Robert Pascoe

An Australian Perspective on the Humanities

As elsewhere in the Anglophone world, there has been a serious contraction in public funding for the teaching of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Australian universities during the 1990s. Although staff morale has suffered and class sizes have grown, the level of innovation in undergraduate teaching has risen and student assessments of how they are taught have improved. Certain disciplines in the Humanities have prospered during this decade; others have gone into seemingly irreversible decline. The Humanities will play a crucial role in Australia’s economic future, given the emergence of new knowledge-laden industries. The styles of teaching and learning in the BA will also foster some of the skills necessary for success in that as yet ill-defined economy.

Admission to Australian Universities

Abstract Australian Universities have been historically reluctant to pursue innovative methods of student selection and recruitment. The development of a national market in the higher education market provides the opportunity for ‘open access’ universities to embark on strategies of recruitment based on the experience and practices of certain North American institutions.

Italian miners and the second‐generation ‘Britishers’ at Kalgoorlie, Australia∗

This article studies the 1934 Kalgoorlie riot in Western Australia by placing the event in the wider social context of the period. The immediate cause of the riot was the killing of a local sports hero by an Italian barman. The rioters were descendants of English colonists and the object of their violence were the people of Southern European descent. They burned Southern European business. The government of Wester Australia acted in such a way that for the Southern Europeans they think it was biased against them. Most of the people in Kalgoorlie works in mines. The mining sector was entangled with the social unrest.

‘A Most Manly and Amusing Game’: Australian Football and the Frontier Wars

Formed in the 1850s frontier contact zone, Australian Football owes more to the experiences of the skirmishes between white settlers and Indigenous Australians than is usually recognised. If we reassess the historical sources from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective, we observe that the ‘Game of Our Own’ is a mix of British and Indigenous styles of warfare. The four men who drafted the rules of this new ‘most manly and amusing game’ were misfits from British society who were seeking new lives on the frontier. Their code contained ‘striating’ features played across ‘smooth’ spaces. The football teams adopted totemic plants and animals in their nomenclature; the players were bedizened in costumes that spoke of Empire; the bloody Frontier Wars were in living memory of the players and their ‘barrackers’.