America's Pie: Trade and Culture After 9/11

Jock Given, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003, 112 Pages, Paperback, $16.95: Reviewed by Melissa Gregg in the March 2004 issue.

Deceptive in its brevity, this significant text begins with a wry observation. Since 9/11, the Statue of Liberty has been closed 'for security reasons'. The symbol of freedom so treasured in the Home of the Brave is now hidden for fear of attack. In one of many historical insights which suffuse this book, Jock Given's introduction notes the importance of the statue as a gift from the people of France, affirming friendship and shared values between two nations. At the time, the author writes, the gesture symbolised both states' commitment to the ideals of freedom and autonomy enshrined in the republic. This was a moment when the French looked to the US as a guiding light in such matters. ... read more.
 

Beautiful, Unfinished

MTC Cronin, Applecross: Salt, 2003, 104 Pages, Paperback, : Reviewed by Stephen Lawrence in the March 2004 issue.

M.T.C. Cronin has the true poetic eye. Her creative confidence does not bully or coerce: it seduces. In a way, this collection is a come-on to the audience: she positions herself visually as a sexy Madonna: Luring, tempting, convincing Desire me after all this is abandoned.The back cover photograph is of an El Greco saint glancing heavenward, her barely containable intellect and poetic soul about to burst forth, like an alien from its ripe, sticky egg. Cronin's collection is subtitled 'PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM.' (Something is going on even before we open the book: Why is the title in lower-case and the subtitle in capitals? And why does the subtitle banish plurals?) The first of its four ... read more.
 

Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia's Female Publicans

Clare Wright, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003, 240 Pages, Paperback, $34.95: Reviewed by Rae Frances in the March 2004 issue.

For decades Australian publishers have been saying that doctoral theses do not make good books. While I have never believed this, Clare Wright's first book should convince anyone that the book-of-the-thesis need not be tediously worthy and inaccessible to the general reader. Beyond the Ladies Lounge is a thoroughly engaging, mercifully jargon-free, passionate yet intelligent cultural history of the female publican in Australia. Wright has a clear aim: she seeks to convince the reader that the Australian pub was never an exclusively male preserve. On the contrary, female publicans have always been prominent as hotelkeepers, playing an important role in the social life of their communities, ... read more.
 

Chinese Women and the Global Village

Jan Ryan, St Lucia: UQP and API Network, 2003, 210 Pages, Paperback, : Reviewed by Bethaney Turner in the March 2004 issue.

Chinese Women and the Global Village is a detailed analysis of the impact that the diverse migratory experiences of Chinese women in Australia has on their everyday life practices, from the private sphere concerns of family to the public work place environment. Jan Ryan's analysis of these elements is informed by an overt theoretical interest in the construction of identity, particularly in relation to issues of ethnicity and gender, and how these influence the identities that the women prescribe for themselves and those that are ascribed to them by others. Most interestingly, Ryan explores how these various identities, or identifications, which generally seek to locate Chinese women in ... read more.
 

Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language

Don Watson, Sydney: Random House, 2003, Hardback, $29.95: Reviewed by David Ritter in the March 2004 issue.

Don Watson is an historian who has achieved national prominence beyond the usual boundaries of academia, first as a scriptwriter, then as the chief author of the speeches of the last Labor Prime Minister and, most recently, as the author of the elegiac Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM. Watson's new work, which has augmented his growing status as one of Australia's more prominent public intellectuals, is Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language,1 in which he floridly and vehemently argues that the idiom 'of political and business leaders and civil servants' in Australia is in a state of terrible decline (p. 1). In Watson's view civic language has ... read more.
 

History and Native Title

Christine Choo and Shawn Hollbach, Nedlands: UWA Press, 2003, 276 Pages, Paperback, : Reviewed by Elizabeth Coleman in the March 2004 issue.

Published ten years after the introduction of the Native Title Act, the sixteen essays published in this issue of Studies in Western Australian History present a 'snap-shot' of the outcomes of a legal solution to the moral problems created by colonialism. The essays, written by Aboriginal people and historians involved in the native title process, discuss the possibilities opened up by the Act, and the bitter disappointments and achievements that flowed from it. As such, History and Native Title is an important historical document in its own right. The editors, Christine Choo and Shawn Hollbach, have organised the essays into three sections -- an introduction and overview of the key ... read more.
 

