Poverty in perception : a study of the twentieth-century prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand

Australia and New Zealand, as English-speaking nations with dominant white populations, present an ethnic anomaly not only in South East Asia, but also in the Southern Hemisphere. Colonised by predominantly workingclass British immigrants from the late eighteenth century, an ethnic and cultural connection grew between these two countries even though their indigenous populations and ecological environments were otherwise very different. Building a new life in Australia and New Zealand, the colonists shared similar historic perceptions of poverty – perceptions from their homelands that they did not want to see replicated in their new adopted countries. Dreams of a better life shaped their aspirations, self-identity and nationalistic outlook. By the twentieth century, national independence and self-government had replaced British colonial rule. The inveterate occurrence of poverty in Australia and New Zealand had created new local perspectives and different perceptions of, and about, poverty. This study analyses what relationship existed between the political directions adopted by the twentieth-century prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand and their perceptions of poverty. Using the existential phenomenological theory and methodology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the study adds to the body of knowledge about poverty in Australia and New Zealand by revealing the structure and origin of the poverty perceptions of the twentieth-century prime ministers.

Re-constructing Asianness in Australia : Yumi Umiumare, Owen Leong, and the remobilisation of monstrosity

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Australia’s relationship with its Asian neighbours has been the subject of ongoing aesthetic, cultural and political contestations. As Alison Richards has noted, Australia’s colonial legacy, its Asia-Pacific location, and its ‘white’ self-perception have always made Australia’s relations with Asia fraught. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the paradoxes inherent in Australia’s relationships with and within the Asian region became a dominant theme in debates about nation, nationhood and identity, and prompted a shift in the construction of ‘Asianness’ on Australian stages. On the one hand, anxiety about the multicultural policy of the 1970s and 1980s, and then Prime Minister Paul Keating’s push for greater economic, cultural and artistic exchange with Asia via policies such as the Creative Nation Cultural Policy (1994), saw large numbers of Australians latch on to the reactionary, racist politics of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. As Jacqueline Lo has argued, in this period Asian-Australians were frequently represented as an unassimilable Other, a threat to Australia’s ‘white’ identity, and to individual Australians’ jobs and opportunities. On the other hand, during the same period, a desire to counter the racism in Australian culture, and develop a ‘voice’ that would distinguish Australian cultural products from European theatrical traditions, combined with the new opportunities for cross-cultural exchange that came with the Creative Nation Cultural Policy to produce what Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo have characterised as an Asian turn in Australian theatre...

Tangible cultural heritage and adaptive reuse: the Old Government House, Brisbane, Australia

The Old Government House, a former residence of the Queen’s representatives in Brisbane, Australia, symbolises British cultural heritage of Colonial Queensland. Located on the campus of the Queensland University of Technology, it is one of the oldest surviving examples of a stately residence in Queensland. Built in 1860s, the Old Government House was originally intended as a temporary residence for the first governor of the newly independent colony of Queensland. However, it remained the vice-regal residence until 1909, serving eleven succeeding governors. Nearly seven decades later, it became the first building in Queensland to be protected under heritage legislation. Thus its importance, as an excellent exemplar that demonstrates the significance of cultural heritage, was established. The Old Government House has survived 150 years of restoration work, refurbishments, and additions. Through these years, it has served the people of Queensland in a multitude of roles. This paper aims to investigate the survival of heritage listed buildings through their adaptive re-use. Its focus will be on the adaptive reuse of the Old Government House through its refurbishments and additions over a period of 150 years. Through a qualitative research process this paper will endeavour to establish the significance of restoration work on the Old Government house; the new opportunities that has opened up as a result of the restoration work; the continued maintenance and management of the building through adaptive re-use; the economic benefits of restoration work; and its contribution to the on-going interest in the preservation of the Tangible Cultural Heritage.

Never-Never Land : affective landscapes, the touristic gaze and heterotopic space in Australia

This article explores how the imaginative use of the landscape in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008) intersects with the fantasy of Australianness that the film constructs. We argue the fictional Never-Never Land through which the film’s characters travel is an, albeit problematic, ‘indigenizing’ space that can be entered imaginatively through cultural texts including poetry, literature and film, or through cultural practices including touristic pilgrimages to landmarks such as Uluru and Kakadu National Park. These actual and virtual journeys to the Never-Never have broader implications in terms of fostering a sense of belonging and legitimating white presence in the land through affect, nostalgia and the invocation of an imagined sense of solidarity and community. The heterotopic concept of the Never-Never functions to create an ahistorical, inclusive space that grounds diverse conceptions of Australianness in a shared sense of belonging and home that is as mythical, contradictory and wondrous as the idea of the Never-Never itself. The representations of this landscape and the story of the characters that traverse it self-consciously construct a relationship to past events and to film history, as well as constructing a comfortable subject position for contemporary Australians to occupy in relation to the land, the colonial past, and the present.

