A Lot to Learn: Girls, Women and Education in the 20th Century

Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, Toronto: Women's Press, 2005, 182 Pages, Paperback, CDN$24.95: Reviewed by Robert Imre in the July 2005 issue.

A Lot to Learn employs a fascinating mixed-genre format which incorporates biographical elements in order to elucidate the social context of two generations of women in education. A major portion of the book relies on Lenskyj's contribution to women's studies and to critical pedagogy in the Toronto area in Canada in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. I finished high school in the same part of the world and went on to University study and completed my first degree in 1990 at a university directly affected by Lenskyj's brand of feminism and pedagogy. As such, I am situating myself as a de facto 'student' of Lenskyj's and telling my own story as it connects to this particular book. ... read more.
 

Blush: Faces of Shame

Elspeth Probyn, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005, 198 Pages, Paperback, $29.95: Reviewed by Zoe Anderson in the July 2005 issue.

Shame, in its collective context, has been explored by many writers in recent years in very indirect ways. In the Australian cultural and political milieu shame seems to be the silent 'other' to which we defer and which we deny; a constant, shadowing us in debates on everything from the interaction between indigenous and 'white' Australian histories, to personal anxieties over bodies and self. In this work Probyn attempts to bring together varied manifestations of shame in (mostly) the Australian socio-cultural setting. In doing so, Probyn also riskily endeavours to utilise that troublesome area of 'the personal' within academic writing. Feminist theorists in particular have criticised the ... read more.
 

Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market

Elisabeth Wynhausen, Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2005, 246 Pages, Paperback, $30.00: Reviewed by Robert Imre in the July 2005 issue.

Dirt Cheap is a jarring book. Reminiscent of Studs Terkel's books on life in the United States published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, or Ehrenreich's classic Nickel and Dimed, Wynhausen delivers an analysis that is devastating to the supporters of the new economy. The book has a primary focus of illustrating how people in Australia live from minimum wage employment. Wynhausen seeks to explore this way of life, she claims, without a preconceived agenda. Further, in a self-critical prologue, Wynhausen foreshadows her own personal journey in describing articles written for newspapers in which she previously thought she had a connection with working-class Australians. Here she finds ... read more.
 

Down the Road: Exploring Backpacker and Independent Travel

Brad West ed, Perth: API Network, 2005, 192 Pages, Paperback, $24.95: Reviewed by Lisette Kaleveld in the July 2005 issue.

Backpacking sees itself existing outside the frame, even outside the frame of tourism. The community of backpackers is a critical and reflexive population whose need for unique and authentic experiences lead to the very corners of the travel industry, lingering at the edges of the tracks and searching for secrets in the lands they explore. I was interested to see if this romantic framework stood the test of the academic gaze. Down the Road is a book of 8 academic articles about backpacking. The idea of sacred pilgrimage, (the seeker, the escapist) the uses of technology, backpacking and identity constellations, the shape of international travel friendships and communities, and the ... read more.
 

God's Willing Workers: Women and religion in Australia

Anne OBrien, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005, 314 Pages, Paperback, $49.95: Reviewed by Ann Jensen in the July 2005 issue.

It takes both courage and insight for a historian to embrace the subject women and religion, in an Australian context. Here is a gendered perspective that recognises that the profound influence of women on children, charity, work, men, education and society, is both intensified and modified through their complex relationship with church. Within this book are the seeds for a dozen theses and deeper studies of the lives of remarkable and powerful women, who have been otherwise ignored or forgotten. The role of religion in colonial times has also been underestimated or ignored, while the role of women in our early social milieu, has been marginalised by predictable mega narratives and ... read more.
 

Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales 1850-1950

Janis Wilton, Armidale: New England Regional Art Museum, 2004, 132 Pages, Paperback, Colour Illus., $34.95: Reviewed by Christine Choo in the July 2005 issue.

Golden Threads, the book, is an integral part of a wider project which documents the story of the Chinese in New South Wales. Working closely with local Chinese communities at a very practical level, the Golden Threads project honours the presence and contribution of Chinese in that state through stories, photographs, objects, cultural practices, sites and genealogies of Chinese and their descendants in their daily life, work, leisure pursuits, family life, cultural practices and links with the 'home country'. Well designed with wonderful photographs and illustrations, the book is easy to read and draws the reader in. The facility of this engagement of the reader with the book belies the ... read more.
 

