This CFP is open for one more week! Get your proposals in by Monday 30 March.
#CFP #OzStudies
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It's Monday morning and you're writing your to do list for the week. Why not add "write abstract for JAS 50.4 special issue" on that list?
#OzStudies #CFP #OzHist #OzLit #humanities
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This is the latest ACNZSN Newsletter. Please share widely :-) #ozstudies #canstudies #nzstudies #news #opportunities #funding #fellowships #jobs #scholarships #prizes #publications #academicsky #highered #skystorians
acnzsn.org/2026/03/13/a...
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50In 2026, the Journal of Australian Studies publishes its 50th volume. To mark this occasion we propose a special issue for release in late 2026. For this volume, we would like to invite scholars to revisit its back issues - perhaps with nostalgia, perhaps with criticism, but always with the purpose of evaluating what Australian Studies has been, what it currently is, and what it can be. We seek articles of that can do one or more of the following: Select a particular article or special issue from the past to speak to from a contemporary perspective Revisit one of your own articles published in JAS to critically revise, update - or perhaps redact past scholarship Scholarly reflections of editorial experiences with the journal focused on characterising “Australian Studies” at the time Critical personal reflections Debates and disputes in Australian studies (on the pages and off of JAS ) A critical history of/commentary on JAS and its relationship to the field of Australian Studies more broadly Critical reviews of key themes the journal has covered (or not covered) over its history Critical reviews of the role of disciplines and disciplinarity within the interdisciplinary formation of Australian Studies We also welcome other proposals and suggestions. Please note that we are open to a wide range of lengths and formats in this context, as appropriate to the form of your contribution, and we invite contributors to specify a nominal word count in their proposal, noting that this cannot exceed 8000 words (inclusive of footnotes). We invite all contributors to provide a 300-500 word abstract proposal for their article by 30 March 2026 . This is to allow us to identify and remedy any potential overlaps, and to identify peer reviewers in advance. Outcomes and feedback on abstracts will be provided by 3 April at the latest. Please submit your abstracts to: journalofaustralianstudies@gmail.com with the subject line: Attn: JAS at 50 Special Issue.
Initial manuscripts are due in ScholarOne by 17 July 2026 ; however, we welcome early submissions. All manuscripts will be peer reviewed. In the spirit of collaboration, we ask that contributors to the special issue also assist with peer reviewing other contributions. After revisions based on the peer review are made, manuscripts will undergo an editorial review, after which they may be returned for further revisions. After this round of editorial revisions, the manuscripts will then be forwarded to our copyeditor by no later than 28 August. Final manuscripts (including peer review, revision, copyediting, and revisions after copyediting) are due by 9 October 2026. If you have any questions, please email the Editors: jess.carniel@unisq.edu.au and chris.hay@flinders.edu.au Production timeline at a glance Abstracts: 30 March 2026 Notification of acceptance: 3 April 2026 Initial manuscript submission: 17 July 2026 Peer review and revision process completed by: 28 August 2026 Final manuscripts (including peer review and copyediting) : 9 October 2026 Publication: December 2026
To celebrate our 50th volume, JAS invites you to contribute to a special issue on (the Journal of) Australian Studies at 50.
Please see the CFP below for details - and please circulate it far and wide!
@intlausstudies.bsky.social
#CFP #OzStudies #OzLit #OzHist #auspol #AustralianStudies
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ACNZSN is excited to announce a Call for Proposals for an edited collection on 'Migration and the British World: Peoples, Flows, and Connections'! The deadline for submissions is 30 April 2026 :-) #CFPs #ozstudies #canstudies #nzstudies #academicsky #skystorians #highered
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: Old Wine in New Bottles for Australian Readers: Captain Cook and Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey in Children’s Picture Books. Authors: Martin Kerby, Eseta Tualaulelei, Lisa Ryan, Margaret Baguley, and Alison Bedford (University of Southern Queensland). Abstract: This article explores a famous but controversial figure in the Australian imaginary, Captain James Cook, and his representation in children’s books over different periods. We examine three representative examples of children’s books that explore James Cook and his first voyage to the South Pacific: The Story of Captain Cook: An Adventure from History (Ladybird Books, 1958), Excuse Me, Captain Cook: Who Did Discover Australia? (Salmon, 1988) and Meet … Captain Cook (Murdie and Nixon, 2011). Each book was created by the respective authors and artists at different points in time, so we analyse the stories using Joseph Campbell’s three-stage metaphor of the “Hero’s Journey”, a canonical structure that he identified in mythological narratives or monomyths that resonate across cultures and epochs. Our analysis demonstrates that representations of Cook in children’s picture books are largely conservative, drawing the reader’s attention away from contentious alternative perspectives of his story.
