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Malcolm Mackerras
When Prime Minister John Winston Howard declared himself the victor on election night he made a claim which was initially disputed by some television analysts. The claim was that the two party preferred vote swing to his Government in 2001 was the biggest general election swing to any Government since 1966. It can be seen from Table 28.1 that, when all the votes were counted, Howard was correct. Table 28.1 tells us that in 22 general elections since 1949 only five (1955, 1963, 1966, 1993 and 2001) produced a two party preferred swing in votes towards the Government. However, it should be ...
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Network Review of Books

Devotion (2006)

Reviewed by Marion May Campbell in the July 2006 issue.
For this elegantly constructed and potent first novel Ffion Murphy chooses cyberspace and the hospital corridor for the literally haunting narrative front, off-setting the potential claustrophobia of these spaces by broadly brushed estuary and beach vistas around Perth, Western Australia. The suburban gothic opens in elegiac mode with a backlit idyll underscored by dread -- the family picnic at Mt Eliza is disrupted by a visitation and a portent of loss. The pregnant body of the young mother, Veronica Peterson, is the site of contestation: the baby son will be reluctant to be born; the husband ... read more.

Drawing the Crow (2006)

Reviewed by Eva Chapman in the July 2006 issue.
This collection of essays is told through a 'set of South Australian eyes', those of Adrian Mitchell who grew up in Adelaide in the 1950s and is now a Professor of English at the University of Sydney. At the outset of this memoir, the author explains that the phrase, 'drawing the crow' can mean 'coming off worst in any allocation'. Having drawn the crow myself when I landed in Adelaide in 1950 as a three-year-old refugee from Eastern Europe, I was curious to read about that era from the point of view of a person born and bred in Adelaide. I was not disappointed. This book is a real treat. I ... read more.

Network Dialogue

The Australian Public Intellectual Network is conducting a survey on the best minds in the country: these might include academics, writers, activists, professionals, religious leaders, politicians, community leaders, etc. The API Network keen to know who you might rank as the ten most influential and/or important thinkers in Australia at this present moment? You may want to make a distinction between importance and influence in compiling your list. Are there reasons for your selection?
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Network Books
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Comic Commentators: Contemporary Political Cartooning

Edited by Robert Phiddian and Haydon Manning
Anyone who reads a newspaper reads the political cartoons. Each is an island of condensed visual humour in a sea of print. For more than a century, Australia has had a particularly potent and much-loved cartooning tradition, but we have only a limited understanding of how cartoons work and what they really do. As the response to the Danish Mohammed cartoons and the debate over the 2006 Sedition laws suggest, there is a growing sensitivity to cartoons' potential impact in public ... ($34.95) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

ACH 26: Australian Television History

Edited by Liz Jacka
In 2006, Australia commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of television in Australia.� This led to a flurry of celebrations by the various free-to-air networks, but it also provided the occasion for renewed academic attention to the history of television in Australia, an area, it is quickly discovered, that has been almost shamelessly neglected by historians and media scholars, with a few honorable exceptions.� In the year leading up to the anniversary a number of media academics and historians joined ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

Australian Rock: Essays on Popular Music

Jon Stratton
"Stratton has been writing authoritatively on aspects of Australian popular music for a number of years. This book brings together for the first time some of his most important work in this under-represented field of popular music studies.An absolutely essential read for all those with an interest in the highly complex interplay between popular music, space and place." (Andy Bennett, Professor of Cultural Sociology at Griffith University. Author of Popular Music and Youth Culture and the ... ($34.95) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

Big Stars

John Castles, with afterword by John Frow
Why does the crowd scream when the star appears? They can hardly be surprised. Nor can they be registering critical approval for a performance that has not begun. Rather, they are performing the essential task of making themselves into a crowd, which then tumbles down into the star figure who absorbs it and can then give it back or withhold it. The star is like a black hole. His appearance creates a massive object, the crowd, which experiences itself moving, tumbling towards an ... ($34.95) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

