Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Debating Vaccination: Understanding The Attack On The Australian Vaccination Network, Brian Martin

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

The Australian Vaccination Network (AVN), a citizen group advocating parental choice in whether children should be vaccinated, has come under an extraordinary attack by advocates of vaccination. Controversies over vaccination involve both disagreements about scientific matters, such as the effectiveness of vaccination to prevent disease, and clashes of values, including compulsion versus free choice. To help understand the attack on the AVN, I give an overview of the nature of scientific controversies, including the roles of evidence, vested interests, solutions, paradigms and methods of debate. I analyse a formal complaint against the AVN to highlight the assumptions underlying the anti-AVN …

Tiny Leaf Men And Other Tales From Outer Suburbia: Re-Presenting The Suburb In Australian Children's Literature, Kelly E. Oliver

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper explores how, through word and image, Tan’s Tales From Outer Suburbia challenges stereotypical representations of the suburban. Typically, suburban spaces have been represented as aesthetically bland, mundane, and ornamental. Tan takes these tropes and ironically re-deploys them anew, and in doing so undermines anti-suburban sentiment, which has dominated Australian literary and popular culture.

Although the notion of anti-suburbanism in Australian fiction has been well documented, its presence in children’s literature has received far less attention. As a case study, Tales From Outer Suburbia, signals the ability of children’s literature to present more positive representations of suburbia because …

Les Murray In A Dhoti: Transnationalizing Australian Literature, Paul Sharrad

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

My first encounter with Australian literature as such (that is, as more than a few works of children’s fiction read at home), was in high school in Papua New Guinea. There, we read Vance Palmer’s The Passage alongside Shakespeare in a setting that made both seem equally strange. It was an early and only dimly apprehended lesson in the cultural politics behind curricula.

Detention, Displacement And Dissent In Recent Australian Life Writing, Michael R. Jacklin

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Narratives of persecution, imprisonment, displacement and exile have been a fundamental aspect of Australian literature: from the convict narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to writing by refugees and migrants to Australia following World War II, to the narratives of those displaced by more recent conflicts. This paper will focus on two texts published in Australia in the past few years which deal with experiences of persecution and displacement from Afghanistan. Mahboba's Promise (2005) and The Rugmaker of Mazar-e- Sharif (2008) are texts that have to some extent bypassed the quarantining that Gillian Whitlock has argued works to locate …