Place, progress and memory : McGlashan and Everist at Geelong College

Building in an historical setting engages the problem of progress and authentic dialogue between tradition, contemporaneity and visions of a future. Since 1960, McGlashan and Everist have been the sole architects for Geelong College's Talbot Street campus, established in 1871. They have designed its master plans and all new buildings and alterations to the existing eclectic stock. As modernists with a task providing no opportunity for stylistic coherence in an age of universality, the architects were caught between protecting the College's perceived authenticity by continuing its historicist links with English collegiate architecture on the one hand, and their own modernist ethic on the other. Adopting what Frampton has called in his essay, 'Critical Regionalism', an 'arriere-garde' position (an 'identity-giving culture' rather than reversion to the past or to the 'Enlightenment myth of progress'), the architects avoid overt display of nostalgic historicism, modernist tectonics and populism. This paper asks whether and to what extent they have been capable of an authentic dialogue. Have they created an existential place in an 'architecture of resistance' as Frampton would have it, attending sufficiently to 'identity-giving culture' and the future? What is the role of implacement in the problematic of 'progress' in this context and how might it have affected a particular approach and the outcome?

Tradition as past is a modernist idea

As outlined in the theme of this conference, the problematisation of the notion of 'progress' relates to a questioning of the West's teleological aspirations for the future. This critique has allowed for the presence of a multiplicity of ways of perceiving the world, including those from outside the West's intellectual tradition. However, within architectural discourse, conceptual plurality has been largely limited to movements such as critical regionalism or postmodernism, which have tended to question the direction or desirability of progress, rather than its fundamental nature.

This paper looks at an example of recent architecture by an Asian diasporic community in Melbourne. This is a building that appears to be 'traditional' in style, in other words atavistic and antithetical to 'progressive' architectural ideals. However, looking at it through different philosophical understandings of duration can provide us with alternative interpretations to these assumptions.

By this I am not referring to disillusionment with progress, as expressed through postmodernist and neo-traditionalist movements in the West, but ways in which looking at the 'traditional' architectures of non-Western cultures from their own philosophical positions might provide alternative definitions pf the idea of 'progress'. The increasing presence of non-western 'traditional' architecture in the West implies that West modernity might not be the only 'tradition' that has a viable future. Consequently, the idea of 'the future' as something to aspire to, might be the outcome of a particular dominant historicity rather than a universal condition.

Cosmopolitan perspectives on European and Asian transnationalism

The article explores the implications of major social transformation in Asia for Europe. It specifically addresses expressions of cosmopolitan engagement between transnational organizations representing Asia and Europe. Within Asia, there is some evidence to indicate that cosmopolitanism is becoming a significant factor in culture and in politics, as is illustrated by increasing transnational cooperation within Asia and the dilution of national interests. A major question is whether such forms of cooperation will play a significant role in Asia's relation to Europe and whether as a consequence European—Asian relations will develop in a direction congruent with cosmopolitan principles. The thesis of the article is that if its momentum continues to develop, cosmopolitan relations and normative regionalism in Asia and Europe are significant factors in reshaping the world and transregional order, and that critical cosmopolitanism can be an alternative to nationalism and to narrowly defined globalization.

Women clinical nurses' constructions of collegiality : an ethnomethodological study

This research is about a shared journey of being together. It involved thirteen women nurses (including myself) in a process approach to working with data collected through audio transcriptions of conversations during group get-togethers, field notes and journalling over twelve months. The project was conducted in a large acute care metropolitan hospital where the ward staff interests lie in a practice history of the medical specialty of gynaecology and women's health. Prior to commencement ethical approval was gained from both the University and hospital ethics committees. Accessing the group was complicated by the political climate of the hospital, possibly exaggerated further by the health politics across the state of Victoria, at a time of major upheaval characterised by regionalism, rationalisation and debt servicing. In order to ascertain women clinical nurses' constructions of collegiality I adopted an ethnomethodological approach informed by a critical feminist lens to enable the participants to engage in a process of openly ideological inquiry, in critiquing and transforming practice. I felt the choice of methodology had to be consistent with my own ideological position to enable me to be myself (as much as I could) during the project. I wanted to work with women to illuminate the ways in which dominant ideologies had come to be apprehended, inscribed, embodied and/or resisted in the everyday intersubjective realities of participants. The research itself became a site of resistance as the group became aware of how and in what ways their lives had become distorted, while at the same time it collaboratively transformed their individual and collective practice understandings, enabling them to see the self and other anew. Set against the background of dominant discourses on collegiality, women's understandings of collegiality have remained a submerged discourse. Revealed in this work are complex inter-relationships that might be described by some as collegial!, but for others relations amongst these women depict alternative meanings in a rich picture of the fabric of ward life. The participants understand these relations through a connectedness that has empathy as its starting point. In keeping with my commitment to engage with these women I endeavoured to remain faithful to the dialogical approach to this inquiry. Moreover I have brought the voices of the women to the foreground, peeling away the rhizomatic interconnections in and between understandings. What this has meant in terms of the thesis is that the work has become artificially distanced for the purposes of academic requirements. Nevertheless it speaks to the understandings the participants have of their relationships; of the various locations of the visible and invisible voices; of the many landscapes and images, genealogies, subjectivities and multiple selves that inform the selves with(in) others and being-in-relation. Throughout the journey meanings are revealed, revisited and reconstructed. Many nuances comprise the subtexts illuminating the depths of various moral locations underpinning the ways these women engage with one another in practice. The process of the research weaves through multiple positions, conveying the centrality of shared goals, multiple identities, resistances and differences which contribute to a holding environment, a location in which women value one another in their being-in-relation and in which they stand separately yet together.

