Marty Branagan

'We Shall Never Be Moved': Australian Developments in Nonviolence

Within the Australian environment movement can be found a variety of modes of action, from the extremes of machinery sabotage to a strict or ‘orthodox’ nonviolence.1 ‘Orthodox’ nonviolence has been widely used and has produced a number of successful outcomes for campaigns. However, it has also been criticised for being imposed on grassroots activists from above, for being inflexible and dogmatic, and for being inappropriate in some situations. These critics have developed new forms of action in between the two extremes, forms that have also proven effective. This article discusses from an ‘emic’2 or insider perspective what these methods are, and why they ... read more.
 

Malcolm Mackerras

Australian Capital Territory

In Chapter 18 of Howard's Agenda: The 1998 Australian Election, which dealt with the Australian Capital Territory, my opening words were:In a major respect the contests in October 1998 in the Australian Capital Territory differed from those in March 1996. Whereas 1996 saw an interesting contest for one of the House of Representatives seats 1998 saw an interesting contest for one of the Senate seats. In 1996 the result of the two Senate places had been wholly predictable — Kate Lundy would take the first seat for Labor and Margaret Reid the second for the Liberal Party. Both would easily achieve a quota on the first count (Simms and Warhurst 2000, 143).In 2001 the outcome was quite ... read more.
 

Beryl Langer and Estelle Farrar

Becoming 'Australian' in the Global Cultural Economy: Children, Consumption, Citizenship

In an ironic conjuncture emblematic of life in the global cultural economy, the end of Australia’s November 1999 Referendum on the Republic coincided with the beginning of a McDonald’s promotional campaign featuring ‘Snoopys of the World’. Both events were about national identity. The McDonald’s campaign ran for three weeks, and featured Snoopy ‘collectibles’ in national costume — signified in the Australian case by an Akubra hat, a leather vest and two boomerangs. McDonald’s, at least, was in no doubt about what it meant to be ‘Australian’. Such certainty was less evident among the nation’s political and intellectual ... read more.
 

Glen Ross

"Dreamtime", Who's Time?: A.P. Elkin and the construction of Aboriginal time in the 1930s and 1940s

Our sense of the primitive impinges on our sense of ourselves — it is bound up with the selves who act in the ‘real’, political world. Freud’s map of the Psyche placed the ego ... at a point that mediates between the civilising super-ego and the ‘primitive’ [id]. Whether this map was accurate or not is less important than its strength as a metaphor for our time. We conceive of ourselves as at a crossroads between the civilised and the savage; we are formed by our conceptions of these terms, con-ceived dialectically.1In his book Time and the Other, Johannes Fabian points out that evolutionary-anthropological representations of other peoples were and are ... read more.
 

Margaret Rogers

It’s a Fair Cop, Guv: Australian Fans of The Bill

The British serial The Bill holds a special position within the television police genre, not only because of its longevity in Britain and Australia but also due to its ability to adapt to the changing demands of industry and audience. Since its inception The Bill has continually renegotiated the boundaries of the television police genre through innovative production techniques, characterisation and the creation of an active fandom. First broadcast in Britain in 1984 as an example of the police procedural category of the television police genre, it was hailed by critics and audience for its authenticity and gritty realism. Twenty years and some 2,000 episodes later, The Bill incorporates ... read more.
 

Tracy Spencer

Woman Lives as a Lubra in Native Camp': Representations of 'Shared Space'

The life of Rebecca Forbes is an ‘event under description’ that can only be thought about through the ways it has been reported and described.1 Her life has been of interest to white Australians primarily because she was a white woman ‘sharing space’ in an Indigenous community through her marriage to a man of full Aboriginal descent. Her life is of interest to this author because, like Rebecca, I am a white woman sharing relationships with Adnyamathanha people within and beyond the context of research. In this article, I examine representations made of Rebecca’s life in a newspaper article found pasted into an anthropological field journal belonging to Norman ... 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.
 

Robert Crawford

A Slow Coming of Age: Advertising and the Little Boy from Manly in the Twentieth Century

Looking back on his career, renowned Bulletin cartoonist Livingston ‘Hop’ Hopkins recalled the difficulties cartoonists face when depicting Australia as a human figure. ‘Every nation’, he declared, ‘has some mythical figure, usually of the gentler sex, to typify the national spirit’.1 The use of classical feminine figures was a well-established allegorical tradition.2 Hop, however, found the feminine figure not only ‘difficult to acclimatise’, but also unsuitable for presenting the ‘more rugged phases of national life’. ‘There was a ... vacancy’, he said, ‘at the Bulletin office for a myth that was willing to make ... read more.
 

Nicole Anae

'The New Prima Donnas': 'Homegrown' Tasmanian 'Stars' of the 1860s Emma and Clelia Howson

Even during the height of his career, Errol Flynn’s reputation was never really overshadowed by his ‘Tasmanian-ness’. In fact, both his reputation and his origins were often integral to his publicity. Around the same era, Merle Oberon’s publicists claimed that the famous actress was Tasmanian-born, specifically, into a wealthy Hobart family. Whether or not this was true, Oberon’s identification as ‘Tasmanian-born’ cast a glowing light on the State’s cultural credibility despite the fact that she lived 10,000 miles away and returned to the island only once, in 1978. Modern-day Tasmanian celebrities encounter a similar emphasis on their State of ... read more.
 

Frank Hough

Pauline Hanson's One Nation

The 1998 Federal Election saw high profile One Nation National President and party founder, Pauline Hanson, as the party's primary focal point in the election campaign. Hanson travelled all over Australia in support of the party's candidates in various states. However, the 2001 election required an alternate strategy given that the party's principal objective was to ensure her election as a Queensland Senator. Therefore, unlike the 1998 Federal Election, the party's 2001 campaign saw each state branch internally focus on their candidates while Pauline Hanson remained in Queensland and worked to convince the Queensland electorate that she was their best representative for the federal upper ... read more.