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Non Fiction

Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

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February 2011, no. 328

When members of the rock band Men at Work recorded their legendary hit ‘Down Under’ in the early 1980s, they wanted to inject a stronger sense of Australianness into the song, so they included a flute riff of a few bars echoing the classic Australian children’s chorus ‘Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree’, just as one might, in a different geographical con ...

Face: Australian Portraits 1880–1960 by Anne Gray & The Naked Face: Self-portraits by Vivien Gaston

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February 2011, no. 328

Roy Porter wrote that ‘the portrait (above all the self-portrait), the diary and the biography (especially the autobiography) – reveal heightened perceptions of individuality, the proud ego vaunting and flaunting his own being’. This may be so, but self-portraiture is a genre that crosses many secret thresholds ...

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Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia by Penny Russell

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February 2011, no. 328

Lacking a titled aristocracy and the leisured class that went with it, Australian colonial society encouraged an egalitarianism of manners. This, however, did not reflect the absence of social stratification: rather, as it has been argued, it was a means of being reconciled to it in a new setting ...

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The Lure of Politics: Geoff Gallop’s Government 2001–2006 by Lesley van Schoubroeck

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February 2011, no. 328

A few months after the 2010 federal election, Geoff Gallop delivered the annual Hawke Lecture at the University of South Australia. In an address focused upon political engagement, he canvassed some possible reforms to the Australian political system. Among a number of other proposals ...

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Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia edited by Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson

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February 2011, no. 328

Anthropology’s significant contribution to both academic and applied research focused on Indigenous Australia has intensified over the last four decades. Among Aboriginal people and anthropologists themselves, debates have occurred as to the discipline’s earlier alignments with colonialism ...

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A bomb in every download

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May 2011, no. 331

On 30 July 2010, WikiLeaks uploaded a file named ‘insurance.aes256’ to the Internet. The file was 1.4 gigabytes in size – large enough to hold a mountain of leaked documents – and encrypted with a 256-character key strong enough to have the US National Security Agency’s approval for use to secure classified documents. It was also copied to dozens of USB sticks and mailed out to a cadre of WikiLeaks supporters around the world. In a letter enclosed with the USB sticks, WikiLeaks said that ‘insurance.aes256’ contained an encrypted archive:

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A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates

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May 2011, no. 331
Morag Fraser reviews 'A Widow's Story' by Joyce Carol Oates

On 18 February 2008, Joyce Carol Oates’s husband, Raymond J. Smith, died unexpectedly of cardiopulmonary arrest. Smith was eminent in his own field as editor of the Ontario Review, but quietly eminent. Now he has become famous, a household name in international literary circles – as his widow’s spouse. It is an odd state of being, or non-being. But this is an odd book, alternately brilliant and bizarre.

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Australian Documentary: History, Practices, Genres by Trish FitzSimons, Pat Laughren, and Dugald Williamson

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May 2011, no. 331

The concept of ‘documentary’ is a slippery customer. It may start with John Grierson’s ‘creative treatment of actuality’, but, like holding water in your hand, it bleeds across media from film into television and digital media, and across modes in one direction into news reporting and in the other into docudrama ...

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Rewriting History: Peter Carey’s Fictional Biography of Australia by Andreas Gaile

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May 2011, no. 331
Joseph Wiesenfarth reviews 'Rewriting History: Peter Carey’s Fictional Biography of Australia' by Andreas Gaile

Andreas Gaile presents his Rewriting History as Peter Carey’s biography of Australia. Before he gives us the facts of that biography, however, he suggests why Carey cannot write a biography of Australia: ‘there is no “real” Australia waiting to be uncovered. A national identity is an invention ...

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Crack Hardy: From Gallipoli to Flanders to the Somme, the True Story of Three Australian Brothers at War by Stephen Dando-Collins

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May 2011, no. 331

While explorations of Australia at war have never been short on ‘male stories’, the prevalence of the masculine frame may yet increase in coming years as part of the ongoing examination of competing forms of manhood in this country, as evidenced by the upcoming symposium ‘Embattled Men: Masculinity and War’ at the Australian National University. The publicit ...

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