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At the height of the Victorian gold rush, between July 1852 and June 1853, hundreds of government-assisted migrants from Lancashire, England made their way to Australia and disembarked in Victoria. They were part of a huge flood of such migrants who were poured into the new-born colony as the colonial administration scrabbled to cope with the gold rush. The scheme was an unprecedented achievement in government-organised migration. Yet most historians have tended to dismiss these assisted migrants as the unskilled poorest-of-the-poor, and not of the same calibre as the working-class and middle-class unassisted migrants also arriving at the colony in great numbers. Made in Lancashire is a collective biography that explores in detail who the Lancashire assisted migrants were, their origins, why they migrated, where they went on arrival in Victoria, and what they made of their lives. Far from being the dross of England, these migrants were intelligent, highly motivated risktakers, many of whom went on to experience success as gold diggers, selectors, tradespeople, and entrepreneurs.
The death of a bird haunts the relationship between two siblings. A lonely narrator waits for a bus that never comes. A boy makes soup with his grandmother and wonders about the memories she has buried. For the sixteenth edition of Verge, we asked contributors to reflect on the theme of Home, a word that took on a new meaning after a year of solitude and separation. We chose this theme because we hoped to read about homes of all kinds: unhomely homes, abandoned homes, unlikely homes, forgotten homes, found homes. And we were awed by the beauty, depth, and variety in the pieces we received. Our writers explored homes of past, present, and future; they probed the bleakness of domesticity and mourned the loss of what was once held close. They wrote about familial ties and found communities, about the painfulness of childhood and the bonds of ancestry. Writing, indeed, to make a home in.
Autobiography or fiction? This question has shadowed the work of enigmatic Australian author Eve Langley since her death in 1974. Was her writing the truth, or false, or somewhere in between? What did it mean when she described her father as 'evil' and 'perverted' in her first published novel The Pea Pickers (1942) and a kindly figure in later, unpublished work? Did she really believe herself to be Oscar Wilde? Was she gender fluid? Eve and her sister (and co-conspirator) June held onto family secrets as if their very lives depended on it. Eve Langley has been in the news since the 1920s and reviewed on both sides of the globe. She was an author, a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter and a long-term psychiatric inmate. But June, who traversed the Australian countryside dressed as a boy, a willing lifelong companion to her beloved sister, is a lonely anonymous figure. Drawing on contemporary evidence, Eve Langley and the Pea Pickers gives the key players in the author's life a voice, and the result is a fascinating but ultimately poignant tale of love and loss.
The Ypres salient 'was the favourite battle ground of the devil and his minions' wrote one returned serviceman after the First World War. Few who fought in the infamous third battle of Ypres - now known as Passchendaele - in 1917 would have disagreed. All five of the Australian Imperial Force's (AIF) infantry divisions were engaged in this bloody campaign. Despite early successes, their attacks floundered in front of the devastated Belgian Passchendaele's when autumn rains drenched the battlefield, turning it into an immense quagmire. By the time the AIF withdrew, it had suffered over 38,000 casualties, including 10,000 dead, far outweighing Australian losses in any other Great War campaign. Given the extent of their sacrifices, the Australians' exploits in Belgium ought to be well known in a nation that has fervently commemorated its involvement in the First World War. Yet, Passchendaele occupies an ambiguous place in Australian collective memory. Tracing the commemorative work of official and non-official agents-including that of C.E.W. Bean; the Australian War Memorial; returned soldiers; battlefield pilgrims; and, more recently, the Department of Veterans' Affairs, working in collaboration with Belgian locals-The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory explores why these battles became, and still remain, peripheral to the dominant First World War narrative in Australia: the Anzac legend.
