A Turbulent Decade: Social protest movements and the labour movement, 1965-1975

Beverley Symons and Rowan Cahill eds, Newtown: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2005, 94 Pages, Paperback, $24.00: Reviewed by Maryrose Casey in the May 2006 issue.

The radical sixties exist in the popular imaginary as a quasi-mythical era of student riots, antiwar movements, free love and drugs, a time of 'social and political upheaval that shook the world'. (p ix) As an 'era', the period, usually from the early to mid 1960s to the early 1970s, is presented as a time of cultural revolution; the moment of birth of many aspects of contemporary society from Australian theatre and film to the beginnings of a less racist and sexist Australia. A Turbulent Decade: Social Protest Movements and the Labour Movement, 1965-1975 is a collection of reminiscences from 39 people who participated in a broad range of groups working for social change in the 1960s ... read more.
 

Aboriginal Suicide is Different: A portrait of life and self-destruction

Colin Tatz, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005, 192 Pages, Paperback, $34.95: Reviewed by Gus Worby and Brian Marshall in the May 2006 issue.

This book invites its readers to consider three problematic interrelated propositions: that there is something that can be defined as 'Aboriginal suicide'; that difference is a complex term with context and discourse specific meanings; that insight into suicide can be gained through a composite 'portrait' of life, self-destruction and 'life and self-destruction'. In each of these propositions there are inbuilt ontological, historical and political debates and each of the approaches 'debates' the others within the whole. The range of tensions inherent in the collective subject matter is sufficient justification for the re-release of this 2001 Aboriginal Studies Press publication. It has a new ... read more.
 

Beyond Good and Evil? Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region

Dennis Haskell Megan McKinlay and Pamina Rich, Nedlands: UWA Press, 2006, 232 Pages, Paperbac, $29.95: Reviewed by Mads Clausen in the May 2006 issue.

Haskell, McKinlay and Rich's Beyond Good and Evil: Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region is borne out of what the authors see as the re-emergence of perilously rigid notions of evil in post-September 11 discourse. The editors see this monolithic conception of evil as 'a theological term of frightening certitude and simplification' particularly evident in the Bush administration's rhetoric, but that it also spills over into other debates about culture and identity, sustaining existing chasms in political and cultural discourse. The collection seeks to query this certitude, and to reintroduce a measure of 'intercultural curiosity and understanding' against which such ... read more.
 

Deconstructing Sport History: A Postmodern Analysis

Murray G Phillips ed, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, 266 Pages, Paperback, US$26.95: Reviewed by David Rowe in the May 2006 issue.

The discipline of history and postmodern thought have rarely been happy travelling companions, not least in the subdiscipline of sport history. Without wishing to caricature the latter, or discount its honourable exceptions, much of it has displayed the 'reconstructionist naïve empiricism' (p viii) bemoaned by Alun Munslow in the Foreword to this book. In sport history, furthermore, the easily obtained 'facts' of who played, lost and won have tended to be accompanied by nostalgic, romantic celebrations of its object. This is, then, not an intellectual space generally much given to sceptical, critical, theoretically informed inquiry. Murray G Phillips's collection, as a consequence, sets ... read more.
 

East of Time

Jacob G Rosenberg, Blackheath: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005, 220 Pages, Paperback, $26.95: Reviewed by Sue Bond in the May 2006 issue.

This memoir is sometimes so painful to read that I had to stop and go away from it for a while. None of the people named within it had such a luxury. It is a collection of stories set in Poland under the Nazis, in the Lodz ghetto, when the author, Jacob Rosenberg, was a boy. It is a series of largely chronological fragments that tell of the people he knew, his family, neighbours, friends and teachers, and what happened to them. In his preface, Rosenberg tells the reader that he has used his memories and his 'storyteller's embellishment' in writing the book. He also writes of the strong need he felt to tell these stories, and to name the people he once knew, most of whom are long dead: ... read more.
 

Firelick

Morgan Yasbincek, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2004, 92 Pages, Paperback, $22.95: Reviewed by Helen Hagemann in the May 2006 issue.

Poets use metaphor, symbolism, concrete images and the 'non-linear' to enhance the aesthetic quality of their poetry. When the subjectivity of a poetry collection uses all this, together with an extensive use of metaphor or theme, the work is multivalent, dense, and rewarding. Such is the case with Morgan Yasbincek's second collection firelick, published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press, where the element of fire is used in its symbolic richness. Most poems throughout the book concentrate on the fire's variants: its radiant energy, destruction, colour, high spirits, modes of sexual passion, its birth/death dichotomy, and the fire sign within the 'personal' female experience. The opening poem ... read more.
 

Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History

A Dirk Moses ed, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005, 326 Pages, Paperback, £14.95: Reviewed by Christine Choo in the May 2006 issue.

The catalyst for Genocide and Settler Society arose when, arriving in Australia in 2000 to take up a position at the University of Sydney, Dirk Moses discovered that there was no text on genocide in Australia for his new course on comparative genocide. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Bringing Them Home Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families which was published in 1997 had sparked a lively public debate on whether the forcible removal of children from their families and communities constituted genocide. By 2001 the debate on frontier violence as genocide and whether it was possible to say ... read more.
 

In the Time of Madness

Richard Lloyd Parry, London: Jonathan Cape, 2005, 316 Pages, Paperback, $39.95: Reviewed by Des Wagner in the May 2006 issue.

Madness is an effective label by which to separate out troublesome individuals from a sane society. Since the advent of mental asylums those individuals have been shipped away, preferably over water where they cannot easily escape in transit. With Richard Parry we step into events in which social norms have been abandoned and 'madness' -- cannibalism, pogroms, and intimidation -- reigns. His tales take us through tribal violence, the political ousting of Suharto, and the secession of East Timor. A photograph of a severed head and rumours of tribal conflict lure Parry to Borneo in search of headhunters. On the island he finds corpses that have been mutilated by an ethnic group indigenous to ... read more.
 

No Ordinary Determination: Percy Black and Harry Murray of the First AIF

Jeff Hatwell, Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2005, 304 Pages, Paperback, $29.95: Reviewed by Janda Gooding in the May 2006 issue.

Standing at the centre of any military historian's interpretation of Australia's involvement in the first world war probably will be Charles Bean's massive six volume series The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-18. Authoritative and elegantly written, Bean's work remains as a remarkable blend of the grand narrative while still, in some part, acknowledging the important contribution of individuals. Understandably, The Official History lays out much of the tactical and operational detail of Australia's first world war involvement, and while personal stories are presented as examples of Australians in action, there is little room for a fuller account of the relationship between ... read more.
 

Not Wrong - Just Different: Observations on the rise of contemporary Australian theatre

Katharine Brisbane, Strawberry Hills: Currency Press, 2005, 370 Pages, Paperback, $34.95: Reviewed by Donald Pulford in the May 2006 issue.

If Katharine Brisbane didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent her. David Marr has called her 'the wise old woman of Australian theatre'. After twenty-one years as a critic, mostly for The Australian, she founded Currency Press in 1971 with her husband, the late Dr Philip Parsons. Currency is far and away the single most important institution disseminating Australian scripts, scholarship and theatre histories to a population that would otherwise remain largely ignorant of the field. It has made the most tremendous contribution to the study of not only Australian theatre but Australian culture more broadly. Not Wrong -- Just Different is a very welcome collection of Katharine ... read more.
 

Pioneers of the Pacific: Voyages of exploration, 1787-1810

Nigel Rigby Pieter van der Merwe and Glyn Williams, Crawley: UWA Press, 2005, 144 Pages, Hardcover, $38.95: Reviewed by Catie Gilchrist in the May 2006 issue.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the European discovery of Australia. The 1606-2006 timeframe derives from the arrival in Australian waters in 1606 of the Dutchman Willem Janszoon whose voyage heralded the integration of the Australian continent into a mapped world. Historical works on early explorers, geographers and cartographers are certainly in vogue with publishers at the moment. The recent controversy over Gavin Menzies' book 1421: the Year China Discovered the World which claims that voyagers from the Ming Dynasty circumnavigated Australia in the fifteenth century is bound to increase interest in the subject. Pioneers of the Pacific adds to this renaissance of historical ... read more.
 

Rethinking Wellbeing

Lenore Manderson ed, Perth: API Network, 2005, 230 Pages, Paperback, $34.95: Reviewed by Brenda Dobia in the May 2006 issue.

Wellbeing, as David Clark and Ian Gough announce in their contribution to this volume, is a protean concept with currency across multiple domains. This is evident in the breadth and diversity of perspectives available in both public and academic settings -- an observation that very quickly struck me a few years ago when I was attempting to formulate an introductory and interdisciplinary undergraduate unit on wellbeing. As well there seemed to be little interchange amongst the range of approaches on offer, with very different conceptualisations separating the research deriving from distinct academic disciplines, and in some cases also marking distinctions within them. Consequently, I found ... read more.
 