In our final article for 49.4, Kerby, Tualaulelei, Ryan, Baguley and Bedford use Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" to explore how Captain Cook has been portrayed in children's books from the 1950 to the 2010s.
#KidsLit #OzHistory #CaptainCook #OzStudies #OpenAccess
tinyurl.com/pcxfbeuv
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: Subverting Social Order: Recovering the Intelligent Woman Farmer in John Naish’s That Men Should Fear (1963). Author: Elizabeth A. Smyth (James Cook University). Abstract: In a 1985 lecture, Australian literary scholar Bruce Bennett said that people associated with farming are commonly regarded as intellectually impoverished. John Naish’s farm novel That Men Should Fear (1963) subverts the literary social order that Bennett described by portraying a farmer who is characterised as highly educated. Naish’s first novel, The Cruel Field (1962), has appeared in recent georgic studies and ecocritical scholarship, and in analyses of the migrant experience and labour systems. In this article, I recover his second novel, That Men Should Fear, and argue that Naish’s characterisation of the farmer as university educated subverts the literary “scale of civilisation” noted by Bennett while enabling insights into a class division based on ownership of farmland. This article centres on Naish’s portrayal of a strong and independent woman farmer at a time when women felt sidelined in Australian literature and society. I argue that Naish’s That Men Should Fear reshapes the genre of the Australian farm novel by expanding traditional representations of women and class. It also enriches the farmer’s perspective offered in Naish’s The Cruel Field.
Next in 49.4:
Smyth argues that Naish's That Men Should Fear reshapes the genre of the farm novel through its portrayal of women and class.
#class #LitStudies #OzLit #OzStudies
tinyurl.com/2rbbcute
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: “That Riddle of a River”: Currents of Colonial Ambivalence in Ernestine Hill's Water Into Gold. Author: Scott Robinson. Abstract: In this article, I conduct a close reading of Ernestine Hill's Water Into Gold (1937) to argue that it reveals Hill's ambivalence about colonial development in her account of the transition of White settler colonialism from an earlier period of mythologised pioneering to one of industrial development. I show how Hill's narration frames the elimination of Aboriginal people at the frontier as inevitable and deploys religious language to sanctify the domination of nature as well as the process of colonisation. This religious aspect of Hill's work has not received previous attention. The article tracks three key features of Hill's text, contributing to three bodies of work. I demonstrate how each of these features provokes Hill's ambivalence. First, I identify how the pioneering travellers in Hill's narrative are stalled by colonial settlement and industrial development. Second, I describe the ways Hill's text paradoxically figures Aboriginal people as disappearing while attesting to their indelible presence. Third, I analyse the way Christian language provides a foundational justification for the domination of nature and White colonial settlement. Connecting these three features, I demonstrate Hill's ambivalence at the loss of mythic origins and their sanctifying role in the colonial development she endorses.
More from 49.4:
Robinson's close reading of Ernestine Hill's Water Into Gold reveals the author's ambivalence about White settler colonial development.
#colonialism #EnvHistory #OpenAccess #OzStudies
tinyurl.com/yc22uefy
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: Making an Entrance on a Man’s Stage: Pioneer Women Flautists in Australia. Authors: Karen Anne Lonsdale (University of Southern Queensland) and Ana Stevenson (University of Southern Queensland and University of the Free State). Abstract: Flute playing was primarily a male domain during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. Whereas the piano and singing were traditionally considered acceptable musical pursuits for women, the flute was not thought to be an appropriate choice of instrument. As women were not included in orchestras, they formed their own. Despite facing strong opposition and public criticism, Australia’s trailblazing women flautists pursued music as both amateurs and professionals. Against a backdrop of changing trends in women’s work in 20th-century Australia, some women musicians first broke into the profession as replacements for men who were serving during World War II. This article uses newspapers to uncover women flautists’ entry into the classical music scene of the early 20th century, highlighting the achievements of five pioneering women: Constance Pether, June Lindsay, Florence Elkin, Linda Vogt and Audrey Walklate.