Australia has enjoyed an unprecedented period of prosperity in recent decades, yet despite this there has been a widely reported loss of faith in politics and institutions. With the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia faces its most significant economic and social challenges in decades. How is politics placed to deal with these challenges and what is the capacity of our key institutions to do so? What are the lessons and warnings from history? In Challenging Politics, longtime politician Scott Ryan argues that the way we determine issues, the way we practice politics, and what we expect from politicians and government, is in flux. To some, the virtue of compromise has become the sin of sellout. The louder voices of fringe and single-issue movements attract attention, money and commitment, and apply litmus tests to those who seek to govern. This makes it more difficult for our institutions, and therefore our politics, to function effectively. The long-talked-about collapse of the centre isn't solely about extreme ideas. It is also about how our expectations of politics and our institutions have changed.--
For some time, Australia's democracy has been slowly sliding into disrepair. The nation's major policy challenges go unaddressed, our economic future is uncertain and political corruption is becoming normalised. It's tempting, but distracting, to point to the usual list of reasons, from the declining calibre of the political class to the growing polarisation of politics. But we can't understand the current predicament of our democracy without recognising the central role of Murdoch's national media monopoly. In Queensland, where national elections are determined, he owns thirteen of the state's fourteen newspapers. All his papers are loss-making and retained for political influence only; nationally, they act as a Liberal Party protection racket, providing zero accountability on Coalition corruption and incompetence. Together with the Liberal Party, the Murdoch media cultivates a climate of national anxiety, fear and anger through relentless campaigns on deficit, debt and the threat to Australia from ever-changing but always nefarious foreign interests. Their goal is an anxious Australia, reinforced by the latest campaign applications of political neuroscience, permanently predisposing the electorate towards the reassurance of having conservatives in power. For these reasons, there is no longer a level playing field in Australian politics. We won't see another progressive government in Canberra until we deal with this cancer in our democracy. Three more things must change for Labor to be returned to office. Labor must significantly broaden its political base; demolish the entire rationale for the conservative political project now that the Liberal Party has abandoned its position on debt, deficit and government intervention in the economy; and put forward a clear plan dealing with the challenges ahead: recurring pandemics; demographic decline; technological disruption undermining economic competitiveness and employment; the rise of China; and the continued economic and environmental devastations of climate change. All four tasks are essential. All four will require great political courage to bring about fundamental change. And now is the time for women and men of courage to act.--
Nature creates viruses. But people and politics create pandemics. And pandemics create new politics. In the 1980s, the toxic politics of the response to HIV/AIDS turned a serious but manageable viral threat into a global pandemic that took the lives of 32 million people and brought illness and suffering to millions more. In 2020, COVID-19 emerged into a world where many governments had failed to heed the lessons of the past, and so they were unprepared and unable to stop its global spread. But some countries had learned the harsh lessons of HIV/AIDS, and had contained SARS1, Ebola, Zika and MERS. When coronavirus hit, they knew what to do to save their people from avoidable infections and deaths. In Unmasked: the Politics of Pandemics, Bill Bowtell draws on his four decades of experience in the global and local politics of public health to examine why some countries got it right with coronavirus while others collapsed into misery and chaos. He looks closely at the critical weeks when poor planning brought Australia to the brink of disaster, until the Australian people forced their governments to put public health before politics. Unmasked reveals how and why our politicians failed us during the greatest public health crisis of this century to date.
