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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

Protecting Indigenous Art: From T-shirts to the flag
Indigenous Studies

Protecting Indigenous Art: From T-shirts to the flag by Colin Golvan

In this important book, Colin Golvan – a distinguished senior counsel – recounts some of the most notorious cases of copyright abuses endured by Indigenous artists, their work taken without permission, attribution, or adequate compensation and used on objects ranging from souvenir T-shirts to expensive carpets. An intellectual property barrister, Golvan leads us through the intricacies of these cases with lawyerly precision and poise, championing the role of copyright in bringing justice to Indigenous people.

From the Archive

November 2003, no. 256

‘On La Cienega’ a poem by John Tranter

By the filling station on La Cienega a burger joint

somehow survives. This Sunday morning

a pink Thunderbird sags at the kerb,

and an old Studebaker, paint flaking.

From the Archive

May 2007, no. 291

Inside the Welfare Lobby: A history of the Australian Council of Social Service by Philip Mendes

Most of you will have heard of the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), but for those who have not, it is the peak lobby group of the community welfare sector. ACOSS’s website will tell you that its aims ‘are to reduce poverty and inequality by developing and promoting socially, economically and environmentally responsible public policy and action by government, community and business while supporting non-government organisations which provide assistance to vulnerable Australians’. ACOSS has seventy member organisations, including eight Councils of Social Service at state and territory level, and another four hundred associate members. Every year, Council of Social Service staff lobby federal, state and territory politicians and bureaucrats with proposals and budget submissions. And every year, bureaucrats and ministerial staffers craft careful speeches for politicians game enough to face the Council’s tough questions about budgetary allocations.

From the Archive

February 2014, no. 358

The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 edited by Jane McCredie and Natasha Mitchell

All scientists are writers. Science only exists in the written form. What is not written is not published, is not accepted, is not knowledge, and does not exist. It is written science that is scrutinised, peer-reviewed, and cited – nothing else matters but to ‘publish or perish’. Scientific articles, in all their clever, compacted, content-laden complexity, may well be impenetrable to all but the most specialist reader, but this does not mean they are poorly written. Articles are extraordinarily difficult to craft; writing them is the hardest and most intellectually challenging aspect of scientific practice. Evidence – the experimental result or the novel observation – may well lie at the heart of science, but until this evidence is written up and published it remains an unpolished gem which cannot be appreciated or understood. Through the medium of the written word, science has taken us to new worlds. Charles Bazerman argues that ‘scientific writing is one of the more remarkable of human literary accomplishments … [and has] literally helped us move mountains and to know when mountains might move on their own’.