Cultural Studies

In Vex Ashley’s film Machine Learning Experiments, a body – she, they, he, them, take your pick – is penetrated by a luminescent black tube. The body’s boundaries dissolve in the pleasure of becoming: animate/inanimate, human/non-human, interior and exterior, inorganic and inorganic. Backed by the steady pulse of Boy Harsher’s Augustus Muller, the series’ tripartite sequence – ‘Automation’, ‘Orgone Theory’, ‘Hydra’ (this last ‘about invading and consuming’) – offers a psychosocial exploration of transmission and penetrability of all kinds.

Over the past three decades, Peter Beilharz has carved out an important space in Australian social and socialist theory. Co-founder of the journal Thesis Eleven, Beilharz’s work ranges from studies of Australian labourism and European social democracy to more general works in socialist and social democratic theory. Alongside these he has written two important works addressing the themes of culture and modernity. One of them is a study of Bernard Smith (Imagining the Antipodes, 1997) and the other is on the Polish émigré sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000). The essays collected in Beilharz’s latest volume cover much of his intellectual journey over a period of twenty-five years ‘from socialism, to modernity, via Americanism’, as he titles his introduction. Beilharz well understands that the art of the essay is conversation rather than argument, raising possibilities rather than seeking a single answer. All the essays – engaging, learned, and undogmatic – reflect the kind of pluralistic and open-ended politics that Beilharz is concerned to promote.

Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora is the product of a project financed by the Australian Research Council and undertaken by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, herself a refugee. Between 2005 and 2008 she and two co-workers (Boitran Huynh-Beattie and Thao Ha) recorded confidential oral testimony from forty-two Vietnamese women living in Australia, who are referred to only by their first names. They come from a range of different backgrounds, in terms of age, class and district, but all of them fled war and political upheaval before prolonged and painful transitions to Australia. Their narratives cover generations of war and its aftermath, from the French and Japanese occupations to American intervention and the 1975 fall of Saigon, and life in re-education camps thereafter. Many of the women made multiple escape attempts before reaching Australia – fourteen, in one case.

A new monarch succeeded the day I sat down to write this review about the idea of Australia. Prime Minister Albanese, in a blessedly unpoliticised speech about Elizabeth II’s death, was direct in announcing that he and the governor-general would be heading to London, ‘where we will meet the king’.

‘Such is life’ is a common phrase in Australian popular culture – it has even been tattooed on bodies – but Joseph Furphy’s novel of the same name, published in 1903, is often forgotten. Ned Kelly mythology suggests that he uttered this phrase just before being hanged in 1880, though some historians argue that what he actually said was, ‘Ah well, I suppose’. Long before Furphy (1843–1912) wrote his magnum opus, the stoic phrase was perhaps wrongly associated with a cult hero’s execution.

If you’ve somehow avoided listening to podcasts, you will have missed out on the recent explosion of long-form audio storytelling – and I mean it, you’ve really missed out. The show which pioneered the form, This American Life (TAL), pulls a cool four to five million listeners each week ...

Love and Lament offers a bracingly revisionist and upbeat account of how the arts flourished across a broad cultural spectrum in Australia over the course of the twentieth century. Margaret Plant, an emeritus professor of the visual arts at Monash University, argues explicitly with the thesis propounded by Keith ...

When I was twenty-seven, I visited mainland Scandinavia for the first time. I had spent the last of my travel money on a rail pass, and I was on a tight budget. One day, I thought I would save some money on accommodation by catching an overnight train from Stockholm to Trondheim. When I woke up the next morning ...

No one should be surprised that Terry Eagleton has written yet another book about the excesses of academic postmodernism. Railing against the pretensions and deceptions and ...