Next in 49.4:
Lonsdale and Stevenson highlight five pioneering women flautists breaking the glass ceiling of Australia's professional music scene.
#OzMusic #WomensHistory #flutes #OzStudies #OpenAccess
tinyurl.com/3ypwd9xc
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: Alan Renouf, Malcolm Booker and “The Departmentof Foreign Affairs in Crisis” in the Australian Policy Worldof the 1970s. Author: James Cotton (UNSW). Abstract: In the late 1970s, for the first time, veterans of Australian diplomacy published multiple books that disputed the fundamentals of the national diplomatic pattern, their projects impelled by what they saw as a “crisis” in foreign policy and its management under the Fraser government. The putative crisis was occasioned by a drastic withdrawal of funding from the foreign affairs and aid sectors, the concentration of foreign policy initiative in the hands of the prime minister, and the rise to prominence of a group of personal political advisers. Alan Renouf and Malcolm Booker both rejected the accustomed and unqualified reliance upon the United States as a security and diplomatic partner, appealing to current developments—notably the Vietnam withdrawal—to indicate waning US will and capability. For Booker, the emergence of Soviet strategic interest in the Indian Ocean region indicated that Australia would be forced to deal with regional powers on new terms; Renouf was more sanguine on the prospects for managing regional relations through a middle-power strategy. In the trajectory of their careers, both Renouf and Booker were victims of the “crisis” of the 1970s, though estranged by its bureaucratic consequences.
More from 49.4:
Cotton explores the "crisis" in Australian foreign affairs in the 1970s, providing insight into diplomatic and bureaucratic machinations.
#DFAT #ForeignPolicy #OzStudies
tinyurl.com/33h2xyke
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This is the first ACNZSN Newsletter of 2026. Please share widely :-) #ozstudies #canstudies #nzstudies #news #opportunities #CFPs #jobs #scholarships #publications #academicsky #highered
wp.me/pbX0uz-2u1
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: Beyond Professor Starlight’s Sporting and Stage Career: Race, Self-Representation and Caribbean Legacies in Australia. Authors: Gary Osmond (University of Queensland) and Jan Richardson (Griffith University). Abstract: Edward William Rollins (c. 1852–1939), ″Professor Starlight″, was a noteworthy boxer and entertainer in Australia for three decades from the 1880s. A dapper gentleman and consummate storyteller, he was celebrated by the sporting press well beyond his fighting days. Born in British Guiana, he offers a valuable opportunity to extend the historiography of African Caribbean migrants in Australia at a time of growing interest in British imperial dynamics, legacies of slavery and Black migrant histories. As the author of a published memoir and the subject of several interview-based newspaper articles, Rollins is a rare example of a Black public figure in Australia who left notable personal accounts. We triangulate these writings with press reporting and archival records to examine Rollins’s life, as well as to assess the carefully curated inclusions and omissions contained in his written accounts and interviews. We argue that the fact of his achievements and claims not always being exactly true was beside the point. Rollins was a raconteur and entertainer as much as he was a boxer and, as Mark McKenna has posited in relation to the historian Manning Clark, to “keep his audience entertained, it was sometimes necessary to be flexible with the facts”.
Next in 49.4:
Osmond and Richardson examine the life and career of 19th c boxer, raconteur, and entertainer Professor Starlight (Edward William Rollins).
#OzStudies #SportHistory #representation #OpenAccess
tinyurl.com/msdfa2e4
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Screenshot of a journal article. Title: “Spirits of Resistance”: A Politics of Feeling in Behrouz Boochani’s Prison Writing. Author: Rebecca Hill, RMIT. Abstract: This article engages with Behrouz Boochani’s prison writing, especially his autobiographical novel No Friend but the Mountains and his poetic manifesto, “A Letter from Manus Island”. Boochani wrote these works while he was incarcerated in Australian immigration detention on Manus, a tropical island in an archipelago in the far north of Papua New Guinea. His writing is widely acclaimed for its meticulous description and analysis of the ongoing atrocities of the Australian immigration detention regime. I argue that his work should also be read as a sustained thinking of collective practices of freedom. The practices of freedom that Boochani articulates emerge in the generation of “profound relations” of feeling between the people, animals, plants, oceans and winds of Manus. These relations of feeling resist the system of control, coercion and violence that undergird Manus Prison. For Boochani, the system of control at the prison is a microcosm of what he calls Manus Prison Theory. His thinking of freedom is a thinking with the feelings and forces of Manus, and his writing is traced with the places that he wrote in.