Subtopia

A L McCann, Carlton North: The Vulgar Press, 2005, Pages, Paperback, $29.95: Reviewed by Jean-François Vernay in the May 2006 issue.

Like many realist novels, Subtopia is the fruit of the author's experience. For a kid who lived out his adolescence in a quiet and desolate Melburnian suburb and ended up as an Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College in an American metropolis, one half-expects a novel of ideas set against the gritty urban backdrop of 1970s Australia. Julian, a narrator of many theories, recounts what he perceives as his static life:Events in suburbia seldom generate the dynamism that can propel us on to something else. Rather, they tend to stasis, like a boring plotless movie in which the camera seems to limp from one moment to the next, without being able to establish any meaningful of vital ... read more.
 

The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War

Robert Bevan, London: Reaktion Books, 2006, 240 Pages, Paperback, £19.95: Reviewed by Rosemary Hollow in the May 2006 issue.

The destruction of architecture has regrettably become a regular feature of our daily news, even on the front page at times. We have watched the bombing of the sacred Shiite shrine in Iraq, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes along the West Bank, the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the repeated televised images of the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers. Death does not always accompany the destruction of architecture, but the effect can still be catastrophic and long term. The dismantling and displacement of a community, the removal of centuries-old places of worship, means the removal of the history, if not the memory, of the cultural icons of great significance not only of a ... read more.
 

The Dismissal: Where were you on November 11, 1975?

Sybil Nolan ed, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005, 168 Pages, Paperback, $24.95: Reviewed by Kristy Yeats in the May 2006 issue.

Three decades on and the dismissal of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister remains a deeply contested chapter in Australian history, where, as Jenny Hocking notes in her introduction to this anthology, grand themes, arrant characters and circumstance collide. No consensus has been reached either over the legitimacy of Governor-General John Kerr's actions in removing Whitlam from office, nor over the legacy of short-lived Labor administration, subsequently distorted in the public mind. Whitlam's period of government -- he won two elections and lead the country from December 1972 -- still casts a long shadow over our collective consciousness, often seen as a measure, either positively or ... read more.
 

The Ethics of Waste: How we relate to rubbish

Gay Hawkins, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006, 152 Pages, Paperback, $34.95: Reviewed by Lisa McDonald in the May 2006 issue.

I am standing in the local supermarket while renovations are made around me. I scan my list. Things have been moved: shelves, boxes, all kinds of items. Entire walls have disappeared. I stare at grime newly exposed which has set into some type of resin. Its crusty heritage contrasts in silent relief the otherwise polished architecture of supermarket things. A woman walks past and traces the direction of my eye. She winks this at me as I catch hers: 'Tsk'. And all this right here in the aisle of bleach, inside the colony of clean. Waste is nothing if not perverse, I think. I've been reading chapter two of six chapters in Gay Hawkins' latest book. It's called 'Plastic Bags' and suggests the ... read more.
 

Trade Secrets: Australian actors and their craft

Terence Crawford, Strawberry Hills: Currency Press, 2005, 230 Pages, Paperback, $34.95: Reviewed by Donald Pulford in the May 2006 issue.

What actors actually do is pretty much a mystery to most of us, even though we encounter their work every day. There has to be more to it than just learning lines and moves and making them seem real because pretty much anyone could do that. And why are some actors so much better than others? Added to the oddness is that actors choose to confront public humiliation, one of our greatest fears. Terence Crawford provides insider views of the mysterious art in Trade Secrets: Australian actors and their craft. Though Peter O'Toole apparently considered acting 'farting about in disguises', the 200 odd pages of transcripts from interviews with actors in this book suggest that there may be more to ... read more.
 

Ways of Seeing China: From Yellow Peril to Shangrila

Timothy Kendall, Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2005, 254 Pages, Paperback, $29.95: Reviewed by Mads Clausen in the May 2006 issue.

Awakened to -- if not always completely cognisant of -- the implications of China's unrelenting economic expansion, the mainstream media increasingly recognises that significant changes might be afoot, not only to existing global power structures, but also to key domestic issues. While the frisson in the punditocracy has not yet reached the intensity in evidence during the heady days of Keatingesque engagement, each new week nonetheless sees articles and editorials published on how Australia should 'manage' and/or 'handle' the 'rise' of China. The recent visit of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and, above all, the decision to allow the export of uranium to China -- is itself a monumental shift in ... read more.