Nell Musgrove

‘Filthy’ Homes and ‘Fast’ Women: Welfare Agencies’ Moral Surveillance in Post-Second World War Melbourne

Quiet suburban streets, white picket fences, Mum, Dad and the kids: these are the most popularised images of Australian domesticity in the post-second world war years, yet one must not forget that in the midst of the postwar prosperity that permitted increasing portions of the population to attain economic security, there were many Australians whose lives did not fit with this idealised notion of the ‘suburban dream’. The case files created by welfare workers provide some insight into the conditions faced by families in crisis, but, more particularly, the case files are also suggestive of the ways in which caseworkers perceived these families and the various pressures they ... 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.
 

Helen Lambert

A Draft Preamble: Les Murray and the Politics of Poetry

Can anyone truly claim that politics and poetry are absolutely separate, that a poem is not also political? This article argues that the work of Les Murray demonstrates a political will as sharp as Plato’s. Once Murray imbues poetry with the power of what he calls wholespeak, it becomes more powerful than any other mode of writing. Murray’s aim is to reclaim poetry from its maligned position, not by returning it to the domain of the political but by fashioning a poetic republic of his own. Yet the question remains: can poets or their work ever escape the political? To explore the problematic relationship between poetry and prose, I will turn, first, to Murray’s draft ... read more.
 

Eva Dobozy

Teaching Democracy and Human Rights: A Curriculum Perspective

Curriculum documents are open to multiple readings and despite attempts by bureaucracies to impose a preferred reading on the curriculum text, teachers, in the privacy of their own classrooms, interpret and implement these documents on the basis of their own experiences, discipline base, beliefs and philosophy of teaching and education. The attempt to control meaning may well be seen to be futile.1Democracy and human rights are among the most significant concepts discussed in established and new democracies in recent times. The discussions are fuelled by conceptual and ideological controversies. The concept of democratic citizenship has developed over a historical and political continuum and ... 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.
 

Andrew Bartlett

The Australian Democrats

From the Democrats' perspective, the 2001 election had many parallels with the 1998 election. This includes a turbulent 12 months leading up to the poll right through to a result that was similar to 1998 in most respects. In my chapter of the preceding volume of this election series on the 1998 election I started out by highlighting the difficult situation the Democrats faced at the start of that election year.While there were many differences in the political landscape at the start of 2001, one similarity was a range of headlines predicting the demise of the Democrats and an anticipated emergence of a new political third force. In 1998 that new third force was supposed to be One Nation, who ... 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.
 

Gail Jones

Interview with Veronica Brady

Veronica Brady’s long and distinguished career as a critic and teacher of Australian literature has been marked by a level of political commitment practically unmatched in the Australian academy. 1 As critic, teacher and member of the Loreto teaching order, Veronica has been a vigorous supporter of Aboriginal causes and deeply concerned with social justice issues. She has travelled widely in and beyond Australia as guest of human rights and related organisations, regularly earning the ire of political and even church leaders. Relentlessly critical of injustice in various forms – particularly institutional injustice as dispensed by conservative governments – Veronica’s ... read more.
 

Henry Reynolds

Frontier History After Mabo

One evening in 1844 in a bark hut on the outer fringes of white settlement in south Queensland four young men debated the morality and legality of European settlement. They divided on the matter. Two had doubts about the process; two were proponents of colonisation. Henry Mort detailed the arguments in a letter to his mother and sister in England:Had a very animated discussion on the ‘Moral right of a Nation to take forcible possession of a Country inhabited by savages’. John and David McConnell argued that it is morally right for a Christian Nation to extirpate savages from their native soil in order that it may be peopled with a more intelligent and civilized race of human ... read more.
 

Cassandra Atherton

'Fuck All Editors': The Ern Malley Affair and Gwen Harwood's Bulletin Scandal

Until the 1990s and Helen Demidenko, there have been only been two Australian literary hoaxes. The first was the Ern Malley Hoax; the second Gwen Harwood’s Bulletin scandal. James McAuley and Harold Stewart were the two poets behind the creation of the ‘great aussie battler’ Ern Malley and Gwen Harwood was the quaintly titled ‘lady poet’ behind the suave European Walter Lehmann. McAuley, Stewart and Harwood are important figures in Australian literature, not just for their individual contributions to Australian poetry but for their construction of enduring literary figures. Ern Malley and Walter Lehmann were believed by many to have made a mockery of editors ... read more.