Cultural Cringe Research Articles

Mortality Salience and Cultural Cringe

Terror Management Theory predicts that mortality salience (MS) instigates cultural worldview defenses, especially among individuals with lower self-esteem. That MS intensifies positive evaluations of pro-U.S. essay authors, and negative evaluations of anti-U.S. essay authors have been documented as supportive evidence. However, the evidence to date may have been limited to where praising for the former and rejection of the latter authors is consistent with a shared cultural script and thus normative. In the case of Australian people, the cultural script of cringe prescribes them to evaluate their country modestly and to reject high praise of their country. We therefore predicted that MS (vs. control) should lead Australians, with low self-esteem in particular, to evaluate pro-Australia essay authors less positively while not affecting their evaluations of anti-Australia essay authors. Results from two studies were consistent with this prediction. It is important to distinguish MS effects on adherence to cultural norms from those on reaffirming collective self-esteem, and to consider relevant cultural scripts when interpreting evidence for worldview defenses.

DIY Cheese-making and Individuation: Towards a Reconfiguration of Taste in Contemporary Computer Culture

DIY Cheese-making and Individuation: Towards a Reconfiguration of Taste in Contemporary Computer Culture

Found in translation: debating the abstract elements of cultures through actor training styles

While the synthesis of acting methodologies in intercultural acting has been discussed at length, little discussion has focussed on the potential of diverse actor training styles to affect performance making and audience reception. This article explores a project where the abstract elements of the British and American cultures were translated in rehearsal and in production through the purposeful juxtaposition of two differing actor training styles: the British ‘traditional’ approach and the American Method. William Nicholson's Shadowlands was produced by Crossbow Productions at the Brisbane Powerhouse in 2010. Nicholson's play contains a discourse on the cultural cringe of British–American relations. As a research project, the production aimed to extend and augment audience experience of the socio-cultural tensions inherent in the play by juxtaposing two seemingly culturally inscribed approaches to acting. Actors were chosen who had been trained under a traditional conservatoire approach and the American Method. A brief overview of these acting approaches is followed by a discussion centred on the project. This article analyses how from the casting room to the rehearsal room to the mise en scene and into the audience discussions, cultural issues were articulated, translated and debated through the language of acting.

The core business of caring: A nursing oxymoron?

Nursing has always regarded caring as its core business. The historical record about caring in nursing is non-specific, and little direct evidence exists about caring as part of nursing. Caring is not restricted to nursing, is possibly influenced by public perceptions of nursing, and can be subverted for maleficent ends. This paper discusses these points, and then moves to explain how caring fares in the Australian health care system. Australia has been blighted by a "cultural cringe" which sees anything from overseas as more valuable than anything Australian. This is as true for nursing, and caring within that, as for any other aspect of Australian life. However, Australia has one of the best health care systems in the world, and nursing as a profession is a world leader. The argument of this paper is that the core business of caring could be under threat in Australia unless nurses recognize their particularly good contribution to the profession and subsequent patient/client care, and celebrate that. Examples are taken from the United Kingdom where there is a crisis of caring within nursing and health. These are used to explain how Australian nursing can avoid the pitfalls and retain caring as its core business.

A personal essay on the role of the nurse

Nursing has suffered a lack of understanding by the general public, who often can see no further than stereotypes of heroine, harlot, harridan or handmaiden. These have colored nursing’s development as a profession, in Australia as in the rest of the world. Australia, as the ‘lucky country’ has one of the best health systems in the world, and Australian nurses are amongst those at the forefront of the profession. However, it appears that Australian nurses, as with many sections of Australian society, do not recognize that they hold high professional standards. With the influence of the international nursing shortage and the ever-growing technological advances within health care, alternatives to nurses, and to the registered nurse, are emerging. It is vitally important that nursing controls and regulates these developments. Only by protecting the legitimate role of the nurse, ensuring that education standards are maintained at the highest appropriate level, and generating and using new nursing knowledge will outcomes for all those who come to us for care be of the highest order. This essay proposes that Australian nurses need to overcome the ‘cultural cringe’ and recognize that they are in charge of a profession which meets the highest international standards.