ACH 21: To the Islands: Australia and the Caribbean

Edited by Russell McDougall
Historically, the degree of contact between the West Indies and the Antipodes has been considerable, particularly in the colonial period. But the Empire vestiges of the Caribbean in Australia are now quite eclipsed; and the sum present meaning of the Caribbean for most Australians is probably cricket, rum, exotic holidays and a residual childhood mythology of pirate adventure. This volume seeks to salvage something of the history and meaning of the Caribbean in Australia, simultaneously begging ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 70: Romancing the Nation

Edited by Richard Nile
Contributions include: "Romanticism, Nationalism and Myth" by Andrew McCann; "Subverting the Empire" by Paul Genoni; "Les Murray's Fredy Neptune" by Ian J Bickerton; "Unsettled Country" by Perrie Ballantyne; "Historical Collections" by James Gore; "Remembering Eureka" by Anne Beggs Sunter; "Wild Children" by Lynette Russell; "A Cure for all Seasons" by Peter Davies. ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 75: Country

Edited by Richard Nile
Contributions include: "History in Black and White: a critical analysis of the Black Armband debate" by Anna Clark; "Why We Need Black Armbands" by Adi Wimmer; "A Poetics of Failure is No Bad Thing: Stephen Muecke and Margaret Somerville's White Writing" by Fiona Probyn; "Aboriginal Affairs: Monologue or Dialogue?" by Vanessa Castejon; "Racial Essentialism: A Mercurial Concept at the 1937 Canberra Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 77: Sojourners and Strangers

Edited by Richard Nile
Contributions include: "Australia's New Other: Shaping Compassion for Onshore Refugees" by Sonia Magdalena Tasc�n; "Woomera 2002 Festival of Freedoms: Experiencing community in tragic recognition of the other" by David Monson; "A Fair Queue? Australian Public Discourse on Refugees and Immigration" by Katharine Gelber; "Teaching Democracy and Human Rights: A Curriculum Perspective" by Eva Dobozy; "Rethinking Australian Studies in Japanese Universities: ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 78: Grit

Edited by Richard Nile
Contributions include: "The Dole Wars" by Anthony Yeates; "The Housewives' Wages Debate in the 1920s Australian Press" by Louie Traikovski; "The New Face of Police Governance in Australia" by Beno�t Dupont; "Youth Workers, Professional Identities and Narratives of Workplace Change: A Preliminary Report" by Judith Bessant and Ruth Webber; "The Age of Transition: Nursing and Caring in the Nineteenth Century" by Wendy Madsen; "Nursing Gallipoli: ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 79: Rezoning Australia

Edited by Richard Nile
Contributions include: "Cartography and Native Title" by Alexander Reilly; "Localising National Identity: Albany's Anzacs" by Robyn Mayes; "Tourists and Pilgrims: (Re)Visiting the Rocks" by Grace Karskens; "Selling the Snowy: The Snowy Mountains Scheme and National Mythmaking" by Grahame Griffin; "Imaging a Nation: Australia's Representation at the Venice Biennale, 1958" by Sarah Scott; "Queensland Shows the World: Regionalism and Modernity at ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 81: Colonial Post

Edited by Richard Nile
Contributions include: "Myths and Non-Myths: Frontier 'Massacres' in Australian History -- The Woppaburra of the Keppel Islands" by Michael Rowland; "The 'little empire of Wybalenna': Becoming Colonial in Australia" by Anna Johnston; "Develop the North: Aborigines, Environment and Australian Nationhood in the 1930s" by Russell McGregor; "'Their Ultimate Absorption': Assimilation in 1930s Australia" by John Chesterman and Heather Douglas; "Beyond Orality ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

JAS 82: Colour

Edited by Richard Nile with Denise Tallis
Contributions include: "Dark Tourism and the Celebrity Prisoner: Front and Back Regions in Representations of an Australian Historical Prison" by Jacqueline Zara Wilson; "The Tempest: Creating dialogue from points of difference" by Angela Campbell; "'It pulsates with dramatic power': White Slavery, Popular Culture and Modernity in Australia in 1913" by Jeannette Delamoir; "Understanding History as a Rhetorical Strategy: Constructions of Truth and ... ($24.5) -- TO ORDER ONLINE, please click here or contact the Network Books office at 08 9266 4788 with your details. Alternatively, you can email orders@api-network.com or download our mail-order form.

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