Remembering sport history: Narrative, social memory and the origins of the rugby league in Australia

This study examines the historiography of the origins of rugby league in Australia. By accepting the inclusive nature of representation of the past as found in social memory theory, a wide range of sources ranging from histories written by academics to annuals, yearbooks and newspaper books are consulted. These sources reveal that there are several competing and conflicting accounts of the emergence of rugby league in Australia. These divergent accounts are used to facilitate a discussion of the role of narrative in sport history This article argues that narrative is an integral, not optional, feature of the production of history and that the historography of the origins of rugby league highlight the problematic nature of objectivity in history and the unavoidable, impositionalist role of the historian.

Sun exposure and interaction with family history in risk of melanoma, Queensland, Australia

Sun exposure is the main environmental risk factor for melanoma, but the timing of exposure during life that confers increased risk is controversial. Here we provide the first report of the association between lifetime and age-specific cumulative ultraviolet exposure and cutaneous melanoma in Queensland, Australia, an area of high solar radiation, and examine the association separately for families at high, intermediate and low familial melanoma risk. Subjects were a population-based sample of melanoma cases diagnosed and registered in Queensland between 1982 and 1990 and their relatives. The analysis included 1,263 cases and relatives with confirmed cutaneous melanoma and 3,111 first-degree relatives without melanoma as controls. Data an lifetime residence and sun exposure, family history and other melanoma risk factors were collected by a mailed questionnaire. Using conditional multiple logistic regression with stratification by family, cumulative sun exposure in childhood and in adulthood after age 20 was significantly associated with melanoma, with estimated relative risks of 1.15 per 5,000 minimal erythemal doses (MEDs) from age 5 to 12 years, and 1.52 per 5 MEDs/day from age 20. There was no association with sun exposure in families at high familial melanoma risk. History of nonmelanoma skin cancer (relative risk [RR] = 1.26) and multiple sunburns (RR = 1.31) were significant risk factors. These findings indicate that sun exposure in childhood and in adulthood are important determinants of melanoma but not in those rare families with high melanoma susceptibility, in which genetic factors are likely to be more important. (C) 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Phylogeny, molecular and fossil dating, and biogeographic history of Annonaceae and Myristicaceae (Magnoliales)

Annonaceae and Myristicaceae, the two largest families of Magnoliales, are pantropical groups of uncertain geographic history. The most recent morphological and molecular phylogenetic analyses identify the Asian-American genus Anaxagorea as sister to all other Annonaceae and the ambavioids, consisting of small genera endemic to South America, Africa, Madagascar, and Asia, as a second branch. However, most genera form a large clade in which the basal lines are African, and South American and Asian taxa are more deeply nested. Although it has been suggested that Anaxagorea was an ancient Laurasian line, present data indicate that this genus is basically South American. These considerations may mean that the family as a whole began its radiation in Africa and South America in the Late Cretaceous, when the South Atlantic was narrower, and several lines dispersed from Africa-Madagascar into Laurasia as the Tethys closed in the Tertiary. This scenario is consistent with the occurrence of annonaceous seeds in the latest Cretaceous of Nigeria and the Eocene of England and with molecular dating of the family. Based on distribution of putatively primitive taxa in Madagascar and derived taxa in Asia, it has been suggested that Myristicaceae had a similar history. Phylogenetic analyses of Myristicaceae, using morphology and several plastid regions, confirm that the ancestral area was Africa-Madagascar and that Asian taxa are derived. However, Myristicaceae as a whole show strikingly lower molecular divergence than Annonaceae, indicating either a much younger age or a marked slowdown in molecular evolution. The fact that the oldest diagnostic fossils of Myristicaceae are Miocene seeds might be taken as evidence that Myristicaceae are much younger than Annonaceae, but this is implausible in requiring transoceanic dispersal of their large, animal-dispersed seeds.

Communism and Public Opinion in Queensland, 1939-1951 : An Explanation of Queensland's Vote in the 1951 Anti-Communist Referendum