Introducing the papers in 49.4:
Hill examines the more-than human elements of Behrouz #Boochani's prison writing as an important part of his "practices of freedom".
#OzStudies #immigration #ManusIsland #OpenAccess
tinyurl.com/2s3k5dke
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Melbourne poet Pi.O performs in front of the Melbourne offices of Meanjin during the Save Meanjin protest, 11 September 2025. Behind him, a man in jeans holds up a sign that covers his face. The sign reads, "Purely on financial grounds".
🚨JAS 49.4 now available 🚨
JAS editors: "the intellectual mission of #Meanjin lives on beyond its pages, and we commit JAS to similarly challenging and extending the nation’s mental life."
Thank you to @beneltham.bsky.social for permission to use the cover image.
tinyurl.com/yphjfn38
#OzStudies
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: Desert Depictions in Australian Science Fiction. Author: Gary Reger (Trinity College, US). Abstract: The great interior deserts of Australia provide the setting for two important genres of Australian literature: exploration narratives and science fiction (SF). Both borrow heavily from, but also revise and challenge, the tropes about deserts European settler colonists brought with them. More recent Indigenous SF, however, has pushed back against these settler-colonist tropes, and thus introduced new approaches to the rich field of Australian SF.
And in the final paper of the deserts special section for 49.3, guest editor Reger explores Australian deserts as a setting for Australian science fiction.
#SciFi #deserts #OzStudies #AusLit #ecocriticism
tinyurl.com/3yb5u3pv
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: Entering the Arid Zone: Australian Development Diplomacy and UNESCO, 1945–1960. Author: Ruth A. Morgan (Australian National University). Abstract: This article examines the response of Australian governments to UNESCO’s agenda of conducting scientific research in “arid zones” to explore the role of the nation in the liberal internationalism of the postwar world order. UNESCO’s first director-general, Julian Huxley, and its first head of the Natural Sciences Section, Joseph Needham, both positioned science as critical to an internationalist agenda. Australian botanist Bertram Thomas Dickson and his contemporaries shared this belief in the necessary role of science in postwar reconstruction and the betterment of humanity. However, as Dickson’s hitherto unexamined correspondence with Canberra and UNESCO shows, national interests still mattered, as did empire, to the movement of scientific ideas during the first decades after the war. The interwar rise of applied science and its contributions to rural Australia, as historical geographer J. M. Powell argues, had “won” scientists like Dickson and the CSIR official support, which sustained their importance to postwar reconstruction and development efforts. Australia’s contribution to the UNESCO initiative therefore followed Canberra’s assessment of the strategic value of the organisation to its regional ambitions and development diplomacy.
In the second article in the Australian desert special, @ruthamorgan.bsky.social examines Australia's response to the UNESCO agenda on research in "arid zones".
#deserts #CSIRO #UNESCO #science #OpenAccess #OzStudies #OzHist
tinyurl.com/m4wcn734
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: The Symbolic Australian Desert. Author: Steve Morton. Abstract: Arid Australia is lightly peopled, and so in past eras its representation in art and literature has often been based on fleeting visits. The paucity of personally lived experience has encouraged commentators to use it as a blank canvas for a contradictory range of imputed meanings, from emptiness to plenitude. The country is occasionally benign yet is mostly hot and dry: the resulting attitude of deficit is exemplified by Sidney Nolan’s “Desert and Drought” paintings of the 1950s. Yet a subsequent explosion of Aboriginal art, and of written accounts revealing the appetite of Aboriginal people for connection with Country, has helped swing the pendulum towards mystique, and settler Australians have begun to interpret the deserts sympathetically. Even so, settler Australians struggle to see this tough country as habitable. Western ideals have run up against a landscape unusually inimical to industrial and agricultural purposes, such that now the inland may best be interpreted as a symbol of the limits to human endeavour.
In 49.3's desert special section, Morton explores the various meanings that have been inscribed across the desert by settler Australians, then changed by a new appreciation of Aboriginal art.
