Tim Kendall

Looking for New Opportunities: Sang Ye and the Discourse of Multiculturalism

I don’t care what happens, I’m not going back, and no one in Australia can do anything to make me. Just try me: you can boil me in oil, cook me in soy sauce, pop me in a steamer, whatever you’ve got a taste for. Call me a slut if you like. Doesn’t bother me. “You’re a goddamn whore!” Yeah, and what of it! “The East Wind blows, the war drums roll; in today’s world, no one’s scared of anyone else.” Chairman Mao taught us Chinese not even to fear death. So why should I be scared of losing face? Just write it all down and to hell with it ... 1In July 1996, Nikki Barrowclough published an article in the Good Weekend section of the ... read more.
 

Trish Luker

Intention and Iterability in Cubillo v Commonwealth

In order to function, that is, in order to be legible, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to detach itself from the present and singular intention of its production.1In August 2000, Justice O’Loughlin of the Federal Court of Australia handed down the decision in Cubillo v Commonwealth,2 in which Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner unsuccessfully sued the Commonwealth, arguing that it was vicariously liable for their unlawful and forcible removals from their families as children and subsequent detentions in the Retta Dixon Home and St Mary’s Hostel in the Northern Territory during the 1940s and ’50s. They argued that during this time, the ... read more.
 

Karen Martin — Booran Mirraboopa

Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing: A Theoretical Framework and Methods for Indigenous and Indigenist Re-search

IntroductionThe myth of terra nullius implied that this country was uninhabited and terra nullius social policy supported by research enabled for the dispossession of knowledges of Indigenous peoples. It must be remembered that university curriculum, teaching methodologies and research endeavours have a history of development that contributed to this dispossession. Has the time come for change?3Aboriginal writers Jackie Huggins,4 Michael Dodson,5 Rosemary van den Berg 6 and Lester Irabinna Rigney 7 argue that the quantity of research conducted in Aboriginal lands and on Aboriginal people since British invasion in the late 1770s is so immense that it makes us one of the most researched groups ... read more.
 

Caryl Bosman

Homes for Everyone

The Golden Grove Development, situated approximately twenty kilometres north east of the Adelaide CBD, is South Australia’s, and perhaps Australia’s, first largescale fully planned residential development. Initiated in the early 1970s as a state government project, it eventually became a joint venture between the state government and the Delfin Property Group. The development of the Golden Grove site was subject to an indenture ratified by parliament in late 1984. The indenture stipulated ten paramount objectives, which were to ensure that planning, marketing and development produced a ‘diverse’ ‘community’ environment. The ratification of the indenture ... read more.
 

Jacqueline Dickenson

'The greatest curse and traitor': H H Champion and the Australian Labour Movement

In all class struggles, treachery to the workers pays the traitor well.1On 7 November 1890, William Campbell of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) in Melbourne wrote to the British labour activist John Burns: ‘There is hardly a day elapses but what I have the pleasure of looking at your Photo … and comparing it with the original of Mr Champion’.2 In Campbell’s view, the photograph of the British socialist, Henry Hyde Champion, did not compare favourably with that of Burns. It showed the face of a man he could no longer trust: ‘the greatest curse and traitor that ever stood amongst the body of working men’. Three months earlier, Campbell and his ... read more.
 

Andrew Johnson

Orpheus on the Hawkesbury: Placing Robert Adamson

Just why the environment, the natural world, the landscape or even the flora and fauna peculiar to this continent should feature so prominently among the subjects of Australian poetry — almost as if to write poetry as an Australian is to venerate nature in one form or another — remains a substantial question. The way in which different Australian poets have addressed such themes of environment and ‘place’, and how they have found and lost themselves in the process, are questions of equal importance. The standard response to both questions — that this focus is part of the inheritance Australian poets, like poets across the western world, have received from their ... read more.
 

Christine Boman

'Let's get her': Masculinities and Sexual Violence in Contemporary Australian Drama and its Film Adaptations

Many commentators have observed the existence of a masculinist bias as a significant feature in the history of Australian drama and film, with the nexus between masculinity and violence evident in a large number of texts. During the last two decades, issues concerning men and masculinity have gained a high profile on the public agenda and, in the aftermath of the second-wave of feminism, there have been frequent suggestions that masculinity is ‘in crisis’. A number of plays and their film adaptations, spanning the decade from 1991 to 2001, can be seen to engage with recent debates in their thematic treatment of masculinities ‘under pressure’. This article explores the ... read more.
 

Maria Tumarkin

'Wishing You Weren't Here …': Thinking About Trauma, Place and the Port Arthur Massacre

Michael Taussig, Columbia University professor and the Mick Jagger of Anthropology, giving his keynote address at a ‘Space and Identity’ conference in North Carolina,1 says that, ‘An island is as likely to be a prison as a utopia. A hell-on-earth as a paradise. Think about it! All these islands that were once prisons ... Devil’s Island, Alcatraz, Norfolk, Greek Islands, the whole of Australia’.2 The audience laughs, grateful, relieved. The point is made. There is no need for the esteemed speaker to continue with the list. There must be, at least, three or four Australians in the room. For a moment, our thoughts merge. Tasmania’s unparalleled utopian ... read more.
 

Eva Dobozy

Teaching Democracy and Human Rights: A Curriculum Perspective

Curriculum documents are open to multiple readings and despite attempts by bureaucracies to impose a preferred reading on the curriculum text, teachers, in the privacy of their own classrooms, interpret and implement these documents on the basis of their own experiences, discipline base, beliefs and philosophy of teaching and education. The attempt to control meaning may well be seen to be futile.1Democracy and human rights are among the most significant concepts discussed in established and new democracies in recent times. The discussions are fuelled by conceptual and ideological controversies. The concept of democratic citizenship has developed over a historical and political continuum and ... read more.
 

Robert Sparrow

Talking Sense about Political Correctness

Over the last seven years or so the expression ‘political correctness’ has entered the political lexicon in the English-speaking world. Hundreds of opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines have been written about it in addition to scores of academic articles and debates in which the expression has gained currency. It is close to being received opinion in Anglo-American popular culture that a coalition of feminists, ethnic minorities, socialists and homosexuals have achieved a hegemony in the public sphere so as to make possible their censorship, or at least the effective silencing, of views which differ from a supposed ‘politically correct’ orthodoxy. ... read more.