Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Public Intellectuals: Writing AustraliaFfion Murphy

The pursuit of learning and the acquisition of knowledge involve what has been referred to as civic responsibility.1 It might be supposed, therefore, that education and scholarship connect in important and direct ways with citizenship in that they imply the rights and obligations of all citizens to critique and better understand the worlds of their lived experience.

Like the classic role assigned to the public intellectual, citizens engage in the ?production, transmission and adaption of ideas about society and culture?.2 To some extent all citizens, including the most compliant, reluctant or subversive, participate in social dialogue that draws them into the realm of the public intellectual. The conditions of citizenship may well demand that we all be ?intellectuals? of one type or another, but clearly we are authorised to ?speak our minds? to a very ?uneven extent?.3 For instance, not everyone, as John Frow has argued, belongs to what might be called the ?knowledge class?, those whose principal occupations involve specialist analysis and interpretation.4

The social categories of citizen, public intellectual and knowledge specialist continually intersect and sometimes blur into one another. Editor of Eureka Street, Morag Fraser, has argued that ?public intellectuals?, a term many Australians may not be especially comfortable with ? even public intellectuals themselves ? are those ?people who spend a great deal of their time thinking hard about issues? and who ?make those thoughts accessible in a way that is, broadly speaking, for the public good?. In a similar fashion, Nicholas Jose has observed: ?the interesting thing is that intellectuals in Australia are bound together by some sort of commitment or responsibility to Australia?.5

Yet according to Brian Head, writing in the late 1980s, ?Australian intellectuals have been reluctant to adopt a high public profile. Intellectual work, after all, is often contrasted with the activities of Australian cultural heroes: high achievers in sports, exploration, political leadership, entertainment, and (perhaps) technical innovation?.6 The silence and silencing of public intellectual debate in the mid-to-late 1990s is perhaps an indication that Australian public intellectuals lack the confidence to speak out and demand to be heard when the circumstances do not favour them. From a public intellectual point of view, Australian civic culture may, indeed, be quite weak. The politically inspired reinvigoration of the ?battler?,7 who is sceptically opposed to political correctness and intellectualism, especially, left many public intellectuals alienated, and bewildered that the openness they felt had characterised Australia since the 1970s could be so transformed.

With breathtaking simplicity, just about any suggestion of detailed cultural analysis could be swept aside on the basis that the questions raised were too ?academic?, merely ?hypothetical?, overly ?partisan?, not ?dignified?, lacking ?common sense? or outside the bounds of ?reasonableness?. Alone almost, economics seemed to be saved from this process as its jargon consolidated in political-speak with specialised terms like micro- and macro-economic reform, complex agendas like economic rationalism and globalisation, tropes like level playing field, and euphemisms like down sizing and voluntary separation, becoming part of public language and public experience. Linguistically, Australia moved from ?reconciliation? to the ?black armband view of history?, from ?multiculturalism? to the ?mainstream?, from ?tolerance? to ?un-Australian?, and from ?the republic? to ?the monarchy?. Arguably, societies most need their public intellectuals when circumstances do not favour them. Equally, intellectuals need to be more critical and self-reflective when circumstances do appear to favour them.

Into the mix, Mark Davis proposed his ?generation x? thesis in Gangland (1998) which argues that an intellectual orthodoxy has been achieved in Australia by the generational hegemony of the baby boomers. ?Is there a backlash against young people and the way they think??, Davis asks, ?Has an older generation of cultural apparatchiks, used to being at the centre and having a strong media presence, more or less systematically set out to discredit young people and their ideas, even progressive opinion generally??. His questions are, of course, rhetorical because he has important things to say on these and related matters. A PhD student at Melbourne University, Davis? ?usual suspects? include the likes of Phillip Adams, Bettina Arndt, P P McGuinness, Gerard Henderson, Robert Manne et al ?who have dominated broadsheet opinion pages? for too long.8

Gangland might be interpreted as the classic whinge of the buster generation, who are often confused as late boomers or early x-ers. Busters fill-out the largest but most frequently overlooked demographic cohort, representing those born in the immediate wake of the boomers but before generation x. Around the time of Gangland?s publication, ?younger? journalists like McKenzie Wark, Emma Tom, Gideon Haigh, John Harms and Fiona Capp were beginning to make their mark in the broadsheets. Boomers and busters who were educated in the 1970s and 1980s benefited from free education policies, as did recent education ministers and treasurers who subsequently cut the amounts of public money spent on tertiary education. Successive governments since the late 1980s have imposed university fees on generation x which soon became known as generation HECS, on account of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme.

