School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemLittle Johnny's foaming lip: the culture wars, cultural studies and the ten-point plan( 1998)The late 1990s mark an interesting moment in both Australian and global, postcolonial history. In 1992, in a case brought by Eddie Mabo, a Torres Strait Islander, the doctrine of terra nullius, by which European occupation of Australia had ratified itself on the grounds that the land was empty and belonged to no-one before white settlement, was ruled invalid by the High Court. The Mabo case set an historical precedent in Australian postcolonial history, opening up non-freehold land claims by traditional Aboriginal owners. A subsequent High Court judgement on a case brought by the Wik people also allowed Aboriginal people to negotiate for dual occupancy of the huge pastoral leases that take up many traditional tribal lands. Both judgements have, however, been savagely resisted by the conservative government elected in 1996. This government has accused the High Court of meddling in race politics and of judicial activism. In early 1998 the government legislated a ‘ten-point plan’ on Wik which, among other things, denied Aborigines the right to negotiate native title under the Wik judgement. On the surface, these judgements and the controversy that surrounds them might seem like isolated instances of merely colonial race politics. The context is, however, explicitly global.
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ItemCrying in public places: neoconservatism and victim panic(Random House, 1997)Being a self-professed feminist heretic is big business these days. It’s certainly where the kudos is in mainstream journalistic writing about feminism. As the successes of writers such as Helen Garner and Katie Roiphe have shown, it’s possible to maintain a strong media presence through attacking feminisms. So formulaic has the business become, that lately, touching base with feminist commentators in the media has been like listening to a bad commercial radio station. You keep hearing the same old song over and over again, like a ‘classic rock’ hit from the seventies, repeated ad nauseam. It’s either a tune about ‘victim feminism’ or ‘puritan feminism’, and it’s played mainly by feminists who were around then. Beatrice Faust, for example, calls ‘victim feminism’ ‘wimp feminism’, and says: ‘Wimp victims believe that they will be victims for the rest of their lives’, and that it is ‘revolutionary feminism gone to seed’. Susan Mitchell asks ‘was it for this that feminists had fought so hard’, lamenting what she sees as the new scourge of ‘victimhood’ among young feminists on campus. Bettina Arndt worries that sexual harassment legislation and amendments to the Victorian Domestic Violence Act potentially usher in a new era of punitiveness and retribution by feminist ideologues with a victim mentality and a taste for ‘vengeance’. Helen Garner speaks of ‘this determination to cling to victimhood at any cost, which seems to have become the loudest voice of feminism today’.
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ItemSick wicked culture: the global politics of regional youth( 1998)The languages used to describe youth now, and by ‘youth’ I mean people between the ages of 15 and 24, are much more complex then they once were. The word ‘gang’ in the 1970s, used in the context of young people, primarily referred to a group of friends and in particular the fraternal relationships between them, as in ‘will you be in my gang’. Whereas the word ‘gang’, now, refers to a particular relation between such groups and the rest of society; a malevolent, dangerous relationship.
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ItemElegies, boundaries, disciplines: the humanities after liberalism( 1999)Writing elegies for the humanities is currently something of a growth industry. The historian Keith Windshuttle has argued that history, the ‘Queen of the Humanities’, is a discipline ’now suffering a potentially mortal attack from the rise to academic prominence of a new array of literary and social theories’.
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ItemAssaying the essay: fear and loathing in the literary coteries( 1999)The essay will save us. Well, that’s the impression you might get from the claims, implicit and direct, made for some of the books of essays published lately. According to Morag Fraser, her recent anthology, Seams of Light: Best Antipodean Essays, “is a set of essays on Wik, although I doubt that word is ever mentioned”. Peter Craven doesn’t “know why, in any technical or volitional sense The Best Australian Essays, 1998 is preoccupied with history . . . perhaps it is what you would expect at a time in the last two years when Wik and Black Armbands and One Nations have raged all around us”. If Craven is concerned with what he describes as “the Aboriginal question”, then Robert Manne’s collection, The Way We Live Now: the Controversies of the Nineties, too, starts off with a number of essays on Australia’s Aboriginal history, including the standout ‘TheStolen Generations’, which is also included in Craven’s Best Australian Essays. And Two Nations: The Causes and Effects of the Rise of the One Nation Party in Australia (which includes a Foreword by Manne) devotes itself entirely to race relations.