Digital disruption and co-creating Australian Studies

In the early 1990s, designing curricula was a fundamentally different exercise to what it is today: teaching was face-to-face, resources were print-based, overhead projectors were state of the art in lectures, while VHS had only recently taken over from over Betamax videos. Computers were little more than text editors, as floppy disks gradually reduced in size from eight inches to three and a half. Compact disks vied for supremacy with vinyl in music stores, not as storage devices, while DVDs had not yet been invented. I had arrived in London in August 1989 to work at the Menzies Centre in the midst of immense transformations in the world. Less than twelve months into the job, I received a call from the Australian Ambassador in Budapest with a request to scope the prospects of mounting Australian Studies programs at Hungarian universities. The present article gives an overview of the development of Australian Studies and compares what it was like to teach an Australian Studies course in Hungary then and what it is like today

The Anzac Legend didn't mention mud: Australian novels of the Western Front

Mud was not the least of ironies of war on the Western Front. Nor was it the least of ironies that trenches had been dug ‘where the water-table was the highest and the annual rainfall most copious’ (47), Paul Fussell observed in his classic study of British literary responses, The Great War and Modern Memory. Beyond irony, mud was a ‘gruesome fact no one had planned for.’ It claimed the lives of countless thousands ‘drowned’ nowhere ‘near the sea,’ Adam Hochschild observed in his 2014 history To End All Wars (211). Mud defined the main theatres of operation and was code for the Western Front even when the conditions were dry. Passchendaele was known as the ‘Battle of Mud’ while Ypres was called ‘Wipers’ at least partly because of the atrocious conditions. Australian photographer Frank Hurley’s iconic images at Chateau Wood reveal something of the extent of the quagmire (in a compositional method that brought him into dispute with the creator of the Anzac myth, C. E. W. Bean) while bombs and rain poured down on the Somme and turned the earth into a ‘dark glutinous sea,’ as Leonard Mann called it in his 1932 novel Flesh in Armour. Vance Palmer’s ‘mud and misty figures’ of battle fatigued diggers emerge from the ‘foul morass’ and persist into nightmares ‘endlessly coming,’ even when the war is over in the 1920 poem ‘The Farmer Remembers the Somme’ (Holloway 110). Soldier-novelist Edward Lynch wrote simply of ubiquity in Somme Mud: ‘We live in it, work in it, fight in it, wade in it, and many of us die in it. We see it, feel it, eat it and curse it, but we cannot escape it, not even by dying’ (108)

Post memory violence: the Great War and children of trauma

Hundreds of thousands of Australian children had been born in the shadow of the Great War to men who enlisted between 1914 and 1918. The lives of these children could be and often were hard and unhappy, as Anzac historian Alistair Thomson observed of his own father’s experiences as the son of a returned serviceman who had been in and out of repatriation hospitals during the 1920s and 1930s (257-259) and who became erased from family stories (299-267). These children of trauma fit within a pattern suggested by Marianne Hirsch in her influential essay “The Generation of Postmemory.” According to Hirsch “Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (np). This paper attempts to situate George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964) within the context of postmemory narratives of violence that were complicated in Australia by the Anzac Legend which occluded any too open discussion about the extent of war trauma present within community, including the children of war

The Anzac Legend didn't Mention Mud

John Schumann's song 'I was only Nineteen' contains the line 'The Anzac Legend didn't mention Mud,' which might be reasonably read as the dirt music of Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. This article argues that Leonard Mann's 1932 novel Flesh in Armour is both an exception and indicative novel of Australian wartime experiences on the Western Front. Contaminated mud features as a persistent metaphor of abjection. Yet the sacralised beach and rocky outcrops of Gallipoli and the desert sands of the Middle East had the effect of obscuring the filth and tragedy of war in the trenches and across no-man's land. The article compares E P F Lynch's Somme Mud and Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune with Flesh in Armour and speculates on influences emanating from Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front