In Educating Australia (1997), Simon Margison argues that education policy in the 1980s and 1990s moved away from a model of input, where society accepts a civic role of educating its population for the greater public good, to one of output, in which educational settings and goals are framed according to commercial considerations.9 Educational institutions were increasingly identified with, and identified themselves as, corporate entities with products and services to sell. Under the influence of new practices, regulations and laws, postgraduate education became postgraduate training, as the squeeze was applied to fundamentals like resource allocation and completion time. Increasingly postgraduate scholarship is envisaged in terms of what students might reasonably be expected to achieve within given time limits rather than as an opportunity for them to make ?original and significant? contributions to knowledge. Postgraduates themselves, however, generally remain committed to the notion of a research culture.

Writing Australia is designed to showcase the quality of work being achieved. In late 1998, JAS invited current and recently completed postgraduates working in interdisciplinary domains to respond to a call for papers for a special issue dedicated to ?new talents?. After more than 200 expressions of interest, close to 150 abstracts were received from national and international researchers and this, together with the diversity of subject-matter and approaches, seems a clear indication of the potential and vitality of scholarship on Australia. The success of the initiative, in terms of the enthusiastic response it has received and the range and quality of submissions, suggests that new publishing options involving postgraduate scholarship might be further explored. In many instances, postgraduates are doing it for themselves with e-journals proliferating, for example, but next generation scholarship still awaits recognition by mainstream scholarly publishers and journals ? despite various estimations that postgraduate and postdoctoral work produces more than half of the research output in Australia.

Writing Australia opens with Patty O?Brien?s investigation of the use of Tasmanian women as objects of scientific, sociological and anthropological inquiry by Francoise P?ron and members of his Baudin voyage of 1800. In 1998, Patty O?Brien successfully completed her PhD thesis on colonial stereotypes of Indigenous women in the Pacific. Her article, ?Divine Browns and Mighty Whitemen?, explores how early colonial representations of women of the Pacific suggested wider occidental cultural preoccupations and anxieties about race and gender and how these in turn provided the much needed ?ideological armoury? for gender debates then taking place throughout Europe in the wake of the French Revolution.

Several writers examine the contingent nature of Australian space, specifically its shifting and unstable frontiers and the ambivalence surrounding the project of making Australia home. Christy Collis is currently writing a literature PhD, at La Trobe University, on late twentieth century Australian desert and Antarctic exploration. In her article, ?Emptying Post-Colonial Antarctica?, she argues that in the last decades of the twentieth century, Antarctica has recaptured the Australian public?s interest and considers why notions of emptiness and conquest, epitomised by Douglas Mawson's hut, retain cultural and geo-political valency. She suggests that the hut functions as an icon of or monument to the ?heroic era? of imperial expansion and as a symbol and agent of Australian acquisitive territoriality. According to Collis, the hut has been reinvoked within the Australian historical imagination to legitimate contemporary attempts at possession and spacial conquest, in response to international challenges to Australia?s sovereignty in this region.

Ruth Balint similarly explores the ?fiction of emptiness? at the centre of Australian spacial narratives. Her PhD research in history at the University of Sydney is concerned with the maritime borders of north western Australia. In her article, ?The Last Frontier?, Balint examines the implications of a 1979 decision to extend Australia?s territorial limits from twelve to 200 nautical miles. The creation of the new Australian maritime zone resulted in a jurisdiction that held dramatic implications for the traditional fishing communities of eastern Indonesia. Australia?s territorial expansion was justified using a maritime equivalent of terra nullius which made possible the annexation of the continent and, like the vacant lands of Australia Felix, the ?empty? waters off the north west coast were reclassified as ?sovereign, fertile and desirable?. In the process, impoverished east Indonesian fishermen who had fished these waters for hundreds of years were reclassified as invaders who repeatedly broke Australian laws. Balint argues that the apprehension and punishment of the fishermen is a colonial act that effectively re-enacts the brutality of Aboriginal dispossession on the mainland.

