The Invention of Terra Nullius
by Michael Connor
History books, school curricula and legal texts all treat terra nullius as the defining doctrine in the foundation of Australia and the dispossession of the Aborigines. The High Court's Mabo decision was supposed to have overturned it.
Michael Connor reveals terra nullius to be a mythical notion. It was never a phrase used in Australia in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It was only injected into Australian political and legal debate in the 1970s. Since then it has meant whatever its users want it to mean. The foundation of Australia was based on entirely different concepts and terminology.
HEAD OF STATE
The Governor-General, the Monarchy, the Republic and the Dismissal
by David Smith
On the thirtieth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government, the man who read the proclamation dissolving parliament, Sir David Smith, makes a powerful case about the Australian Constitution. Our founding fathers made the Governor-General, not the Queen, our head of state.
The author also recounts his personal role, both in public and behind the scenes, in the events of November 11 1975. He argues that the actions of Governor-General Sir John Kerr put an end to any claims that Australia's sovereignty, independence and national identity were centred on London.
This book is a dramatic intervention into the debate about whether Australia should become a republic or keep our present Constitution intact. It will be read now and in years to come as one of the most controversial and stimulating books on Australian political life.
OTHER BOOKS IN PRINT
It locates the day-to-day struggles of political life in Australia within both domestic and global ideologies and economics, in particular within the profound historical shift that has seen socialism fail throughout the world and liberalism triumph in its place.
Bob Catley is a former Labor member of the House of Representatives and a one-time advisor to the Hawke government. He is now Professor of Management and Head of the School of Business of the University of Newcastle at Ourimbah.
Making and Breaking Universities
Memoirs of academic life in Australia and Britain
1936-2004
by Bruce Williams
Bruce Williams became vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney in 1967, a time that coincided with the rise of student radicalism and protests against the Vietnam War. His tenure was punctuated by student demonstrations and occupations of university offices, including his own. At the end of his career with the university in 2001, he witnessed another radical group successfully manoeuvre to depose the Chancellor, Leonie Kramer.
As well as a revealing insight into university politics and governance, this book recounts the author's experience as an advisor to governments in both Australia and Britain on both economic and educational policy and technological change. It examines the implications of globalisation and economic reform on academic values and asks whether the traditional university can survive.
The White Australia Policy
Race and shame in the Australian history wars
by Keith Windschuttle
Many historians today argue that its immigration policy was once so shamefully racist that Australia was in danger of becoming an international pariah, like South Africa under apartheid.
This book shows these claims are so exaggerated they lack all credibility. Australia is not, and never has been, the racist country its academic historians have condemned.
Washout
The academic response to the fabrication of Aboriginal history
by John Dawson
Waged across airwaves and newspapers for the past two years, the history wars have spread fear and loathing through the besieged halls of academia. The veracity of university-based historians and their versions of our past have been under assault as never before.
The Fabrication of Aboriginal History by Keith Windschuttle fired a broadside whose aftershocks are still reverberating. Given the intellectual capital and political energy many academics had invested in the Aboriginal cause, it was expected they would close ranks and retaliate. In Robert Manne's anthology Whitewash , a score of the authors under siege mounted a counterattack.
In Washout , John Dawson uses Whitewash as a telescopic sight into current academic codes of conduct. In a piercing inspection of the methods, standards and philosophic premises within Australia 's humanities faculties, Dawson finds they have adopted irrationalism as their standard and abandoned their patriotic oath to defend the truth.
Corrupting the Youth
A history of philosophy in Australia
by James Franklin
Philosophers deal with hard and basic questions — the meaning of life, whether the mind is more than the brain, whether people have more rights than animals. Their answers affect how they and their students conduct their lives, make legal decisions, think about politics.
Corrupting the Youth follows a large cast of Australian thinkers, from admirable geniuses to dangerous fanatics, as they struggle with fundamental questions, argue, write and plot. Aboriginal philosophy, nineteenth century idealism, John Anderson's Sydney realism, Sixties hedonism, feminist and environmental philosophy and the ethics of Peter Singer and his opponents pass in review as philosophers, judges, Communists, priests, teachers, doctors and students promote their visions of the way the world is and how life should be lived.
The Fabrication of Aboriginal History
Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847
by Keith Windschuttle
This is the first volume in a series that re-appraises the now widely accepted story about conflict between colonists and Aborigines in Australian history. Beginning in Tasmania, and eventually covering the whole of the Australian mainland, the volumes find that the academic historians of the last thirty years have greatly exaggerated the degree of violence that occurred.
In a close re-examination of the primary sources used by historians, Keith Windschuttle concludes that much of their case is poorly founded, other parts are seriously mistaken, and some of it is outright fabrication.
The author finds the British colonization of the Australia was the least violent of all Europe's encounters with the New World. It did not meet any organized resistance. Conflict was sporadic rather than systematic. The notion of ‘frontier warfare' is fictional. To describe the process as ‘genocide' is to use hyperbole that is unsupported by the historical evidence.
