Sian Supski

‘It Was Another Skin’: The kitchen as home for Australian post-war immigrant women

This article examines the importance of the kitchen for immigrant women who arrived in Australia in the late 1940s and 1950s. Using oral history interviews with 27 immigrant women I examine the multiple and overlapping ways in which they ‘make’ home. Women construct home through the kitchen by re/negotiating the kitchen space to ensure that the kitchen and their central placement within it produces a ‘feeling’ of being ‘at home’. Women shape the architecture and design of the kitchen in terms of their own understandings of the discourses of efficiency and domesticity, and also through colour and decoration, to ‘make’ the kitchen home. These understandings will be explored through nuanced readings of the immigrant womens stories of their kitchen lives. In those days a womans home, [well] you were in the kitchen all the time. You felt safe and confident in your kitchen because it was yours, your job, your work or whatever you do, you feel confident, but if you meet someone else outside of that you lose a little bit of that confidence … In the kitchen, I felt good … Cooking or whatever it may be, we just sat down at the table and it was a wonderful feeling. (Emily: interview, 1998, Scottish immigrant)1. Este artículo examina la importancia de la cocina para las mujeres inmigrantes quien llegaron a Australia en los últimos años de los cuarentas y los cincuentas. Utilizando entrevistas de las historias orales de 27 mujeres inmigrantes, examino las maneras diversas y traslapando en las que ellas producen ‘el hogar’. La mujeres construyen el hogar a través de re/negociar el espacio de la cocina para asegurar que la cocina y sus colocaciones dentro de ella produzcan una ‘sensación’ de estar ‘en hogar’. Además, para ‘hacer’ la cocina como hogar, mujeres influyen la arquitectura y diseño de la cocina en cuanto a sus comprensiones de los discursos de eficacia y domesticidad, y también por los colores y decoraciones. Estas comprensiones se explorarán a través de lecturas matices de las historias de las mujeres inmigrantes de sus vidas de cocina.

University students’ drinking as a social practice and the challenge for public health

Abstract In this paper, we explore the relational dynamics of alcohol consumption by university students, drawing on qualitative interviews with fifty undergraduates in Victoria, Australia. We argue that university drinking is a social practice comprised of a bundle of activities that operate together to reinforce excessive consumption. Drawing on a distinct version of social practice theory, we conceptualise drinking as an organising principle of university social life with interacting elements – meanings, materials and competences. The meanings of drinking include cultural conventions, expectations and socially shared meanings that alcohol is central to student life. Materials of drinking include objects and infrastructures such as, beverage choice, drinking venues and mobile phones. Drinking competences include managing bodily effects of alcohol but also social relationships while consuming alcohol. The distinct social practice perspective we utilise can assist public health to address the interrelated dynamics of alcohol consumption as a social practice, with its own trajectory into which students are recruited and become carriers of the practice while at university.

‘We still mourn that book’: Cookbooks, recipes and foodmaking knowledge in 1950s Australia

Oral history interviews were conducted with forty-eight women in the year 1998 that were wives, mothers, housewives and homemakers in Western Australia in the 1950s. The results of this study showed that women use cookbooks and recipes as a guide, but they apply their learned skills to make the food hence their foodmaking knowledge was transformative which indicated a level of competence and confidence that was gained with practice.

Anzac biscuits — a culinary memorial

Anzac biscuits are a powerful reminder of an event that is regarded as one of Australia s pivotal moments as a nation and Anzac biscuits link generations of grandmothers, mothers and daughters. Their importance is the role they play in commemorating Anzac Day, and because of this, Anzac biscuits can indeed be regarded as a culinary memorial.

‘There’s something wrong with you’:: How young people choose abstinence in a heavy drinking culture

Contemporary universities in Western democracies are renowned for heavy drinking youth cultures. In this context, abstinence is ‘accountable’ behaviour that requires justification. Some previous research has reported accounts of why young people choose not to drink and the social consequences, but there is limited research on how they achieve abstinence in a heavy drinking culture. Drawing on Heller’s notion of choosing oneself and Giddens’ concept of reflexive choice making, we show how young non-drinking Australian university students emphasize abstinence as an individual lifestyle choice, show determined strength in their decision not to drink and report eventual acceptance from their peers. The non-drinkers in our research use some similar accounts noted in other research such as ‘being sporty’ or ‘focused on their studies’, yet they do not position themselves as part of an alternative subculture such as those in straight edge or religious groups. They choose their abstinent selves both in an existential sense and as an act of everyday self-identity. We argue that the choice of abstinence needs to be viewed as a part of a positive claim to identity, alongside other alternative ways of being for university students.

