Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Woomera 2002 Festival of Freedoms: Experiencing Community in Tragic Recognition of the Other

David Monson
The protesters who ‘liberated’ the Woomera detainees preach freedom and tolerance but practise violence and mayhem … until more people … fight this [culture], street gangs of greenshirts and their allies will increasingly threaten our democracy and our freedoms. (Andrew Bolt, Sunday Mail, 8 April 2002)1 Anarchy — Show me a greater crime in all the earth! She, she destroys cities, rips up houses, Breaks the ranks of spearmen into headlong rout. But the ones who last it out, the great mass of them Owe their lives to discipline. Therefore We must defend the men who ...
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Network Review of Books

En Passant (2003)

Reviewed by Stephen Lawrence in the June 2003 issue.
In grey, the sea forged between my thighs gasping for blue sky... ('Cumberland Island')Zan Ross' poetry is characterised by a wild precision. Part of the pleasure in reading her new book is peeling the rinds of association�that spin off the poems in all directions. Like Neo in flight, she flames across her landscapes--as much for dirty fun as from a sense of civic duty. 'En Passant is sex, sex, sex...' writes MTC Cronin -- but it is more than this. The multiplicities, speed-hump syntax and jazz-riffing had me revisiting and re-returning to (and re-arriving at) many of Ross' poems. And ... read more.

A Place to Lay My Head: Immigrant Shelters of Nineteenth Century Victoria (2003)

Reviewed by Jasmina Brankovich in the March 2005 issue.
This book touches the heart of an important subject in contemporary Australia: the status of migrants, particularly those who arrive here in search of more promising lives for themselves or their families, and the consequences of a national failure to treat these people with deserved respect, and provide for their immediate needs. But, unlike more recent debates, the events described in A Place to Lay My Head took place in the nineteenth-century and concern some of Australia's first 'boat people', the English, Irish and Scottish migrants who arrived to Australia to labour on pastoral fields ... read more.

Mr Ruddock Goes to Geneva (2003)

Reviewed by Sue Bond in the March 2004 issue.
This book is part of the University of New South Wales Press's Briefings series of inexpensive and accessible works about important issues of our time. Spencer Zifcak ends his short and focused work on Australia's relationship with the United Nations and our government's response to the criticisms of its human rights record with sobering thoughts: 'repudiation of the competence and authority of UN bodies can only be expected to persist and worsen, to the detriment of the international rule of law ----�and ultimately to our common security and our common humanity' (73). The book is impressive ... read more.

Cultural History in Australia (2003)

Reviewed by Tim Dolin in the October 2003 issue.
'Culture', as everybody knows by now, is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. It is also one of the two or three most overused words in the humanities these days--although, come to think of it, 'construct' as a noun and 'privilege' as a verb can't really match it with the 'c' word. Nearly half a century ago, Raymond Williams's Culture and Society (1958) began, famously, by tracing the complex history of changes in the word's meanings, which concentrate 'a number of important and continuing reactions to ... changes in our social, economic, and political life' ... read more.

Sea Change: Movement from Metropolitan to Arcadian Australia (2003)

Reviewed by Michelle Gabriel in the March 2004 issue.
Throughout the post-war period an unprecedented number of young, working Australians embraced the 'great Australian dream' of home ownership. Following the settlement patterns laid down by previous generations, these owner-occupiers took up residence in the expanding suburbs of Australia's capital cities, places that offered the combined benefits of employment and ready access to transport and services. While such family and work-centred aspirations have continued to fuel urban sprawl in the late twentieth century, since the mid-1970s social scientists have also observed a steady ... read more.

Free Radicals: Of the Left in Postwar Melbourne (2003)

Reviewed by Nick Fischer in the July 2004 issue.
Free radicals, John McLaren writes, are 'groups of atoms which exist independently but change the world around them'. McLaren's new book Free Radicals, profiles three close, late friends: Stephen Murray Smith, Ian Turner and Ken Gott, three radicals who vigorously shook the tree that was the Australian body politic. Notwithstanding the strength of their convictions and the steadfastness of their political commitment, their ideas are today 'suffering an eclipse in the age of individualism and the market state', which perhaps makes McLaren's homage to his fallen comrades' lives and times both a ... read more.

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