Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Rural and regional interests: The demise of the rural revolt?

Jennifer Curtin and Dennis Woodward
Speculation as to how rural and regional Australians would vote in the 2001 federal election had been rife since 1998. In late 2000, it was reported that there were more "soft voters" in rural and regional Australia, albeit with a very "hard edge" (Grattan 2000). Others labelled these voters "politically promiscuous" (Green 2000). This rural and regional discontent was also apparent at state level. In the 1999 Victorian state election, the Kennett Government lost power largely because of a swing to Independents and the ALP in regional Victoria (Woodward and Costar ...
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Network Review of Books

Westminster Legacies: Democracy and responsible government in Asia and the Pacific (2005)

Reviewed by Paul A Pickering in the April 2006 issue.
In 1934 five young Nepalese men met to establish the country's first political party and to imagine a political future for their nation beyond the oppressive hereditary prime ministership of the Ranas under which they lived. Among the five were graduates of Nepal's only High School where they had been taught 'British history' and on the basis of this the political future they envisioned for their nation was as a parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarch -- a Westminster system. Following the overthrow of the Ranas, the services of Sir Ivor Jennings, a leading scholar of British ... read more.

Sounding the Alarm: Remote area nurses and Aboriginals at risk (2005)

Reviewed by Stephanie Lindsay-Thompson in the October 2005 issue.
Sounding the Alarm is a disturbing case study of unsafe nursing practices in the delivery of health services from a 'nursing post' at Warburton to Ngaanyatjarra communities in the Western Desert region of Western Australia. Some 2,300 Ngaanyatjarra people live in eleven widely separated communities scattered across 9.8 million hectares of their own lands. Warburton, the operational centre for the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, is 930 km distant from the nearest hospital and medical services, at Kalgoorlie, and four hours by air from Alice Springs. This book draws on Jennifer Cramer's research for her ... read more.

Vision and Reality in Pacific Religion (2005)

Reviewed by Christine Cheater in the April 2006 issue.
Religion plays a central role in Pacific history. Before the arrival of the Europeans religious considerations dominated the social organisation of many Pacific Islander communities. The region was one of the first areas of operation for the London Mission Society and both Protestant and Catholic missionaries have been active in the region since the early nineteenth century. Religious institutions continue to play a role in the provision of education and medical services on the Pacific Islands and around 90 per cent of Pacific Islanders actively practice a faith. Vision and Reality in Pacific ... read more.

The Child is Wise: Stories of Childhood (2005)

Reviewed by Sylvia Alston in the July 2005 issue.
In the foreword Veronica Brady says that the writers share with us the 'pleasures of memory', adding that their stories are mostly 'memories of struggle, of failures and disappointments overcome'. The 'pleasures of memory' is a delightful phrase and it is a delight to share this selection of childhood memories. I think Dorothy Hewett sums up the theme of the book nicely when she writes: 'The first house sits in the hollow of the heart, it will never go away. It is the house of childhood become myth, inhabited by characters larger than life whose murmured conversations whisper and tug at the ... read more.

The Vision Splendid: A social and cultural history of rural Australia (2005)

Reviewed by Anette Bremer in the September 2005 issue.
The Vision Splendid's cover illustration, Arthur Streeton's The Selector's Hut, shows a man with a broad-brimmed hat resting on a partially hewn log, enjoying a midday smoke. Behind him, under a tall, scraggy gum, is his unfinished slab hut. Above, a soft blue sky with whispery clouds; surrounding the hut, the golden brown landscape typical of rural Australia. It is such classic images of the solitary pioneer that The Vision Splendid complicates. Streeton's painting symbolises what is popularly understood as 'the Bush' and while Waterhouse uses the same term (with a capital B) to invoke rural ... read more.

One Bright Spot (2005)

Reviewed by Melissa Bellanta in the April 2006 issue.
Victoria Haskins's One Bright Spot is a culturally significant, moving, and sometimes exhausting work. It begins with the sort of golden moment all historians long for: Haskins's discovery, in the mid-1990s, of a trove of papers belonging to her great-grandmother, Joan Kingsley-Strack, known to her family as 'Ming'. As these papers revealed, Ming had been involved with the Aboriginal citizenship movement in Sydney during the 1930s. She had also been an outspoken opponent of the removal of Aboriginal children from their families. Neither of these were things that Haskins had heard about before. ... read more.

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