The annual performance of the hajj by millions of Muslims throughout the world suggests that Islam forms a spiritual or religious community that transcends national borders. Australian Muslims, nevertheless, aspire to national identification in both the local Australian and Meccan contexts. In her article, ?Australian Experiences of the Meccan Pilgrimage?, Katy Nebhan, a PhD student in history at the University of Sydney, argues that Muslim pilgrims, returning to Australia from Mecca share memories and mementoes of their experiences and thereby contribute to the construction of a unified Australian Muslim identity. The pilgrimage has become critical to overcoming obstacles to unity posed by extensive regional, linguistic and cultural differences.

Rochelle Siemienowicz focuses on the ambivalence surrounding Australians? right to feel at home and their obsessive search for national identity, themes that have recurred in Australian film over the past thirty years. While the old problems of dislocation and lack of identity still figure in contemporary cinema, new challenges presented by globalisation have transformed filmic representations of home. Rochelle Siemienowicz is currently writing a PhD on globalisation, national identity and contemporary cinema at Swinburne University of Technology. Her article, ?Globalisation and Home Values in New Australian Cinema?, argues that 1990s films, The Castle and Floating Life, depart from previously grim depictions of suburban life to assert the importance of home as a bulwark against impersonal and fragmenting ?global realities?. She concludes that creating, maintaining and protecting home values, without becoming isolationist or xenophobic, is perhaps the greatest and most important struggle facing Australians into the twenty-first century.

Also interrogating notions of home, Monash University PhD student, Ceridwen Spark, argues that Aboriginal people continue to be displaced by discourses of belonging which privilege settler Australia. Her article, ?Home on the Block?, begins with the proposition that loss of place plays a crucial role in the marginalisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and examines the processes of displacement forced by current policies to evacuate the Redfern block. Spark?s inner city focus presents new ?possibilities for thinking about indigenous implacement outside constructions of the authentic indigene?. She points out that denying ?persons-in-place? serves the interests of some more than others and argues that ?the block can be considered as a homeplace which, though mutable, enables Aboriginal belonging?.

The trauma of colonisation both resists and demands to be symbolised according to Sacha Gibbons, who is writing a PhD on trauma narratives in the English Department at the University of Queensland. Testimonial writing seeks to make traumatic experience, or memory, part of social and historical narratives. In his article, ?Writing Through Trauma?, Gibbons argues that the power of testimony as a literature of cultural resistance is matched by its efficacy as a process of ?re-personalisation and re-culturation?; as such it serves as a means to ?bind together families, communities and individuals?. Drawing on post-colonial and trauma theory in his investigation of Ruby Langford?s My Bundjalung People, he argues that testimonial writing, which simultaneously employs and disrupts historical and literary modalities, implicates the reader as a witness and demands specific forms of ethical, moral and political response.

Tony Hughes-d?Aeth, who was recently awarded a PhD with distinction from the University of Western Australia, is similarly concerned with issues of responsibility in relation to narrative but in the context of an interactive environment. In ?Narrative in Australian Multimedia?, he examines some recent and continuing projects in the Australian domains of history, anthropology and literature to determine how choice and interactivity affect the condition of narrative. What does it mean, he asks, to tell a story in an interactive environment? Hughes-d?Aeth argues, for example, that Carmel Bird?s Red Shoes, a novel packaged with a bonus CD-Rom version, is a challenging and thoughtful exploration of what it means to write, read and think in the interactive environment and also a provocative treatment of the problems of evil. Yet Hughes-d?Aeth is ambivalent about the ?neutrality of position? that proliferating narratives like Red Shoes ?bring about, and indeed necessitate?, because ?one does not step outside of narrative and continue understanding the world in a moral way?. He does not consider it the role of fiction to deliver moral judgements. However, he does maintain that if the contemplation of morality is a process that takes place only through the contemplation of an ending, and if endings become complex in the hypertextual medium, then this has implications for the conventional narrative dimensions of time and morality. Who, Hughes-d?Aeth asks, will be the ?angel in the house of hypertext??.

Writing fictional biography is a precarious occupation precisely because it raises tricky issues concerning authorial responsibility and transgression. Donna Lee Brien argues in ?Mary Dean and the Challenge of Writing Fictionalised Biography? that biographers who challenge orthodox biographical conventions may expose, in the stridency of the criticism levelled against them, ?how much is invested in the authorised products and methodologies of official biographical discourse?. Nevertheless, for her PhD in creative writing at the Queensland University of Technology, she tackles the story of Mary Dean, once the ?most hated woman in Sydney?, by writing the diary Mary might have produced if she had ?sought to voice her story?.

