Australian history (Australia)

This articles applies the modern concept of ‘entrepreneur’ to thrice-Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin.  The purpose is to use historical records, including Deakin’s own writings, to uncover the extent to which Alfred Deakin was a a social and business entrepreneur.  The period of analysis is 1885 when he was twenty-nine years of age and serving as Minister for Water Supply and President of the Royal Commission on Water Supply.  Deakin’s vision of an irrigated Murray Basin drew upon his Victorian liberalism and on his own spiritualism, viewing water as ‘life force’ that could provide the ‘vital spark’ to the land through engineering and irrigation science.  His vision and self-efficacy saw him travel throughout the United States and Mexico to examine irrigation works, dams, weirs and canals in search of technology to ‘free the soul’ of inland Australia.  The paper also examines Deakin as a ‘failed business entrepreneur’ and director of dubious companies during the great Land Boom and Bust in Victoria in the early 1890s.

Academic Reference:

Zuckermann, Ghil'ad & Monaghan, Paul (2012). "Revival linguistics and the new media: Talknology in the service of the Barngarla language reclamation", pp. 119-126 of Foundation for Endangered Languages XVI Conference: Language Endangerment in the 21st Century:Globalisation, Technology & New Media. Auckland, New Zealand.

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Revival Linguistics and the New Media:
Talknology in the service of the Barngarla Language Reclamation


Ghil‘ad Zuckermann

Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, SA Adelaide 5005, Australia
[[email protected]]


Paul Monaghan

Mobile Language Team
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, SA Adelaide 5005, Australia
[[email protected]]


Abstract

Revival Linguistics is a new branch of linguistics, currently being established at Adelaide. It analyses comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and local peculiarities on the other hand, apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world (see Zuckermann & Walsh 2011). A branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning (language reclamation is the most extreme case of Second Language Learning).

The study: The Barngarla language (spelled Parnkalla by Schürmann 1844) is a no-longer spoken Thura-Yura Pama-Nyungan Aboriginal language of the Lakes Cultural Region of South Australia. Most recently Zuckermann, Monaghan and the Barngarla community have launched a reclamation of this sleeping beauty in three major rural/urban centres on the Eyre Peninsula, namely Port Lincoln, Whyalla, and Port Augusta. The presence of three Barngarla populations several hours drive apart presents the revival linguist with a need for a sophisticated reclamation involving ‘talknological’ innovations, such as online chatting, newsgroups, photo and resource sharing through a Barngarla wiki. This paper also examines the tensions accompanying the creation of a Barngarla ‘community of practice’ (cf. Wenger 1998) in a post-traditional Aboriginal context. In important ways, the new talknology poses a direct challenge to existing authority structures relating to the everyday management of knowledge, collaboration and participation. We predict that how the broader Barngarla community negotiates these issues will have an important bearing on the ultimate results of the reclamation project.




Revival Linguistics

Revival Linguistics is a new branch of linguistics, currently being established at Adelaide. It analyses comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies on the other hand, apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world (Zuckermann & Walsh 2011). A branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning (language reclamation is the most extreme case of Second Language Learning).

Revival Linguistics complements the established field of documentary linguistics, which records endangered languages before they fall asleep. Revival Linguistics ought to revise the fields of grammaticography (writing grammars) and lexicography (writing dictionaries): Grammars and dictionaries ought to be written for language reclamation, i.e. in a user-friendly way, for communities, not only for linguists. For example, juxtapose Lutheran missionary Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann’s 1844 spelling of the Barngarla word nunyara ‘recovery’, which ignores the English environment, thus resulting in the pronunciation nanYAra rather than NOONyara.

Closely related to contact linguistics, Revival Linguistics changes the field of historical linguistics, e.g. by weakening the Family Tree model, which implies that a language ought to have only one parent. Assisting Aboriginal communities in a realistic, non-purisitic way, without selling them myths, Revival Linguistics promotes efficiency and efficacy in language reclamation.