#OzStudies #OpenAccess #desert #Australia #AboriginalArt
tinyurl.com/388x8xcn
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: The Humanities in the Australian Desert: An Introduction to a Special Section of the Journal of Australian Studies. Authors: Andrea Gaynor (University of Western Australia) and Gary Reger (Trinity College, USA)
Introducing the special section in 49.3 on "Humanities in the Australian Desert" guest edited by Andrea Gaynor and Gary Reger.
#OzDeserts #deserts #OzStudies #OpenAccess #humanities
tinyurl.com/8t52xxz9
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: The Impact of Gender on Incomes in the Visual Arts in Australia. Authors: Kate MacNeill, Jenny Lye, Edwina Bartlem (University of Melbourne), Grace McQuilten, Chloe Powell, Marnie Badham (RMIT). Abstract: The gendered discrepancy in income across the visual and craft arts is widely recognised. Female artists on average receive less for their sales of art than do male artists, and at auction in the resale market, work by female artists on average sells for less than that of male artists. These outcomes are compounded by lower earnings from waged employment in the visual arts and craft sector. This article draws on the results from a 2022 survey of the incomes and working conditions of 702 visual and craft artists and arts workers in Australia to explore how gender impacts the economic status of artists. The authors analyse the survey findings in conjunction with art-market outcomes for visual artists in Australia to assess the key moments in artists’ careers where their career progression is impacted by gender and how policymakers might respond to these challenges.
In the last of our general articles in 49.3, MacNeill et al draw upon a survey of 702 artists and arts workers to explore the impact of gender on their economic status as artists.
#OzArts #OzStudies #VisualArts #GenderGap #OpenAccess #CreativeIndustries
tinyurl.com/23c7sp37
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: The Golden Chariot: Quacks, Quackery and New England Newspapers, 1889–1893. Author: Belinda Beattie, University of New England. Abstract: Quack advertising was widespread in pre-Federation newspapers including those in rural New England (northern New South Wales). Between 1891 and 1892, Madame and Dr Paul Duflot and their Golden Chariot visited the New England area and attracted large crowds. At the same time, the practice of medical science was striving to establish its credibility and set itself apart from alternative health providers. They did this by pejoratively labelling alternative medicine providers as “quacks”. This article contributes to the New England media-history and news-framing literature on quack reporting. It draws on the framing theories of Robert Entman and Paul D’Angelo, alongside Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of the “stranger” and “strangerhood”. The analysis reveals a striking hypocrisy among local newspapers: while they prominently advertised the quacks and their cures—including the Duflots’ public appearances and private consultations—they simultaneously ran anti-quack news stories. Notably, the popularity of the Duflots suggests that New Englanders were not entirely won over by medical science. Instead, they prioritised personal autonomy, human agency and control over their healthcare decisions.
49.3 cont'd...
Beattie examines the popularity and scepticism surrounding quacks visiting New England in the late 19th century revealing a familiar tension between profit and information in the media.
#OpenAccess #quackery #OzHist #OzStudies
tinyurl.com/yda83dhp
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: A Study of Patterns of Environmental Protest in Sydney, Australia. Author: Thomas O'Brien, University of York. Abstract: As a global city and commercial capital of Australia, Sydney occupies an important place in the national imagination. Attention is naturally drawn to the city, making it a valuable target for those seeking to present claims and challenge those in power. This article draws on a unique protest-event catalogue to examine patterns of environmental activism in Sydney over the 1997–2018 period. The article draws out the key issues, actors and actions, and shows how these have changed over time across the Sydney metropolitan region. The findings suggest that the affordances of the urban environment play an important role in shaping the patterns of protest. A central division is between actions in the City of Sydney and those in surrounding local government areas. The greater availability of targets in the City of Sydney facilitates larger-scale actions, whereas those in the wider metropolitan region are more closely tied to sites impacted by perceived threats.
Next up in 49.3, O'Brien examines patterns of environmental protest in Sydney over a decade, finding key differences in inner and outer urban/metro areas.