Is the Cultural Cringe Alive and Kicking? Adolescent Mythscapes of Australian English in Queensland and Victoria

Although there is a growing literature on grammatical, lexical and phonological aspects of Australian English, there are comparatively few studies of attitudes towards this variety of English. What literature there is tends to be either anecdotal or based on media language or on findings from experimental, subjective reaction tests where samples of speech are matched against those produced by speakers of other varieties of English. This study aims to add to existing research through an examination of responses of Australian adolescents to the following question: ‘When you think about “Australian English”, tell me the first three things that come into your mind’. The findings fall into three broad overlapping categories: (i) comments about language features; (ii) comments about attitudes towards those features; and (iii) comments about culture. All three categories contain responses which suggest that young Australians associate Australian English with rural and informal lifestyles. Those who provide attitudinal judgments either describe the variety in neutral terms or give it evaluations typical of those reported for broad and vernacular varieties of English. Of particular interest is the frequency with which categories overlap and intersect, and the mythscapes they construct of Australian language and identity.

<em>America and the British Imaginary in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Literature</em>, by Brook Miller

Reviewed by: America and the British Imaginary in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Literature Martha Vicinus (bio) America and the British Imaginary in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Literature, by Brook Miller; pp. x + 246. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, £55.00, $84.00. For many years now critics have studied the so-called cultural cringe that afflicted so many nineteenth-century former colonies of Britain. Possessing such a long and distinguished literary history, Britain inevitably cast a shadow across other English-speaking [End Page 759] nations. Brook Miller, however, turns his critical lens in the opposite direction to consider the ways in which British authors used the United States, or more precisely their idea of it, either to criticize or bolster British traditions. Miller suggests that many British writers of the late nineteenth century used American culture to emblematize their worst fears about modernization; to them, Americans seemed obsessed with material success and the rights of individuals. These characteristics seemed to be overtaking Britain, in danger of losing ties to the past, to community, and to class harmony. By focusing on the period between 1870 and 1914, Miller explores in some depth the contradictory nature of so much British writing about America, which often reveals more about Britain and its prejudices than about America. Miller notes in his introductory survey the long-lasting impact of Matthew Arnold’s pedagogic view of America: it was homogeneous and provincial, in serious need of British cultural education. Yet, turning to Britain, he and many others felt that their own country needed America’s energy and idealism. In effect, British texts managed a “subtle evocation of a sense of British cultural superiority even while criticizing the British or English public” (10). By the early twentieth century, at the peak of British imperial power, numerous cultural commentators of quite varied political views believed that Britain was in decline and needed to “restore and cultivate” its cultural traditions as a bulwark against American materialism and democracy (15). I wish that Miller had explored more fully the notion of a homogenous culture, whether British or American. Both countries saw an influx of immigrants and a revival of regional literature during the years 1880 to 1900, so why was it that elite critics such as Edmund Gosse or H. G. Wells so rarely noticed the vigorous growth of dialect literature, whether in the Jewish or Irish English of the urban immigrant or the Dorset or Lancashire English of the countryman? Miller compares the pedagogic responses to America to the performative, arguing that British commentators, at home and abroad, performed the role of cultured Briton. By modeling values in danger of being lost, writers reminded their readers that culture was an agent for both national stability and personal refinement. I’m not sure whether performativity does the work that Miller wants it to, since only Oscar Wilde fits neatly into this category, though presumably one could include several English critics who never visited the United States. More effective is Miller’s discussion of the ways in which attacking American materialism served to consolidate an author’s rapport with his British readers; by suggesting a shared cultural understanding that was beyond not only the crude American but also most British citizens, an author could both critique Britain and uphold its cultural superiority. The most interesting turn Miller takes is to show how cultivated condescension gave way to an effort to align Americans with British traditions. Rather than seeing Americans as needing culture, the two countries should come together under the banner of their shared English heritage. In a key chapter, Miller discusses what he calls Anglo-Saxon racialism, or the ways in which British commentators attempted to make common cause with white Americans against modernization, commercialism, and immigrants (and, implicitly or explicitly, African-Americans). Miller uses the millennium celebrations for King Alfred as the quintessential example of this effort to unite the Anglo-Saxon races in a shared tradition of law and order. The nostalgic revival of a chivalric past was especially important in popular fiction, which was so often framed in terms of imperial duty. The Anglo-Saxon races, with their incomparable legal tradition, had a...