Had Mary Dean written and published her story as a novel ? a gruesome tale of a husband?s attempted murder of his wife ? it might have appeared as a ?penny dreadful? and been condemned as a ?serious evil? by those promoting high culture. Leanne Day, a postgraduate in humanities at Griffith University, examines the cultural and literary assumptions that underpinned the establishment in 1888 of the Brisbane Literary Circle, the first home reading union in Australia. In her article examining the circle?s ?Quest for Universal Culture?, she points out that this effectively meant a quest for English culture. The circle?s failure to attract the interest of the working classes and to achieve its aims is attributed in part to its refusal to broaden its curriculum to include subjects for study which would address utilitarian needs and interests.

Taking a different approach to issues of critical orthodoxy and culture wars, Kirsty Leishman explores recent debates on the production and reception of Australian ?grunge? novels. These have been typified as a struggle between ?an incumbent cultural elite who represent and reinforce established cultural institutions and knowledges? and emerging writers and intellectuals ?who seek to have an effect on cultural and public life in Australia?. Kirsty Leishman is writing her University of Queensland MA thesis on Australian zines. In her article, ?Australian Grunge Literature? she considers that generational debates, characteristic of the domain of cultural production, do not necessarily represent conscious acts of suppression and exclusion on the part of cultural elites. She suggests that the sometimes hostile response of critics to grunge writing is less a conscious effort to disregard literary values contrary to those of cultural elites, than a failure by critics to recognise the presence of values or politics in this literature. Seemingly bereft of identifiable, comprehensible moral, social or political values, grunge fiction has frequently been criticised for its lack of literary value. Leishman points out that Australian antecedents of grunge, such as Helen Garner?s Monkey Grip, contain similar incidents of sex and drug use, for example, but are endowed with a sense of moral responsibility, or a ?deep sense of political engagement?, claimed to be missing from grunge novels. Leishman maintains, furthermore, that debates about grunge literature assume a ?specifically Australian? inflection: grunge is devalued because it falls outside dominant Australian literary traditions, or ?national fictions?, thus appearing illegitimate and unauthentic. She concludes that the critical response to grunge fiction marks a missed opportunity to debate publicly the assumptions informing our national literary identity and to change some of the things ?Australia? currently means.

Vanessa Evans and Jason Sternberg also focus on generational difference. Vanessa Evans completed her Master of Business at QUT in 1999 and Jason Sternberg is writing a PhD in journalism at the University of Queensland. They observe from their qualitative research using focus groups of young people that media representations have seriously devalued young Australians? participation in politics, democracy and citizenship. As a consequence of the pitch to a much older demographic, current affairs programs lead with negative images of youth that have, in turn, contributed to the maintenance of political apathy and cynicism as a defining characteristic of generation x. ?Young People, Politics and Television Current Affairs? argues that strategies of non-participation may be empowering for young people, giving them a specific, marginal political identity. Young people may ?renegotiate power relationships? that constitute a form of ?postmodern citizenship?.

Despite the sometimes heated arguments over labelling, the controversies surrounding the value of particular fictions and the concern expressed over the relevance or usefulness of media news, it is difficult to imagine a contemporary world without books and television. Louise Poland is writing a PhD on publishing at Monash University which concentrates on the production and dissemination of printed literature by dedicated cultural enthusiasts and entrepreneurs. In her article, ?Independent Australian Publishers?, she argues that publishing is a ?high-risk business? and suggests that it may be inevitable that ?individual independent publishing ventures will continue to come and go?. Driven by their desire to create quality books, independent publishers constantly devise new strategies to reconcile cultural and commercial claims and to stay afloat in a global marketplace dominated by multinational publishing companies.

A very different group of entrepreneurs was behind late nineteenth and early twentieth century ?fashionable productions?, as Amanda Taylor calls the popular theatre of the day. European theatre restaged in Australia was linked to the display of fashionable dress for local consumption. Australian theatre functioned almost as a shop window for the high fashions of Europe that were available for sale at local department stores. Amanda Taylor is writing an MA in art history at the University of Queensland. In ?Advertising and Consumer Culture on the Australian Stage?, she observes that the plays which attracted commentary upon their lavish and noteworthy costuming were anything but Australian in context or content. Theatrical productions were used to package and display European fashions to an increasingly consumerist Australian public.