#environment #protest #GlobalCity #urban #Sydney #ProtestEventAnalysis #OzStudies
tinyurl.com/7537amzs
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This is the latest ACNZSN Newsletter. Please share widely :-) #ozstudies #canstudies #nzstudies #news #opportunities #awards #CFPs #funding #jobs #fellowships #publications #academicsky #highered #skystorians
wp.me/pbX0uz-26r
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: "Rupert Murdoch: Elite Outsider". Author: Matthew Ricketson, Deakin University. Abstract: Rupert Murdoch stepped down from heading his company News Corporation in 2023 after a 71-year career as a media proprietor that has been as controversial as it has been financially successful. The life and career of Rupert Murdoch has been examined through many different lenses yielding insights into his ceaseless media deal making and his influence on politics and on other media, among other topics. This study draws on the eight biographies of Murdoch and the 34 books about his company’s activities to examine three questions: why is Murdoch so hostile to the Establishment and “elites”, however variously they are defined by him when he has been a member of both his entire life? How does his antipathy show up in his media outlets, especially in his populist rhetoric where simple “us and them” binaries are posited for complex issues, and do the biographical sources about him help explain his apparently contradictory behaviour?
In our last article from 49.2, Ricketson examines Rupert Murdoch as an elite paradox - he is hostile to "the Establishment" and elites yet he is one of them...
#OzStudies #Murdoch #elites #OpenAccess
tinyurl.com/26ahd9vv
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: Political Outsiders? A Study of “Teal” Independent Campaign Demographics in the 2022 Australian Federal Election. Author: Phoebe Hayman, La Trobe University. Abstract: The 2022 “teal” independents’ campaigns were a movement of political outsiders challenging the power of the established parties. Their campaigns mobilised candidates, campaigners and volunteers in the thousands across Australia, but little is known of who these participants were. Analysing the gender, class and ethnicity of campaign participants, this article considers whether the independent campaigns should be understood as a departure from or replication of the elite demographics of political parties. This study employs mixed methodologies, drawing on interview data from candidates, campaigners and volunteers (N = 55) and a survey of highly engaged volunteers (N = 270) to explore who joined independent campaigns and how recruitment processes influenced the gender, class and ethnicity of participants. This article argues that, despite efforts to attract participants from diverse backgrounds, the independent campaigns largely mirrored the demographics of political participants within party campaigns—except for their achievements in recruiting women across participant types. Recruitment via the social networks of existing participants was a contributing factor, reinforcing demographic disparities. This study contributes new knowledge of the teal independents movement and highlights the role of informal and social processes in shaping the gender, class and ethnicity of political participants and representatives, inside and outside of party campaigns.
More excellent 49.2 content:
@phoebehayman.bsky.social examines political participation in teal independents' campaigns - are they outsiders challenging established power, or are they replicating elite dynamics?
#OzStudies #auspol #WomenInPolitics #teals
tinyurl.com/4aacnp7a
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: "Elite Economists and the Neoliberal Ascendancy in Australia: The Case of Dr John Hewson". Author: Chris Wallace, University of Canberra. Abstract: Worsening inequality worldwide has stimulated a renewal of scholarly work on the dynamics of elite recruitment, notably Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman’s large-scale UK study (2024), which found only modest change in the make-up of Britain’s elite between the 1890s and today. Cumulative advantage is shown to accrue to those who pass through more than one of Britain’s “precise channels of elite recruitment”. Reeves and Friedman’s underlying motivation is to identify how these channels “might be remade so the elites we get are the ones we need”—implicitly, elites interested in reversing current trends in inequality. Australia presents an opportunity to consider their findings in a situation where, compared with Britain, elite recruitment is more nebulous. Drawing on the life and transnational career of Australian economist John Hewson, this article responds to Reeves and Friedman’s invocation to evaluate “how elites think, and what elites do, rather than simply who they are”. The dynamics of Hewson’s elite recruitment and its relationship to his role in constructing consent for neoliberalism in Australia in the late 20th century—in the academy, the media and politics—is contextualised in the national and global history of neoliberalism.
Next in 49.2, guest co-editor @chriswallace.bsky.social explores the role John Hewson played in constructing consent for neoliberalism - 🔥"a cautionary tale concerning upward mobility in the neoliberal era"🔥
#OzStudies #neoliberalism #elites #auspol #OpenAccess
tinyurl.com/mw6j7fjs
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: "Remaking a Scholarly Elite? Insiders, Transnationalism, Outsiders and Australian Women Historians". Author: Melanie Nolan, ANU. Abstract: This article considers a group of Australian women historians trying to break through the employment “glass ceiling” (a colloquial term for invisible social barriers based on gender) before the 1970s. The experiences of this group provide a case study of the ways they entered, and thereby remade, a scholarly elite in the period before second-wave feminism. These academic women built transnational careers that took them to universities elsewhere in the Anglophone world, which served to improve their employment prospects back home. I argue that this transnational employment strategy relied on an insider-outsider divide, whereby Australian women historians accrued qualifications and experience outside Australia to try to leverage entry into a local elite formerly closed to them.