The scandal involving Dyson Heydon, former justice of the High Court, confirmed that the scourge of sexual harassment in Australian workplaces was also to be found in the chambers of one of the seven most senior judges in the country. An unquestioning reliance on the calibre of the fine legal minds appointed to the High Court had blinded us to the reality that sexual harassment is as common in the legal profession as it is in corporate Australia and in all other industries. In particular, in the legal profession, a hierarchical structure and a culture of silence had served to perpetuate feelings of embarrassment, fear and shame on the part of victims. In Power & Consent, Rachel Doyle, a practising Senior Counsel for over a decade, argues that we need to understand the power relationships at the heart of the modern workplace. Sexual harassment is rarely a 'one off'. Perpetrators continue their harassment because they are not called to account for their actions. Silence and complicity allow recidivists to go unpunished and normalise the phenomenon of 'getting away with it'. Perpetrators must be taught what consent means. This book demands a new response to complaints of sexual harassment; one which recognises the power of strength in numbers, the probative value of multiple complaints, and the restorative power of grievances shared. It also calls for the imposition of new obligations: it asks bystanders to become participants and to take collective responsibility for supporting victims and stopping perpetrators.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the digital disruption of business by the information and communications sectors, is well underway in Australia and around the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the pace of change. We are witnessing a proliferation of new platforms and new markets, with AI replacing human expertise - we are seeing the transformation of the firm, how we work and the nature of society. These seismic changes are all impacting the global distribution of economic growth and income. And alarmingly, among the OECD economies, as a share of GDP, Australia's ICT sector is around half the average, and falling further over time - it is second-last, only above Mexico. Given the scope and speed of change, Australia is now confronted by a stark choice between becoming a tech innovator, and so a producer of economic profits and high-paying jobs, or stagnating. We are at a crossroads, and our policy choices today will determine whether we remain one of the wealthiest and happiest nations in the world, or see our global position continue to slide. In The Digital Revolution: A Survival Guide, Professor Simon Wilkie argues that, to preserve our status as one of the most desirable economies to live in, we need a policy revolution that addresses not just universal basic income, but tax policy, lifelong education, social inclusion and the nature of work. In short, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to usher in a period of sustained prosperity and increasing equality. But to achieve this demands no less than a rethinking of the social contract.In the National Interest is a new series in the Monash University Publishing list that is focused on the challenges Australia confronts. The series informs, influences and inspires public discourse. Showcasing experts both from within Monash and beyond, these short, thought-provoking and accessible books will address the major issues of our times, from public policy to governance and government.
The erosion of public trust in government has been a characteristic of liberal democracies in recent years. How much have the twists and turns in climate change policy over the past decade contributed to this in Australia? As a senior public servant during six prime ministerships, Martin Parkinson had a front-row seat from which to watch the inability of successive governments to tackle climate change. From an emissions trading scheme through to a National Energy Guarantee, this is a story of science and expertise ignored, short-termism, wasted opportunities, and international disappointment. Climate change demands both a local and a global response, just as do pandemics, mass migration, and ocean pollution. The increasingly urgent question is whether governments are up to the challenge or are prepared to bear the consequences of inaction or indifference. The history of climate change policy in Australia is a sorry story which should leave Australians demanding more courage and commitment from their political leaders.
The level of public frustration and disengagement with political leaders has never been higher. At the same time, the problems we need them to deal with, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis in aged care, and accelerating climate change, are immediate and urgent. Based on his experience working closely with a large number of ministers and their private offices, both at the federal and state level, and his time in the United States, Don Russell reflects on politicians, the political process, and the role of government, and explains why our political leaders are as they are. Drawing on his experience, including his involvement in the golden age of public policy of the Hawke/Keating years and his observations on Australia's early success responding to the pandemic, he suggests that there is a pathway that can lead to dramatically better outcomes for the country and more satisfying and longer careers for our politicians. People want their elected officials to be informed, to be capable and creative, to be able to devise solutions that work, and then to be able to explain those solutions and bring the community with them. They want their elected officials to lead.
In A Secret Australia, eighteen independent and prominent Australians discuss what Australia has learned about itself from the WikiLeaks revelations. This is an Australia that officials do not want us to see. However Australians may perceive our place in the world, whether as dependable ally or good international citizen, WikiLeaks has shown us a startlingly different story. This is an Australia that officials do not want us to see, where the Australian Defence Force's 'information operations' are deployed to maintain public support for our foreign war contributions, where media-wide super injunctions are issued by the government to keep politicians' and major corporations' corruption scandals secret, where the US Embassy prepares profiles of Australian politicians to fine-tune its lobbying and ensure support for the 'right' policies. The revelations flowing from the releases of millions of secret and confidential official documents by WikiLeaks have helped Australians to better understand why the world is not at peace, why corruption continues to flourish, and why democracy is faltering. This greatest ever leaking of hidden government documents in world history yields knowledge that is essential if Australia, and the rest of the world, is to grapple with the consequences of covert, unaccountable and unfettered power. Contributors include author Scott Ludlam, former defence secretary Paul Barratt, lawyers Julian Burnside and Jennifer Robinson, academics Richard Tanter, Benedetta Brevini, John Keane, Suelette Dreyfus, Gerard Goggin and Clinton Fernandes, psychologist Lissa Johnson, as well as writers and journalists Andrew Fowler, Quentin Dempster, Antony Loewenstein, Guy Rundle, George Gittoes, Helen Razer and Julian Assange.
