A Reading by David Ray

A reading delivered at Colby College in 1976.

Book reviews : David Palmer, Ross Shanahan, and Martin Shanahan, eds., Australian Labor history reconsidered

An objective of this collection is to bring the history of the Australian labor movement to international attention. The editors introduce the collection with a brief overview of Australian labor history, emphasizing differences between the Australian and American experiences. The introduction argues that a unique aspect of Australian labor history is “laborism,” which is defined as the central place of the labor movement in Australian culture, as compared with the more marginal position of the labor movement in America. In Australia, this centrality is reflected in the embedding of trade unions and labor in the state through wage-fixing tribunals, a social security system designed to support the families of male wage earners, and the Australian Labor Party's strong links to the trade union movement. The introduction is informative and especially benefits from the insights of David Palmer, an American historian teaching at Adelaide's Flinders University. However, the introduction was apparently written later at the suggestion of an American reader and has thus not been fully integrated into the structure of the book.

'You moulded me like clay': David Almond's sexualised monsters

Naarah Sawers is an Alfred Deakin Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University where she is researching environmental agendas in computer games for children. She has also published and researched in children's literature in the area of feminist bio-ethics and agency.