History, Historians and Autobiography

Jeremy D Popkin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 340 Pages, Hardcover, : Reviewed by Susan Tridgell in the July 2005 issue.

It's a rare and delightful experience to read a perfect book. This is especially the case with academic books -- even the most impressive normally generates a wish to argue with it. Yet Jeremy Popkin, despite being a newcomer to the field of life writing (he is well-known as a historian) has managed to achieve this miracle. The only 'but' he manages to generate in my mind is to write so fascinatingly about his chosen subject -- the autobiographies of historians -- that I felt immediately impelled to go and read even the autobiographies he warns are dull.This is one of the central and delightful paradoxes of this book: in Popkin's hands, even tales of technical failure become illuminating. ... read more.
 

Love in Time of War

Deborah Montgomerie, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005, 146 Pages, Paperback, NZ$34.99: Reviewed by Catie Gilchrist in the July 2005 issue.

Love in Time of War is the first in a series of new social and cultural histories, written by experts for the general market. According to the press release, this series will 'have a popular format, modest but authoritative text and will be lavishly illustrated'. With over sixty marvellous illustrations (mostly original photographs) in a volume that is only 146 pages long the written content is indeed modest, albeit accessible. The absence of a bibliography is disappointing. As a general reader my mum loved it but academics might be left unsatisfied. Introduction and conclusion aside, the book consists of three chapters that concentrate on Bob Wilson's war, Gay Grey's war and Jack Lewis' ... read more.
 

Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne

Andrew McCann, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005, 254 Pages, D-book, $49.95: Reviewed by Ian Morrison in the July 2005 issue.

Bohemian House. Now there's an idea for historical reality television. There'd be the struggling writer, of course, getting just enough published to keep him going -- periodic minor successes drip-feeding the delusion that the book he's currently writing will be his breakthrough. And the bohemian wife. She will have given up a promising career as an artist, or maybe something musical, when El Jerko got her pregnant. The kids -- three at least -- are screaming all the time: each on their own can be quite reasonable, but in a pack they are monstrous. Then there are the drug-addled arty friends who keep dropping in to sneer at suburban respectability and collect a free feed. Throw in a few ... read more.
 

Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics

Simone Murray, London: Pluto Press UK, 2004, 260 Pages, Paperback, $52.95: Reviewed by Katharine Sarikakis in the July 2005 issue.

This is a book about books -- books written by women and books about women writing books. Mixed Media is largely a historical account of the rise and transformations of feminist book publishing as industry and as social and political work. It offers a solid analysis of the political economic and cultural contexts of the feminist press movement and comes to fill in a long-standing gap in the history of the print communications medium. Murray explores the role of feminist presses in the grand scale of the publishing industry, and the impact of the latter on the choices and directions of development of the former, ranging from the questions imposed by commercialisation and profit-making in an ... read more.
 

Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography

Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant eds, North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2004, 444 Pages, Paperback, $34.95: Reviewed by Lisette Kaleveld in the July 2005 issue.

Even for those of us repeatedly reaching for the delete button, the visibility and accessibility of pornography in our everyday lives has increased exponentially. And yet, strangely, any substantial critique of it remains invisible. What is this silence? Is it discomfort? Is it approval? At best our reaction to pornography and prostitution is a snigger. And what can anyone really say in a world where Larry Flynt is a people's hero and a 'Porn star' t-shirt is a liberating statement (Clarke p 157). In our contemporary world, as Elizabeth Wurtzel has said, innocence itself is subversive. Clarke (p 190) puts it like this: Pornography and prostitution are either sacralised by a knee jerk ... read more.
 

Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial women artists and the amateur tradition

Caroline Jordan, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005, 224 Pages, Paperback, $49.95: Reviewed by Jane Simon in the July 2005 issue.

Caroline Jordan's Picturesque Pursuits is an elegant piece of cultural history. It offers up a field of art practice that lies beyond the easels and canvases of the professional artist, in the albums, sketchbooks and miniatures of the female amateur colonial artist in Australia. Like the artists she discusses, Jordan's approach to her subjects is detailed and tinted with the pleasure of her discoveries. Picturesque Pursuits is not a celebration of colonial women artists but it is imbued with a sense of why these amateur artists matter. The reader is provided with this sense though Jordan's finely tuned attention to the historical, cultural and political contexts in which the artists ... read more.
 

Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau: Romantic souls, realist lives

Simon Haines, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 214 Pages, Paperback, $149.00: Reviewed by Susan Tridgell in the July 2005 issue.

