Naomi Stead

In the Vernacular: On the Architecture of the National Museum of Australia

The recently completed National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra, designed by architects Ashton Raggatt McDougall, has polarised the architectural community in Australia. While much of the critical comment centres on its apparent contravention of standards of propriety in civic architecture, this article examines the building’s playful and obtuse character in light of its supposed ‘populism’. The NMA’s avowedly ‘anti-monumental’ building has been widely read as being ‘populist’. In examining the veracity of such claims, this article finds instead that there is an aesthetic of populism which exists quite independently of actual popularity, ... read more.
 

Natasha Campo

'Having it all' or 'had enough'? Blaming Feminism in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, 1980–2004

In July 2002, the Age published an opinion piece by ABC journalist Virginia Haussegger entitled ‘The sins of our feminist mothers’ accompanied by the blurb that she was exposing the ‘great lie’ of ‘having it all’ feminism. Blaming feminism was nothing new in the pages of the Age. However, in this article Haussegger succinctly put into words what various journalists had been hinting at for decades. She asserted that feminism in Australia was responsible for a host of social and political problems, including the declining birth rate and the idea that an entire generation of women had supposedly found that after obediently following the dictates of their ... read more.
 

Masayo Tada

Japanese Newspaper Representations of Australia 1970-1996

In the past three decades a closer relationship between Australia and Japan has officially been pursued, with both governments referring positively to closeness in recent years. This essay discusses Australia-Japan relations in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, decades which have witnessed significant political changes in both societies relating to national identity. Analysis of Japanese newspaper representations of Australia offers not only a different perspective on the relationship between the two countries but also an insight into its key characteristics. The specific foci of representations of Australia are, in the 1970s, abundant national resources, in the1980s tourism, and in the 1990s an ... read more.
 

Rae Wear and Ian Ward

Queensland

In explaining the Liberal Party's convincing 2001 federal election win, its federal director Lynton Crosby pointed to "the professionalism of the Liberal Party team, its members and candidates at every level". His party, he said, had beaten Labor "on the ground, [and] in the streets and suburbs where it mattered" (Crosby 2001). In the streets and suburbs of Queensland the Liberals indisputably dealt Labor a resounding defeat. In its own right the Liberal Party claimed 15 of Queensland's 27 House of Representatives seats. Although this was only 1 more seat than the party had won in 1998, all sitting Liberal members increasing their primary vote. The Liberals' Coalition ... read more.
 

Mark Finnane

Just like a 'nun's picnic'?

In a memorable phrase comparing Australia with other places settled by the European empires, Claudio Veliz has described British colonisation of this country as 'like a nun's picnic'. The occasion was his launching of Keith Windschuttle's new book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land, 1803-1847. What kind of a nun's picnic was this? Unpredictably, Windshcuttle's book confirms that, at least in this part of Australia, the experience of colonisation was devastating for the Aboriginal inhabitants. For even on the most demanding of historical standards as applied by himself, the rate of death from violence in the first thirty years of Tasmanian settlement was ... read more.
 

John McQuilton

German Australians in Rural Society 1914-1918

In the literature devoted to the home front during the first world war there is a general acceptance that the German Australian had moved from being a model citizen in 1914 to the ‘enemy within’ by 1916. The pressures of war and government propaganda demonised the German Australian, creating an ugly social climate that allowed the suspension of civil rights, encouraged witch hunts and personal scores to be settled using ethnicity as an excuse. Michael McKernan has argued that this was deliberate government policy. 1 Australia was a long way from the battlefields of Europe and the government, to boost the war effort, manufactured an internal threat. The German Australian became ... read more.
 

Anna Johnston

The 'little empire of Wybalenna': Becoming Colonial in Australia

The colonial past is hot property in Australian public life at present. Debates throughout the 1990s about ‘black armband’ history versus ‘white blindfold’ history, about histories of land use and ownership, and about what constitutes ‘mainstream’ Australian historical scholarship seem to have coalesced in the arguments surrounding Keith Windschuttle’s publications. In this most recent set of history wars, some Australian historians seem to feel under siege.3 Others, as Nicolas Rothwell suggests, see this as a breath of life for the discipline, reasserting the centrality of history even as it calls into question the authority and reliability of ... read more.
 

Jillian Walliss

Garden without a Destiny: Untangling Landscape Narratives at the National Museum of Australia

In 1975 the Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections released their recommendations, which outlined new directions for Australian museums. Now known as the Pigott Report, after committee chairman Peter Pigott, the report proposed a progressive vision for a new national museum, challenging the historical framings evident in museums established in the nineteenth century. Tropes such as the separation of Indigenous Australian history from European history and the separation of nature from culture were criticised as outdated. The Pigott Report recommended the establishment of a Museum of Australia, which would not ‘imitate or duplicate’ the focus of older Australian ... read more.
 

Wendy Madsen

The Age of Transition: Nursing and Caring in the Nineteenth Century

The history of nursing is inextricably linked with caring activities — indeed, much of the early literature on nursing uses these terms interchangeably. Over the past 150 years, this relationship has been both exploited and actively rejected by nurses. For example, the Queensland Nurses’ Union’s recent campaigns have pivoted around the slogan, ‘Nurses Care’. However, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, nurses as a group of emerging professionals sought to distinguish themselves from carers. This paper will examine the relationship between nursing and caring throughout the nineteenth century, as it was during this period that differences between ... read more.
 

Jacqueline Zara Wilson

Dark Tourism and the Celebrity Prisoner: Front and Back Regions in Representations of an Australian Historical Prison

Gossip magazines are notorious for their practice of sensationally revealing the mundane side of celebrities’ lives, especially where it is seen to be incompatible with the celebrity’s presentation of their public self. The celebrity’s preoccupation with maintaining an appropriately splendid public image, and his/her concomitant preoccupation with concealing what goes on behind that façade, constitute a personal dichotomy innate to everyone — albeit writ large in the case of the celebrity or public figure. Social psychologist Erving Goffman explains this dichotomy in terms of a ‘dramaturgical’ model of the human self composed of internal ... read more.