Diane Kirkby

The Nervous Nineties: Australian Cultural Life in the 1890s

A cultural history of Australia during the 1890s with emphasis on the remarkable creativity of the period in stories, novels, paintings, design, journalism, intellectual and political movements.

‘Never a Machine for Propaganda’? The Australian-American Fulbright Program and Australia's Cold War

Abstract Some overlap in personnel between the Australian-American Fulbright board and those advising Menzies on anti-communist legislation and the 1951 referendum, including former Chief Justice J. G. Latham, raises questions about the politicisation of the Fulbright program over this period. A careful reconstruction of the Australian schemes founding years reveals, however, that the program resisted becoming a simple instrument of Cold War foreign policy. This was thanks to careful groundwork laid by Evatts Department of External Affairs, ensuring a measure of independence to the Australian board, and board member Lathams strategic defence of the programs educational goals when pressures were felt.

.."From wharfie haunt to foodie haven" : modernity and law in the transformation of the Australian working class pub.

Abstract In the first half of the twentieth century, indeed until the 1960s, dining out was unusual for ordinary Australians, saved for special occasions when they ate in the dining room of the local hotel. This formal and conventional style of dining provided utterly predictable food in surroundings that emphasized the specialness of the occasion and the status of the diners, rather than the imaginative quality of the food. Pubs also provided cheap food at the counter, to customers drinking at the bar. This had all changed by the end of the twentieth century, as pub dining rooms became restaurants, catering to the pleasures of modern urban life, offering adventure, fantasy and the lure of the exotic. This paper traces this transformation and argues that the change in pub food culture was a feature of modernity and universalizing US capitalism, not a consequence of postwar immigration but a business enterprise in which Europeanness featured as an alternative to Americanness. In this, the transformation of pub licensing laws was a crucial catalyst.

Sex Discrimination, Workplace Opportunities and Law’s Transformative Promise

Abstract Starting with the recent publication of a book of essays marking the federal Sex Discrimination Act’s twenty-five years, this article uses an evaluation of the book’s contents and the fact of the legislation’s silver anniversary to reflect upon the issues of law and discrimination in Australia over that time. It seeks to show how historical thinking can contribute critically to legal scholarship and the assessment of the relative importance or otherwise of law(s). It argues for a global temporal contextualisation in understanding change and ponders the possibilities for optimism about future directions.

Introduction: Of Turtles, Dining and the Importance of History in Food, Food in History

When a group of gentlemen of the Royal Society in London sat down to their turtle dinner in 1783, they were simultaneously enjoying fine dining and participating in an act of colonialism. Turtle soup was all the rage in England in the eighteenth century. By the second half of the eighteenth century turtle was recognised as ‘a key dish of grand English cuisine’, with the first recipes for turtle having appeared by 1750.1 Hannah Glasse explained ‘How to dress a Turtle the West India Way’ in her Art of Cookery (1743): this involved bleeding, dissecting, soaking and cleaning the guts, then boiling, stewing and baking various parts. From this came various courses. The turtle could be baked or roasted but this was an acquired skill.2 Its status was such that ‘imitation’ turtle dishes were soon included in later eighteenth century cookbooks and, by the nineteenth century, mock turtle soup, as mentioned in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and made with calf’s head (less expensive than green turtle) plus seasonings and wine, featured regularly in formal menus for civic banquets. Instructions from The Bath Cookery Book (1790) indicate it was custom at the time to serve turtle as five separate dishes: the calipee (white belly meat), calipash (dark back meat), fricassee, soup and fins, which were served in a clear, madeira-flavoured broth, which could make a ‘turtle dinner’ on their own.3

Connecting work identity and politics in the internationalism of ‘seafarers … who share the seas’

‘We seafarers … who share the seas’ is the expression of a collective identity and mutual responsibility. This article examines that collective identity among members of the Seamen’s Union of Australia and asks, what did internationalism mean in practice to seafarers themselves? Employing an oral history method, coupled with a reading of the union’s own printed media, it explores the seafarers’ understanding of internationalism that they claimed was ‘the language of seafarers’. It was grounded in the nature and reality of their work, and became their politics. The article takes as a case study the campaigns to restore democracy in Greece and Chile after military coups in 1967 and 1973 respectively, and the longer campaign against apartheid in South Africa, which began earlier, before 1960, and ended later, in 1990. These campaigns were conducted alongside many other trade unions, both in Australia and overseas, but maritime workers brought a unique inflection to activism as their internationalism expressed their connectedness across the oceans on which they sailed.

