Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Voices from the Battlefield: Personal Narratives as an Historical Tool in Studying the Place of the Vietnam War in Australian Society

Janine Hiddlestone
The use of personal narratives has proved a popular method of studying the Vietnam War, both in Australia and the United States. Vietnam was one of the most controversial and longest wars in contemporary history. It was a war that was fought on the home front as well as on the battlefield, and for many, the wounds inflicted are still painful more than a quarter of a century later. The rush of histories that quickly followed previous wars were not so swift to appear after Vietnam. There was no great victory to celebrate and many found difficulty placing Vietnam into the context of a proud ...
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Network Review of Books

Botany Bay: Where histories meet (2005)

Reviewed by Stephanie Lindsay-Thompson in the April 2006 issue.
Botany Bay, celebrated as a birthplace of the Australian nation, is surrounded by memorials to Captain Cook's first landfall in April 1770, the arrival of the First Fleet in January 1788, and Lap�rouse's encampment at Frenchmans Bay during January-March 1788. Monuments including an obelisk dominate the skyline, plaques cling like barnacles to the headlands, and numerous place names imprint the landscape with the names of early European visitors. Through the monuments, Maria Nugent suggests, historical stories take on a 'physical form', and are 'repeatedly, indeed insistently, told' using ... read more.

Samurai in the Surf: The Arrival of the Japanese on the Gold Coast in the 1980s (2005)

Reviewed by Narrelle Morris in the May 2005 issue.
This book deals with the Japanese presence in modern Australia. Joe Hajdu is a cultural geographer and it is no surprise, therefore, that his work focuses on the energetic locality of the Gold Coast and the cultural impact of the 'arrival' of the Japanese in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Hajdu extends upon his earlier research in this area to explore the incoming and outgoing wave of Japanese individuals and investment in this period. The main text of this book consists of nine chapters. Chapters one and two cover the rise of Japan's economy and the reasons behind the choice of ... read more.

Breastwork: rethinking breastfeeding (2005)

Reviewed by Amanda McLeod in the January 2006 issue.
Exploring the deeply held cultural assumptions embedded in the meanings of breastfeeding, Breastwork offers new and empowering narratives that seek to remake the representations and knowledges of breastfeeding and maternity. Despite much of the literature on breastfeeding appearing clinically and scientifically neutral, Alison Bartlett's examination reveals 'impossibly contradictory and inexplicable [stories] knotted around the meanings of women's bodies and sexuality' in terms of class, gender, heterosexuality, race and religion. (p 3) In rejecting the idea that breastfeeding is a natural and ... read more.

Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (2005)

Reviewed by John Stephens in the August 2005 issue.
By any standard, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape is an impressive achievement. It was first published and now resurfaces at times when public and scholarly interest in commemoration is high. When Inglis started his survey of war memorials in 1983, war memorialisation and Anzac day commemoration was waning but had vigorously re-emerged by 1998 when the book was published. Recent interest in remembrance is part of 'the memory boom' as observed by Jay Winter which is a world wide phenomenon at the heart of many commemorative projects, seeking to provide a point of ... read more.

Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market (2005)

Reviewed by Robert Imre in the July 2005 issue.
Dirt Cheap is a jarring book. Reminiscent of Studs Terkel's books on life in the United States published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, or Ehrenreich's classic Nickel and Dimed, Wynhausen delivers an analysis that is devastating to the supporters of the new economy. The book has a primary focus of illustrating how people in Australia live from minimum wage employment. Wynhausen seeks to explore this way of life, she claims, without a preconceived agenda. Further, in a self-critical prologue, Wynhausen foreshadows her own personal journey in describing articles written for newspapers in ... read more.

God's Willing Workers: Women and religion in Australia (2005)

Reviewed by Ann Jensen in the July 2005 issue.
It takes both courage and insight for a historian to embrace the subject women and religion, in an Australian context. Here is a gendered perspective that recognises that the profound influence of women on children, charity, work, men, education and society, is both intensified and modified through their complex relationship with church. Within this book are the seeds for a dozen theses and deeper studies of the lives of remarkable and powerful women, who have been otherwise ignored or forgotten. The role of religion in colonial times has also been underestimated or ignored, while the ... read more.

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