School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications

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Love Letters: The Romance of Grace Warne & Vernon Hogg 1933-35

Botsman, P (Working Papers, 2024)

These letters are a glimpse into another time and place. Passion burned brightly through the hot summer nights and cold winters of Melbourne in 1933-5. Grace Warne and Wilfred John Vernon (Vern) Hogg were head over heels in love. When Vern was posted as a Principal of a small school four hundred and twenty kilometres away in the small town of Walwa on the Murray River, it seemed the end of the earth. Letters became the life force that connected them both. Waited on eagerly every week, if no letter turned up in the post then the disappointment was palpable. The urgency of being together was heartfelt. Love was blind to whatever was happening in the world. At this tumultuous time there is little in these letters of politics, of the Depression and of the tumultuous events in Europe though Grace and Vern were to become passionate environmentalists and stalwarts of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The only thing that mattered at this time in their lives was love. The letters were kept faithfully in a “Remember” box. Grace died nine months before Vern, and the letters were by his bedside. They were together for over fifty years. To have known love like this is a great blessing. The letters are a reminder of something beyond words and even life itself. Non Omnis Moriar (Not all of me will die) was the monogram on some of Vern’s letters to Grace and it has proved to be true in so many ways. Should these private letters be made public? There are many notes from Grace and Vern and their daughter Barbara that are very instructive, as if they knew that at some point something might happen, though the letters may have been their last consideratno. Vernon notes the shyness of Grace in one letter and both did not like the limelight. No doubt to have these letters published while they were both alive may have been too much. But the joy of these letters and the unique way they convey simple values from another time is something that Grace and Vern would have approved of. It is in keeping with the way they lived. I can imagine Grace’s cheeky smile at the thought of current generations putting aside their phones and dating apps to read her beautifully written letters. She was a feminist and an environmentalist and a supporter of Aboriginal rights and yet she was also an adoring partner. Love was everything that made all things right. Each letter glows with devotion, adoration and simplicity. Love was for life. The modern world was held at bay by dreams of a simple life and pleasures: being together, a house and a family in a cocoon of love. It was not a mirage. Grace and Vernon lived, worked together and were inseparable all their lives. They were seminal and inspirational for four generations of their family and beyond. Outwardly they appeared conventional, but they were always something special, unique, wonderful and modern about them. Heterosexuality and the nuclear family with all its traps sure, but wrapped up by the power of an abiding love. Vernon was ten years older than Grace. He probably first met her with her sisters at the Matrons Ball, Mansfield on Sept 15, 1925. Vernon’s program, (see opposite) faithfully kept in the box with the love letters, shows his dance partners penciled in. He danced with four of the six Warne sisters, “Grace” is written next to the third dance, the Fox Trot. She would have only been ten years old. In one of her photo albums Grace suggests that she met Vern while a nurse. Perhaps Vern made the connection to the Mansfield Dance after their 1930s romance. In the summer of 1933 Grace was a Nurse at Madeleine Private Hospital, Parkville. Nursing was never something Grace enjoyed. More than anything else she wanted to be with Vern. Vern was a young teacher at the mercy of the Victorian Department of Education being posted from country school to country school, enduring white-ant infested residences, he was intent on securing a good house that he and Grace could live in and be together. The beauty of these letters comes from their under-stated sensuality and longing at at a time when seeing a show on Friday night, tennis (Saturday) and cricket (Sunday) were all the entertainment on offer and probably all that most could want. ‘Going to the city’ was something Grace and Vernon loved to do all their lives. In their latter years it was something of a rite, Vernon would walk up the laneways from Flinders St Station for chocolates and freshly baked cookies from the basement at Myers, stop in at Fletcher Jones perhaps and Grace would go wider afield up the tram lines to North Carlton and Brunswick doing a prowl of op. shops for her son, daughters, grandson and their friends, always coming up with amazing bargains and sought after fashion items never out of date. Friday night movies in country theatres were mandatory and often Vernon would take his daughter Barbara who had a life long love of cinema and the moving image. Grace’s letters are wonderful, partly because of their rhythm. In 1933/34 Grace would write weekly and then post the letter the next day. Her closest post office was the Carlton North Post Office at 546 Rathdowne St and she almost always (except when letters were entrusted to her brothers!) made the mail the day after her night-time writing. Vern’s letters are more enigmatic but equally passionate. The great love that is expressed in these letters was a primary reason why the generations that followed Grace and Vernon had successful, happy, adventurous and joyful lives. Those of us who are are alive and breathing in Australia in 2024 are invariably spoilt. We have so many things, privileges and capacities. Grace and Vernon lived simply, loved devotedly and unilaterally and they carried successive generations forward. These letters are a glimpse into anothe time and place. A great love was flourishing that would bind us in our families and in our world. We owe so much to the angels of the past. This volume is an attempt to say thank you and to acknowledge the miracle that was Barbara Botsman. Love is the foundation of all that is good. Non Omnis Moriar
Transforming Nuclear Safeguards Culture: The IAEA, Iraq, and the Future of Non-Proliferation

