Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Young People, Politics and Television Current Affairs in Australia

Vanessa Evans and Jason Sternberg
The victory of John Howard’s coalition government at the 1996 federal election and its re-election in 1998 have brought about a series of harsh, restrictive youth policies that for some, border on ‘institutional discrimination’.1 Youth wages have been cut and access to the dole tightened.2 At the same time, policies to reduce youth unemployment, homelessness and suicide have been neglected, schools have been closed down and higher education fees increased.3 Young adults in Australia are increasingly constructed as political objects. However, the extent to which they are ...
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Network Review of Books

Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky (2002)

Reviewed by Robyn Tucker in the October 2002 issue.
Understanding power the Chomsky way means thinking critically about information. Who knows what and who doesn't know? Why, and what are the implications? These are central questions posed in this collection.Understanding Power is a selection of previously unpublished transcriptions of seminars and conversations with Noam Chomsky that took place between 1989 and 1999 in the United States. The editors have maintained the question and answer format and loosely grouped the discussions into ten chapters, which are helpfully broken down into titled subsections (so you can ignore the daggy overtones ... read more.

Attuned to Alien Moonlight: the Poetry of Bruce Dawe (2002)

Reviewed by R Wolny in the June 2003 issue.
Bruce Dawe is one of the most acclaimed contemporary Australian poets, his reputation reaching far beyond the Australian shores, and Dennis Haskell, Professor of English at the University of Western Australia, is -- and it clearly shows throughout the book -- also a poet, albeit of a considerably lesser prominence (he has published four volumes of his own poetry so far). And it is indeed a difficult task to write on a contemporary poet, particularly if you are a contemporary poet yourself. The question is, therefore, whether Haskell was up to the task. The book is essentially a collection of ... read more.

Into the Blue: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (2002)

Reviewed by Robert Clarke in the May 2003 issue.
Captain James Cook had a busy year in 2002 with a number of titles about the eighteenth-century British navigator and explorer being released. Amongst them was Tony Horwitz's Into the Blue, which mixes history and social commentary with a fast flowing and at times very funny travel narrative. Horwitz is a US Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of a number of fine travel books including One More for the Road, Confederates in the Attic, and Bagdhad without Maps. In this latest work he sets off on a journey that takes him to Polynesia and the northwestern coast of north America, and ... read more.

The Blue Mansion (2002)

Reviewed by Christine Choo in the September 2004 issue.
The mansion of Cheong Fatt Tze located in Leith Street, Penang, was built at the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and embodied the best of Eastern and Western influences in a colonial environment. It was his favourite home built for his favourite consort, his seventh wife, and is said to have outstripped all his other homes in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Singapore, in beauty, refinement and architectural interest. The Blue Mansion records in beautiful colour and presentation, the story of Cheong Fatt Tze, the architecture and history of the mansion and the successful and ... read more.

Settlers, Servants and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in Nineteenth-Century Western Australia (2002)

Reviewed by Shirleene Robinson in the April 2003 issue.
Settlers, Servants and Slaves is an absorbing and important book that will potentially change the way people look at Western Australian history. It is only recently that Australian historians have begun to investigate the historical experiences of children and have recognised the way that their youth impacts on these experiences. With Settlers, Servants and Slaves, Penelope Hetherington has filled in a considerable gap in Australian social history. She thoroughly examines the exploitation of both Aboriginal and European children by the settler elite in nineteenth century Western Australia. The ... read more.

Postcards from the Zoo: Animal Tales from a 25-year Zoo Safari (2002)

Reviewed by Natasha Giardina in the Aug/Sep 2003 issue.
Few people I know can resist anecdotes about animals, whether they involve recounting the escapades of a favourite moggie or a chance encounter with an endangered native species. The flavour and spice of animal stories, however, is always the human factor, perhaps because we are fascinated by our origins in, and continuing relationships with, the animal world. In Postcards from the Zoo, Darill Clements uses our fascination not only to tell a personal history of Taronga Zoo, but also to educate readers about the importance of animal conservation. Clements' experiences come from twenty-five ... read more.

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