Certainly Australia has been made the ‘Unlucky Country’ through the historical processes of linguicide (language killing) and glottophagy (language eating). These twin forces were in operation from the early colonial period. In her detailed study of the role missionary language practices in the early years of the South Australian colony, Scrimgeour quotes the following colonial language ideology: ‘Mr Forster afterwards adverted to the present mode of teaching the children in their own language. He, with all respect to the Missionaries, would say, on several grounds, that this was wrong. The natives would be sooner civilized if their language was extinct. The children taught would afterwards mix only with whites, where their own language would be of no use – the use of their language would preserve their prejudices and debasement, and their language was not sufficient to express the ideas of civilized life.  He gave the Missionaries full credit for their talents and zeal, but he thought it would be better to teach the children in English’ (from Report on a public meeting of the South Australian Missionary Society in aid of the German Mission to the Aborigines, Southern Australian, 8 September 1843; Scrimgeour, 2007: 116, italics added).

In the case of glottophagy, Governor George Grey noted: ‘The merchant in London who lays on a vessel for a certain port, regards the affair as a mere mercantile speculation, but could he trace out the results he effects in their remotest ramifications, he would stand astonished at the changes he produces.  With the wizard wand of commerce, he touches a lone and trackless forest, and at his bidding, cities arise, and the hum and dust of trade collect – away are swept ancient races; antique laws and customs moulder into oblivion.  The strong-holds of murder and superstition are cleansed, and the Gospel is preached amongst ignorant and savage men. The ruder languages disappear successively, and the tongue of England alone is heard around’ (Grey 1841: 200-201, italics added). Grey was a strong supporter of Aboriginal languages, encouraging Schürmann’s work documenting the Adelaide language (Kaurna) and Barngarla at Port Lincoln (see below).

With globalization, homogenization and Coca-colonization there will be more and more groups all over the world added to the forlorn club of the lost-heritage peoples. Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve their wellbeing. There are various ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits of language revival: for example, social justice, diversity and employability, respectively.

Zuckermann (2012) has enthusiastically called for Native Tongue Title and linguistic human rights, suggesting that the Australian government ought to compensate Indigenous people not only for the loss of land but equally importantly for the loss of language. Zuckermann has suggested to the Australian government to define Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vernaculars as official languages.

Furthermore, it is predicted that in the future the very insights offered by Revival Linguistics will themselves become part of Indigenous Intellectual Property, when Slovenes and Estonians come to Australia and New Zealand to ask Aboriginal Australians and Maori to assist them in their own European language resurrection.

There is an urgent need to produce perspicacious LINGUISTIC and socio-linguistic insights relevant to language reclamation. Otherwise, linguists or language workers would not be able to offer, if asked by Indigenous people, efficient and efficacious advice. There are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would help revivalists and First Nations leaders to work more efficiently; for example, to focus more on basic vocabulary and verbal conjugations than on sounds and word order – see Zuckermann (2009: http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Hybridity_versus_Revivability.pdf.

Revival linguistics would assist revivalists to be more realistic and to abandon discouraging slogans such as "Give us authenticity or give us death!" The following are among the basic principles that the revival linguist encourages in Aboriginal communities:

i. If your language falls asleep: stop, revive, survive!
ii. If you revive a language, embrace the hybridity of the emerging tongue; and
iii. If your language is healthy, assist others in linguistic need.

One day we may invent devices to “inject” a language into our brains. But until then, any attempt to reclaim a hibernating language will result in a hybrid that combines components from the revivalists' and documenters' mother tongues and, of course, the target language. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld: "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

The Study


Figure 1: Map of Traditional Aboriginal Country after Norman Tindale (adapted from Hercus 1999)

The Barngarla language reclamation project has arisen through partnerships between the University of Adelaide (Linguistics and the Mobile Language Team) and the Barngarla people. Although still in its infancy, consultations began in September 2011, a number of very significant steps have been made towards reclaiming this ‘sleeping beauty’. Without doubt, the key challenge has been to develop a strategy for the reclamation of the language simultaneously and without favour in three major regional centres. In ways that will be elaborated below, this multi-sited, regional or peripheral reclamation makes demands that are very different to those often found in metropolitan reclamation contexts (e.g. Kaurna, cf. Amery...