Findlay, T (MIT Press, 2022-06-21)

In Transforming Nuclear Safeguards Culture, Trevor Findlay investigates the role that organizational culture may play in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, examining particularly how it affects the nuclear safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the paramount global organization in the non-proliferation field. Findlay seeks to identify how organizational culture may have contributed to the IAEA's failure to detect Iraq's attempts to acquire illicit nuclear capabilities in the decade prior to the 1990 Gulf War and how the agency has sought to change safeguards culture since then. In doing so, he addresses an important piece of the nuclear nonproliferation puzzle: how to ensure that a robust international safeguards system, in perpetuity, might keep non-nuclear states from acquiring such weapons. Findlay, as one of the leading scholars on the IAEA, brings a valuable holistic perspective to his analysis of the agency's culture. Transforming Nuclear Safeguards Culture will inspire debate about the role of organizational culture in a key international organization—a culture that its member states, leadership, and staff have often sought to ignore or downplay.
Food Journeys: Stories from the heart

Rodrigues, J ; Kikon, D (Zubaan, 2023-10-20)

Food Journeys is a powerful collection that draws on personal experiences, and the meaning of grief, rage, solidarity, and life. Feminist anthropologist Dolly Kikon and peace researcher Joel Rodrigues present a wide-ranging set of stories and essays accompanied by recipes. They bring together poets, activists, artists, writers, and researchers who explore how food and eating allow us to find joy and strength while navigating a violent history of militarization in Northeast India. Food Journeys takes us to the tea plantations of Assam, the lofty mountains of Sikkim, the homes of a brewer and a baker in Nagaland, a chef’s journey from Meghalaya, a trip to the paddy fields in Bangladesh, and many more sites, to reveal why people from Northeast India intimately care about what they eat and consider food an integral part of their history, politics, and community. Deliciously feminist and bold, Food Journeys is both an invitation and a challenge to recognize gender and lived experiences as critical aspects of political life.
Seeds and Food Sovereignty: Eastern Himalayan Experiences

Deka, D ; Rodrigues, J ; Kikon, D ; Karlsson, BG ; Barbora, S ; Tula, M (North Eastern Social Research Centre, 2023-03-06)

Crops and seeds are everywhere. They nourish our bodies, families, and communities, but are also taken for granted. Simultaneously, an increasing number of community organisations, farmer movements, and individuals are challenging corporate control and commodification of seeds. In the name of seed and food sovereignty, they seek to enhance local control over agriculture and ensure peoples’ rights to nutritious, ecologically-sound and culturally-appropriate food. In this book, the authors bring together resource persons, students, and researchers working across the Eastern Himalayan region, and, in doing so, they hope to facilitate new ways of learning together. The Eastern Himalayas are commonly characterised as a biodiversity hotspot, and this also applies to agrobiodiversity. The authors hope that this book will inspire further engagements with the ongoing farming initiatives and food sovereignty movements on the ground. Also featuring, Seno Tsuhah, Manorom Gogoi, Amba Jamir, Bhogtoram Mawroh, Mahan Chandra Borah, and Vilazonuo Gloria.
The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia

