Melbourne University Publishing

A couple of years ago I attended the patronal festival at St James’, King Street, Sydney. The preacher was the Dean of Newcastle, who, after the blessing, opened with ‘Greetings from across the Chasuble Belt!’ The large congregation erupted into laughter, then settled in for twelve minutes of civil gospel. This is because Sydney Diocese, alone in the Anglican Communion, requires its clergy to sign an understanding that they will not wear Eucharistic vestments, including the chasuble. The ban is but one outward and visible control mechanism of an inward and enclosed evangelical attitude that typifies the power play within the diocese.

In her essay in this collection, Jenna Mead quotes from the work of a co-contributor, the Australian medievalist David Matthews. He tells a story which is likely to resonate in the memories of many of us who have, by choice or otherwise, studied medieval culture at university in this country. His tutor at the University of Adelaide, in the course of a seminar on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, asked the class about the famous line which describes Bertilak’s castle: ‘Towres telded bytwene, trochet ful [th]ick.’ ‘Where might the nearest example of such an architectural feature be found?’ The class, suspecting some academic trick, fell silent, not making the imaginative connection to the tower of the administration building ‘about two hundred yards away’.

If it is the case that we can no longer avoid the effects of living under conditions of globalisation, then increasingly that spatial dimension governs our lives. Look not, therefore, deep into the history of our individual nations or localities to explain what is going on, but lift your eyes to the horizon, and beyond, where a devastated city may be smouldering. Within minutes, a local politician will be warning us that we may be next.

When is a suburb not a suburb? When it is an inner-urban locale with a distinctive café culture, its own postcode and football team, but no town all. And here’s another: how did an Old English word meaning ‘churl’s farm’ come to be assigned to a swanky inner suburb of a major city in the southern hemisphere? These and numerous other questions are answered in Carlton: A History. This encyclopedic book tells a fascinating story that resonates way beyond its notional suburban boundaries.

As Melbourne grew, its suburbs became too vast for one local government body to administer, and areas were carved off to form separate municipalities: Richmond, Collingwood, Fitzroy, South Melbourne, North Melbourne. Carlton, however, despite periodic agitation from its residents, has remained within the boundaries of the Melbourne City Council.

Was there ever an uglier duckling than Australian republicanism? It’s a movement whose end is vital to anyone who believes that a people should attempt to extend the control over their own destiny, but which, of itself, fails to inspire the slightest excitement in anyone for whom politics is a living, breathing thing. Even more suspicious are those for whom republicanism is an exciting cause. They’re a strange mob, often decent and committed people, but able to subsist on a fairly thin diet. Because so many of them are lawyers, they are always on the ball when it comes to saying how the Constitution should be changed and what new mechanism should be put in place. Because so many of them are lawyers, the movement is efficient and well run. And because so many of them are lawyers, no one else trusts them or feels comfortable working with them.

Towards the end of his informative introduction, Robert Manne, the editor of Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history, outlines the collective intention of the book’s nineteen contributors. He refers to Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002), a revisionist text dealing with early colonial history and violence in nineteenth-century Tasmania, as ‘so ignorant, so polemical and so pitiless a book’ ... 

Masculinity isn’t what it used to be. To begin with, it has gone forth and multiplied to become masculinities, for it is a requirement of a pluralist culture that diversity not only be acknowledged but cultivated. What has happened, of course, is that as women’s history has given way to gender studies, masculinity, which was formerly taken for granted as part of the dominant culture, is being put under the microscope.

Science Fiction (speculative fiction, sf, sci-fi, whatever) is not much more than a century old. H.G. Wells called his pioneering efforts ‘scientific romances’, still a good name, and his wonderfully fecund The Time Machine and War of the Worlds were published as late as 1895 and 1898. So Australia as a Europeanised nation is even younger than this ‘space age’ genre. If you push it back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818, its birth coincides with white settlement. Time enough, you’d think, to grow plenty of Aussie sf.