AustLit

'The photographs that fill the pages of the Australian illustrated magazines The Home and Decoration and Glass offer new insights into the connections between urban development and citizenship in 1930s Sydney. This article focuses on two sites in which urban citizenship was represented and contested in these magazines: symbolic images of white Australian construction workers as builders of the nation, and debates about the lived experience of urban citizenship associated with the rise in flat construction. The multivocal quality of these illustrated magazines provides a means of addressing the complex interconnections between the built environment and cultural conceptions of citizenship. Examining work in and for these illustrated magazines shows that citizenship was neither understood nor lived as a fixed status defined and conferred by the state, but a contested series of values, obligations and modes of social participation.' (Publication abstract)

'Both Dennis Altman’s autobiographic Unrequited Love: Diary of an Accidental Activist and the edited anthology Growing up Queer in Australia are engaging books rich in insights into queer life and politics in Australia.' (Introduction)

'The story of Adela Pankhurst, the third daughter of Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, is a complex and uncomfortable one. Exiled to Australia by her mother and sister Christabel for her socialist ideas, Adela quickly became a darling of the left. She was a charismatic leader in the anti-conscription campaign and led women in militant marches during the great strike of 1917. In the late 1920s, however, Adela's politics took a sharp turn to the right. Disillusioned with the rise of Stalinism in Russia she became a staunch anti-communist, flirted with fascism and died a born-again Catholic. Though this paper focuses on Adela's role in the anti-conscription campaign, it also considers the methodological and ethical challenges involved in investigating such a contradictory career.'  (Publication abstract)