'The fighting Gunditjmara' tells the story of the Gunditjmara people from western Victoria, who have fought for country and for nation, from frontier wars to world wars. The article looks at how Aboriginal servicemen and servicewomen serving in the Australian military forces have often spoke of being part of a long-standing, continuous warrior tradition that embodies deep respect for their forebears who fought for their traditional lands. Such sentiments were encapsulated by Captain Reg Saunders, a Gunditjmara man,  "I would have fought the war my forefathers fought because I think we were right. We were fighting for survival." One of the most famous Australian soldiers of the Second World War, Saunders was the first identifiable Aboriginal to be commissioned as an officer in the Australian Army. He is from a long line of Gunditjmara men and women - who have earned the reputation 'the fighting Gunditjmara' - who have served in the Australian military.

The Victorian Exploring Expedition was organised by the Royal Society of Victoria who wanted to contribute to the advance of geographical knowledge. The desire for the colony of Victoria to become involved in exploration was unusual and the expedition eventuated as the result of a remarkable set of circumstances that occurred in Melbourne in the 1850s. It took three years to organise and outfit the expedition and during that time the objectives changed frequently and the aims were never clearly defined. The way the Society established the expedition was unlike any previous Australian expedition. The expedition was renamed the Burke and Wills Expedition after the deaths of the two leaders. Although it is easy to imagine the drama on the expedition centered solely on Burke and Wills, the story of the expedition is a complicated one which involved many people in various groups scattered all across the continent. Fifty people sat on the Exploration Committee in Melbourne and at one stage there were more than one hundred and twenty people employed on the expedition and the relief expeditions - it was a large undertaking.

An examination of a language's loan words often reveals the historical contacts that have shaped the society in which it is spoken. For those of us who have taught Indonesian and Malay, the ability to identify Sanskrit, Arabic and European loan words has helped us to show how historical contacts have shaped Indonesian and Malay language and society. 1 With the publication of the fourth edition of the Macquarie Dictionary, 2 Australians have been given an opportunity to examine the way that continuing, and ever closer, contact with Indonesia, and to a lesser extent Malaysia, has influenced Australian English through the ever increasing number of Indonesian and Malay loan words gaining currency in Australian English. This research note documents the Dictionary's current corpus of words from Indonesian 3 and Malay which provide evidence of Australia's historical and modern links to Australia's near north. It might be noted here that Australian English is not the only language to provide evidence of links to Indonesia, since Afrikaans does as well, albeit in a historical rather than contemporary context. 4 Standard English, too, like other European languages, bears the marks of long trading and political links with Asia. The Dictionary in the introductory section to its fourth edition states that it bases its selection of words on those that have 'currency' (p. vii) in Australia as revealed by the wide ranging searches by editorial staff of published and internet Australian sources. The source material includes representative Australian texts such as CJ Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously (1978) and Blanche d'Alpuget's Turtle Beach (1981)(pp. 1652-5). These texts may well have been sources for such words as wayang, rupiah, gamelan, kretek, pasar malam, ringgit,