The starting point of this thesis was a desire to explain the rapid demise in the popularity which the Communist Party enjoyed in Queensland during the second world war. Wartime Queensland gave the Australian Communist Party its highest state vote and six years later Queensland again gave the Communist Party its highest state vote - this time however, to ban the Party. From this I was led into exploring the changing policies, beliefs and strategies of the Party, as well as the many sub-groups on its periphery, and the shifts in public response to these. In 1939 Townsville elected Australia's first Communist alderman. Five years later, Bowen elected not only Australia's first but also the British Empire's first, Communist state government member. Of the five electorates the Australian Communist Party contested in the 1944 Queensland State elections, in none did the Party's candidate receive less than twenty per-cent of the formal vote. Not only was the Party seemingly enjoying considerable popular support but this was occurring in a State which, but for the Depression years (May 1929 - June 1932) had elected a Labor State Government at every state election since 1915. In the September 1951 Constitution Alteration Referendum, 'Powers To Deal With Communists and Communism', Queensland regist¬ered the nation's highest "Yes" majority - 55.76% of the valid vote. Only two other states registered a majority in favour of the referendum's proposals, Western Australia and Tasmania. As this research was undertaken it became evident that while various trends exhibited at the time, anti-Communism, the work of the Industrial Groups, Labor opportunism, local area feelings, ideological shifts of the Party, tactics of Communist-led unions, etc., were present throughout the entire period, they were best seen when divided into three chronological phases of the Party's history and popularity. The first period covers the consolidation of the Party's post-Depression popularity during the war years as it benefited from the Soviet Union's colossal contribution to the Allied war efforts, and this support continued for some six months or so after the war. Throughout the period Communist strength within the trade union movement greatly increased as did total Party membership. The second period was marked by a rapid series of events starting in March 1946, with Winston Churchill's "Official Opening" of the Cold War by his sweeping attack on Communism and Russia, at Fulton. Several days later the first of a series of long and bitter strikes in Communist-led unions occurred, as the Party mobil¬ized for what it believed would be a series of attacks on the working class from a ruling class, defending a capitalist system on the verge of an economic collapse. It was a period when the Party believed this ruling class was using Labor reformism as a last desperate 'carrot' to get workers to accept their lot within a capitalist economic framework. Out of the Meat Strike emerged the Industrial Groups, who waged not only a determined war against Communist trade union leadership but also encouraged the A.W.U.-influenced State Labor apparatus to even greater anti-Communist antagonisms. The Communist Party's increasing militancy and Labor's resistance to it, ended finally in the collapse of the Chifley Labor government. Characteristically the third period opens with the Communist Party making an another about-face, desperately trying to form an alliance with the Labor Party and curbing its former adventurist industrial policy, as it prepared for Menzies' direct assault. The Communist Party's activities were greatly reduced, a function of both a declining member-ship and, furthermore, a membership reluctant to confront an increasingly hostile society. In examining the changing policies, beliefs and strategies of the Party and the shifts in public response to these, I have tried to distinguish between general trends occurring within Australia and the national party, and trends peculiar to Queensland and the Queensland branch of the Party, The Communist Party suffered a decline in support and membership right across Australia throughout this period as a result of the national policies of the Party, and the changing nature of world politics. There were particular features of this decline that were peculiar to Queensland. I have, however, singled out three features of particular importance throughout the period for a short but more specifically detailed analysis, than would be possible in a purely chronological study: i.e. the Party's structure, the Party's ideological subservience to Moscow, and the general effect upon it of the Cold War.

Deconstructing sport history: The postmodern challenge

The crisis in the historical profession today is both conceptual and political, both methodological and practical. To the crises of the decline of great narrative history for the popular audience, the multiculturalist challenge to Eurocentric history, and the loss of faith in grand themes of progress and liberation that provided moral and political guidance through history’s lessons, must be added the crisis created by the implications of literary and rhetorical theory for the very practice of history itself.

Graceville and District Peace Committee members with banner during Hiroshima Day 1964, Brisbane

Graceville and District Peace Committee members with banner during Hiroshima Day 1964, Brisbane, Australia.

On the threshold of forgetting: Amnesiac identities and the Brazilian capital

Centuries after Locke asserted the importance of memory to identity, Freudian psychology argued that what was forgotten was of equal importance as to what was remembered. The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw a rising interest in the nature of forgetting, resulting in a reassessment and newfound distrust of the long revered faculty of memory. The relationship between memory and identity was inverted, seeing forgetting also become a means for forging identity. This newfound distrust of memory manifested in the writings of Nietzsche who in 1874 called for society to learn to feel unhistorically and distance itself from the past - in what was essentially tantamount to a cultural forgetting. Following the Nietzschean call, the architecture of Modernism was also compelled by the need to 'overcome' the limits imposed by history. This paper examines notions of identity through the shifting boundaries of remembering and forgetting, with particular reference to the construction of Brazilian identity through the ‘repression’ of history and memory in the design of the Brazilian capital. Designed as a forward-looking modernist utopia, transcending the limits imposed by the country's colonial heritage, the design for Brasilia exploited the anti-historicist agenda of modernism to emancipate the country from cultural and political associations with the Portuguese Empire. This paper examines the relationship between place, memory and forgetting through a discussion of the design for Brasilia.