"Unfair" results and unfair doctrines : structuring the application of the equitable doctrines of undue influence and unconscionable dealing

Relevance of the substantive matter of an unfair result on the application of the doctrines of transactional fairness - undue influence and unconscionable dealing - need to keep considerations of transactional fairness and substantive fairness separate - case law involving undue influence and unconscionable conduct - relevance of an unfair result for future unconscionable dealing and undue influence cases.

Book reviews

Combined book reviews of the following three books :<br/> "Seamus Heaney: creating Irelands of the mind" by Eugene O'Brien. ISBN: 1904148026 <br/> "Brian Friel: decoding the language of the tribe" by Tony Corbett. ISBN: 1904148034 <br/> "John Banville: exploring fictions" by Derek Hand. ISBN: 1904148042

The rule of law as an Australian constitutionalist promise

The author poses the question whether the rule of law is a constitutionalist promise that protects all Australians or whether it is simply a juridical principle that may be balanced against certain social factors.  Constitutionalist promises involve the limiting and supporting of state power. The author examines several instances of state power exercised in Australia and concludes that we should not rely on the rule of law as an absolute means of achieving equality, human rights, justice, freedom and even democracy.

The Canadian response to Aboriginal residential schools : lessons for Australia and the United States?

The common policy of the Australian, Canadian and United States governments of removing aboriginal children from their families and placing them in institutions is now well documented. This article considers the responses to the stolen generations in Australia, Canada and United States. A major focus of the article is the historic compensation package agreed to by the Canadian government. Whilst the Canadian federal government has not been without criticism on this issue, it must be applauded for its efforts to meet a peaceful solution to a tragic past. The political responses in Australia and United States and Canada are simply incomparable. The failure to address the plight of the stolen generations of Australia and the United States evidences a major failing in Indian/Aboriginal policy in these two nations that needs to be addressed. Australia and the United States have much to learn from the reconciliatory policies of the Canadian government.

The Japanese effect in contemporary Irish poetry [book review]

Review of: The Japanese effect in contemporary Irish poetry, by Irene de Angelis, Houndmills, Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 216 pp. ISBN 9780230248953.

Interview with Nina Nurmila

Nina Nurmila is an Indonesian who studied at Murdoch University in 1995-1997 and at Melbourne University in 2002-2007, and in 2008. Her first two periods of study were on Australian Development Scholarships (ADS) and she completed a Masters degree at Murdoch and a PhD at Melbourne, both in Development Studies. Her PhD thesis was about polygamy in Indonesia and she spent some of this study period (2002-2007) in Indonesia. In 2008 she returned to Australia on a post-doctorate Endeavour Scholarship. The interview was conducted in English on 30 April 2014 by Dr. Jemma Purdey of Deakin University and Dr. Ahmad Suaedy of the Abdurrahman Wahid Centre for Inter-faith Dialogue and Peace at Universitas Indonesia. This set comprises: an interview recording, a timed summary, and a photograph.

Book review: Flight

‘Flight’ is the perfect metaphor for Frawley’s new-breed globalizing Irish emigrés and immigrés. Like everything about this novel, the epigraph, a dictionary definition, riffs on what flight might mean. The novel thoughtfully, deftly, interlaces a series of flights—to and from Ireland. Ireland has typically been a place of mass export of population, until the advent of the Celtic Tiger, or perhaps a decade or two before it began to rear up, and this novel set around 2004 but moving much further back in time, takes up issues of migration and refugees that became pressing in the prosperous years.

Book review:. The most dangerous book: The battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

Birmingham, a literary historian from Harvard, tells, in much greater detail than ever before, the story of the banning of what is arguably the most important and transformative literary text ever. For it to be in our hands and read openly is for it to have changed the conditions under which reading occurs in the western world, changed definitions of obscenity, and challenged the secrecy which was the stock-in-trade of the purity-snoopers, both vigilante and state-sanctioned. Joyce’s fiction was burned, guillotined, confiscated, had printer’s plates wrecked and whole editions pulped, was smuggled across borders, carried in corsets, was extensively and ‘legally’ pirated in the US. The story of its surveillance is a gripping one, and the book a page-turner, and moreover to tell the story is to explain how literary modernism became mainstream, and not the just preserve of marginalised avant-garde bohemians.

Book review. Made to matter: White fathers, stolen generations

The topic of white fathers of Aboriginal children has been a long time coming into focus. Aboriginal mothers and children and their loss by being taken into white custody—these matters have been thoroughly, often heart-rendingly explored in artefacts and documentaries in a variety of genres. The white male progenitors have been much less visible except as occasions of scandal. An Aboriginal child without a known father made the child very vulnerable and, conveniently (from an administrative point of view), able to be drawn into the white ‘care’ system where the state became by proxy the stern father in a process that obliterated Aboriginal kinship claims. Probyn-Rapsey notes perspicaciously that although they are often written about (by Aboriginal relatives, biographers, scholars, government officials, Protectors, white women activists, parliamentarians), the fathers of the children rarely speak in their own voices on the subject of their paternity of mixed race children. This study examines the next best thing: textual traces of them in reports, letters, diaries, novels and especially Aboriginal memoirs.