As the only country to occupy an entire continent occupying more than 5% of the world's land area, Australia is also the oldest, flattest, driest, and most geospatial region. Through the three main historical development stages of the continent, Australia has stepped from a pre-colonial society to the culture of the resident community. The indigenous is agricultural, negative, and the importance of virtue is important to modern Western culture with British culture as the root, the center, and dominates the economic - cultural - major life the social rule of the entire continent for a long time thereafter; then entered an independent era of the young Australian Commonwealth with the majority of the population being white, especially the British with a superiority over the posterior transitional patriarchal society. the original communal feat of indigenous communities in terms of socio-economic development level. The Australian ethnic picture is outlined from three main areas: an array of indigenous communities with a physical and spiritual culture imbued with nomadic agriculture due to isolation from development. economy - trade - cultural exchange with other civilizations in the world for a long time, so it was invaded; Along with the second array of paintings is the Asian immigrant community that possesses a culture bearing the identity of sedentary agriculture and associated with the authoritarian monarchy for thousands of years and carries a variety of techniques. Oriental traditional oriental virtues and achievements; Both the indigenous community and the Asian immigrant community suffered the same fate, overlapping with the third picture, the European immigrant community with bold modern industrial civilization. commercial identity by sea, exposed to the risk of redundant crises caused by the rapid development of the capitalist economy after the scientific and technical revolution, thus promoting colonial expansion, Solve security problems for the various strategic chain colonies around the world. Although it is impossible to hold a unique position, dominate in all aspects to decide the common development destiny of the entire Australian continent right from the beginning of the political process of the 6 colonies as the original resident community The UK, but the indigenous communities and the Asian immigrant community have constantly risen, striving to become high-value, highly productive, competitive white workers. on the fields from sugar cane, banana planting, pearl hunting, camel riding to gold digging, coal mining, ... Coming from the upper aristocracy in England abandoned the estate to Australia to organize into occupants on public land, they gradually became a system of closely linked landowners over a vast area of ​​land. They themselves have promoted the use of cheap labor of color, but also fear and seek ways to prevent cultural exchanges with the local communities through the role of women in landlords occupied white public lands. From here, not only the Australian economy officially developed in the rotation of world capitalism, but the nationalist spirit of Australia was also gradually formed by the descendants of the public landowners. with racism in mind for the purpose of preserving culture as well as economic - political - social benefits for the British community.

...for the book: In recent years race has fallen out of historiographical fashion, being eclipsed by seemingly more benign terms such as culture, ethnicity and difference. This timely and highly readable collection of essays re-energises the debate by carefully focusing our attention on local articulations of race and their intersections with colonialism and its aftermath. In Rethinking the Racial Moment: Essays on the Colonial Encounter Alison Holland and Barbara Brookes have produced a collection of studies that shift our historical understanding of colonialism in significant new directions. Their generous and exciting brief will ensure that the book has immediate appeal for multiple readers engaged in critical theory, as well as those more specifically involved in Australian and New Zealand history. Collectively, they offer new and invigorating approaches to understanding colonialism and cultural encounters in history via the interpretive (not merely temporal) frame of the moment.

The "white Australia policy" has so far largely been discussed with regard only to its political-ideological perspective. No account was taken of the central problem of racist societalization, i.e. the everyday production and reproduction of "race" as a social relation ("doing race") supported by broad sections of the population.
This comprehensive study of Australian racism and the "white sugar" campaign shows that the latter was only able to achieve success because it was embedded in a widespread "white Australia culture" that found expression in all spheres of life.

Final draft. Published as: Emily Turner-Graham and Christine Winter (Eds.), National Socialism in Oceania. A critical evaluation of its effect and aftermath, Germanica Pacifica No. 4, Peter Lang Verlag, 2010.

This book was was edited during a time when multiculturalism came under attack, and it explores a non-homogenious Australia, and the diverse responses to National Socialism during the 1930s and early 1940s.