Whenever anyone tells you that only the big parties or star candidates have a chance of winning a seat in federal parliament, just say 'Cathy McGowan'. Running as a community-backed independent candidate, Cathy won the previously safe Liberal seat of Indi in 2013 and again in 2016 and passed Indi on to another independent in 2019 - a first in Australian history. Cathy tells how thousands of ordinary men and women in north-eastern Victoria got together, organised themselves and made their voices heard in Canberra. An inspiring tale and a primer for other communities looking to create change.--
'There is something mysterious and wonderful about the act of teaching someone how to do something. Good teaching can lead to personal and social transformation.' In Binding Things Together, author Ronald Noone contends that religion and education remain indispensable vehicles for living authentic, rewarding, and valuable lives so long as these terms are not confined by the institutions that seek to claim ownership of them. One of the many definitions of religion, from the Latin 'religio' means, 'to consider carefully' while re ligare means to 're-connect' following Saint Augustine. The author's preferred definition for religion is 'that which binds things together'; that religion helps makes sense of existence or gives a purpose. Teaching is the act where showing someone how to do something can also give a sense of purpose to both the teacher and the learner. The author addresses the new gods appearing in schooling and education. The god of technology, the pursuit of 'wellness' in school settings, the obsession with data and metrics, and the influence of business on education with the corporatisation of school boards and the demand that schools' chief responsibility is to prepare students for the workforce. Binding Things Together addresses the cultural questions of the day that are facing parents, teachers, school administrators, clergy, and religious laity. The author argues that the broad range of teaching is at a fundamental level, a religious activity.
Injustice. Survival. Memory. These are the stories of civilians arrested, deported, and incarcerated in camps at Hay, Orange and Tatura during the Second World War. Over 2500 men came from Britain to Australia on the Dunera, disembarking in Melbourne and Sydney in September 1940. Over 250 men, women and children came from Singapore on the Queen Mary three weeks later. Volume 2 of Dunera Lives follows the paths of a selection of these people, from their early lives before and during the Nazi years, through their arrival in Britain or the Straits Settlements in search of a safe haven, to their arrest as enemy aliens and subsequent deportation and incarceration in camps in Australia. Then, as free men, they start new lives in many parts of the world. What they made of their freedom is striking. This book is a chronicle of injury, endurance, courage, and transcendence.
What is the purpose of an intelligence organisation? The short answer is to transform disparate and ambiguous information into a product that clarifies national security decision-making. Ideally, that process ought to be politically neutral and detached from the policy objectives of the government it serves. But what happens when intelligence ceases to be impartial and is used as a political means to support a policy preference? More significantly, what happens when intelligence is distorted, twisted, or manipulated to achieve this aim? Spinning the Secrets of State addresses these questions by investigating historical case studies developed from assiduous research into previously classified archival documents, political papers, private correspondence, and diaries to show how the secrets of state can be spun into a potent political weapon. In this revealing tour Justin T. McPhee considers the evolution of intelligence politicisation in Australia from before Federation in 1901 through to the modern era, providing a deep historical context in which to understand the convergence of intelligence and politics. Containing much new information, Spinning the Secrets of State offers an illuminating account of the secret inner workings of intelligence manipulation and the conditions that enable politicisation to arise. An essential read for both the general observer and scholars interested in understanding why intelligence and politics seem fated to collide.--
Navigating obsessions, commemorating loved ones, cooking a meal, drinking with friends, picking at our bodies, reckoning with our choices, finding ways to connect, finding ways to exist in a world that doesn't always accommodate us. Rituals give shape to our days and punctuate our years. It's the large ones we remember the most, but it's the small ones that carve out our lives for us. This year's theme resonated with so many creative writers in all different, wonderful ways. Our contributors picked through their lives, minds, and imaginations to bring creative pieces spanning various genres and forms. Some will break your heart, while others will make you laugh. Most will do both.
