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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

June 2012, no. 342

Gay Life Stories by Robert Aldrich

The author of this handsomely produced volume claims in his opening sentence, ‘The sex lives of celebrities (and the less famous) always excite the curiosity of others.’ For the sake of his book he’d better be right, because what follows are more than eighty gay histories and/or partnerships, each moving inexorably to the matter of sexual orientation and declaration – reluctant or otherwise. Aldrich is probably right. Think of all those journals whose covers you browse while waiting in the supermarket queue, inviting you to speculate on, say, the vicissitudes of Brangelina. Recent political controversies about gay marriage rights or the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy of the US armed forces provide a contemporary context for Aldrich.

From the Archive

From the Archive

October 2009, no. 315

Shattered Anzacs: Living with the scars of war by Marina Larsson

One of the keenest childhood memories of David Meredith, narrator of George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964), is of the hall of his parents’ suburban home in Melbourne. It was full of prostheses, the artificial limbs of servicemen returned, maimed, from the Great War. The men are friends and former patients of Meredith’s parents. Her mother was a nurse, her father served in the First AIF. The scant historical regard that has been paid to these damaged men, and to their families, is rectified by Marina Larsson’s brilliant study of Shattered Anzacs. Her subject is the cohort of revenants who returned to Australia after the war – their bodies ruined, shell-shocked, infected with venereal disease and tuberculosis – and the families, institutions and government bureaucracies into whose hands they fell.