Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Not For Punishment: We Need To Understand Bail, Not Review It, Julia Quilter

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Courts make hundreds of bail decisions every week but we rarely hear about them. In the past month in New South Wales, however, we have heard much about three high-profile decisions granting bail to: Steven Fesus, accused of murdering his wife 17 years ago; Hassan “Sam” Ibrahim, charged with selling illegal firearms across western Sydney (bail was revoked on appeal); and Mahmoud Hawi, charged with the murder of Peter Zervas during a brawl at Sydney Airport in 2009.

Each was granted bail under the Bail Act 2013, which came into force on May 20 this year. The allegations these men …

Book Review: David Grant, Jagged Seas: The New Zealand Seamen's Union, 1879-2003, Rowan Cahill

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Jagged Seas is a commissioned history of the New Zealand Seamen’s Union (rebranded the New Zealand Seafarers’ Union following amalgamation with the Cooks’ and Stewards’ Union in 1990) from its beginnings in 1879 until it merged in 2002/03 with the New Zealand Waterfront Workers’ Union to form the Maritime Union of New Zealand. Author David Grant has a background in journalism and teaching, and a significant publication record in the research and writing of New Zealand labour movement, and dissident, anti-militarist, histories.

Walking And Mapping: Artists As Cartographers By Karen O'Rourke (Review), Michael Leggett

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In Walking and Mapping, both senses of the term "mapping" are caught up in a detailed hagiography of artists who, in one way or another, engage with movement through space, mainly as walkers. Records of the experience, by both the participants and the creators of the artworks, are mapped across both contemporary and historical time spectrums.

Book Review: Fukushima, Leigh Dale

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Three years ago today, Japan was hit by the strongest earthquake ever measured in that country – and Fukushima became an international by-word for disaster.

Now, as Japan tries to put its past behind it, Fukushima is back in the news as hundreds of evacuees prepare to return to their homes near the crippled nuclear power plant for the first time next month. But how do any of us begin to understand a disaster that could mean 50,000 people never see their homes again?

ABC journalist Mark Willacy’s Fukushima: Japan’s Tsunami and the Inside Story of the Nuclear Meltdowns is …

History Foundation To Year 12 (In Review Of The Australian Curriculum - Supplementary Material), Gregory Melleuish

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The Australian history curriculum is compulsory for Years Foundation through to Year 10. It states that its rationale is as follows: ‘The curriculum generally takes a world history approach within which the history of Australia is taught.’ The curriculum is also defined, and limited, by its three cross-curriculum priorities:

* Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures

* Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia

* Sustainability.

Cinema Of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking In The Season Of Image Politics By Yuriko Furuhata (Review), Michael Leggett

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The Japanese word eizo is central to an understanding of the significance of the interventions made into the cultural life of the nation by a relatively small grouping of artists and writers working between the 1950s and 1970s. Traditionally used as a phenomenological term in science and philosophy, the character connoted shadow or silhouette, later shifting to signify optical processes. Like the Greek term tehkne, creativeness and the tools used to achieve the outcome are relative, nuanced and complex.

Book Review: The Art Of Censorship In Postwar Japan. Studies Of The Weatherhead East Asian Institute. By Kirsten Cather, Rowena G. Ward

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The practice of censorship is a divisive issue that is often justified on moral reasons rather than aesthetic or legalistic ones. It is perhaps because of the claims to morality rather than to the law that it is relatively rare for censorship (or more accurately in Japan’s case, obscenity) to be the subject of criminal trials. Yet, in Japan, from the occupation years through to the present day, there has been on average one high profile censorship trial per decade. In The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, Kirsten Cather considers seven such censorship trials held between the 1950s and …

Book Review: David Walker And Agniezka Sobocinska, Eds. Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril To Asian Century, Julia T. Martinez

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Australia's Asia is a timely collection that offers an historical background to the recent debates on Australia's Asian Century. As the use of the term 'yellow peril' in the subtitle suggests, there is a strong emphasis in this book on Australia's ongoing anxieties about the rise of Asia.

Review Of "Speaking The Earth's Languages: A Theory For Australian-Chilean Postcolonial Poetics', Michael R. Jacklin

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Critical connections between Australian and Latin American literature are few and far between. Equally rare are readings which place Aboriginal literary production in Australia alongside that of Indigenous writing from Hispanic or Lusophone America. While a number of scholars have drawn comparisons between Australian Aboriginal writing and English-language Indigenous literature from North America, Indigenous writing from South and Central America has remained an almost terra incognita for Australian scholarship. Stuart Cooke’s study Speaking the Earth’s Languages: A Theory for Australian-Chilean Postcolonial Poetics reads Aboriginal poetic works by Paddy Roe, Butcher Joe Nangan and Lionel Fogarty along with poetry by Chilean …