Ingenious: Emerging Youth Cultures in Urban Australia

Melissa Butcher and Many Thomas eds, North Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2003, 220 Pages, Paperback, $29.95: Reviewed by Julie Ustinoff in the March 2004 issue.

Ingenious, as the editors indicate in their acknowledgements, grew largely out of research conducted for the GENERATE project conducted in New South Wales in 2000. That project aimed to 'realise the contemporary nature of migration heritage and highlight the positive contribution that young people from migrant backgrounds make to the creation of that heritage, and to dynamic culture in Sydney and Australia.' Clearly that research uncovered a thriving youth culture among Australian young people with migrant backgrounds, and revealed an enormous degree of diversity in their expressions of individual and community identity. Ingenious, therefore, is an attempt to capture, through a range of ... read more.
 

Life and Death in the Age of Sail: The Passage to Australia

Robin Haines, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003, 366 Pages, Paperback, $49.95: Reviewed by Christine Cheater in the March 2004 issue.

Robin Haines opens her account of the en route experiences of the 750,000 government assisted British families migrating to Australia in the nineteenth century with a quote. The quote is taken from a letter written by Sarah Brunhill, an emigrant to South Australia in 1838. The letter is a cry of grief, a lament for the loss of her two children, one from diarrhoea and one from measles, on the same day. Haines then asks: Was this experience typical of voyages to Australia in the age of sail? How did government officials deal with the problems of transporting emigrant families half way around the world? And, more importantly, how did emigrants cope with and react to the adversities of sea ... read more.
 

Mr Ruddock Goes to Geneva

Spencer Zifcak, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003, 92 Pages, Paperback, $16.95: 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 for its scope, detail, clarity and fairness. Zifcak is Associate Professor of Law at LaTrobe ... read more.
 

North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia's North

Henry Reynolds, Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2003, 220 Pages, Hardcover, $49.95: Reviewed by Raymond Evans in the March 2004 issue.

In comparison with Henry Reynolds' many other works, this is a surprisingly slight production. In a volume of almost 240 pages, there are less than 100 of actual text. Quotation from a select range of sources is fulsome, accounting for almost one-third of the narrative. The rest is devoted to photographs and other illustrations reproduced on glossy art paper: Not quite a coffee-table book, but close. Thematically this also represents a new departure for Reynolds' scholarship, the bulk of which has previously examined frontier contact and post-frontier labour relations on the Australian mainland and in Tasmania. The theme of North of Capricorn, however, is racial diversity and racism, ... read more.
 

Sea Change: Movement from Metropolitan to Arcadian Australia

Ian Burnley and Peter Murphy, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003, 272 Pages, Paperback, : 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 undercurrent of counter-urbanisation. This 'population turnaround' is the subject of Ian Burnley and Peter ... read more.
 

Sexing it Up: Iraq, Intelligence and Australia

Geoffrey Barker, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003, 112 Pages, Paperback, $16.95: Reviewed by Daniel Fazio in the March 2004 issue.

Sexing it up provides a lucid account and analysis of the revelations of how the Bush Administration, and the Blair and Howard governments used imprecise and manipulated intelligence information and political spin to procure public support for the war against Iraq. Barker discusses how and why this was possible and the consequences and lessons that need to be drawn from this. His study raises some important questions about the honesty and integrity of these three governments. The issues Barker discusses reflect the current state of Australian politics where public apathy and political cynicism and expediency have undermined trust in the political process. Essentially, Barker achieves his ... read more.
 

Shadow Lines

Stephen Kinnane, Fremantle: FACP, 2003, 414 Pages, Paperback, $29.95: Reviewed by Fiona Probyn in the March 2004 issue.

As I write this review on campus at the University of Sydney (built on the grounds of an Indigenous meeting place), there are media reports of a riot in Redfern between police and Indigenous residents of the 'Block'; a seventeen-year-old Indigenous boy was killed after being impaled on a fence when his bicycle crashed. He thought police were chasing him -- the police say they were blocks away. The media reports it as another event of Indigenous violence, using words like 'rampage' and asking the police officers involved what it was like to be injured. It quickly became a story of whites under attack, which overshadowed the boy's own history and effaced histories of violence that shadow this ... read more.
 

The Best Australian Poetry 2003

Martin Duwell and Bronwyn Lea eds, St Lucia: UQP, 2003, 126 Pages, Paperback, $19.95: Reviewed by Mark Mahemoff in the March 2004 issue.

