Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Stages of development: remembering old Sydney in Ruth Park's 'Playing Beatie Bow' and a Companion Guide to Sydney

Monique C. Rooney — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 15:39:32 PST

Ruth Park's Playing Beatie Bow (1980) can easily be read as a bildungsroman, a novel of self-development or apprenticeship. Falling between the "child" and the "Young Adult" category, it is the story of an adolescent girl who comes to terms with the part she plays in a family romance. This plot, in keeping with other Oedipal dramas, matches personal development with issues of social, cultural and national importance. However, in tension with this thematic of personal and cultural progression is Park's exploration of the contradictory role that the fetish plays in a female coming-of-age narrative. This essay analyses Park's deployment of the fetish object as a medium that introduces her protagonist to working class life in Old Sydney but, at the same time, points to the unreliability of this form of signification. In doing so, the question of whether Park depicts The Rocks as a stage for a story that mythologises personal, cultural and national origins is explored. Is Playing Beatie Bow another narrative about self and cultural maturation that, via recourse to an Irish working-class history in The Rocks, legitimises colonial and postcolonial desires for belonging? Addressing this question is my reading of the novel as a captivity narrative, as well as a bildungsroman. This essay highlights the role of the female as fetish in the captivity narrative. Contrasting fetishism to other, more institutionalised and enshrined, memorial processes, it contests the notion that authorial fascinations with the colonial past are necessarily concerned with totalising ownership claims and/or revisionist historical practices. Finally, Park's cultural performance as travel writer, in her The Companion Guide to Sydney (1973), is linked to Playing Beatie Bow's deployment of the fetish as an object through which capture of the past is always partial and unreliable.

Drug trafficking in the Pacific

Charles M. Hawksley — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:34:46 PST

This case study examines the organized trafficking of drugs into the Pacific region. The Pacific is small in population but massive in area. Relative to the size of states, there are significanl movement of drugs in the region. The flow is generally from the developing to the developed world for heroin and cOCc1ine, but the ecstasy and amphetamine market is more mixed, with manufacture in Europe, South East Asia and Pacific Island states. Wilh over 5,000 vessels sailing through the region everyday, ssearching each shipping container is impossible. In Australia, for example, five ports offload containers, with Melbourne alone handling more than 2 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) over the past year (Baird Maritime 2010). Few are actually searched (due to the cost) so authorities are already hampered. Transshipment through the Pacific islands attracts less suspicion than shipments direct from source areas, but tbe relatively small capacity that developing states possess means that Australia and New Zealand have an interest in developing the customs and law enforcement capabilities of Pacific island states. Despite current positive efforts, however, concerns remain over the presence of transnational criminal organizations in the Pacific.

Injury prevention in Australian indigenous communities

Rebecca Ivers — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 21:17:05 PST

Queer Commodities: Contemporary US Fiction, Consumer Capitalism, and Gay and Lesbian Subcultures

Guy R. Davidson — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:50:17 PST

This book investigates the connections and tensions between gay and lesbian sexualities and consumer culture in novels by five contemporary American writers: Edmund White, Samuel Delany, Jane DeLynn, Michelle Tea, and Lynn Breedlove. The relationship of gays and lesbians to consumer capitalism has been one of the most vigorously debated issues in queer communities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The 1990s saw the consolidation of the gay and lesbian niche market, with numerous corporations actively targeting queer consumers, as well as queer entrepreneurs devising and selling signifiers of gay and lesbian identity. While many gays and lesbians welcome such recognitions, and while so-called mainstream gay and lesbian community forums, such as online and print media, tend to celebrate the commodification of same-sexuality (and, of course, to exemplify it), these developments have been a source of urgent concern for many scholars and activists, who argue that the commercialization of gay and lesbian life is a betrayal of, or a diversion from, the political project of sexual liberation.

Book Review: Ross Mcmullin, Farewell Dear People: Biographies of Australia's Lost Generation

John McQuilton — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:45:15 PST

In 1931, Harold Edward Elliott committed suicide. This man, better known to many as 'Pompey', had led a distinguished life as a barrister, a member of the Senate and, above all else, as brigadier-general in the AIF on the Western Front. He gained the admiration of his men and, often, the ire of his superior officers. If he had not survived the war, he would have probably found a place in Ross McMullin's book rather than the perceptive, moving and sympathetic biography McMullin did write about the man: for Pompey would have fitted the model set by the author in the opening pages of this book. These were the men of a lost generation, men who could have made a difference in Australia's history.

History and Becoming: Deleuze's Philosophy of Creativity

Craig A. Lundy — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:45:15 PST

Social transformations in Southeast Asia: The case of the garment industry and labour migration in Malaysia

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:40:17 PST

Vietnamese foreign workers in the garment industry in Malaysia

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:35:15 PST

Labour- intensive manufacturing and flexible workers in the global garment industry

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:35:14 PST

Vietnamese foreign workers in the garment industry in Malaysia

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:30:22 PST

Female foreign workers in the garment industry in Malaysia

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:30:22 PST

Sweat or no sweat: workers in the garment industry in Malaysia

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:25:19 PST

Brand name manufacturers and corporate social responsibility in the garment industry in Malaysia

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:25:18 PST

Brand name manufacturers, codes of conduct and foreign workers in medium to large garment factories in Malaysia

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:20:19 PST

The garment industry and foreign workers in Malaysia

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:15:21 PST

Female unionism in the Malaysian garment industry

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:10:19 PST

In Malaysia, women workers in the garment and textile industries have their own trade union in each state but only 12% of workers in these industries are in the garment and textile workers' trade union. This is both a reflection of the decline of trade union power in Malaysia and unions' attitudes towards women. This paper questions male leadership attitudes towards women and how the largely female workforce in the garment industry has negotiated this lineal space.

Colonisation, migration and prostitution in colonial Malaya

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:10:18 PST

This paper examines the ways prostitues and domestic workers were similarly positioned within colonial discourses in British Malaya. These discourses sought to separate maids and prostitutes from 'good' women and stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as distinguish between the coloniser and the colonised. A close examination of the archives of British Malaya reflects the marginalisation of Malay women, who were relegated to the home and reproductive sphere, outside standard definitions of waged work. There was little written record concerning Malay women workers, and immigrant women workers were described in the appendices or subsidiary sections of the labour reports. In contrast, prositution was documented in great detail. Given that the largest numbers of women worked in the agricultural sector and were not prostitutes or domestic workers, the colonial governments emphasis on collating reports concerning prostitution and the mui tsai raises certain questions. Why did the colonial officials document the lives of sex workers when the working lives of women were generally ignored? This paper argues that the contribution of female family members to the economy was subsumed within unofficial family support systems, which required little or no intervention by colonial authorities in the plantation and mining sectors of the colonies because workers, by definition, were male. In contrast, the work of the prostitute required official intervention because of its effects on production processes: the prostitute's life was important to the management and productivity of estates/mines and thus required surveillance.

Transnational histories: migrant workers in colonial Malaya

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:10:15 PST

Approaches to the study of the garment industry in the Asia Pacific

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:05:21 PST

History repeating itself: migrant labour in Malaysia's sex industry

Vicki D. Crinis — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:05:21 PST