Transnational History and Cultural Cringe: Some Issues for Consideration in New Zealand, Australia and Canada

This article draws upon my personal experience working across the boundaries of New Zealand, Canadian and Australian History. With attention to the British colonial past in these places I compare and contrast the politics of writing history. I explore national historiographies as counterparts, with a particular focus on writing women into history. I argue that transnational history must address the ongoing presence of cultural cringe in the historiography. Important gaps between national histories are revealed: gaps that might offer future direction for scholarship. Teaching beyond national boundaries is also discussed, and the danger of replicating the imperial past is foreshadowed.

Beyond the Ivory Tower - Higher Education Institutions as Cultural Resource: Case Study of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music

This paper focuses on the interface between higher education and the arts, in particular the role of the music school or conservatorium as a cultural resource. The genesis of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music leading to its establishment in 1957 in Brisbane, Australia, and its subsequent development to the early 1990s, is used as a case study. Perceptions of cultural cringe, both in respect to the northern hemisphere and also the southern Australian states, have been lively discussion points in Queensland’s artistic development for many years. The foundation of the Queensland Conservatorium was therefore viewed as a cultural emblem of mature statehood, and threats to its survival have been debated in this light. The unique socio-political dynamics of the state, whose capital city Brisbane is far removed from regional centres, also play into any study of Queensland’s artistic development. The conservatorium’s cultural value in contributing to society as a talent pool, incubator of original work, and as an arts centre, is examined. Evidence that the relationship between academia and the broader arts community can be both symbiotic and ambivalent is also presented, largely through analysis of the mass print media, where much of the early history of Queensland Conservatorium is documented.

Politics, Clichés and the “lurky country”: Murray Bail’s Critique of National Mythologies in Holden’s Performance

[Excerpt] From the outset of his career as a novelist, Murray Bail has been concerned with the perennial issues of Australian identity and the country's putative destiny. As the progeny of a predominantly white, Victorian settlement on the far rim of the Asia-Pacific region, Australians have been acutely conscious of their belatedness, isolation and reliance on a transplanted culture. These factors, together with continued dependence on powerful allies, have produced Australians' notorious cultural cringe. Australia, too, throughout its relatively brief history of Caucasian settlement, has usually been acted upon, rather than taken decisive steps to shape its own destiny. Like Holden Shadbolt, the main protagonist of Bail's second novel, Holden's Performance, who is at times unable to talk, the country appeared to need a in the right direction. This was always his trouble, the problem (159). For the first hundred and twenty years it meekly followed the dictates of Whitehall, until granted independent status at Federation in 1901. Thereafter it prided itself on loyalty to the British flag, and remained dependent on London for investment capital, as well as markets for its primary produce. Only the shove provided by Japan's attempt to extend its empire during the Pacific War moved the loyal Commonwealth member-state from the side of an isolated and encircled Britain to embrace the burgeoning superpower on the other side of the Pacific, the United States. Bail, in his early novels, is concerned with the antipodean nation that emerged victorious after the Second World War, and with national traits and blindness that threatened to rob the Great South Land of the glittering destiny that might have awaited it as a developed Western nation positioned near the rising economic epicentres of the Asia-Pacific region.

Popular cultural cringe: language as signifier of authenticity and quality in the Singaporean popular music market

AbstractThis article looks at the popular music industry in Singapore and argues that there exists a ‘cultural cringe’ for domestic English-language music, which is considered as inferior to English-language music from Western countries. Singaporean consumers of popular music use the English language as a signifier of authenticity and consequently quality of musicians. Local musicians are deemed ‘inauthentic’ because consumers perceive the local variant of English spoken in Singapore is inferior to other variants of English spoken in Western countries. There is thus an underlying sub-text of an inferiority complex coming out of the post-colonial experience that effectively diminishes the possibility of success as English-language musicians. Yet, such a phenomenon is not observed in the vernacular Malay and Chinese-language music industries. In the final analysis, this article suggests that modernisation and modernity for Singapore is neither completely localised nor completely imposed: there exists a negotiation in the popular cultural sphere based on historical (colonial) baggage.

