Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Citizenship, History and Indigenous Status in Australia: Back to the Future, or Toward Treaty?

Stuart Bradfield
Australia remains unique among settler societies in not signing treaties with local Indigenous peoples, nor recognising their prior occupation in foundational documents like the Constitution. States such as Canada and New Zealand are currently seeking to ameliorate previous non-recognition via negotiated settlements, treaty processes, and even redrawing their internal boundaries to accommodate Indigenous autonomy. Given that these developments build on historical recognitions of Indigenous status that simply never happened on this continent, it may not be surprising that processes of ...
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Network Review of Books

Spirit Country: Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art (2002)

Reviewed by Rick Rutjens in the May 2003 issue.
Spirit Country is a beautifully produced book. Its colour plates are extraordinary, reproduced to perfectly illustrate both the beauty of the full artworks and the detail of the artistry that has produced them. With each piece accompanied by both a description of the reproduction and a biography of the artist, Isaacs has created a comprehensive and informative introduction to contemporary Indigenous art. It seems that Spirit Country started its life as an expensive and thorough exhibition catalogue. It was a collaborative project, written by Isaacs for Hardie Grant Books and the Fine Arts ... read more.

Skins (2002)

Reviewed by Marion May Campbell in the March 2003 issue.
It takes some courage to choose as material for a first work of extended fiction the survival narrative of a handful of marooned characters and their captive women, who, except for one delicate Englishman, are brutalised, brutal, illiterate, or all three. Sarah Hay gives this situation austere and potent handling in her Vogel Prize-winning novel, Skins. The title evokes more than sealing or skin colour, although both senses are foregrounded in the book; it is fundamentally concerned with the behaviour of humans in naked need, whose circumstances are so circumscribed that only crude choices ... read more.

The Australian Frontier Wars 1788-1838 (2002)

Reviewed by Lorenzo Veracini in the April 2003 issue.
The Ice and the Inland The Australian Frontier Wars 1788-1838 These are very different books: a sophisticated argument concerning the shaping of an Australian consciousness, and an acutely needed military overview of the first fifty years of British presence on the continent. Both works, however, repropose forcefully the question of the defining role of the 'frontier' in Australian history, and aim to revisit in a similar direction a theme that is strategically located at the heart of Australian debates about the foundations of the national identity. Despite their very different approach ... read more.

The Man Who Lost Himself: The Unbelievable Story of the Tichborne Claimant (2002)

Reviewed by Strephyn Mappin in the December 2002 issue.
Unbelievable but true, Robyn Annear's The Man Who Lost Himself is the fascinating retelling of the machinations surrounding what was, until recently, the longest and most puzzling trial in English history. Lost at sea in 1854, Roger Tichborne was the heir to extensive estates and an English baronetcy. Frail of stature and an odd and spoilt mummy's boy, Tichborne had been brought up mostly in France. After spending some time as a Carabineer with the 6th Dragoon Guards, he went adventuring in South America in order to escape both a frowned upon love affair with his cousin and the demands of his ... read more.

Hooky the Cripple (2002)

Reviewed by Deborah Hunn in the Aug/Sep 2003 issue.
The transformation of ex-con Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read - notorious, albeit apparently reformed, crook and hitman - into a successful writer may strike some cynics as yet another of those bizarre triumphs of celebrity over substance that have become all too familiar in our surface obsessed late-capitalist culture. Such a response, however, does not do justice to the skills of Read, whose forays into crime writing repay some serious consideration. In turning from conman to penman, he is certainly no rival for Jean Genet, but his 'Chopper' books - an idiosyncratic series with such crassly ... 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.

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