No worries – we’ll take care of it!! An examination into managing equality and inclusivity in multicultural Australia

This paper explores the various paths to equality and inclusivity developed in the past 40 years within the Australian workplace with a view to critically examining their capability of addressing diversity and equality within the cultural needs of a unique society. A society which struggles to overcome the tyranny of distance and a colonial past as it takes its place in the world as a global 1st world economy country in what is often considered ‘the global north’ despite its geographical location. Findings indicate that despite various legislative and non-legislative approaches including anti-discrimination; affirmative action; equal opportunity; managing diversity and more recently gender equality, the individual members of the many diverse groups in the Australian workplace still experience inferior work conditions and work opportunities.

Locating Indigenous Australia within community development practice : clients, consumers or change makers?

The philosophical promise of community development to “resource and empower people so that they can collectively control their own destinies” (Kenny 1996:104) is no doubt alluring to Indigenous Australia. Given the historical and contemporary experiences of colonial control and surveillance of Aboriginal bodies, alongside the continuing experiences of socio-economic disadvantage, community development reaffirms the aspirational goal of Indigenous Australians for self-determination. Self-determination as a national policy agenda for Indigenous Australians emerged in the 1970s and saw the establishment of a wide range of Aboriginal community-controlled services (Tsey et al 2012). Sullivan (2010:4) argues that the Aboriginal community controlled service sector during this time has, and continues to be, instrumental to advancing the plight of Indigenous Australians both materially and politically. Yet community development and self-determination remain highly problematic and contested in how they manifest in Indigenous social policy agendas and in practice (Hollinsworth 1996; Martin 2003; McCausland 2005; Moreton-Robinson 2009). Moreton-Robinson (2009:68) argues that a central theme underpinning these tensions is a reading of Indigeneity in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, behaviours, cultures, and communities are pathologised as “dysfunctional” thus enabling assertions that Indigenous people are incapable of managing their own affairs. This discourse distracts us from the “strategies and tactics of patriarchal white sovereignty” that inhibit the “state’s earlier policy of self-determination” (Moreton-Robinson 2009:68). We acknowledge the irony of community development espoused by Ramirez above (1990), that the least resourced are expected to be most resourceful.; however, we wish to interrogate the processes that inhibit Indigenous participation and control of our own affairs rather than further interrogate Aboriginal minds as uneducated, incapable and/or impaired...

Disability performance in Australia

In disability arts, as in so many things, Australia has both its own cultural specificities, as well as the cultural followings that come with being a colonised country. In Australia, our colonial legacy, multiculturalism, and Asia-Pacific location have always made our relation to our own arts and culture fraught, the subject of ongoing aesthetic, cultural and political contestation. We have historically suffered from what Phillips (2006) calls a ‘cultural cringe’, in which we worry about the individuality, value and volume of our arts and culture compared to others, and this comes up again and again in commentary to this day...

Giving in Australia: Philanthropic Potential Beginning To Be Realized

Australia in a sense has two histories: that of its indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people based on a traditional culture of mutual dependence and reciprocal altruism (Turner, 1981) and the other from its eighteenth century colonization as a British penal outpost. These colonial overtones have proved an abiding cultural force. A dominant government presence, British legal platform, and ongoing sense that ‘the government will provide’ remain today (Liffman, 2008; McDonald & Scaife, 2011).

Postglacial Early Permian (late Sakmarian-early Artinskian) shallow-marine carbonate deposition along a 2000 km transect from Timor to west Australia

Late Sakmarian to early Artinskian (Early Permian) carbonate deposition was widespread in the marine intracratonic rift basins that extended into the interior of Eastern Gondwana from Timor in the north to the northern Perth Basin in the south. These basins spanned about 20° of paleolatitude (approximately 35°S to 55°S). This study describes the type section of the Maubisse Limestone in Timor-Leste, and compares this unit with carbonate sections in the Canning Basin (Nura Nura Member of the Poole Sandstone), the Southern Carnarvon Basin (Callytharra Formation) and the northern Perth Basin (Fossil Cliff Member of the Holmwood Shale). The carbonate units have no glacial influence and formed part of a major depositional cycle that, in the southern basins, overlies glacially influenced strata and lies a short distance below mudstone containing marine fossils and scattered dropstones (perhaps indicative of sea ice). In the south marine conditions became more restricted and were replaced by coal measures at the top of the depositional sequence. In the north, the carbonate deposits are possibly bryozoan–crinoidal mounds; whereas in the southern basins they form laterally continuous relatively thin beds, deposited on a very low-gradient seafloor, at the tops of shale–limestone parasequences that thicken upward in parasequence sets. All marine deposition within the sequence took place under very shallow (inner neritic) conditions, and the limestones have similar grain composition. Bryozoan and crinoidal debris dominate the grain assemblages and brachiopod shell fragments, foraminifera and ostracod valves are usually common. Tubiphytes ranged as far south as the Southern Carnarvon Basin, albeit rarely, but is more common to the north. Gastropod and bivalve shell debris, echinoid spines, solitary rugose corals and trilobite carapace elements are rare. The uniformity of the grain assemblage and the lack of tropical elements such as larger fusulinid foraminifera, colonial corals or dasycladacean algae indicate temperate marine conditions with only a small increase in temperature to the north. The depositional cycle containing the studied carbonate deposits represents a warmer phase than the preceding glacially influenced Asselian to early Sakmarian interval and the subsequent cool phase of the “mid” Artinskian that is followed by significant warming during the late Artinskian–early Kungurian. The timing of cooler and warmer intervals in the west Australian basins seems out-of-phase with the eastern Australian succession, but this may be a problem of chronostratigraphic miscorrelation due to endemic faunas and palynofloras.