Unlikely Allies: Britain, America, and the Origins of the Special Relationship, by Duncan Andrew Campbell

Reviewed by: Unlikely Allies: Britain, America, and the Origins of the Special Relationship William Anthony Hay (bio) Unlikely Allies: Britain, America, and the Origins of the Special Relationship, by Duncan Andrew Campbell; pp. vii + 307. London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2007, £30.00, $34.95. History involves not only understanding the past but also explaining how the present came to be. Duncan Andrew Campbell takes up that question in exploring Anglo-American relations over the century before a special relationship emerged between Britain and the United States. In the early nineteenth century, lingering resentments from the American Revolution and the War of 1812 were the primary special aspects of the Anglo-American [End Page 359] relationship. Campbell notes Alexis de Tocqueville's observation "that he could conceive of no hatred more poisonous than that which Americans felt for Britain" (108–09), and the recurring vituperation of England in Congressional debates underlines the point. The War of 1812 had created resentment among Britons who saw it as a betrayal. Those in Britain and the United States who resisted animosity nonetheless saw the other as just another nation among nations rather than one with special ties. So what changed the underlying dynamic? Campbell argues that the development of a wide network of connections ultimately bridged not only the differences but also the mutual distrust and incomprehension. By the late nineteenth century, leading figures in Britain and the United States had come to see fundamental commonalities that distinguished them from other countries. Tensions over Canada's position in North America gradually faded, and British views changed once America ceased to be a potential adversary. Similarly, a generation of Americans saw Britain in a more positive light. Campbell repeatedly acknowledges countervailing forces to the convergence he describes but argues for an overall pattern that made possible the special relationship. He "leans more toward a British perspective of the United States than an American view of Britain" (8–9), and the book strives to highlight dimensions overlooked in a focus on North America. Conflict between American determination to assert independence and British disdain for a society whose sole merits derived from an English heritage set the dynamic behind Anglo-American relations. "Who reads an American book?" the Whig author Sydney Smith asked sarcastically in an 1820 issue of the Edinburgh Review. In a chapter titled after Smith's question, Campbell discusses Robert Southey, Smith's Tory counterpart, who discerned a national character of low and lying knavery that the Canadian writer Thomas Haliburton captured in the Yankee peddler Sam Slick. English travel writers, notably Frances Trollope, elaborated the theme with accounts of rough accommodations and uncouth manners. American writers in turn resented British condescension. James Fenimore Cooper, whose books were widely read in Britain, urged Americans to secure their "mental independence" (qtd. in Campbell 49). Determination to escape what later would be called the "cultural cringe" shaped American attitudes. Nathaniel Hawthorne's uneasy balancing of a romanticized view of Britain with resentment toward it marked a typical mid-century American perspective. Geopolitical factors also shaped relations by casting Britain and the United States as rivals. Pressures of competing interests generated antagonism. Menacing Canada threatened Britain itself. Lord Palmerston viewed Washington as always pushing for advantage and treating efforts at conciliation as signs of weakness to be exploited, while Andrew Jackson feared British efforts at encirclement, particularly when the Republic of Texas made overtures to London during the 1840s. Britain's global maritime empire brought interests that generated friction with the American continental empire built by westward expansion. The fact that confrontations were avoided or resolved did not remove the potential for confrontation until well after the American Civil War. Indeed, the great struggle between Union and Confederacy amplified resentments on both sides of the Atlantic. Campbell also notes trends that, from an early stage, brought Britain and the United States together. Independence had not fundamentally altered economic relations. Partnership within an Atlantic trading system backed by British investment became the foundation for expansion across the American continent. The British [End Page 360] writer John Wilson Croker described New York as "a suburb of Liverpool, or, if you will, Liverpool of New York" making the...

Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization (review)