The Killing of History
How a discipline is being murdered by literary critics and social theorists
by Keith Windschuttle
History has become an endangered species. Parisian academic fashions threaten to exterminate one of the most enduring disciplines of the Western intellectual tradition. The salons of theory claim the distinction between history and fiction can no longer be sustained.
Out in the environment of historical practice, however, Keith Windschuttle reports a different story. He debates real historical issues—from the discovery of America to the fall of Communism—to expose the pretensions of the would-be usurpers.
This clearly written, witty and timely book defends the scientific integrity of traditional history and upholds its status as literature.
The Multicultural Experiment
edited by Leonie Kramer
The global movement of millions of people seeking better lives or refuge from persecution has given debate in Australia over immigration and multiculturalism a new urgency. What once seemed a settled policy framework accepted by most political shades of opinion is now being widely questioned again.
Does Australia need more immigrants or have we reached the limits of social, political and environmental tolerance?
Should immigrants and refugees adopt the customs and traditions of the host country or create cultural enclaves within it?
Does multiculturalism threaten national identity and is this desirable or not?
Has our experiment with multiculturalism been a success and should it continue?
In this book, some leading Australians debate these issues with British and American experts in the field.
Exasperating Calculators
The rage over economic rationalism and the campaign against Australian economists
by William Coleman and Alf Hagger
In the past decade, Australian politics has been haunted by two words: Economic Rationalism. They were burnt into the Australian mind in a fire that is still well alight. Exasperating Calculators is a withering new critique of this conflagration.
The authors argue that the alarm over Economic Rationalism was a case of a ‘moral panic': a group of persons were identified as a threat to society, and the ‘moral barricades' were then manned by editors, bishops, politicians and right thinking people in an attempt to denounce and root out those purportedly engaged in undermining society as we know it.
Exasperating Calculators is a critical account of how the fire was lit, how it was fed, and how it was fought. It looks at the protagonists and the targets; the arguments and the facts; what was said and done and what should have been said and done.
Anything Goes
Origins of the cult of scientific irrationalism
by David Stove
The most acrimonious controversy within intellectual debate today is over the status of Western science. Since the publication of the now famous Sokal hoax, the ‘science wars' have erupted. Critics from radical sociology, cultural studies and science studies have charged that, instead of being a universally valid method of attaining knowledge, science provides only an ethnocentric view of the world. Their opponents have replied that the debate has become a site of political demagoguery, theoretical obfuscation and plain ignorance.
The most remarkable book in this whole debate is Anything Goes by the Australian philosopher, the late David Stove, who in recent years has gained a cult following among philosophy students in both Australia and the USA. Long out of print but now republished by Macleay Press, this book has a new foreword by Keith Windschuttle and a new Afterword by James Franklin.
"Reading Stove is like watching Fred Astaire dance. You don't wish you were Fred Astaire; you are just glad to have been around to see him in action."
— Professor Michael Levin, City University of New York
Paradise of Quacks
An alternative history of medicine in Australia 1788-2002
by Phillipa Martyr
This is both a sparkling, witty book and a full-length scholarly history of medicine in Australia. It is a history of scientific medicine that looks at the field's disreputable origins in the convict colony and its struggle for respectability over the next 200 years.
It is also a history of alternative medicine that covers the growth of popular non-scientific therapies. It is a clearly-written work that will appeal to those working in the fields of both professional medicine and alternative health therapies. It will also provide many fascinating insights for their patients.
Tribunes and Amazons
Men and Women of Revolutionary France 1789-1871
by R. B. Rose
Tribunes and Amazons is a synthesis of the formidable scholarship of one of the most respected historians of the French Revolution and its nineteenth century aftermath, Professor Barrie Rose.
Combining social history, the history of ideas and historical biography, Professor Rose examines the careers of many of the men and women who provided political leadership from the outbreak of revolution in 1789 to the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871.
He tells the story of these 'tribunes' and 'amazons' within the context of the development of political movements ranging from utopian speculation and messianic communism, to functional democratic politics within a pluralistic society.
Journalism
Theory and practice
edited by Myles Breen
What is news? Can journalists be objective? Do press photographs tell the truth? How does the need to be dramatic affect the veracity of television news? These questions and many more are posed in this collection of essays by Australia's leading journalism educators.
The book also:
• examines how the Internet has changed the way journalists cover stories
• provides a social profile of Australian journalists today
• uncovers some of the realities behind journalism education in our universities.
As the training of journalists has expanded within higher education, educators in the field have had to re-examine their professional role. They were once content to teach the practice of journalism and to leave theory about the news media to sociologists and cultural theorists. In recent years, however, they have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the results produced by those who lack direct experience in the profession. The result is this book — the most substantial body of work yet produced in this country to theorise the nature of journalism and its practice.
