Kylie Message

Mum's Got A Whirlpool: Abject Bodies and the Regulation of Maternity

In her study of Australian paintings produced in the second half of the nineteenth century, Jeanette Hoorn argues that these images represent ‘motherhood as a condition which requires the intervention of men’.1 She is concerned with the absence of images that depict motherhood as a successful enterprise. I would suggest that the codes informing these images maintained currency within the decade following the second world war. The absence of images presenting contented and able mothers was reconfigured by the advertising of the fifties, as is indicated by my examples from The Australian Women’s Weekly. These advertisements extol motherhood as the most appropriate role for ... read more.
 

Simone Battiston

Salemi v MacKellar Revisited: Drawing Together the Threads of a Controversial Deportation Case

Mr Salemi is a prohibited immigrant and has no fundamental right to remain in Australia. He has long since overstayed his authorised period of entry. He did not fall within the category of persons qualifying for amnesty in 1976 and I have not since been prepared to exercise my discretion in his favour … He has sought, by appealing to my discretion, by seeking through the High Court to restrain me from applying the law to him, by misrepresenting his activities in Australia to people of goodwill in the community and of left-wing trade unions to sign petitions on his behalf, to restrain me from applying to him the rules that apply to many thousands of other prohibited immigrants. (Michael ... read more.
 

Dinesh Wadiwel

The Sovereign Whip: Flogging, Biopolitics and the Frictional Community

These higher interests of European civilisation are, of course, trade, maritime navigation, markets, factories: what can be higher than these things in Europe’s eyes? Interests like these cannot be touched, not only by fingers but even by thought, but- but ‘may they be damned these interests of European civilisation!’ These are not my words, these are the words of the Moscow News, and I consider it an honour to add my voice to this exclamation: indeed may they be damned if its preservation demands the stripping of skin from living people. Yet this is a fact: preserving it demands the stripping of skin from human beings! (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)1Torture is an art of life ... read more.
 

Damien W Riggs

Understanding History as a Rhetorical Strategy: Constructions of Truth and Objectivity in Debates overWindschuttle's Fabrication

The history of Australia’s colonisation continues to be a contested site, wherein narratives of a ‘civilising mission’ challenge narratives of dispossession and genocide. Such struggles over representation demonstrate one of the key questions Keith Jenkins raises in his work on the discipline of history, namely, whose history counts?1 From this perspective, history may be understood not as an ‘objective truth’ arrived at by those who correctly study ‘the facts’ but, rather, as a meaningmaking practice that privileges certain groups of people over others, and which thus legitimates the worldview of particular groups to the exclusion and oppression 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.
 

Rachel Buchanan

The Home Front: Hostess, Housewife and Home in Olympic Melbourne, 1956

My Olympics begins with the tall, dark figure of Mrs John Murphy, who is preparing her Victorian terrace in Grey Street, East Melbourne for the many informal parties she expects to host there during the 1956 Games. She wipes clean her china in the kitchen end of the grey, white and lilac living room with the maple ceiling squares and she shows off her bread crock, an artistic kitchen item that was hand-thrown by potter John Percival in the shape of a merry face.1 Phyllis Murphy, her husband John, and two other architects, Kevin Borland and Peter McIntyre, designed the famous Olympic swimming pool with its wall of mirrored windows and ceramic Arthur Boyd totem to guard the entranceway, but ... read more.
 

Jennifer Curtin and Dennis Woodward

Rural and regional interests: The demise of the rural revolt?

Speculation as to how rural and regional Australians would vote in the 2001 federal election had been rife since 1998. In late 2000, it was reported that there were more "soft voters" in rural and regional Australia, albeit with a very "hard edge" (Grattan 2000). Others labelled these voters "politically promiscuous" (Green 2000). This rural and regional discontent was also apparent at state level. In the 1999 Victorian state election, the Kennett Government lost power largely because of a swing to Independents and the ALP in regional Victoria (Woodward and Costar 2000). In 2001, the West Australian election result provided Labor with the largest number of seats ... 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.
 

Peter C Pugsley

Manufacturing the Canon: Australia in the Chinese Literary Imagination

Over the past fifty years, a broad range of translated Australian literary texts have been published in China. An examination of the texts selected for translation offers a perspective on Chinese attitudes toward Australian literature and culture. This article will examine translated Australian novels, which represent one site of 'contact/collision' between Australian and Chinese culture, in order to track the interpretive processes through which meaning is reconstructed by a Chinese audience.1 I propose that literary works chosen for translation from the 1950s to the 1970s were ideologically sympathetic with the emerging communist China. However, the central focus of this article is the ... read more.
 

Noel Loos

Edward Koiki Mabo: The Journey to Native Title

Edward Koiki Mabo preferred his Murray Islander name, Koiki, to the colonialist, Eddie, by which he was known to the Australian public. Koiki was the name used by other Murray islanders and by those white Australians who had become close friends and interacted with him over a long period of time. I had addressed him for so long as Eddie that it took me quite a while to change and then only as a result of his persistence. My wife, Betty, who saw him less frequently than I, had to do so many double takes, which they both found amusing, that Koiki eventually gave up. ‘You can call me Eddie!’ he laughed. He continued to use Eddie as his public name, probably because he thought it ... read more.