In today's security-conscious environment, the loyalties and allegiances of migrant communities are increasingly being brought into question. Drawing on the collected knowledge of a number of Australian experts investigating interwar issues of security, surveillance and civic rights from the perspective of migration studies, this book aims, through the examination of individuals and groups in Oceania who were targeted for potential subversion or believed to hold National Socialist sympathies (including local National Socialists, Italian-Australians, Russian exiles, members of the right-wing movements the New Guard and Australia First), to consider how issues of security were regarded at another critical point in world history and what lessons we may learn from that period today. This book examines a variety of motives for embracing National Socialism and investing hope in the Third Reich. Attitudes shifted over time from enthusiasm to scepticism and disappointment. But, most importantly, beyond support and opposition, there was a surprising level of disengagement and indifference from sister movements on the radical right. This groundbreaking study defies easy answers and previously-held understandings, and will stimulate debate and further research.

Content:
‘The forest is the original home of the German soul’: Die Brücke and the complexities of finding a racial landscape
Emily Turner-Graham

Count Felix von Luckner’s 1938 “Propaganda” Visit to New Zealand and its Consequences
James N. Bade

The NSDAP stronghold Finschhafen, New Guinea
Christine Winter

Arnold von Skerst: Servant of two Masters
Barbara Winter

An almost innocent association: Russians and Fascism in Queensland (1935-45)
Thomas Poole

A not so brutal friendship: Italian responses to National Socialism in Australia
Gianfranco Cresciani

The Nazification of the New Guard: Colonel Campbell’s fascist odyssey, 1933-1938
Andrew Moore

‘A fellow of slogans and attitudes’: Leslie Cahill, National Socialism and the Australia First Movement.
Georgina Fitzpatrick

“Authority can take no risks:” Australia and the Internment of Enemy Aliens during the Second World War
Paul R. Bartrop

Locked up and guarded ‘lest [they] escaped to help their mortal enemies’: Jewish internees in New Zealand during the Second World War
Ann Beaglehole

At Home in Exile: Ambiguities of War-time Patriotism
Helga Griffin

Stephen Roberts And The Nazi Threat, 1938-39
Andrew G. Bonnell

The Church of England in Australia, Nazi Germany and the Reception of Jewish Refugees
John Moses

Nazis Unwelcome! The Jewish Community and the 1950s German Migration Scheme
Suzanne D. Rutland

Ich heiβe Olga Hedwig Krause: Deutsche Künsterlin - My name is Olga Hedwig Krause: German Artist
        Olga Hedwig Janice Krause (Leafa Wilson)

From the moment Caroline Dexter (nee Harper 1819-1884) set foot on Australian shores, she set about placing herself at the centre of public life through her writing and avocation of dress reform. With her artist husband William Dexter at her side, the couple quickly became celebrities in the new colony. She was steadfast in her endeavours despite negative publicity and fought against hard line colonial opinion. Her time in Australia found her initially ridiculed but eventually gained some support and respect through her articulate lectures and dedication to promoting the rights of women, health and libertarian principles. The Journey of the Bloomer from America to Britain and eventually to Australia would not have been possible without Caroline and her bravery (Morgan, 1999).

This article reconsiders the politics and aesthetics of aftermath photography. Many critics have argued that the emerging, experimental genre of documentary photography ‘abstracts’ and renders ‘sublime’ the traumatic historical events that it takes as its subject matter. While these terms accurately reflect the aesthetics of aftermath photography, their politics cannot, the author argues, be so easily dismissed. The article reconsider the genre through Gene Ray's theories of the sublime and Rosemary Laing's photograph welcome to Australia (2004), which documents the Woomera refugee detention centre, in order to offer a better understanding of what is at stake in this new mode of documentary photography.

Third Text, 28.6 (December, 2014), 555-562

Free download for those without access to Third Text:

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/65x3pFdkmTNRu4ZkQbj9/full

Or
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09528822.2014.970775#.VbMVRjWzq-0

John King was a young man from Ulster whose life changed forever after a chance meeting in India. He arrived in Australia with no aspirations of being an explorer. Nevertheless he became the first person to cross Australia from north to south and became an reluctant hero as a result. His loyalty to Burke secured him a trusted position in charge of the expedition's camels, and camels allowed Burke to explore in a style that no one had been able to attempt previously. At the age of 21, after being in Australia  for only ten weeks, John King set off with Burke to walk from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria and back. His story is intertwined with that of the camels, the first to be used on a major Australian exploring expedition.