When Vincent van Gogh picked up his pencil and set out on his artistic career, it was not with the intention of becoming a leader of the avant-garde art world. Rather, his aims centred on earning a reasonable wage and living within the middle-class norms of his family. Van Goghs hope was to become an illustrator of magazines and newspapers. From 1880-85 van Gogh assembled a collection of over 2,000 black-and-white prints, predominately from English publications such as the Graphic and the Illustrated London News. These prints were produced in the thousands to accompany news stories or as stand-alone illustrations to be pinned up in the family home. Vincent Alessi reveals for the first time how van Goghs collection acted for him as both inspiration and manual: a guide to the subject matter demanded by leading illustrated newspapers and magazines and a model of artistic style. These popular images are shown to have palpably shaped van Goghs art, throughout his career, and to open up rich new understandings of a life and body of work that continue to intrigue and inspire.
Ken Inglis was one of Australia's most creative, wide-ranging and admired historians. During a scholarly career spanning nearly seven decades, his humane, questioning approach - summed up by the recurring query, 'I wonder...' - won him a large and appreciative audience. Whether he was writing about religion, the media, nationalism, the 'civil religion' of Anzac, a subject he made his own, or collaborating on monumental histories of Australia or the remarkable men aboard the Dunera, he brought wit, erudition and originality to the study of history. Alongside his history writing, he pioneered press criticism in Australia, contributed journalism to magazines and newspapers, and served as vice-chancellor of the fledgling University of Papua New Guinea. This collection of essays traces the life and work of this much-loved historian and observer of Australia life.
Mallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to survive the droughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity as well as the vagaries of international markets and became some of Australias most resilient agriculturalists. In mallee country, innovation and tenacity have been neighbours to hardship and failure. Mallee Country is a story of how land and people shape each other. It is the story of how a landscape once derided by settlers as a howling wilderness covered in dismal scrub became home to citizens who delighted in mallee fauna and flora and fought to conserve it for future generations. And it is the story of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain future of depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope.
Winner of the Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal for Excellence, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, 2019.
From the maelstrom of the Depression and World War II, from Communist Party membership in the 1930s-1950s, and early attachment to the feminism and peace, Jean Blackburn emerged as a significant public intellectual. Her life work was the attachment of education policy to the causes of social equality and opportunity. She worked with Peter Karmel on the most significant government report framing school policy in the twentieth century, the blue-print for the Australian Schools Commission. Blackburn was the architect of the Disadvantaged Schools Program, which revolutionised the way that public and Catholic schools delivered education to families marked by many disadvantages, including poverty. She was an architect of the Girls, School and Society report of 1976. Jean Blackburn possessed a charismatic presence, never more in evidence than as she worked on senior secondary school reform in Victoria in the 1980s. As a feminist Blackburn bridged the generations. She was a fiercely independent, courageous, creative and effective social reformer and public intellectual.
Dennis Altmans long obsession with the United States began when he went there as a graduate student during Lyndon Johnsons Presidency. His early writing stemmed from the counter-culture that developed in the States in the mid-1960s. Altman was involved in early Gay Liberation, and his 1971 study: Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation is regarded as a classic work in its field. Since then, Altmans writings have touched in various ways upon the shifting terrain of sexual politics, including the AIDs epidemic, which he witnessed from the onset while living in New York. Altmans memoir, Unrequited Love, is as wide-ranging and remarkable as his career, moving between Australia, the United States, Europe and parts of Asia, and influenced by encounters with intellectuals and writers including James Baldwin, Gough Whitlam, Dorothy Porter, Christos Tsiolkas, Anne Summers, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag. Written through the lens of recent activism and the global rise of authoritarianism, this is a story of a half century of activism, intellectualism, conflict and friendship.
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