Despite the presence of Rousseau in the title, this is not a book for those who are devoted to Romantic literature (or indeed for romantics more generally). The idealistic impulse of Romanticism, the wish to dedicate oneself wholly to a single idea (or another person) comes under sustained fire in this monograph. Remarkably, Haines manages to trace this Romantic notion back to what he sees as its origins in Plato. In some ways this book is an excoriation of the main lines of thought in Western literature and philosophy, a tale of complete cultural loss. Redeeming it from this apocalyptic tendency, however, is the attention which Haines pays to a smaller tributary of Western thought: ... read more.
 

Readers, Writers, Publishers: Essays and Poems

Brian Matthews ed, Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2004, 190 Pages, Paperback, $20.00: Reviewed by Carolyn van Langenberg in the July 2005 issue.

'Readers, Writers, Publishers: essays and poems' is a collection of poems and essays which were presented at the 2003 symposium of the Academy of Humanities. With the help of an able team, editor Brian Matthews has compiled a book of wit and intelligent reflection and analysis on the subject of reading and writing. The analysis of reading itself is a subject of discourse at universities in the twenty-first century. The reading public is knowing. The manipulators of the electronic media have broadened and deepened their target-practice. And the general public appears to be cynical. Hence the need for an understanding of how opinion is formed and how, if ever, it is subjected to ... read more.
 

Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife

Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd, Oxford: Berg, 2004, 182 Pages, Paperback, £16.95: Reviewed by Michelle Gabriel in the July 2005 issue.

Despite the enormous popularity of Desperate Housewives in Australia, the figure of the housewife has virtually disappeared from Australian public life. Today, debate around women's capacity to have it all -- work, wealth and family -- rages, but much of this debate has been couched in terms of another step towards women's independence and their capacity to make choices about their own lives rather than a celebration of the re-emergence of the housewife. In their fascinating book Sentenced to Everyday Life, Johnson and Lloyd take a closer look at the phenomenon of the housewife and her marginal status within the feminist project. As historians, they want to look beyond contemporary ... read more.
 

The Body: An Anthology

Henry Ashley-Brown Chelsea Avard Amy T Matthews and Stephanie Thomson eds, Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2004, 226 Pages, Paperback, $19.95: Reviewed by Dean Durber in the July 2005 issue.

For many, the body continues to be an object of interest, study, contestation, and often control. Many desire to 'know' it. And yet, in our attempts to decipher its complexities, to deconstruct the essentialist notions that surround and produce it, to undermine the discourses of science, biology, and psychodynamics that dominate it, we might be guilty of forgetting that the body can also be a wayward and wobbly fictional form. Many of us have already become too accustomed to considering the body as an important and very serious object of scrutiny. In contrast, The Body: An Anthology begins by injecting some laughter back into the flesh. Leanna Amodeo's 'Des Proce' and Stefan Laszczuk's 'Feet ... read more.
 

The Child is Wise: Stories of Childhood

Janet Blagg ed, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005, 345 Pages, Paperback, $24.95: Reviewed by Sylvia Alston in the July 2005 issue.

In the foreword Veronica Brady says that the writers share with us the 'pleasures of memory', adding that their stories are mostly 'memories of struggle, of failures and disappointments overcome'. The 'pleasures of memory' is a delightful phrase and it is a delight to share this selection of childhood memories. I think Dorothy Hewett sums up the theme of the book nicely when she writes: 'The first house sits in the hollow of the heart, it will never go away. It is the house of childhood become myth, inhabited by characters larger than life whose murmured conversations whisper and tug at the mind'. The backdrop to these reminiscences range from the remote regions of Australia to the ... read more.
 

The Long, Slow Death of White Australia

Gwenda Tavan, Carlton North: Scribe Publications, 2005, 298 Pages, Paperback, $32.95: Reviewed by Rob Edwards in the July 2005 issue.

The idea of White Australia has been an enduring one. A new book by Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia sheds new light on the origins and path to dismantling of the White Australia policy. In this balanced, well-written account, Tavan enters a long-standing debate on the racist or racialist origins of the policy, concluding -- unsurprisingly to most -- that the White Australia policy was predominantly about race. Further, she argues that there was no elite conspiracy to eradicate the policy ahead of its time. Tavan's voice is an assured one, passing through and beyond the debates to create one of the most significant contributions to date to our understanding of the slow ... read more.