The Unknown War and the Known Soldier - David Ritter

Australia is a nation at war. If one counts the aerial attacks on Baghdad of 20 March 2003 as the beginning of battle, then the conflict in Iraq has now passed its 1300th day. Australian troops have been involved in the hostilities from the outset, participating in the initial invasion and remaining as part of the occupation...

Political Lessons from the A.W.B. Affair - Philip Senior

The so-called 'wheat for weapons' scandal has understandably been the subject of considerable debate in the media and amongst commentators and pundits. Most of that attention has focussed on the role the government played in any wrongdoing on behalf of AWB, specifically, whether they knew AWB was paying kickbacks to the Iraqi regime in violation of the UN sanctions regime, or in the alternative, should they have known...

Geoff Gallop as Premier of Western Australia 2001-2006: Political and Constituational Change and the Expansion of Horizons - David Hodgkinson

In 2003, Geoff Gallop, then Premier of Western Australia, presented the inaugural John Forrest lecture to the WA state conference of the Australian Association of Constitutional Law. Although the lecture was ostensibly concerned with John Forrest, Western Australia's first premier, and his vision of Western Australia, it also - perhaps unsurprisingly - revealed much about Gallop's own visualization of the future...

Religion, Politics and Buddhuism - Dr. Geoff Gallop

All over the world today there is debate about the relationship between politics and religion. Go to any bookshop and you can find a range of offerings on the subject, some polemical and some considered and academic. It is the topic of the times with some seeing religion as the liberation of politics from relativism and cynicism whilst others see it as the poisoning of politics with fear and intolerance. This wasn't always the case...

Uranium: The West Australian Connection - Sally Thompson

Uranium mining in Australia is an emotive issue, throwing the States into conflict with the Commonwealth, environmentalists into conflict with each other, and sounding the clarion of hyperbole wherever discussed. Western Australia, for largely political reasons, has never brought a uranium mine into full production, despite a number of promising reserves...

Me and You and Eve We Know: The Aesthetics of Joining In - Nick Tapper

Nicolas Bourriaud's theorisation of a 'relational aesthetics' in his book of that name has elucidated for many artists and critics the changes in the form of art that emerged in late twentieth century practice. It offers the possibility of a form of art that might initiate social change by creating works that establish open and democratic social structures within the aesthetic realm...

The Spirit of a Civic University - Laksiri Jayasuriya

Since 1987, Australian universities have been the site of a struggle between many competing visions and ideologies of the university as a social institution. In the wash up universities have been pushed in many directions, some of which seriously threaten the 'Ideal of a University', embodied in the classic work of Cardinal Newman...

In Review Anna Clark: "Teaching the Nation" - Susie Byers

On 26th May 2006, Dr Anna Clark of Monash University delivered a lecture entitled 'Teaching the Nation'. The lecture preceded a seminar 'History School Textbooks: a comparative and historical perspective on the teaching of history in Australia', organised by the Institute of Advanced Studies and History Department at UWA. The lecture was intended to explore some of the "fundamental paradoxes" that Clark associates with the "politics and pedagogy" taking place in classrooms, newspapers and parliamentary chambers both here and overseas...

In Review Samantha Power's "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" - Martin McKenzie Murray

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, Perth reached a maximum of 32 degrees on February 15, 2003. There was high humidity, no rain, and some cloud cover. I checked this because on this date Western Australia's capital accommodated its largest public protest since Vietnam. 10,000 citizens marched and moped through the CBD's streets, waving anti-war banners and speaking to each other in hurried, heated tones. I checked the above statistics because I was one of those 10,000 people, and time and trauma will make it that memory is rarely accountable...