ABSTRACT
The relationship between command ability and criminal responsibility was key to a case in a British military court in Singapore in 1946 that convicted Japanese Lt. Col. Hirateru Banno and six others for the deaths of 3,097 British and Australian prisoners of war, part of a group known as “F Force” on the Burma Thailand Railway during the Second World War. Banno was handed a sentence of three years. The reviewing officer upheld the sentence, accepting evidence of Banno’s inability to command his troops. He also questioned the ability of the senior British
officers in the POW camp. The Banno case took place a year after the precedent-setting trial of Lt. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, which appeared to hold commanders to a strict liability for war crimes committed by their subordinates. This thesis also examines the status of prisoners and how they are protected by the laws of war as well as the question of fairness in trials by military tribunals.

From the moment the expedition of Magellan gave Patagonia its name, it became a land where European fantasies and fears dwelled. A no man’s land inhabited by giant anthropophagites located at the antipodes of civilization, this steppe swept by icy winds was not transformed into a colonial setting until the 19th century. The territory then became the object of an ongoing territorial dispute between the new states of Argentina and Chile, whose efforts to establish sovereignty as landowners languished until the late 1870s. Nomadic indigenous sovereignties had faced slow Western expansion on the continent; here, they were swiftly replaced by sheep. On the continent, the Tehuelche were displaced; on the island of Tierra del Fuego, the Selknam faced extermination. Sheep sovereignty, fully integrated into imperial networks, was the driving force behind local state building. Just as the British pastoral colonization of the Falkland Islands conditioned any possibility of permanent presence in the South Atlantic, the sheep industry, arriving swiftly in the shape of capital, persons, and animals, allowed for the Argentinization and Chileanization of what was once the frontier of civilization. In this sense, the occupation of the Falklands/Malvinas, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego may be considered successive colonial processes that form part of the same frontier drive as the Empire in capital.

"In the final chapter of Capital: Volume 1, Karl Marx discusses E.G. Wakefield’s insights into the colony in the Swan River district in Western Australia and pokes fun at the ‘unhappy Mr Peel’ (1976: 933). Despite Thomas Peel’s foresight to bring ‘means of subsistence and production to the amount of £50,000’, along with 300 working class persons, he failed to arrange for ‘the export of English relations of production’ to the isolated district (ibid.)1. In the years that followed the colony’s establishment in 1829, it approached collapse. Unable to generate capital and extract surplus labour, by the early 1840s colonists were petitioning for the first ‘free’ colony of Australia to introduce convict transportation2. It was ultimately through the introduction of unfree labour to Swan River in 1850 that capitalist social relations were able to advance, and almost 10,000 convicts were relocated to the location by 1868, when transportation ceased. A question that emerges from the story of Swan River, and from the early years of the other Australian colonies further east, is whether a land lacking virtually any ‘doubly free’ labour should be considered part of the capitalist mode of production.

This article argues that, despite the early Australian colonies encompassing the extensive use of unfree convict labour and a virtual absence of wage-labour, the ‘English relations of production’ (definitively capitalist relations) were present from the start. That is, the colonies were, during the first few decades after 1788, part of the British capitalist mode of production. The colonies were not pre-capitalist because they were largely a gaol and penal state, as some have argued, but were capitalist because that goal served an important social purposefor British capitalism. Further, this article argues that the failure of the colonies to trade within the world market is not itself sufficient to argue that another mode of production, non-capitalist or pre-capitalist, was in place.

The heritage-listed Hay Gaol in southwestern New South Wales, in addition to other functions, served as a locked institution for adolescent girls. The Gaol now functions as a museum and is also the location for the annual Australia Day celebrations for the town of Hay.  However, the exhibits in the Hay Gaol Museum focus more on the town’s settler history than on its previous carceral function. This disembodied presence may symbolise a nation’s refusal to acknowledge the importance of material culture to Forgotten Australians.

