UNSW Press

At a recent Australian Broadcasting Authority conference, federal communications minister Senator Richard Alston conceded that the early adoption of digital television in Australia had been ‘modest’. More impartial observers of the transition to digital broadcasting in Australia have been less restrained. ‘A digital dead-end’ and ‘dismal failure’ are representative of recent media commentary on the subject.

This beautiful book showcases the botanical orchid illustrations of John Riley, a retired shearer whom some regard as Australia’s finest living botanical illustrator. Riley started drawing Australian orchids in the 1970s, and this volume includes subjects that date back to 1992. It lists 150 works. Those who take book titles literally will assume that this volume contains illustrations of all our native orchids. This is not the case. We have a rich flora of about 1,200 species. This, therefore, is the first in a planned series intended to describe and illustrate all our orchidaceous flora.

In the aftermath of the ideological jousts between Henry Reynolds and Keith Windschuttle about the level of violence on the colonial frontier, a new book has appeared that tackles the issue from a fresh perspective. The author, John Connor, is a military historian. In this meticulously researched and highly readable book, he uses the methods of military history to examine the weapons, tactics and conduct of warfare on the Australian frontier during the first fifty years of British colonisation. Connor emerges from the fray with exciting new findings.

Sylvia Lawson’s How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia warrants a second reading to be properly appreciated. The seven pieces in this collection are intricately connected, so that the messages are cumulatively conveyed. The book manifests its author’s ambitious desire to raise the consciousness of her readers. For me, however, the question remains: who is the intended audience?

The current legal regime for the regulation – I use the term advisedly – of drugs has many unintended consequences. One of its minor tragedies is the number of thinkers and activists whose valuable energies are thus diverted to the Sisyphean labour of undoing it. So many words have now been written on the failure of prohibition that there is surely little more to be added. More than a decade ago, former Senator Peter Baume expressed it well: ‘Our strategies seek to prevent the production of certain designated illegal substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the importation of substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the distribution of substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the sale and use of substances, and fail to do so.’ Instead, our laws and policies make all these activities that much more dangerous, more corrupt, more poisonous and more destructive.

Tara Brabazon’s Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women is a collection of essays on feminism and popular culture. Addressing a range of subjects – including aerobics, wrestling, Miss Moneypenny, Anita Roddick and the pedagogy of Sylvia Ashton Warner – Brabazon’s material on the whole does justice to her general contention that feminist readings of popular culture need to be fearless and bold. Arguing that feminism requires a (metaphoric) equivalent of the movie Fight Club, Brabazon suggests that feminist critique is at its sharpest when it reads against the grain of mainstream thinking. For the most part, these essays do just that. However, for a book that celebrates the brazenness of feminism, why not include the F word in the title? In fact, the lameness of the title’s pun turns out to be characteristic of a deeper identity crisis. While Brabazon argues for a non-populist feminism, a tough and gritty brave new world of feminist critique, the style and packaging, and sometimes the substance, of her book seem to be trying hard to reach a market that is both ‘young’ and ‘popular’. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this market, but it contradicts Brabazon’s wider project of taking us somewhere other than feminist readings of popular culture that dumb down many of feminism’s most critical insights.

Why are we still hooked on the 1960s? As English art historian David Mellor said they were the Utopian Years. Perhaps our dreams and aspirations were anchored there. It is a rather difficult period to review with historical accuracy precisely because it was so rich in ideas and ideals; there was so much happening.