Start your week right with more 49.2:
Melanie Nolan examines women historians' transnational approach to career-building as a strategy to break the glass ceiling of elite academia.
#OzStudies #OzHistory #FeministHistory #academia #gender #OpenAccess
tinyurl.com/yc2j7m3p
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: The Catholic Elite and the Issue of Loyalty During the Great War in Australia. Author: Scott Denis McCarthy, Deakin University. Abstract: The historiography of the Great War in Australia tends to emphasise the ostracisation of the Irish Australian Catholic community from the dominant discourse of imperial loyalty espoused by Australia’s Anglo-Protestant majority. Such readings have neglected the Catholic elite, whose support for the war, and later conscription, aligned with the higher-status Protestant elite. It was from the latter group that established Catholics sought acceptance and in whose ranks they sought inclusion. The navigation between those ambitions and the loyalty demanded by the church and its working-class following effectively bifurcated the Catholic community along class lines during the Great War in Australia. This article examines the attitudes of the Catholic professional and commercial elite to the war and conscription to determine the extent to which those attitudes were shaped by the cultural hegemony of Protestant elites in wartime Australia. It argues that Catholic elites adhered to Protestant norms of Britishness and imperial loyalty to combat the perceptions of Irish and Catholic treachery and to secure their positions within elite society.
Your 49.2 Friday read:
McCarthy examines the extent to which attitudes to the Great War among the Catholic elite were shaped by those of the Protestant elite and the effect of this in securing their own status.
#OzStudies #elites #GreatWar #WWI #CatholicHistory #OzHistory
tinyurl.com/4rbtvbra
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Screenshot of journal article. Title: "Robert Menzies’s Mallee: The Region as a Frame of Elite Struggle". Author: Sybil Nolan, University of Melbourne. Abstract: This article explores how Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies (1894–1978), framed his origin story as a child of the Victorian Mallee. By 1898, when Menzies was three, the Federation drought had begun. Local water trusts charged farmers and residents for water that often they were unable to deliver. The result was political conflict over water security. Although Menzies, who grew up in Jeparit, remembered the drought all his life, the water crisis itself received scant notice in his memoir, Afternoon Light (1967). This article considers the agency of elites in shaping public knowledge of the regions from which they rise and how critical elite history can use interdisciplinary approaches to produce new insights into elites and their social impact.
Next in 49.2, guest editor @sybiln.bsky.social examines the impact of Menzies' narrative of self as a child of the Victorian Mallee on shaping public knowledge about the regions.
#OzStudies #Menzies #elites #RegionalHistory #Mallee
tinyurl.com/9jvns2aa
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Screenshot of journal article: "Patriarchal Dividends and the Creation of Political Elites in Colonial New South Wales". Author: Karen Downing, ANU. Abstract: Across the 19th-century industrialising world, expectations of access to power became based on expertise and economic role rather than birth. In the early White settler Australian colonies—where no non-Indigenous hereditary aristocracy or political institutions existed—the men who pursued status and influence and designed the political institutions of self-government justified their ambitions on the basis of their “independence”, a long-held marker of masculinity. In this article, I consider the gendered rhetoric of debates about the meaning of independence in colonial New South Wales through the lens of Raewyn Connell’s concept of the “patriarchal dividend” to argue that elites are a reconfiguration of patriarchal power in capitalist democracies. Because the criteria for rights to vote and stand for election were debated in terms of the character and conduct of men rather than their family lineage, political power accommodated more men but continued to make winners of particular men and losers of other men, as well as women.
First up in 49.2, @drink-an-ocean.bsky.social applies Connell's idea of "patriarchal dividends" colonial NSW to show how elites are a reconfiguration of patriarchal power in capitalist democracies.
#OzStudies #masculinity #SettlerColonialism #auspol
tinyurl.com/2a2ehw7k
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Here is the latest ACNZSN Newsletter. Please share widely :-) #ozstudies #canstudies #nzstudies #news #opportunities #CFPs #funding #jobs #publications #academicsky #highered
acnzsn.org/2025/04/30/a...
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