This article examines the ways that Australia’s largest retail firms
accessed and adapted external knowledge flows, largely from the
USA, to develop discount department store chains from the late-1960s
onwards. In doing so, it extends work on retail internationalisation
by focusing on the importation, rather than the exportation of business
models. The three firms – Coles, Myer, and Woolworths – exhibited
differing degrees of absorptive capacity in identifying and
commercialising knowledge flows. This was reflected in fluctuating
levels of success, the scope of store networks and relative positioning
in the Australian market. Further, the role played by informal
associations between managers in non-competing firms in different
markets during the development of discount department stores in
Australia advances the case for socialising analyses of business
knowledge transfer more broadly.

This chapter illustrates the fact that the construction of the Islamic / Arab / Middle Eastern ‘other’ in the news media is not in itself a new phenomena and arguably dates back to the very earliest days of the modern media industry. Tracing such negative portrayals to the origins of the printing press in Europe, this paper therefore seeks to investigate the relationship between Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism and the printing press. Moving forward, this paper also examines the impact this lineage had on the Australian press of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Beginning with its deplorable coverage of Australia’s Indigenous people and the paranoia surrounding the ‘Asian Invasion’ this paper sheds new light on the coverage of Islam and the Middle East in the early Australian press and the emergence of the ‘Muslim Menace’. Finally, this chapter concludes by noting that such a racialist history raises a host of questions and challenges for the contemporary Australian news media.

The story of wages in nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Australia has largely been told through official published statistics and the experiences of skilled artisans and construction labourers. Utilising wage book data from an early successful manufacturing plant – a biscuit factory – we reveal the earning histories of several neglected groups of Australian workers. We specifically investigate the effects of the 1890s depression, the introduction of a wages board, and shifting demographics on the wages of unskilled factory hands, women, juvenile workers, and commercial clerks. We demonstrate that typical Australian wage series studies have misinterpreted the impact of these phenomena.

This paper explores the origins and development of the public dialogue between Bernard Smith (1916-2011) and Robert Hughes (1938-2012). Smith and Hughes were giants of Australian art history of the twentieth century. Both, however, followed very different career paths: Smith’s readership was primarily academic and local, while Hughes’s audience was popular and international. And yet, despite these differences, a considerable amount of exchange existed between the two. After first locking horns in 1961, Smith and Hughes engaged in public debate intermittently for more than four decades. This dialogue, which transpired in the pages of published sources, especially their reviews and books, was characterised by acrimony and bitterness, as well as moments of conciliation and mutual respect. When contesting issues of common interest, both writers played to their natural strengths. Smith was dominant in the field of art history, while Hughes had the upper hand in art criticism. Each, however, encroached upon the other’s area of expertise: Smith wrote art criticism and Hughes wrote art history. Conflict was greatest in areas where their respective spheres of authority overlapped. Although tensions receded after 1964, when Hughes left Australia, they did not end. Key topics of debate included abstract art and modernism; provincialism and internationalism; and most importantly the vexed issue of Australian cultural isolation, which was defined in terms of Australian art and its relationship to European art history (or, as Smith termed it, ‘Renaissance tradition’).

This article analyzes the ways in which Canadian and Australian immigration policies represent causes and consequences of neoliberal restructuring. Interrogating neoliberalism as a series of political-economic and moral changes derived from the marketization of societal and governmental arrangements, it illustrates how numerically-based ‘points systems’ have been employed as mechanisms for: gauging human capital; establishing indices of risk and undesirability; and promoting the ‘responsibilization’ of incoming migrants. In doing so the points systems' historical trajectory is traced through a variety of administrative reforms characteristic of neoliberal government and flexible accumulation. Ultimately, this article contends that as rational, technical and economically guided systems of enumeration and assessment, both governments' policies mirror, enhance and extend neoliberal arrangements and sensibilities. In providing ostensibly objective techniques of evaluation the points systems have assisted in injecting the ideal neoliberal citizens- who are, above all, flexible, cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial and autonomous- from abroad. Overall this paper contributes to studies of state restructuring by providing new insights into the links between the neglected domain of immigration control and emergent techniques of societal regulation and citizen-making.