Determinants of intra-ASEAN exports and imports

Analyses the factors which explain the behaviour of intro-ASEAN exports and imports including the real exchange rate, real income, the industrial production capacity, and other factors; namely foreign direct investment and industrialisation policies, regionalism and emerging new markets.

Sovereignty and resistance : India, China and the Asian-African Conference, 1955

This thesis examines the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 from a broad historical perspective. It presents evidence that the assertion of independent Asian foreign policy - non-aligned and communist led by India and China - signalled a more significant, long-term shift in West-East realtions than has been previously identified.

Regional security and regional conflict

This chapter raises the following main points:
• Regions are groupings of states that share either geographic proximity or have sufficient cultural/historic ties that bind them together.
• Regionalization occurs within a region as interdependence is developed among the regional states.
• The development of regionalism is dependent on the support of the regional great power(s), the extent of reciprocity that exists in the relations of the states in the region, and the level of strategic reassurance that exists among these states.
• Regionalization is not a lineal process, that is, it can increase or decrease.
• The pace of regionalism is different in each region but a basic pattern exists where economic integration precedes political and security integration.
• Regional threats to security can be divided into four categories. The first two comprise traditional military threats such as balance of power contests between regional powers and ‘grass fire’ conflicts between smaller powers or over more localized issues. The
third category includes, for example, intra-state conflicts for ethnic, religious, nationalist or ideological, issues. Finally, transnational threats such as environmental degradation or resource scarcity can also cause regional instability and conflict.

‘Retrieving the Bandung Conference … moment by moment’

This review article discusses two publications: Bandung 1955: Little histories (2010) and Making a world after empire: The Bandung moment and its political afterlives (2010). It concludes that, though thesee two texts offer many prisms through which the conference might be understood, the history of the Bandung Conference remains somewhat fragmented.

Our place in the Asian century: Southeast Asia as ‘The Third Way’

The report, for Asialink at the University of Melbourne, reports the findings of the Asialink Commission, which examined Australia's relations with Southeast Asia. It argues that, at a time of shifting power relations in the Asia-Pacific region, Australia take a more multilateral approach by orienting its foreign and trade policies towards Southeast Asia. By committing more attention to the Southeast Asia region, Australia will enhance its relationships with the region's two principal powers, the United States and China.

Collaborative and conflictive trilateralism: Perspectives from Australia China, and America

This paper provides a critical overview of Australian, Chinese, and American perspectives on trilateralism, with a detailed discussion of Australian debates on the matter. Its aim is to trace the evolution of the changing discourse on the rise of China, examine major debates in Australia, and provide both an intellectual background and an overview for this special issue. © 2014 by the Regents of theUniversity of California.

Australia and Japan after the second world war: constructing new futures in Asia

The subject of my lecture is Australian-Japanese relations since the end of the Second World War, but I’m keen to explore these relations in the context of ideas, efforts and practical results in relation to collaborative and other efforts towards regionalism in the Asia Pacific. My general argument is that, on the one hand, Australian-Japanese relations have developed with a strength that would have been hard to imagine in 1945, and with an important focus on regional growth and security. The incremental steps taken may have been small and at a steady pace but, given the legacy of deep scars resulting from the Second World War and given the limitations on the defence aspects of Japan’s postwar involvement in regional affairs (ie the self defence requirement of the Constitution and the practice of spending not more than one per cent of Gross National Product on defence), these have been very successfully negotiated steps. On the other hand, there are some opportunities for greater joint leadership in the region which may or may not be realized. The incremental steps took place in difficult and changing circumstances; and what I would like to do now is remind us of how many unknowns attached to what might happen in Australian- Japan relationships after the Second World War, partly because there were so many unknowns about how the post-war international order would settle, and partly because Australian-Japanese relations started from such a desperately low point. I will try to walk through some of the key features of different periods, as I see the periodisation logically falling out after the war, and draw some thoughts together in relation to more recent initiatives on regional and bilateral co-operation. My training is as a historian, and that shapes the way this lecture works, and for most of my career I have been an Australian historian of international relations, looking particularly at Australia’s changing role in world affairs, and that is also likely to show in what follows－possibly at the expense of greater detail from Japanese perspectives. But I hope you will understand that, and also the limitations involved in trying to paint with a broad brush on a huge historical canvas.