Education not war May Day 1968 Brisbane

Children on float during May Day march in Brisbane 1968. Banners say Education not war and Overseas for Peace Trade not war.

Kids in tram during No War Toys Christmas outing

Woman and children inside a tram during No War Toys Christmas party in 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.

BWIU float with banner End War in Vietnam during Mayday march Brisbane 1965

BWIU with float End war in Vietnam during Mayday procession Brisbane, Australia, May 1965.

The knowledge gap: A perspective on trade, industry, technology and policy from pre-war Australian music technology manufacturing (1903-30)

Australia struggles to achieve economic competitiveness, prevent expansion of the trade deficit and develop value-added production despite applications of policy strategies from protectionism to trade liberalisation. This article argues that these problems were emerging at the turn of the century, and that an investigation of music technology manufacturing in the first two decades of this century reveals fundamental problems in the conduct of relevant policy analysis. Analysis has focused on the trade or technology gap which is only symptomatic of an underlying knowledge gap. The article calls for a knowledge policy approach which can allow protection without the negative effects of isolation from global markets and without having to resort to unworkable utopian free-trade dogma. A shift of focus from a 'goods traded' view to a knowledge transaction (or diffusion) perspective is advocated.