Contract gangs: race, gender and vulnerability

While violence directed at Indian students in Australian cities has been highlighted in the Indian and Australian press, far less attention has been paid to the violence directed at Indians in rural areas. This has most often involved Indians employed in contract labour in seasonal industries like fruit or vegetable picking. This article reviews various media accounts, both urban and rural, of violence directed at Indians from 2009 to 2012. It draws attention to the far longer history of labour exploitation which has taken place in rural and urban Australia in contract labour conditions and the particular invisibility of rural settings for such violence. Racial minorities, like Aboriginal and Chinese workers, and women in agriculture and domestic work, have seldom had adequate power to respond industrially or politically. This means that in the past, these groups been particularly vulnerable to such structural exploitation. The paper concludes by calling for greater attention not only to the particular vulnerability of Indians in rural settings but to the wider presence of racialised and gendered exploitation enabled by contract labour structures

Building on Sand: Nation, Borders, Myth and History

Building on Sand brought together scholars with high profile roles as public intellectuals whose work is engaged in three very different geographic areas: Australia, Israel/Palestine and India/Pakistan. Each of these, as the conjoined names of two suggest, are sites of conflict over the nature of the civil and social authority which holds power and the peoples who claim to belong there. History has been a central theme in the rhetoric of these political conflicts, in which a unitary and authoritative history for a ‘nation’ and a ‘state’ has been built on the shifting sands of always-emerging historical evidence and its interpretations. In each of these three regions, a history which celebrated national formation and unity was challenged by ‘new’ historians in the 1970s [or 1980s or 1990s]. They used a similar set of methodologies like oral history, popular culture and the built environment: the toolkit of researching ‘history from below’ for a generation of social and cultural historians. Such new histories have been now been challenged themselves by a reassertion of the validity of a celebratory ‘national’ history based on unproblematic, ‘factual’ evidence. These recent conflicts between the ‘new’ historians and the (even newer) re-asserters of a ‘national’ history have been bruising encounters, with high stakes in terms of individual reputations, public emotions and the real, personal safety in some cases of the participants and, more importantly, of vulnerable oppositional communities

Fresh and Salt: Introduction

Fresh and Salt was a Trans/forming Cultures workshop on water, an issue of urgent interest in Australia and the region. It focused on the relationships between people and water, with particular attention to the interests of Indigenous peoples and was organised around four themes: freshwater rivers, oceans, borders and commons. Participants at the symposium included activists and academic researchers who brought with them an extraordinarily broad disciplinary background. They ranged from cultural analysts to freshwater biologists, from historians and anthropologists to lawyers, political scientists and geographers. This generated vigorous and wide-ranging discussions, opening up unfamiliar comparisons between conditions on inland freshwater rivers and those of ocean island societies, or between the politics of modernising technologies on vast tropical rivers like the Mekong with those of arid zone rivers like those in inland China and Australia. In doing so, these discussions probed the ways in which the tools of social and cultural analysis can be usefully engaged with those of policy, biology and economics. This introductory essay argues that the papers refined and presented here reflect the qualities of the symposium discussions. They illuminate the ways in which people generate meanings for water, the ways the political battles over water are fought out and the ways in which water as rivers or oceans has formed fruitful but contested border zones across the region. This symposium was convened by Trans/forming Cultures, the UTS Centre for Culture and Communications in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science. It was generously supported by the Asia Pacific Futures Network and by the International Centre of Excellence in Asia Pacific Studies. The workshop was initiated and conducted by researchers from the centre, including Stephanie Donald [then TfC Director], Heather Goodall, Kate Barclay, James Goodman, Stephen Muecke and Devleena Ghosh [current TfC Director]. Participants were drawn from a number of active research networks associated with TfC, including the China Node of the APFN, the South Asia Network and the Research Initiative on International Activism

Introduction to Cities, Nature, Justice

A discussion of the ideas and the workshop which generated these articles, dialogues and opinions

Georges River Blues

The lower Georges River, on Dharawal and Dharug lands, was a place of fishing grounds, swimming holes and picnics in the early twentieth century. But this all changed after World War II, when rapidly expanding industry and increasing population fell heaviest on this river, polluting its waters and destroying its bush. Local people campaigned to defend their river. They battled municipal councils, who were themselves struggling against an explosion of garbage as population and economy changed. In these blues (an Australian term for conflict), it was mangroves and swamps that became the focus of the fight. Mangroves were expanding because of increasing pollution and early climate change. Councils wanted to solve their garbage problems by bulldozing mangroves and bushland, dumping garbage and, eventually, building playing fields. So they attacked mangroves as useless swamps that harboured disease. Residents defended mangroves by mobilising ecological science to show that these plants nurtured immature fish and protected the river's health. These suburban resident action campaigns have been ignored by histories of the Australian environmental movement, which have instead focused on campaigns to save distant 'wilderness’ or inner-city built environments. The Georges River environmental conflicts may have been less theatrical, but they were fought out just as bitterly. And local Georges River campaigners – men, women and often children – were just as tenacious. They struggled to ‘keep bushland in our suburbs’, laying the foundation for today’s widespread urban environmental consciousness

Georges River Blues

The lower Georges River, on Dharawal and Dharug lands, was a place of fishing grounds, swimming holes and picnics in the early twentieth century. But this all changed after World War II, when rapidly expanding industry and increasing population fell heaviest on this river, polluting its waters and destroying its bush. Local people campaigned to defend their river. They battled municipal councils, who were themselves struggling against an explosion of garbage as population and economy changed. In these blues (an Australian term for conflict), it was mangroves and swamps that became the focus of the fight. Mangroves were expanding because of increasing pollution and early climate change. Councils wanted to solve their garbage problems by bulldozing mangroves and bushland, dumping garbage and, eventually, building playing fields. So they attacked mangroves as useless swamps that harboured disease. Residents defended mangroves by mobilising ecological science to show that these plants nurtured immature fish and protected the river's health. These suburban resident action campaigns have been ignored by histories of the Australian environmental movement, which have instead focused on campaigns to save distant 'wilderness’ or inner-city built environments. The Georges River environmental conflicts may have been less theatrical, but they were fought out just as bitterly. And local Georges River campaigners – men, women and often children – were just as tenacious. They struggled to ‘keep bushland in our suburbs’, laying the foundation for today’s widespread urban environmental consciousness

Making change happen

This book is a unique window into a dynamic time in the politics and history of Australia. The two decades from 1970 to the Bicentennial in 1988 saw the emergence of a new landscape in Australian Indigenous politics. There were struggles, triumphs and defeats around land rights, community control of organisations, national coalitions and the international movement for Indigenous rights. The changes of these years generated new roles for Aboriginal people. Leaders had to grapple with demands to be administrators and managers as well as spokespeople and lobbyists. The challenges were personal as well as organisational, with a central one being how to retain personal integrity in the highly politicised atmosphere of the ‘Aboriginal Industry’. Kevin Cook was in the middle of many of these changes – as a unionist, educator, land rights campaigner, cultural activist and advocate for liberation movements in Southern Africa, the Pacific and around the world. But ‘Cookie’ has not wanted to tell the story of his own life in these pages. Instead, with Heather Goodall, a long time friend, he has gathered together many of the activists with whom he worked to tell their stories of this important time. Readers are invited into the frank and vivid conversations Cookie had with forty-five black and white activists about what they wanted to achieve, the plans they made, and the risks they took to make change happen