Anthea Taylor

Readers Writing The First Stone Media Event: Letters to the Editor, Australian Feminisms and Mediated Citizenship

In March 1995, Helen Garner’s controversial work of ‘non-fiction’, The First Stone — her critique of what she perceived to be the excesses of contemporary Australian feminism — sparked a mass-mediated furore that suggests much about the operation of the ‘postmodern public sphere’ in Australia.1 In order to more deeply understand this media event, this article explores a form of participatory culture that is often overlooked in contemporary cultural analysis: letters to the editor.2 Rather than viewing this media event as the monologic articulation of conservative voices, this article argues that letters to the editor forums during The First Stone ... read more.
 

Grace Karskens

Tourists and Pilgrims: (Re)visiting The Rocks

On any day of the week, Sydney’s historic Rocks area is crowded with visitors. Overseas tourists browse, take photographs, and buy opals and perfume in dutyfree shops. The glossy face of George Street’s restored Victorian and Edwardian shopfronts winds picture-perfect towards the deep shadow of the Bridge. Further up The Rocks, well-dressed business people eat elegant food in a pleasant, greened courtyard. In the 1830s, this courtyard was the backyard of the ship-smith William Reynolds, and was strewn with the detritus of his trade and home. Here, behind the small, flat-fronted stone houses he built in Harrington Street (now a cafe and gift shop), Reynolds stoked his forge, and ... read more.
 

Lynton Crosby

The Liberal Party

The 2001 federal election posed significant challenges for the Coalition. Redistributions in Western Australia, New South Wales, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and South Australia left the Government with a notional majority, based upon the 1998 election results, of just six seats. A loss of three seats would have cost the Government its majority taking into account the loss of Ryan and defection of the member for Kennedy, Bob Katter. In addition the benefits of incumbency were lost in the seven seats where members were retiring. These included three high profile Ministers who were not recontesting. Katter's defection from the National Party and the high profile candidacy of Tony Windsor ... read more.
 

Lorenzo Veracini

Towards a Further Redescription of the Australian Pastoral Frontier

This article proposes a reading of Aboriginal agency on the Australian pastoral frontier that departs from some of the conventional interpretative patterns.1 It simultaneously constitutes a reinterpretation of the secondary sources published since the late 1960s and a critical analysis of the historical debates on Aboriginal ‘collaboration’ and resistance. The pastoral invasion of Aboriginal districts was the major recurrent form of early invasion, and a common pattern of experience has been identified.2 The notion that Australia witnessed a sometimes determined resistance by indigenous clans trying to repel invasion now enjoys a wide currency among historians and the general ... read more.
 

Rod Lucas

The Failure of Anthropology

While there were disparate forms of anthropology presented at the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Royal Commission there was only one which became the measure of veracity and truth. This was a perspective which emerged from the museum as an institution. This was an anthropology which valued collection, appropriation and textual rendering over other forms of knowledge. There is a telling confluence in notions of fact, logic and common sense which made this anthropology the most amenable to legal inquiry. Countering this was a view of anthropological knowledge emerging from the academy - one which employed an epistemology based on social relationships and negotiated disclosure of sensitive cultural ... read more.
 

Michael Moller

Reclaiming the Game: Fandom, Community and Globalisation

Just after 10am on 6 July 2001, I received an email from a South Sydney rugby league football club supporter advising that the club had won the support of the Australian Federal Court in pressing for re-admission to the competition from which it had been excluded for the past two years. As a subscriber to a supporters’ e-group, my inbox rapidly filled with dozens of messages jubilantly proclaiming the club’s legal win. I felt a powerful sense of elation and of wanting to be among others who would respond even more keenly to ‘their’ victory. This was satisfied by a visit to Souths’ League’s Club in Redfern where I knew supporters had been assembled since ... read more.
 

Amanda G Taylor

A Fashionable Production: Advertising and Consumer Culture on the Australian Stage

I always suspected that nine-tenths of the women go to musical comedies to see the dresses. They proved it on Saturday by applauding the frocks, and doing it openly and unashamedly.1It was, in every sense, a most fashionable production when Our Miss Gibbs, a musical comedy set in a luxurious department store, opened in 1911 at Her Majesty’s theatre, Melbourne. The theatre was ‘full of the most expensive people’ who arrived wearing ‘some exquisite gowns’.2 And as the Bulletin’s report indicates, ‘the new library of dresses’ which appeared on the stage was equal to the scrutiny of the feminine portion of the audience who responded by ... read more.
 

Anette Bremer

Plagiarism and Presentation of Self in Elizabeth Spurrell's Journal of her Voyage to New South Wales 1815-16

At first glance, Elizabeth Spurrell is something of an anomaly in the history of travel to early New South Wales. Her journal tells us that she disembarked at Sydney Cove in August 1815 and remained in the colony until the following March. While her travelogue describes what she did and with whom she fraternised, it is curiously silent on why she journeyed across the seas in the first place. In light of this, it is difficult to know how to account for her travel. Two familiar definitions of the unattached woman traveller — the matron inspired with missionary zeal and the adventuring spinster — belong to the later Victorian era.1 Nor is it possible to subsume her narrative within ... read more.
 

Janine Hiddlestone

Voices from the Battlefield: Personal Narratives as an Historical Tool in Studying the Place of the Vietnam War in Australian Society

The use of personal narratives has proved a popular method of studying the Vietnam War, both in Australia and the United States. Vietnam was one of the most controversial and longest wars in contemporary history. It was a war that was fought on the home front as well as on the battlefield, and for many, the wounds inflicted are still painful more than a quarter of a century later. The rush of histories that quickly followed previous wars were not so swift to appear after Vietnam. There was no great victory to celebrate and many found difficulty placing Vietnam into the context of a proud military history. When histories started appearing, they focused mainly on how Australia and the United ... read more.
 

Lisa Hill

Pauline Hanson, Free Speech and Reconciliation

Pauline Hanson’s comments in parliament on the so-called ‘race issue’ have been divisive. She has referred to ‘the privileges that Aboriginals enjoy over other Australians’ and has been critical of the so-called ‘guilt’ or ‘Aboriginal Industry’ putatively generated and defended by ‘the fat cats, bureaucrats and do gooders’ who are said to feed off it.1 Ms Hanson has spoken, often inaccurately but with legal impunity, giving rise to a number of questions about the rights, duties and special privileges of parliamentarians especially where the issues of recognition and reconciliation are concerned. In the Westminster tradition ... read more.