Reviewed by: Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization Christopher Whalen (bio) Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization, by Laura O'Connor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 264 pp. $49.95. By "Haunted English," Laura O'Connor means the language of the colonized, "an acquired speech," as Stephen Dedalus calls it, "so familiar and so foreign" (P 189)—a theme appropriate for a project that began as a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Edward Said. In his debate with the English Dean of Studies, Stephen realizes that "[t]he language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine" (P 189), which is the same crisis of identity facing the three "'Celtic' modernists" (xii) at the center of this study: W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Marianne Moore. O'Connor explores how these poets' "literary vernaculars . . . are shaped by their respective efforts to work through and remake their conscious and unconscious memories of Pale/Fringe linguicism" (xvii). They share an "ambivalence toward the colonial tongue," but none of them developed any sort of serious proficiency in the Celtic languages (65). Instead they "speak out of the dominant English tradition and from somewhere else [but still essentially in English] to give voice to a tradition that has been [End Page 170] marginalized from the mainstream" (65). The brilliant introduction elucidates the often misunderstood concept of "the Pale," which, in late-medieval Ireland, referred to the barricades separating the English-speaking colonial stronghold from the native Gaelic-speaking population (xiii-xiv). The English invaded not only geographical but linguistic territory, forcing the retreat of Celtic languages to the periphery of the British Isles. O'Connor points out that the "cartographical image of the English Pale devouring the Celtic Fringe" needs to be supplemented with the "vertical image" of the "social pyramid" that favors speakers of "proper English" over "accented" or vernacular Englishes and Celtic languages (xiv). This is where the modern colloquial meaning of "beyond the Pale" originates: from an English invader's perspective, the Irish natives "beyond the Pale" were both socially and linguistically inferior. The "linguicism" which non-Anglo writers like Yeats, MacDiarmid, and Moore strive to overcome is a form of discrimination based on language and speaking style. O'Connor loads this term, borrowed from Robert Phillopson,1 with the double-barreled charge that English was both a "'killer language' (an instrument of Gaelic linguicide )" and a "medium of linguistic racism and ethnicized class antagonism" (xiii). As English consumed the native Celtic languages, it also eroded the cultural heritage that these Celtic languages preserved. O'Connor argues that each of these writers overcame the "cultural cringe" to discover his or her own "signature style" "[b]y working through a kind of inscribed melancholia and by unlocking a spectral linguistic resource still present within English" (xvi, xvii). After the introduction's intriguing naming of parts, the first chapter, "Beyond the Pale," establishes the Celtic context in which O'Connor places her chosen writers. Her touchstones in the mire of Celtic discourse are predictably Matthew Arnold's On the Study of Celtic Literature, Ernest Renan's Poésie des Races Celtiques, and Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland.2 Douglas Hyde's lecture "The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland," which prompted the Gaelic Revival in Ireland, also features prominently and supplies the "harsh, virulent, and rebellious" neologism that O'Connor adopts in her subtitle (xvi).3 This first chapter is helpfully structured with subheadings such as "Englishing the Overseas Colony," "Self Anglicizing Makeovers and the Alienation of Gaelic and Scots from Literacy," and "The Fenian Revenant: The Return of the Gaeltacht as the Celtic Fringe," which guide the reader through the argument. The rest of the book fails to maintain this standard of pedagogic coherence and clarity of thought. Each of the final three chapters focuses on a single author. "'Eater and Eaten': The Haunted English of W. B. Yeats" examines the way Yeats consumes Irish folklore and regurgitates it as the reimagined "Collected Yeats." "Hugh [End Page 171] MacDiarmid's Poetics of Caricature" charts the genesis of Christopher Murray Grieve...

Haunted English: the Celtic fringe, the British Empire and de-anglicization

Haunted English explores the role of language in colonization and decolonization by examining how Anglo-Celtic modernists W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Marianne Moore de-Anglicize their literary vernaculars. Laura O'Connor demonstrates how the poets' struggles with and through the colonial tongue are discernible in their signature styles, using aspects of those styles to theorize the dynamics of linguistic imperialism-as both a distinct process and an integral part of cultural imperialism. O'Connor argues that the advance of the English Pale and the accompanying translation of the receding Gaelic culture into a romanticized Celtic Fringe represents multilingual British culture as if it were exclusively English-speaking and yet registers, on a subliminal level, some of the cultural losses entailed by English-only Anglicization. Taking the fin-de-siecle movements of the Gaelic revival and the Irish Literary Renaissance as her point of departure, O'Connor examines the effort to undo cultural cringe through language and literary activism.