While Europe clearly figured as the cultural ?centre? for many Australians in the early part of this century, Australia was being imagined as a ?masculine, democratic and definitively working-class society? by the British, partly as a result of the perceived similarity of the Australian accent to Cockney English. Edel Mahoney completed her Australian Studies PhD at the University of London in 1999 and in her article, ?Divided by a Common Lanaguage?, she draws on modern sociolinguistic studies and contemporary anecdotal evidence to explore the role accent played in shaping British perceptions of Australia during the inter-war and post-war periods. Embedded with the conviction that Australians spoke with a Cockney accent, was a ?set of impressively layered perceptions?. The relative homogeneity of Australian speech, for example, confirmed popular notions of Australia as an especially egalitarian and democratic land but this was faint praise because Cockney speech ? considered ugly, nasal, lazy, slovenly and without any aesthetic merit ? was ?the most disparaged of all English accents? and Australian speech was ?tainted by association?.

According to Edel Mahoney, the idea of speech as an ?outward manifestation of inward character? was widespread during the inter-war period. Inability to speak ?properly? was portrayed as symptomatic of a general laziness of character, an idea with clear moral implications. Similarly, Anna Carden-Coyne, who is writing a PhD in history at the University of Sydney, explains that the ?degenerate? white male body was invoked as a signifier of moral and psychological malaise. In ?Classical Heroism and Modern Life?, she argues that the first world war brought about a crisis of confidence in male instinct and exposed the fragility of the male body. Bodybuilding was a bulwark against the prevailing sense of decay and uncertainty, and it promised corporeal as well as social and national regeneration. The war occasioned philosophical and aesthetic shifts within bodybuilding culture which turned away from the nineteenth century predilection for a ?sanitised asexual classicism?, in preference for a ?technological and sexualised future?. Bodybuilding was promoted as a strategy to counteract the ?physical, psychic and cultural trauma of war?. Personal liberty was of little concern to those promulgating the idea of physical perfection and virility as a democratic right, even an obligation, of all classes of men. Personal liberty, being scarce, was of much account to convicts in colonial Van Diemen?s Land. In ?Beer and Fighting?, Bruce Hindmarsh, who is writing a history PhD at the University of Edinburgh, explores the social activities of assigned convict labourers. He argues that a rich recreational culture among rural assignees in Van Dieman?s Land, which included storytelling, song, blood sports like cock and dog fighting, bare knuckle fighting and boxing as well as gambling and drinking, was significant in promoting a sense of convict solidarity and resistance. Hindmarsh argues that convict non-work time was fiercely guarded, with male and female servants asserting their right to spend this time as they chose, though responses to such freedom by masters and the law suggest that it sorely tested the limits of their authority. Alcohol and the potentially subversive sites in which it could be consumed ? taverns, huts, barns, etc. ? posed threats to colonial order, yet drinking was tolerated by the authorities to an extent, because it could also temporarily ease convicts? feelings of distress and disaffection.

Despite or because of its subversive potential, sport, like film, has been crucial to the construction of Australian national identity. In ?Masculinities, Sexualities and the Politics of Performance?, Kelly Farrell considers that in this discourse, the performance of the male body is critical. However, what is at stake is ?not just theatrical or sporting performance, but the performance of masculinity itself?. Kelly Farrell, who is currently writing a PhD in literary and cultural studies at the University of Melbourne, interrogates the contradictory sexual coding of male bodies by examining two texts: Paul Freeman?s biography of a gay rugby league star, Ian Roberts: Finding Out, and Stephan Elliott?s film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Male sports such as rugby league, she argues, produce the male heroes that hegemonic masculinity needs. But whereas in sport the male body operates as a kind of armour in competition with other male bodies, the self-consciously muscular body, as Anna Carden-Coyne noted in her examination of bodybuilding culture, is constructed ?not to repel other men, but to attract them?. According to Farrell, when Ian Roberts posed naked for the gay magazine, Blue, in 1994, he ?collapsed the division between heterosexual and homosexual performance?, and threatened the ?taken-for-granted heterosexuality of the football encounter?. Even so, when playing league, Ian Roberts? powerful body continues to perform, rather than undermine, hegemonic masculinity, diminishing his potential for queer politics.

Considering casting decisions for the film, Priscilla, as well as its narrative, Farrell proposes that ?extradiegetic constructions of the actors? masculinities? together with reliance on heterosexual and heterosexist stereotypes, compromises what might appear to be the film?s queer politics and limits its subversive possibilities. By using actors whose bodies are explicitly coded as heterosexual to play queers, the film betrays how easily ?heterosexuality can co-opt queer and contain it within the broader concerns of the maintenance of national identity?.

