaws and melodramatic death combine to create an epic saga. C Y O'Connor's work changed landscapes forever. He died before his greatest work, the pipeline that brought water 560 kilometres (according to the dust jacket or 650 kilometres according to the UWA media release) to the Western Australian goldfields, was successfully completed. C Y O'Connor was a legendary colonial civil engineer whose triumphs in New Zealand and Australia also included the railway across New Zealand's Southern Alps, Greymouth Port and ... 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.

The Man from the Sunrise Side (2001)

Reviewed by Christine Choo in the July 2003 issue.
Oomarri, where Ambrose Mungala Chalarimeri was born, is an indescribably beautiful place on the King George River in the far north of Western Australia. It is only possible to reach there, the Sunrise Side, by helicopter or light plane or by driving long hours deep into the bush along unmarked dirt tracks. This is the country to which Ambrose Chalarimeri belongs and which he claims as his birthright. The Man from the Sunrise Side is the story of Chalarimeri, a remarkable man, who was taken to Kalumburu Mission (formerly Drysdale River Mission) when he was a child of six. He and his infant ... read more.

Need to Contact Us?