Hegarty, B (Cornell University Press, 2022-12-15)

In The Made-Up State, Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, who compose one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexuality to photography and feminine beauty. The concept of development deployed by the modern Indonesian state relies on naturalizing the binary of "male" and "female." As historical brokers between gender as a technological system of classifying human difference and state citizenship, warias shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned as nonconforming within it. The Made-Up State illuminates warias as part of the social and technological format of state rule, which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in postcolonial Indonesia.
The Barbarity of Our Own Countrymen

Botsman, P (Working Papers, 2020)

The ghost of Charles Throsby haunts south-west Sydney, the Illawarra, and the regions south to Lake George and west to Bathurst. He opposed the pattern of violence that would extend from Sydney to Tasmania and to the Port Phillip district (Victoria). The words of his Glenfield Farm letter of 5 April, 1816 reflect on Australia' s original sins: of barbarous violence, appropriation of Aboriginal lands, environmental destruction and subjugation of Aboriginal culture. "The barbarity of our fellow countrymen" is a 30,000 word reflection on the so-called "Sydney Wars" of 1814-1816 which set a pattern for the brutal usurpation of Aboriginal lands in Van Diemens Land (Tasmania), the Port Phillip district (Victoria) and other colonial settlements across the nation.
Unequal Lives: Gender, Race and Class in the Western Pacific

Bainton, NA ; McDougall, D ; Alexeyeff, K ; Cox, J ; BAINTON, NA ; McDougall, D ; Alexeyeff, K ; Cox, J (ANU Press, 2021)

This collection is a major contribution to academic and political debates about the perverse effects of inequality, which now ranks among the greatest challenges of our time. The inspiration for this volume derives from the breadth and depth of Martha Macintyre’s remarkable scholarship. The contributors celebrate Macintyre’s groundbreaking work, which exemplifies the explanatory power, ethical force and pragmatism that ensures the relevance of anthropological research to the lives of others and to understanding the global condition.
Ceasefire City Militarism, Capitalism, and Urbanism in Dimapur

Kikon, D ; McDuie-Ra, D (Oxford University Press, 2021-01-30)

While residents of Dimapur often talked about the crumbling infrastructure of the city, musicians and performers connected with everyday challenges that were not limited to power failures, load shedding, and unemployment, but also with ...
Social Standards in EU and US Trade Agreements

Postnikov, E (Routledge, 2020)

This book examines the causes and consequences of social standards in US and EU preferential trade agreements (PTAs). PTAs are the new reality of the global trading system. Pursued by both developed and developing countries, they increasingly incorporate labor and environmental issues to prevent a race to the bottom in social regulation and counter-protectionism. Using principal-agent theory to explore why US PTAs have stricter social standards than those signed by the EU, Postnikov argues that the level of institutional insulation of trade policy executives from interest groups and legislators determines the design of social standards. In the EU, where institutional insulation is high, social standards mirror the normative preferences of the European Commission leading to a softer approach. In the US, where such insulation is low, social standards are driven by interest groups and legislators they control, resulting in a stricter approach. This book shows that both approaches can be effective but work through different causal mechanisms. To test his argument, Postnikov draws on original data collected in Brussels, Washington, Santiago, Bogota, and Seoul.
Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty

Hoang, LA (Amsterdam University Press, 2020-06-03)

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at Moscow's wholesale markets from 2013 to 2016 , this book provides original insights into how uncertainty shapes social practice, identity and belonging in the context of irregular migration from Vietnam to Russia. The uncertainties examined here are not just social, economic, and political, but also psychological and moral. The study speaks to various debates in migration and mobility studies - particularly those focused on brokerage networks, the political economy of sexuality, and social belonging - deepening our knowledge of how the core social values and cultural logics that underpin Vietnamese personhood are challenged and reconstituted by the ethos of the market economy. This book sheds important light on processes of mobility and social change in post-socialist societies that continue to grapple with yawning chasms between old and new ways of life, the local and the global, policy and practice, and obsolete governance techniques and rapidly changing socio-economic realities.

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