Through their inspired and careful interrogations, the writers in this issue of JAS offer astute intellectual analyses of Australia, past and present. Much of this analysis acknowledges the importance of, but is ambivalence towards, a seemingly elusive and contingent Australian national identity which, like the trauma of colonisation, continually resists and demands to be symbolised. Jason Ensor, who is currently finalising his Australian Studies MA at the University of Queensland, is no exception, and, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, he asks, ?what, really, is remarkable about the millennium?? In ?Futurestext? he looks beyond ?sensationalist handwringing and commercial opportunism? to discover what political or cultural processes construct 2000AD as a turning point. The politics of change and time, he claims, ?have played a significant role in manufacturing Australian national identity?, and its status as a ?culture of becoming?. Millennium time, he suggests, is political and can function as ?an instrument of change?; cultural uses of time are ?never for minor effects?. Ensor proposes that 2000AD motivates the political sense in Australia that it has reached a significant marker, and ?a new order and a new age is about to dawn?. This gives rise to a series of ?anticipations, expectations, plans and imaginings? for a future which learns from and improves upon the past. But the future is ?a purely temporal convention and a social product, located in the texts we create and consume?, Ensor reminds us, and what is remarkable about the millennium is that it is a construct of the collective imagination, a written future, or ?futurestext?. What we should ask of ?future myth?, Ensor insists, is not whether it will be true but, rather, ?what it is meant to do??

It is appropriate that Writing Australia should conclude with an interpretative and speculative article on the domain ?Australian studies?. Cameron Richards recently completed his Griffith University PhD on the paradoxes of Australian studies, a topic he returns to in this volume. His article, ?The Australian Paradox(es) Revisited?, of explores one of the most persistent questions connected to the study of Australia: does Australia have a unique culture in any sense of the word that may, for whatever reason, be worthy of study? Richards proposes a framework for Australian studies that attempts to reconcile those ?celebration? of the nation aspects of some earlier writings on Australia, with the social critique emphasis of more recent scholarship. He is critical of cultural studies, particularly postmodern approaches to Australian subject matter which assert that social representations are invariably false because they are not literally true, and he distinguishes between the use of popular and critical forms of analysis.

Writing Australia suggests that public intellectual inquiry is in very capable hands. Next generation researchers and writers are more than able to assume responsibilities for maintaining and extending studies into Australia. The diversity of intellectual backgrounds and approaches in this volume further suggests that Australian studies may now mean something significantly different to traditional practices and the various attempts made in the 1970s and 1980s to establish Australian studies as a discreet and identifiable academic discipline. It may also mean something quite different to the classic divide and territorial disputes between Australian and cultural studies referred to by Cameron Richards.

Such claims are not made blithely on behalf of an impatient cohort ready to take over. Rather, I want to emphasise the quality and range of articles in this volume, and point to the diversity and riches of all the submissions received. It is important to note that except in one or two instances, the contributors to Writing Australia do not conceptualise themselves primarily as Australian studies specialists. They push interdisciplinary boundaries from within a wide range of traditions and specialisations. Yet they do count themselves as scholars on Australia and, by producing new research and analysis using a diversity of approaches, they participate in and hence constitute a new form of Australian studies. As evidenced by this volume then Australian studies can be understood as a discursive formation and a cluster of theoretical and methodological strategies for scholarly inquiry into Australia.

Notes

1 Stuart Macintyre, Whereas the People ... Civics and Citizenship Education, Canberra, AGPS, 1994.
2 Brian Head, ?Intellectuals in Australian Society? in Brian Head and James Walter (ed.), Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1988, p 3.
3 ibid., p 4.
4 John Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996.
5 Cited in Robert Dessaix (ed.), Speaking their Minds: Intellectuals and the Public Culture in Australia, Sydney, ABC Books, 1988, p 13.
6 Head, op. cit., p 1.
7 Clive Bean et al, The Politics of Retribution: the 1996 Federal Election, St Leonards, Allen and Unwin, 1996.
8 Mark Davis, Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism, St Leonards, Allen and Unwin, 1997, pp vii, 24.
9 Simon Margison, Educating Australia: Government, Economy and Citizen Since 1960, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp 149-79.

First published in Ffion Murphy and Emily Warner (eds), Writing Australia: Journal of Australian Studies no 63, St Lucia, UQP, 1999.

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