Indian Seamen and Australian Unions Fighting for Labour Rights: "The Real Facts of the Lascars' Case" of 1939

In 1939, the outbreak of war prompted strikes by Indian seafarers across the empire. This article traces events in Australia as Indian seafarers asserted their labour rights and in doing so contest...

Pursuing trade union internationalism: Australia's waterside workers and the International Transport Workers Federation, c. 1950-70

When the Australian Waterside Workers Federation (WWF) decided in 1971 to join the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) it overturned decades of antipathy to the ITF. We ask why union officials held this view and why the union now changed its mind at this particular moment. We argue that while union power was strong in the immediate postwar decades, the WWF was able to pursue its economic goals locally and join international actions for reasons of solidarity. In the following decade, however, union archives reveal that a confluence of technological change and diminishing union strength under a conservative government made international organising a logical and necessary strategy. Under the guidance of General Secretary Charlie Fitzgibbon, the WWF overcame its opposition to the ITF, by then an organisation representing millions of workers worldwide. We concentrate on Fitzgibbons leadership as a crucial factor in the timing of this historic change.

A Design for Learning? A Case Study of the Hidden Costs of Curriculum and Organisational Change

Like the sector itself, the study of higher education has expanded exponentially in recent decades. There are now many scholarly accounts of the impact of neoliberal and post-neoliberal policies on teaching and learning practices in universities internationally, and of the managerialist forms of governance accompanying them (e.g. Blackmore and Candiko 2012; Lorenz 2012; Blackmore et al. 2010; Olssen and Peters 2005; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Marginson and Considine 2000). There has, however, been relatively little theoretical and empirical work which builds on critical scholarship in comparable fields and, other than identifiably feminist scholars (e.g. Thornton 2011; Blackmore 2005; Evans 2004; Kenway 1994/2006), few bring a consistent gender lens to analysis of the impact of neoliberal managerialism on universities. Analysis of workplaces in non-academic organisations, such as hospitals and other organisations, shows how complex patterns (of gender and cultural diversity, as well as of class) shape identities and interactions at the local levels of social practice and policy implementation (e.g. Connell et al. 2009; Halford and Leonard 2006). Management scholars in particular have demonstrated that building social trust and relationships is central to institutional success, including in higher education (Vidovich and Currie 2010; Tierney 2008; Gilson 2005). As hegemonic forms of masculinity in the public world have meant that women traditionally carried much of this ‘hidden work’ in organisations (Reiger 1993; Pringle 1998), it is, we contend, essential to study how implementation of neoliberal change initiatives impacts on the social relations and trust processes operating in specific institutional settings.

‘The sailor is a human being’: Labour Market Regulation and the Australian Navigation Act 1912

Labour lawyers wanting to broaden their field beyond the traditional narrowness of the employment relationship do so by employing a concept of regulation that has both economic and social objectives. They have called for law to be seen ‘in the wider framework of social relations’ with ‘a longer time frame for analysis’, and for an approach to the field which has an ‘eye to both the future and the past’.1 Their emphasis on the contextual factors impinging on and shaping labour law, its purpose and implementation, provides a compelling argument for historical research. As Michael Quinlan has pointed out, there is a complex interplay between context and purpose that is neither instrumental nor predetermined.2 Understanding the implementation of law thus requires historical, empirical research, to account for the particularities of its purpose and the unpredictable nature and direction of labour market regulation, which changes over time.