Australian Scholars Research Articles

Politics as Space, Class as Language: Problems of Synthesis

Politics as Space, Class as Language: Problems of Synthesis Jean Harvey Baker (bio) Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats. Washington County: Politics and Community in Antebellum America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. xvii + 407 pp. Figures, tables, maps, appendixes, notes, and index. $45.00. Martin J. Burke. The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. xvii + 203 pp. Notes, bibliography and index. $42.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Even variously defined, class, community, and politics have provided American historians with essential interpretative frameworks for their investigations. To political historians, especially those who study nineteenth-century America, the political acts of voting and officeholding are to class as turpentine is to paint. To those who take class as their heuristic departure point, socioeconomic definitions of rank are to partisan choice intriguing, though often mistaken, explanatory factors. For both approaches community offers both a conceptual and a contextual background—the laboratory setting for research. But usually—and this is the case with the two books under review—research designs afford little opportunity to deal with the colligation of the three concepts. Australian scholars Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats have written a finely textured study of Washington County, Oregon, which uses both community and politics as organizing devices. Class is irrelevant to this monograph because, according to Bourke and DeBats, the citizens of Washington County inhabited a preclass, preindustrial society. The latter conclusion, based on the familiar Marxist definition of classes, might surprise Martin Burke who in The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America offers a history of the ubiquitous idea of class in the United States before the twentieth century. Indeed the notion that there were no classes would surprise mid-century Americans who recognized both socioeconomic and socioconstitutional groupings within their society. And certainly, as Washington County: Politics and Community in Antebellum America reveals, there was significant inequality in the distribution of wealth among Washington County’s 2,766 residents, [End Page 209] with the poorest 10 percent of the taxables owning 2.3 percent of the wealth and the richest 10 percent holding nearly 40 percent by 1860. Spending less than 25 of 325 pages on the economic life of Washington County, instead in the grand tradition of the very best local histories that transcend their limited spatial boundaries, Bourke and DeBats illuminate the patterns of life and their meanings in one rural place in the Northwest during the 1850s. The authors focus their microscope on the institutions, demographic sources of the population, culture, and especially politics in a premodern society that might stand “in relation to the nineteenth-century American states and territories as the United States and Canada stood in relation to the newly emergent states of the Old World” (p. 3). Consciously they avoid the straitjacket of the who-voted-for-whom-and-why design of much American political history in the last three decades, though they have the sources that earlier quantifiers would have relished. But it is a political source that encouraged the authors to undertake their exhaustive examination of Washington County in the first place. The extant poll books that recorded the viva-voce votes of the male community provide a matchless source of political information. The largely overlooked practice of oral voting had survived its colonial, British roots in several eastern states, including Virginia, and was adopted in Oregon in 1854. Bourke and DeBats speculate that, as form to function, open voting created “a perception of the political process as being intimately bound up with the places and the manner in which people acted out their whole lives—their marriages, funerals, churching, their public and private excitements of every kind” (p. 13). Thus the community of Washington County serves as “the generality of an imaginary place and the precision of an exact location” (p. 1). Granted that Ronald Formisano has done much to explode ethnocultural interpretations of voting behavior and to encourage broader investigations of politics, still too much political history uses aggregate data to search for answers to individual voting behavior. 1 It is one of the significant contributions of this book that the research tool of...

Square pegs into round holes: a critique of Neeley & Barton

The Levantine Epipalaeolithic,c.20,000–10,000 BP, represents one of the most intensively studied periods in prehistoric research in the past 30 years, with literally hundreds of sites being discovered and many systematically investigated. The researchers involved come from a diverse range of backgrounds and national 'schools', and include American, Australian, British, French and Israeli scholars. Some, myself included, see its variability in chipped stone tool morphology, techniques of manufacture and specific means of hafting to reflect, in addition to functional factors, the stylistic traditions of specific groups in the landscape (Bar-Yosef 1991a; Goring-Morris 1987; 1995). This evidence is further bolstered by chrono-stratigraphy, settlement patterns, inter- and intra-site organization and patterning, as well as other material culture residues (Goring-Morris 1989a; 1989b; 1991).

Reviews

Kirsten Lees, Votes for Women, The Australian Story, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1995, pp. xvi + 206, $24.95 Paula J. Byrne, Criminal Law And Colonial Subject: New South Wales, 1810 ‐1830, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and Melbourne, 1993, pp. 301 + xiv, $59.95. Walter Phillips, James Jefferis, Prophet of Federation, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 1993, pp. xviii + 341, $34.95. John Lack & Jacqueline Templeton, Bold Experiment, A Documentary History of Australian Immigration since 1945, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp.xvi + 312, $29.95. Morris Graham, Albert Bathhurst Piddington: The Last Radical Liberal. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, pp xii + 251, $34.95. Don Grant and Graham Seal (eds) Australia in the World, Perceptions and Possibilities, Black Swan Press, Curtin University, Perth, 1994, pp 385, $37.00. Geoffrey Partington, The Australian Nation. Its British and Irish Roots, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 1994, pp. xvi + 347, $34.95. Scott Prasser, J.R. Nethercote, John Warhurst (eds), The Menzies Era: A Reappraisal of Government, Politics and Policy, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1995, pp. 278, $24.95. Stefan Petrow, Sanatorium of the South? Public Health and Politics in Hobart and Launceston, 1875–1914, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart 1995, ppvii + 218, $20.00. Frank Vanclay and Geoffrey Lawrence. The Environmental Imperative: Eco‐social concerns for Australian agriculture, Central Queensland University Press: Rockhampton 1995, v + 204, $19.95.

Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and beyond, 1700-1990

The first comparative history of one of the most dynamic popular religious movements in recent times, Evangelicalism offers a uniquely comprehensive survey of this complex phenomenon from its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century to the present. International in scope, the book includes essays by leading American, Canadian, English, Irish, Scottish, and Australian scholars and compares developments in every major region in the English-speaking world. The contributors examine the many ways that evangelicalism has been shaped by its popular nature, and explore the international networks of communication that have given it much of its distinctive character, from trans-Atlantic publishing networks in the eighteenth century to mass-marketing campaigns in the twentieth, and covering a wide range of other influences and trends, including Methodism, the legacy of George Whitefield, the American Civil War, anti-Catholicism, religious and civil revolution, and Pentecostalism. Based on path-breaking scholarship, this book is vital to students of religion who wish to grasp the breadth and complexity of evangelicalism as a social and political force as well as an irreducibly religious phenomenon.

Selfhood and the patterning of national identity: some recent Australian scholarship on Thailand

Craig J. Reynolds (ed). National Identity and Its Defenders: Thailand, 1939–1989. Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, No. 25. Clayton: Monash University, 1991. iv, 400 pp. Plates, index. A$19.95, paper. Gehan Wijeyewardene and E.C. Chapman (eds.). Patterns and Illusions: Thai History and Thought –– In Memory of Richard B. Davis. The Richard Davis Fund, and the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, ANU, Canberra; issued under the auspices of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1992. 342 pp. Maps, tables, index. A$37.50, paper.

The politics of Australia's international economic relations: Adjustment and two‐level games

Economic adjustment, a political priority for Labor governments throughout the second half of the 1980s, and in contrast to earlier Australian scholarship and practice, is now recognised to be an internationally, as well as a domestically, determined and constrained enterprise. Theoretical developments in international political economy in North America of late have provided a variety of approaches for conceptualising this twofold enterprise. Taking two cases (the development of the Cairns Group and its activities in the Uruguay Round of Trade Negotiations and the development of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) this paper looks at two of these approaches—to show how they can contribute to the understanding of international economic policy under Labor in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Australian Scholarly Journals

A sample of Australian journals in the natural and social sciences has been analysed with regard to their editorial procedures, costs, revenues, marketing, production methods and general well-being. The analysis shows that many scholarly journals have problems with management, marketing and distribution, and do not cover their costs. Most journals are increasingly subsidized by members of their parent societies or from other sources, and their longer-term future is unclear. The separation in most societies of the editing function from the policy and financial functions is thought to contribute to this situation, which in many cases is simply not yet recognized by those closest to it.

Australian midwifery scholarship foundation

Australian midwifery scholarship foundation

VII. After the Poet

I am not competent to evaluate translations into any language other than English, but I am told that O. Weinrich’s rendering into German verse (1960), in an edition which is both scholarly and sensitive, is outstanding.In general the versions which have appeared since the war are free from the sort of artificiality which had dogged most earlier versions, a hangover from the Victorian age. (Catullus had his own artificiality, but that is a different story.) They are also free from expurgation and bowdlerizing, complete, frank in approach and in language, in fact authentically reflecting the original. The first of these, and one of the best, was J. Lindsay, Catullus: the Complete Poems (1948). Lindsay had made an earlier translation, but this was better. He was a vigorous Australian, an original but erratic scholar, and a minor poet of genuine merit. Other meritorious versions of the full corpus have since appeared, by F. O. Copley (1957), R. A. Swanson (1959), C. H. Sisson (1966), Peter Whigham (1966), James Michie (1969), R. Myers, and R. J. Ormsby (1972), Frederick Raphael and Kenneth McLeish (1978). Several of these translators are both scholars and men of letters, holding university posts in classics. Several are poets in their own right: Sisson once wrote: ‘I have had my eye on Catullus for years – as what poet would not who could make out even a little of the Latin?’ Several have made some reputation for translations of other authors. Jean Granarolo comments that the versions are often scholarly or, at all events, conceived for a wide popularization. I omit one version of which a reviewer said that the reader was ‘confronted with a Catullus who seems to have stepped from the pages of Finnegan’s Wake’.

Interpretive strategies in Australian musical scholarship

Interpretive strategies in Australian musical scholarship

Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives

This interdisciplinary anthology, which brings together the research of a prominent group of Australian feminist scholars, reflects three dominant areas of feminist thinking today: the concept of woman as adaptor rather than victim; the effect of public policy on women, including EEO, childcare, rape, and the labor market; and changing contemporary attitudes toward the family. Five main sections illuminate such topics as the history of women and feminst theory in Australia, the sociology of gender, women and the labor market, reproduction and the family, and the impact of feminism on social change.