It's good to see this kind of book being published, not because it is necessarily an anthology of the best Australian poetry, whatever that actually means, but because it will provide an annual forum for critically appraising a variety of contemporary poetry being written in Australia today. It appears to be modelled on The Best American Poetry anthology series edited by David Lehman, which uses a celebrated poet as guest editor for each annual anthology. The differences between the American and Australian editions, at least in this first offering, are apparent in the size and production values. The average Best American Poetry anthology has about twice as many pages and is built to last. ... read more.
 

The Boy

Germaine Greer, London: Thames and Hudson, 2003, 256 Pages, Hardcover, 206 Illus, 177 Colour, $90.00: Reviewed by Cherry Hood in the March 2004 issue.

It's a curious moment for me to be writing this essay about Germaine Greer's book The Boy. Currently, I am collaborating on some paintings with an amazing young writer, JT LeRoy,1 and can't be as objective in this review as I might otherwise have been. You will have to read his tough, gripping stories to find out exactly what I mean, but the following excerpt from a review of one of his books provides some idea of his work and its potential force. It was two years ago, the night I finished reading Sarah, JT LeRoy's 2000 tale of a boy who becomes a lot lizard (truck stop whore) to compete with his mother, assuming her identity in the mouths and arms of tricks. In his quest for a bigger ... read more.
 

The Hawke Government: A critical retrospective

Susan Ryan and Troy Bramston, North Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2003, 512 Pages, Paperback, $39.95: Reviewed by Bobbie Oliver in the March 2004 issue.

The concept of a 'critical retrospective' to mark the twentieth anniversary of the election of the first Hawke Government is undoubtedly worthwhile, and some of the contributions to this edited collection are of a high standard, yet the book's major weakness is the uneven quality of the contributions. Perhaps this is inevitable when authorship ranges across a number of disciplines and professions, each with its own set of requirements and standards. This reviewer found the chapters written by academically-trained authors to be generally more objective, contextualised and genuinely critical than those by journalists, whilst the politicians' chapters also varied considerably in quality and ... read more.
 

The Mayor's a Square: Live Music and Law and Order in Sydney

Shane Homan, Newtown: Local Consumption Publications, 2003, 210 Pages, Paperback, : Reviewed by Julie Ustinoff in the March 2004 issue.

Congratulations, Shane Homan! The Mayor's a Square is an excellent cultural history of the Australian music industry. The book deftly charts the industry's troubled relationship with government and organisational bodies, many of which were intent on controlling, containing and often repressing youthful subcultures through a range of regulatory means that have impacted on the public music experiences of young Australians for almost fifty years. The Mayor's a Square is a refreshing change from previous works dealing with the Australian popular music industry. Until Homan's work appeared, there was little on offer that had the ability to capture the essence and vibrancy of the Australian ... read more.
 

Upstaged: Australian Women Dramatists in the Limelight at Last

Michelle Arrow, Strawberry Hills: Currency Press, 2002, 262 Pages, Paperback, $29.95: Reviewed by Donald Pulford in the March 2004 issue.

Simply stated, an orthodoxy of Australian theatre history runs something like this: an aggressively Australian and oppositional theatre came about in the early 1970s with the birth of the New Wave, most notably the Australian Performing Group and the Nimrod. Venus-like they sprang from the spume of a featureless sea. Before them, there was nothing of substance, even allowing for the possible exceptions of Louis Esson and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. The new generation of Australian theatre makers did not acknowledge the achievements of earlier artists, particularly their similarity to aspects of the New Theatre movement, upstaging and overshadowing them with their own boisterous work. ... read more.
 

Verandah Music: Roots of Australian Tradition

Graham Seal and Rob Willis, Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2003, 160 Pages, Paperback, $49.95: Reviewed by Tony Smith in the March 2004 issue.

'Verandah' music is traditional and non-commercial in character and is played and sung primarily in homes and workplaces and occasionally at larger public gatherings. Usually, it is played solo or in small groups and is transmitted orally through personal contact rather than through mass media. The repertoire is often original, sometimes adapting or parodying popular songs. The survival of this homespun, unsophisticated musicianship is testament to a universal creative need unmet by the consumption of mass disseminated, professionally produced musical genres. The gathering of this music into written form and its collection using tape recorders is a sensitive task. One subject of Verandah ... read more.