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Peter Beilharz

Peter Beilharz is an Australian sociologist who has taught at La Trobe and Curtin University. He is the founding editor of Thesis Eleven and has published books devoted to writers and scholars such as Karl Marx, Bernard Smith, and Zygmunt Bauman. 

Peter Beilharz reviews 'Hughes' by Andrew Riemer and 'Ellis Unpulped' by Michael Warby

November 2001, no. 236 01 November 2001
Sydney, as everybody knows, is Australia’s world city, always has been. It offers the urban metonym – Opera House sails – which, together with Uluru, is Australia to the outside world. And it generates, or generated, a particular kind of intellectual, the Sydney larrikin, rogue male. These books claim to cover two such, Bobs Hughes and Ellis. How might we receive them? The visuals for these ... (read more)

Peter Beilharz reviews 'Implicating Empire: Globalization and resistance in the 21st century world order' edited by Stanley Aronowitz and Heather Gautney

May 2003, no. 251 01 May 2003
Empire is everywhere. You can see it in the shanty towns of São Paulo and on the coffee tables of the well-heeled in Boston and Sydney. It made us, in its British form, in the antipodes via the expeditions of Cook and Banks, and all that followed. Now it dominates our newspapers and television screens in the form of war. ... (read more)

Peter Beilharz reviews 'The Petrie Family' by Dornan & Cryle, 'Tom Petrie's Reminiscences' by C. Petrie, 'Exiles from Erin' by B. Reece, 'The Mt Kembla Disaster' by S. Piggin & H. Lee, 'Hauling the Loads' by M.J. Kenny, 'All Our Loads' by J. Shields

December 1992, no. 147 01 December 1992
Why do we read what we read? Bookshelves groan with biography, travel, social theory far left corner, cultural studies creeping up the front, Baudrillard in the back door and out the front. Some people’s books get featured in the weekend papers, others go straight into the back of the car and the second-hand shops. Love, sweat and tears … what’s it all for? ... (read more)

Peter Beilharz reviews 'Who's Who in Australia 2001'

June 2001, no. 231 01 June 2001
Why bother reading Who’s Who in Australia? Obviously, it’s a tool, a standard reference, a source of information, a biographical detail, a register – a social register – a place to find an address, or to wonder who’s in, who’s out, who calls the shots. It is also a social symbol in its own right. To read it, to browse or peruse it, is to receive some sense of its own significance and p ... (read more)