University of NSW Press

‘Trust’ between voters and their elected representatives must seem rather arbitrary to politicians, whose success depends on its maintenance. Our simplistic expectations of honesty are belied by the ways in which our subconscious perceptions are herded into different narratives ...

If anyone is qualified to speak authoritatively on the nature and role of community languages in Australia, it is Michael Clyne, who has spent much of his academic career researching these languages. His latest book is firmly rooted in research, but it differs from some of his earlier work in that it is clearly directed at the widest possible audience. It is a wake-up call, exploring the relationships between monoculturalism and multiculturalism and monolingualism and multilingualism in present-day Australian society; and showing how the present situation can be explained in part by Australia’s history, and in part by contemporary local and global pressures.

A book we have all been waiting for, a history we have all needed, should be assured success. In the Australian museum world, such a publication should garner acclaim, yet this review will fail to deliver the praise it anticipates. My lack of enthusiasm is not because the editors have failed to do a good job. In fact, they have brought together a wide-ranging series of essays that fascinate and illuminate just as one might wish. Telling the story of the Museum’s complex history, from its foundation in 1880 as the Industrial, Technological and Sanitary Museum, which became the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in 1950 and, in 1988, the Powerhouse Museum, Yesterday’s Tomorrows captures the changing times and purpose of the institution.

In the last couple of decades, the disciplines of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience (and perhaps others, such as law) have witnessed intensified interest in the emotions. In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, several developments, especially advances in computational modelling and new brain-imaging techniques, brought early successes in understanding important aspects of perceptual and cognitive processes. Partly because it became clear that these processes were not as independent of the affective, volitional and appetitive faculties as the classical division of mind suggested, it wasn’t long before scientific researchers turned to the emotions (and the other peskier faculties). Most readers will be familiar with some of the recent popular works on emotion by distinguished neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and J. LeDoux.

Each day I commute with Melbourne’s wage slaves on a privatised transport system that is invariably overcrowded due to cancelled or delayed trains. Dark thoughts whirl as I read Sebastian Mallaby’s The World’s Banker, a tale of ambition multiplied by ambition. In recent weeks, I have edited countless business stories, many of them half-year reports boasting profits of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, some increased by more than 100 per cent. Meanwhile, in the Third World, the raison d’être of the World Bank, children die for the want of mosquito nets worth two dollars. So what has James Wolfensohn achieved at the World Bank, and what has the World Bank achieved? According to Mallaby, there has been a real decline in world poverty. But one of the greatest achievements is the housing, feeding and clothing of thousands of the world’s neediest economists.

On 9 October 2004, 13,098,461 electors were enrolled to vote for the federal parliament. The Australian Electoral Commission’s website records 11,715,132 electors having voted for the House of Representatives on a two-party preferred result. So much for voting in a federal election having been compulsory since 1911. And not a few will have left the polling booth wondering, ‘Why bother?’

The internet, like its big sister, the electronic computer, is a Little Frankenstein of the Cold War – one of the countless bright ideas brought shuddering to life with the financial backing of the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the feverish aftermath of the launching of Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite, by the Soviet Union in 1957. And why did the US military finance the research and development of a medium that would, thirty years down the track, turn the Amazon into a cheap place to buy books and forever pervert the meaning of a humble can of Spam? In a word: Armageddon.

Like several other publishers, UNSW Press and Text Publishing have produced responses to the recent war against Iraq. The intention appears to be to engage critically with popular perceptions of the war before these harden into accepted historical ‘memory’. The potential benefits of quickly produced, historically aware and politically critical books, which collate and deal comprehensively with the existing evidence and arguments raised by the mass media on a particular issue, are obvious. The two main dangers with publications of this type are that editing and production standards may slip and that the desire to compete with mass-media forms may lead to a replication of, rather than an alternative to, standard journalistic commentary.