Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

'Among Birds and Beasts': Environmental Reform, Racial Preservation and Australian Progressives at the Zoological Gardens

Natalie Lloyd
The investigation of human-animal relations at Australian zoos reveals that constructions of nature alter across time and space. Material, social and symbolic relations are enveloped by historically specific understandings of animals. The importance or legitimacy attached to the conservation of species in association with the power of the elite shifted in the twentieth century from hunting and the frontier (though these continued to be important to the tourism industry) to the moulding of new cities, races and nations. The old associations of animals and natural history with the technology and ...
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Network Review of Books

The Dig Tree: The Story of Bourke and Wills (2002)

Reviewed by Jonathan Richards in the June 2003 issue.
Another book on Burke and Wills? Haven't there been enough discussions of these two tragic figures in colonial Australian exploration? Radio journalist Sarah Murgatroyd brings a fresh approach to this almost perennial Australian topic, by combining previous published work with new research. This is a useful analysis of the expedition's progress, and of its place in Australian history. Small details that eluded previous writers take their rightful place in this book; such as Robert O'Hara Burke's obsession with young actress Julia Mathews and the eccentricities of Burke's life as a rural ... read more.

Itinerant Blues (2002)

Reviewed by Deborah Hunn in the January 2003 issue.
For his first volume of verse, Of Muse, Meandering & Midnight (2000), Brisbane poet Samuel Wagan Watson received the David Unaipon Award for emerging Indigenous writers. Muse was notable for the sensibility of tough lyricism that its author brought to his central and interconnected themes: the poet's struggle to forge and articulate a hybridised, yet uncompromised vision of the complexities of Australian life in the age of globalisation, in particular as it is viewed through the lens of Aboriginal experience and culture. Wagan Watson's second volume, Itinerant Blues, expands upon these ... read more.

Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002)

Reviewed by Stephen Bennetts in the May 2003 issue.
Barry Hill's ambitious 757 page biography of Australian anthropologist Ted Strehlow is almost exactly the same length as Strehlow's monumental Songs of Central Australia, a powerful but strangely anachronistic work which makes a case for elevating the Aranda Aboriginal poetic corpus to the level of the European epic canon which includes Beowulf and the Norse Sagas. Broken Song revisits the complex life of perhaps the most interesting of all anthropologists of Aboriginal Australia. Strehlow's immensely detailed and excruciatingly confessional diaries, which begin at the age of 14, are a ... read more.

Paint-Up (2002)

Reviewed by Lisette Kaleveld in the July 2003 issue.
Take a collection of stunning Aboriginal art, add the texture of the artist's commentary, narratives about the mythologies behind each piece, and insight into the arts' cultural meanings, and you have a window into the culture of Mornington Island Aboriginal people. I can only feel privileged to take a peek in. Paint-Up is, conceptually, a fantastic project, with a simple and straightforward agenda: To promote and record aspects of Aboriginal culture as counter to the threats to survival that traditional Australian Aboriginal culture is currently facing. As, author, Amanda Ahern says herself, ... read more.

From Camp to Queer: Remaking the Australian Homosexual (2002)

Reviewed by Dean Durber in the January 2003 issue.
From Camp To Queer tells the story of the emergence of the Australian 'gay', tracing his/her journey from an era of oppression, through the public struggles, and on to an achievement of expanding legal and cultural freedoms today. It traces the changes chronologically. It retells the myth of liberation. It accepts as axiomatic that sexuality is a part of our being, a part of our self. In this retelling of the 'gay' story, essentialist notions of homosexuality (and therefore heterosexuality) are once again imposed. It is not that Reynolds does not also seek to employ more obvious ... read more.

Night Train to Granada (2002)

Reviewed by Mary Besemeres in the April 2003 issue.
This is a fascinating account of a politically fraught, culturally and humanly revealing sojourn as an outsider in a fascist country of the mid-twentieth-century. A self-confessed 'drop-out Arts undergraduate' from the University of Sydney, Grahame Harrison travelled to England in 1952 but settled in Spain for the better part of a decade, securing a precarious perch as an English teacher in Granada. Beautifully situated, home of the Moorish palace of the Alhambra, it was also, he found, a city haunted by insistent ghosts of the Spanish Civil War. The narrative moves between the author's life ... read more.

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