The Australian Legend and Its Discontents

The Australian Legend and Its Discontents explores the narrative construction of Australia, and those storylines preferred by Australians when describing themselves and their nation. How do Australians figure in literature, film and television, the visual arts, and daily conversation? As an introductory reader, The Australian Legend and Its Discontents is an indispensable tool for students and all those with a general interest in the nation and its people. The book is complemented by electronic study and other notes for those who wish to explore further the issues of what it is to be Australian

Australian Aborigines

Describes the ancient culture of the Australian Aborigines and discusses the continuing struggle of these native people to preserve their way of life and regain the rights to their traditional lands

North by North

[Extract] Seven centuries of cartographic convention has placed north at the top of maps, and by logical extension at the top of the world. This convention has been closely aligned with another, known as the Mercator projection. Devised by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1659, this system of map-making has been uncritically handed down through the centuries to the present time and continues to be the cartographic standard in many parts of the world. Mercator’s projection not only points northward but exaggerates northern landmasses at the expense of the south. For example, it magnifies Greenland to be approximately the same size as Africa, which is actually fourteen times larger. The Greenland example is one of many northern amplifications and conceits that belittle the south. The specific contrast with Africa was presented with deadpan humour and devastating effect in a 2012 episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Cartographers for Social Equity lobby President Bartlet’s White House to withdraw all Mercator maps from US schools and replace them with Gall-Peters maps. The Gall-Peters projection represents with greater fidelity and accuracy the relative proportions of the world’s landmasses. The Cartographers for Social Equity fail in their representation but, coincidental or not, five years after the screening of The West Wing episode Gall-Peters maps began to be phased in at schools in two American states. North and south are cardinal directions and polar opposites that refer to exact locations at either end of the globe. Within ice-bound regions, the North Pole defines the Arctic, an old term derived from Latin and Greek to mean north. By contrast, its antithesis—the Antarctic—is a negative term that means opposite to north. It is defined by the South Pole. This linguistic preference suggests that north is the one while south is the other

The many transformations of Albert Facey

In the last months of his life, 86-year-old Albert Facey became a best-selling author and revered cultural figure following the publication of his autobiography, A Fortunate Life. Released on Anzac Day 1981, it was praised for its "plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and un-self-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth" (Semmler) and "extremely powerful description of Gallipoli" (Dutton 16). Within weeks, critic Nancy Keesing declared it an "Enduring Classic." Within six months, it was announced as the winner of two prestigious non-fiction awards, with judges acknowledging Facey's "extraordinary memory" and "ability to describe scenes and characters with great precision" ("NBC" 4). A Fortunate Life also transformed the fortunes of its publisher. Founded in 1976 as an independent, not-for-profit publishing house, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (FACP) might have been expected, given the Australian average, to survive for just a few years. Former managing editor Ray Coffey attributes the Press's ongoing viability, in no small measure, to Facey's success (King 29). Along with Wendy Jenkins, Coffey edited Facey's manuscript through to publication; only five months after its release, with demand outstripping the capabilities, FACP licensed Penguin to take over the book's production and distribution. Adaptations soon followed. In 1984, Kerry Packer's PBL launched a prospectus for a mini-series, which raised a record $6.3 million (PBL 7–8). Aired in 1986 with a high-rating documentary called The Facey Phenomenon, the series became the most watched television event of the year (Lucas). Syndication of chapters to national and regional newspapers, stage and radio productions, audio- and e-books, abridged editions for young readers, and inclusion on secondary school curricula extended the range and influence of Facey's life writing. Recently, an option was taken out for a new television series (Fraser)

They Are What You Eat: Can Nutritional Factors during Gestation and Early Infancy Modulate the Neonatal Immune Response?

The ontogeny of the human immune system is sensitive to nutrition even in the very early embryo, with both deficiency and excess of macro- and micronutrients being potentially detrimental. Neonates are particularly vulnerable to infectious disease due to the immaturity of the immune system and modulation of nutritional immunity may play a role in this sensitivity. This review examines whether nutrition around the time of conception, throughout pregnancy, and in early neonatal life may impact on the developing infant immune system