Australia's former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was not the great humanitarian of Australian refugee policy many people have claimed in recent years. Such claims are held especially when painting a contrast with the hardline policies implemented by Prime Minister John Howard from 2001 onwards.

Although Fraser achieved many things around the intake of Indo-Chinese refugees following the fall of Saigon, the combination of his “boat-holding policy”, his deterrent international broadcast messages about “queue jumpers” and his refusal to deal with five huge vessels sailing from Vietnam show that in relation to “boat arrivals” Fraser was similar to all Prime Ministers that came after him, hoping that “the boats would stop”.

Fraser not only refused to deal with these five huge vessels, even after the UN stated that the passengers should be treated as refugees, he held them up as examples of “trafficking” when his “people smuggling laws” were presented, debated and passed in Parliament during 1980.

Moreover, the policy patterns and directions set in place from 1978 to 1980, although they may well have been drafted by Australian immigration officials, confirmed the directions firmly maintained under successive governments from Fraser onwards.

If Fraser would have employed a different response around immigration department initiatives, Australians may now well react very differently every time an asylum seeker boat arrives on their horizon.

In this article, I "read against the grain" of a monument to post-WWII immigration and migrant communities. I am concerned with how such monuments, locally situated, might be used in more progressive and transformative histories, ones that harbor the potential to challenge existing public and collective memories of postwar migration and multiculturalism that occur on a national stage and within the ambit of Australia's heritage industry. This is a study in how discursively marginalized migrant groups, with subaltern narratives about mobility and settlement, claim space for alternative histories in the context of a restrictive official heritage.

For Australia as for much of the rest of the globe, the First World War represented a key turning point, prompting a new sense of national identity that thereafter grew steadily stronger. The period extending from the peace negotiations following the end of this conflict to the outbreak of full-scale war between Japan and China in 1937 was a time when Australia began to assemble a corps of diplomats and bureaucrats specializing in international affairs, to create what would become a distinctive foreign policy trajectory designed to promote specifically Australian interests, and to face up to dilemmas that would continue to preoccupy and perplex Australian leaders throughout much of the twentieth century and beyond. The formation of the ‘Pacific Branch’ in 1919 in the Prime Minister’s office, managed by E.L. Piesse, followed by the more formal re-establishment within the Prime Minister’s Department in 1921 of the Department of External Affairs, marked the true beginnings of a discrete Australian foreign affairs agency. The appearance in 2019—coincidentally also marking the centenary of the Paris Peace Conference, where Australia’s Prime Minister William “Billy” Hughes was a notable personality—of the first of two volumes covering the years spanning the aftermath of the First World War to 1936 is therefore particularly welcome.

Australia’s migration experience between 1901 and 2017 (Part 1)

The article concerns the development of Australia’s migration policy from the moment of establishing the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 to modern times. The first part of the article analyses the problem from the beginnings of Australia to World War II, and the second part concerns the period from 1948 up to modern times. Comprehensive conclusions derived from the study are included in the summary at the end of the second part. The first part focuses on the genesis and the key events that determined the Australian authorities’ approach to the issue of immigration in the subsequent years of this country’s existence. In order to show the wide background of this process, the author briefly discusses the events that had taken place before the federation was established. It can be hypothesised that Australia was initially built on the foundation of colonists and then (purposeful) immigrants, from which it drew strength and resources for its development. Tracking the history of migration to Australia is helpful in verifying this assumption.