Finding Ivan Vladislavić – Writing the city

The work of Ivan Vladislavić is well established in his native South Africa, and increasingly recognized on the larger world stage of writing, editing and publishing. If his work nevertheless eludes scrutiny in some quarters, this may also have to do with its nature, and not only with its origin. The works differ and vary; there is no formula or project which proceeds neatly by sequence. No single work can be second-guessed from any other. This is a project full of surprises, connecting variously to art, photography, architecture and to urban studies, setting to work images and practices at once realist and surreal, absurdist and layering, and given to time and place and the universal. How then do we read it, and how does he write? For the purposes of this paper, we explain and locate our enthusiasm with reference to two works, The Restless Supermarket (2001) and Portrait with Keys (2006). We seek to identify some key tropes about place and place-writing and cities and city-writing with reference to Johannesburg and the way in which Vladislavić plays his subjects and his readers, placing not only fiction (or realism) under question but placing writing itself closer to the editor’s deletion mark. This may be, we suggest, a kind of writing sideways.

From Sharpies to Skyhooks – On the cutting edge: An interview with Greg Macainsh

Greg Macainsh is a major actor in the Australian popular music scene. He was the pioneer ethnographic filmmaker of the youth gang the Sharpies, and then bass player and songwriter for the most innovative band of the seventies, Skyhooks. Skyhooks combined new composition, driving music, sarcastic and local lyrics, and keen attention to visuals and costume. This article backgrounds Macainsh and his context. The interview that follows looks further into musical history and performative culture in Melbourne and its suburbs in the period.

A sociology of caravans

Why do caravans matter? Australians, like others, holiday in them, travel in them, cook, eat, drink, play, sleep and have sex in them. They also live in them, often involuntarily. Caravans have a longer history than this, however caravan life has almost no presence in existing historical or cultural sociology scholarship. Our immediate interest is in caravans in Australia, modernity and mobility. Some broader interest is apparent. Theoretical arguments about mobility on a global scale have been developed by Bauman and Urry. Sociologists like Jasper have connected mobility, masculinity and automobility in Restless Nation. The sociologist and writer Marina Lewycka has used caravans as the locus of everyday life study in her novel Two Caravans. In this paper we background some of these broader issues, and offer a case study of postwar caravan manufacturing. This paper anticipates a larger possible research project in these fields. We anticipate this project raising themes like freedom, mobility, escape, utopia; images of domesticity on wheels, décor and design, materials, technology, DIY production and Fordism; caravan parks as homes and as itinerant and long-term accommodation. These themes and images are also necessarily interwoven with class, gender, sex and age. We are interested in the possibilities of using the caravan as a carrier for making sense of postwar Australia.

Bold Palates: Australia's Gastronomic Heritage/The Lamington Enigma: A Survey of the Evidence

which notes that South Australia’s Professional Historians’ Association was formed before similar bodies in Victoria and New South Wales (which, given this, and the continued strength of the Association, makes one wonder why it was not the focus or central case study of his essay, instead of an interesting aside). Susan Magarey—a longstanding resident of Adelaide and major contributor to South Australian and Australian history—is mentioned once in a different chapter, but only in the context of her time in Canberra. This geographical bias is not necessarily the fault of individual authors— though some might have raised their sights a little—but a product of the editors’ selection of contributors and co-ordination of the project. Still, I expect they will be forgiven by readers who will enjoy the elegantly written, lively, and accessible essays that constitute the majority of the volume.

‘To love and to be loved’: Janina Bauman’s ordinary life

Janina Bauman was a sociologist of everyday life. Her autobiographical texts, Winter in the Morning (1986), A Dream of Belonging (1988), and the synthetic volume Beyond These Walls (2006), manage a kind of personal poignancy combined with world-historic content and attention to the detail of everyday life that sets her work apart. This essay responds to these attributes and offers a contribution to her remembrance as a writer, an actor in and observer of everyday life in Warsaw and Leeds across the 20th century.