Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

History in Black and White: a critical analysis of the Black Armband debate

Anna Clark
In December 1998, a letter from B J Wright of Glenelg East, South Australia, was published in Quadrant, a conservative Australian literary journal. Wright complained that the recent widespread commemoration of Aboriginal history was endangering the country:Sorry Day was nothing less than an emotion-driven exercise in Black-armbandism for the moral uplift of middle class non-natives. The result of all this may well be the unintended adoption of very opposite attitudes by the manipulable young.1‘Black armband’ history came to define a growing reappraisal of Australia’s past, ...
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Network Review of Books

Australia and the British Embrace: The Demise of the Imperial Ideal (2001)

Reviewed by Daniel Oakman in the November 2002 issue.
The central proposition of Stuart Ward's Australia and the British Embrace is that Australian political culture did not defiantly cut the apron strings and reject the bonds of the British connection, as asserted in the radical-nationalist tradition of Australian history. Instead, Ward argues that since 1945 Australia was 'pulled along reluctantly in the wake of changing British policies and priorities'. The episode through which Ward pursues these questions is the United Kingdom's decision to seek membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) in the early 1960s. In the early chapters, ... read more.

Oscar and Lucinda (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.

The Enabling State (2001)

Reviewed by Philip Mendes in the October 2001 issue.
Labor MP Mark Latham is Australia's best known Australian advocate of Third Way views. His co-editor, Professor Peter Botsman, is also well known as a former Director of both the Evatt Foundation and the Brisbane Institute. Their new book, The Enabling State, promises to offer a new paradigm for welfare funding and provision in Australia. The Enabling State contains 15 chapters including substantial contributions by Botsman and Latham. Other contributors include representatives of the Scottish employment training company, the Wise Group; British social entrepreneur Reverend Andrew Mawson; ... read more.

The Flight of the Emu: A Hundred Years of Australian Ornithology 1901-2001 (2001)

Reviewed by Joanna Sassoon in the June 2002 issue.
The Flight of the Emu traces the way Australian birds became the object of serious scientific interest. Nominative determinism aside, in taking Robin under their wing, Birds Australia selected someone well suited to writing the history of the discipline of ornithology, and the role of the Royal Australasian Ornithological Union (RAOU) within it. This book combines a knowledge of a history of ideas that surround and inform ornithology, with some of the key scientific questions and challenges that have faced the discipline in the last 100 years. In saying this, this book is more than a history ... read more.

A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis - A Literary Life (2001)

Reviewed by Louise Poland in the Dec 2001-Jan 2002 issue.
Women have always been active in book publishing in Australia, although their contributions have often been hidden by history. Witness, for example, the absence of the following publishers and editors from mainstream Australian publishing histories: Violet Teague, Geraldine Rede, Hilda Esson, Joan Phipson, Bessie Mitchell, Barbara Ramsden, Nan McDonald, Mary Quick and Marjorie Pizer. Like her remarkable sisters in Australian publishing before the 1960s and 1970s, Beatrice Davis was unusual or 'out of type'. Unlike most of them, she was a legend. This long-awaited biography of Beatrice Davis, ... read more.

Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000 (2001)

Reviewed by Tim Metcalf in the August 2002 issue.
The five books from which this selection was made, and the thirty-three pages of new poems, ensure a hearty feast for fans of Oliver and those fascinated by the evolution of poetry in the Antipodes. There is from the outset an emphasis on a 'transtasman' poetic. Set largely in the harbour cities of Auckland and Sydney, the antics of light dominate the images that Oliver so skilfully evokes. From book one he demonstrates an assured and integrated poetic:This time of year the clouds could be happening while the days spin you/me different waysOliver treads precisely, careful not to trip over ... read more.

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