Consultation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in early childhood education: The impact of colonial discourses

In Australian early years education, consultation and partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are central to embedding Indigenous perspectives. Building sustained and reciprocal partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people supports access to local knowledges and perspectives to inform curriculum planning, as well as protocols and community processes, and contemporary responses to colonisation. Drawing on data from a doctoral study about embedding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives in early childhood education curricula, this paper examines interactional patterns in consultations between non-Indigenous early childhood educators and Indigenous people in real and supposed form. Data is read through whiteness studies literature and related critiques to identify how the educators positioned Indigenous people in interactional patterns and how the mobilisation of colonial discourses impacted the potential for reciprocity and sustained partnerships, despite the best of intentions. Colonial traces of positioning Indigenous people as informants, targeted resources or knowledge commissioners were shown to be most salient in interactional patterns. While these findings are contextualised within Australia, I suggest they have applicability in examining approaches to embedding Indigenous perspectives in education curricula in other colonising contexts such as Canada and New Zealand.

Training the natives as nurses in Australia: So what went wrong?

The story of the Aboriginal women who participated in Australias nursing history remains largely untold. In the first six decades of the twentieth century, Aboriginal people were confronted with harsh exclusionary practices that forced them to live in settlements, reserves and missions.¹ While many Aboriginal women worked in domestic roles (in white peoples homes and on rural properties), small numbers were trained at public hospitals and some Aboriginal women received training to be native nurses who worked in hospitals on settlements

In this chapter, an indigenous historical lens is applied to the status of Indigenous nurses and midwives in Australia.

Neurasthénie sous influence? : l'appropriation d'une maladie «moderne» par les classes moyennes du Viêt Nam colonial (1925-1945)

Au tournant du XXe siècle, la neurasthénie – ou épuisement nerveux – est devenue une maladie populaire en Occident et jusqu’au Japon en raison de son association avec la modernité. De nombreux rapprochements ont été faits entre ce diagnostic introduit en 1869 aux États-Unis et certaines maladies contemporaines comme la dépression, le syndrome de fatigue chronique, l’épuisement professionnel et toute la panoplie des maladies causées par le stress. Les transformations socioculturelles qu’a connues le Viêt Nam sous colonisation, principalement au cours des décennies 1920 et 1930, ont été propices à la dissémination du langage des nerfs et à l’appropriation du diagnostic de neurasthénie. Ce mémoire de maîtrise en histoire se penche sur les transformations sociales survenues sous le gouvernement colonial français, dont l’urbanisation et l’instruction publique, au milieu desquelles ont émergé les nouvelles classes moyennes urbaines qui ont adopté le diagnostic de neurasthénie. À partir de la presse vietnamienne de la période, ce travail met l’accent sur l’appropriation, les causes et les traitements de la maladie. Utilisant une approche comparant la neurasthénie en Occident, au Japon et en Chine, pour ensuite présenter son entrée au Viêt Nam, il montre que la domination et donc la subalternité ont compliqué l’accès des colonisés au diagnostic de la maladie moderne neurasthénie, de même qu’à la modernité. Il fournit toutefois un éclairage sur les débuts de l’histoire du diagnostic, encore utilisé de nos jours au Viêt Nam, d’une maladie appelée « la maladie de l’époque ».

The impact of the conquered/settled distinction regarding the acqisition of sovereignty in Australia

Re-examination of the author's 1988 article on the significance of the classification of a colonial acquisition as being through conquest, cession or settlement - discussion of Australian judicial pronouncements on various issues - whether Australia was 'terra nullius' - whether the Aboriginal peoples were sovereign nations - whether sovereignty was acquired through settlement or conquest - the laws of England flowed into and provided the legal foundations of the colony - whether those laws recognised the pre-existing Aboriginal title - significance of the classification of a colonial acquisition - Mabo decision - issues relevant to Aboriginal sovereignty.