AustLit

'From 1950, the Fulbright Program of academic exchange brought a stream of visiting American scholars to Australia and Australians to the USA. The first wave of these scholars to study Aboriginal society and culture, principally through the discipline of anthropology, played a significant role in developing the field of Aboriginal studies, and in bringing Aboriginal art, music and dance into greater public prominence in the 1950s and early 1960s. We reconstruct these exchanges, track the influence of notable scholars and identify the contribution they made to researching, teaching and collecting Aboriginal art. In featuring the role of women who contributed expertise to the field, as postgraduates, senior researchers or as wives accompanying academic husbands, we reveal their importance and expose a little-known feature of the Program. Scholar Ed Ruhe is recognised for bringing his pioneering collection of Aboriginal art to the USA; this article shows he was not alone.' (Publication abstract)

'Victoria’s sex industry is about to undergo a major transformation with the state government vowing to introduce legislation to decriminalise sex work by the end of 2021. Sex worker activists have welcomed the move towards decriminalisation – as is the case in New South Wales (since 1995), Aotearoa New Zealand (2003) and the Northern Territory (2019) – as a crucial step in removing the stigma attached to sex work, and ensuring workers have the same human rights as people in other industries. It is a long-awaited departure from the current status of legalisation, which has created a two-tiered system whereby a select few brothels are regulated and licensed, while the majority of workers are forced to operate outside the law and without legal protection.' (Introduction)

'Dame Enid Lyons, the first woman elected to the House of Representatives, was appointed as a Commissioner of the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1951. Lyons had already proved to be an adept broadcaster, using radio as part of her campaigns for office, and she was a keen believer in radio’s utility for Australian women. Lyons maintained that radio meant that ‘a woman could do two things at once: cultivate her mind and do her housework’ (1). Women might be largely confined to the private sphere, but radio offered a window on the world beyond, and as Catherine Fisher’s polished, compact study demonstrates, many women broadcasters used radio to build an engaged form of citizenship amongst their listeners in the years between the introduction of radio in the early 1920s and the development of television in the mid-1950s.' (Publication abstract)

'In Democratic Adventurer, Sean Scalmer seeks to do two things. One is to save from posterity’s condescension the Victorian colonial politician Graham Berry – draper, shopkeeper, editor, Member of Parliament, cabinet minister and Premier – ‘the most important and influential reformer of a dauntless reforming age’ (xi). Secondly, and somewhat more ambitiously, he seeks to use Berry to ‘explore the workings of political power: the quest for position and influence, the methods through which authority is accumulated and exercised’ (xii). Aping the work of the great Robert Caro, biographer of Lyndon Johnson, Scalmer wants to use the story of one man to explore the history of Australian politics, and hint at where it might have gone wrong along the way.' (Introduction)

'The Australian Historical Studies guideline that critiques should be conducted ‘in the spirit of generosity and engagement, and of furthering an academic conversation’ is particularly apposite when reviewing this book about one of the most bitter historical controversies in recent years. Doug Munro offers a restrained and reflective account of Peter Ryan’s surprising, tasteless and relentless posthumous attack on the person and writings of Manning Clark.' (Publication summary)