Texts and Contexts: International Sources and Universalistic Discourse in Australian Teacher Education 1900-1950

Australia has a long history of what has been pilloried as ‘cultural cringe’, and of bemoaning its isolation from ‘overseas’ developments. In recent years, the valuing of ideas and practices from elsewhere has been transformed under the rubric of ‘world best practice’ within a global economy and culture, both in political discourse generally, and in a raft of reports on the need for reform of teacher education in particular (see Vick, 2006a). Here, I document overseas borrowings in the form of texts in teacher education during the first half of last century, focusing on teachers colleges in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

Social psychology in Australia: Past and present

This paper reviews the development of social psychology in Australia from its early beginnings, through post‐World War II, to the current situation. Social psychology became an integral part of the psychology curriculum after the Second World War, with a strong emphasis at the University of Melbourne. It received an impetus in the 1960s with the creation of Flinders, Macquarie, and La Trobe universities. Currently, teaching and research in social psychology is widespread, with major centres at the Universities of Queensland and New South Wales, and at the Australian National University, but with universities such as Flinders, Macquarie, and Melbourne continuing to contribute. In general, social psychologists in Australia have not deliberately set out to develop a distinctive local identity. Instead, they have a strong international focus and are eclectic in their interests, drawing on theories and methodologies from major centres in North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe. They have made distinctive contributions in many areas, including research on acculturation, achievement motivation, the psychological impact of unemployment, values, expectancy–value theory, role theory, social identity and self‐categorization theory, deservingness, gender studies and household work, close relationships, decision‐making, social cognition, ostracism, and the effects of mood. Uniquely, Australian topics include research on tall poppies or high achievers, and on the cultural cringe. Social psychologists in Australia have also been active in industrial/organizational research and in cross‐cultural research, but there is little social psychological research involving the indigenous Australian population. Australian contributions to social psychology are not always recognized, partly because of Australia's distance from the major centres. However, social psychologists in Australia now have their own association, the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists (SASP), offer symposia and special academic appointments that draw international visitors, and compensate for the tyranny of distance by travelling widely and using the internet. Social psychology is now one of the strongest areas of Australian psychology internationally.

Cultural Cringe in Academe: Studying Literature in the 1940s

Cultural Cringe in Academe: Studying Literature in the 1940s

Scotland at the Smithsonian: Beyond the Cultural Cringe?

'Getting past the Cringe' was the title of a talk Susan Stewart, First Scottish Officer at the British Embassy in Washington, gave at a seminar on 'Cultural Tourism' in Glasgow. Tartan Day' (since 1997), the ever-popular Highland Games and many Celtic festivals are only the tip of the iceberg of a huge reservoir of goodwill towards Scotland in the US. Recent efforts to market Scotland abroad have targeted these American events, but have also included a major scries of promotional events in Sweden and in Catalonia. The

Reflections on learning about Australasian evaluation theory and practice

Few people realises that ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ is actually an evaluation training film, cleverly disguised to encourage a wider audience. Galadriel, for example, is clearly an evaluator. Her mirror shows what is, what has been, and some things that have not yet come to pass. She offers to hold this mirror up for others to look into, knowing that the truth will sometimes be painful. Much of the film involves discussions about wielding power ‐ its attractiveness, its potential to corrupt the well intentioned, and the merits and risks of choosing to give it away. Similar discussions occur in evaluation ‐ for example the paper by .English et al (2002) at this conference, and the theme of next year’s AES conference in Auckland. The film provides us with images that are international, interdisciplinary, and inspirational. International The film itself is the result of international collaboration ‐ an English writer (born in South Africa), an American producer, a New Zealand director, and an international cast including Europeans and Australians. In the same way, at this conference we have been able to combine and engage with ideas and examples from around the world, not with a cultural cringe, not with the arrogant dismissal of Not Invented Here, but thoughtfully considering their local applicability. I have appreciated the way in which our two keynote speakers have introduced examples from the American and British contexts, and how the Presidential Address discussed issues arising at the European conference. Interdisciplinary The film is also about interdisciplinary collaboration. Its main focus is on an interdisciplinary team, who have to learn to understand each other’s different perspectives, and to work together with their complementary tools. An axe is not the same as a bow. They also have to learn about each other’s strengths and weaknesses. As people who care about evaluation, we have to take a journey together to understand our different perspectives, and what we have to offer. I think we do this quite well in Australia and New Zealand. It’s a factor of our relatively small size that we end up

Running on Empty: ‘Modernising’ the British and Australian labour parties

Australia's cultural cringe towards Britan does not just focus on the monarchy. Many in the ALP and the media pay undue deference to Tony Blair's so-called new Third Way. This book shows why the ALP needs to reassess its own history and examines the complex reality of how it compares with the British Labor Party.