“Inside Australian Culture: Legacies of Enlightenment Values” offers a critical intervention in the continuing effects of colonization in Australia and the structures it brought, which still inform and dominate its public culture. Through a careful analysis of three disparate but significant moments in Australian history, the authors investigate the way the British Enlightenment continues to dominate contemporary Australian thinking and values. Employing the lens of Indian cultural theorist Ashis Nandy, the authors argue for an Australian public culture that is profoundly conscious of its assumptions, history and limitations.

Fields, Capitals, Habitus provides an insightful analysis of the relations between culture and society in contemporary Australia. Presenting the findings of a detailed national survey of Australian cultural tastes and practices, it demonstrates the pivotal significance of the role culture plays at the intersections of a range of social divisions and inequalities: between classes, age cohorts, ethnicities, genders, city and country, and the relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The book looks first at how social divisions inform the ways in which Australians from different social backgrounds and positions engage with the genres, institutions, and particular works of culture and cultural figures across six cultural fields: the visual arts, literature, music, heritage, television, and sport. It then examines how Australians' cultural preferences across these fields interact within the Australian 'space of lifestyles'. The close attention paid to class here includes an engagement with role of 'middlebrow' cultures in Australia and the role played by new forms of Indigenous cultural capital in the emergence of an Indigenous middle class. The rich survey data is complemented throughout by in-depth qualitative data provided by interviews with survey participants. These are discussed more closely in the final part of the book which explores the gendered, political, personal and community associations of cultural tastes across Australia's Anglo-Celtic, Italian, Lebanese, Chinese and Indian populations. The distinctive ethical issues associated with how Australians relate to Indigenous culture are also examined. In the light it throws on the formations of cultural capital in a multicultural settler colonial society, Fields, Capitals, Habitus makes a landmark contribution to cultural capital research.

Examines the early narratives of Australian 'discovery' and the settlement of what was perceived as a hostile, gothic environment; exercises of medieval revivalism and association consonant with the British nineteenth-century rediscovery of chivalric ideals and aesthetic, spiritual and architectural practices and models; and more.

Australia is increasingly recognised as a multicultural and diverse society. Nationally, all accrediting bodies for allied health, nursing, midwifery and medical professions require tertiary educated students to be culturally safe with regards to cultural and social diversity. This text, drawing on experts from a range of disciplines, including public health, nursing and sociology, shows how the theory and practice of cultural safety can inform effective health care practices with all kinds of diverse populations. Part 1 explores key themes and concepts, including social determinants of health and cultural models of health and health care. There is a particular focus on how different models of health, including the biomedical and Indigenous perspectives, intersect in Australia today. Part 2 looks at culturally safe health care practice focusing on principles and practice as well as policy and advocacy. The authors consider the practices that can be most effective, including meaningful communication skills and cultural responsiveness. Part 3 examines the practice issues in working with diverse populations, including Indigenous Australians, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Australians, Australians with disabilities, Australians of diverse sexual orientation and gender identity, and ageing Australians. Part 4 combines all learnings from Parts 1–3 into practical learning activities, assessments and feedback for learners engaging with this textbook. Culture, Diversity and Health in Australia is a sensitive, richly nuanced and comprehensive guide to effective health practice in Australia today and is a key reference text for either undergraduate or postgraduate students studying health care. It will also be of interest to professional health care practitioners and policy administrators.

This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in ways that account for both cultural and gendered specificities, demonstrating how gendered ways of imagining Australia are reinforced and contested in celebrity representations and self-presentations. Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture engages with celebrities across a diverse range of fields – actors, journalists, athletes, comedians, writers, and television personalities – and in doing so critically reflects upon different forms of Australian fame and the media platforms and practices that sustain them. Authors in this volume engage directly with pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality, including celebrity feminism and the generative capacity of feminist rage; normative femininity and its instability; hegemonic masculinities; and queerness and its (in)visibility. Contributors also intervene in a number of ongoing debates in media and cultural studies more broadly, including those around the politics and affordances of digital media; whiteness and Australia’s colonial histories; celebrity labour; and methodologies for celebrity studies. This timely collection urges scholars of celebrity to attend further both to the gendered nature of celebrity culture and to local conditions of production and consumption. This book will be of key interest to researchers and graduate students in cultural studies, television and film studies, digital media studies, critical race and whiteness studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary studies.

A bold and provocative book about Australia's national identity and a plea to keep Australia's famed open-mindedness, Cater tracks the seismic changes in Australian culture and outlook since Donald Horne published THE LUCKY COUNTRY in 1964. 'A great book.' Rupert Murdoch A bold and provocative book about Australia's national identity and how it is threatened by the rise of a ruling class. Nick Cater, senior editor at the Australian, tracks the seismic changes in Australian culture and outlook since Donald Horne wrote the Lucky Country in 1964. His belief is that countries don't get lucky; people do. the secret of Australia's good fortune is not found in its geography or history. the key to its success is the Australian character, the nation's greatest renewable resource. Liberated from the constraints of the old world, Australia's pioneers mined their reserves of enterprise, energy and ingenuity to build the great civilization of the south. their over-riding principle was fairness: everybody had a right to a fair go and was obliged to do the right thing by others. today that spirit of egalitarianism is threatened by the rise of a new breed of sophisticated Australians - the 'bunyip alumni' - who claim to better understand the demands of the age. their presumption of elitism and superior virtue tempts them to look down on others and dismiss opposing views. Half a century after Donald Horne named Australia 'the Lucky Country', Nick Cater takes stock of the new battle to define Australia and the rift that divides a presumptive ruling class from a people who refuse to be ruled. the Lucky Culture is a lively and original take on 21st century Australia and its people. Sometimes rousing, often provocative and always good-humoured, its unexpectedly moving message cannot be ignored. 'tHE LUCKY CULtURE is a great book and particularly relevant as it comes in a moment of high political excitement. I particularly loved Nick Cater's passion for the great Australian dream. It is the first step in restoring that dream.' Rupert Murdoch

A revelation in literary criticism, Philip Mead's Networked Language offers absorbing new perspectives on Australian poetry and its cultural life. This study presents new ways of understanding Australian poetry, drawing on an equal fascination with the artifice of poetry and the complexity of culture. It is about the ways poetry changes in relation to its social, political and historical contexts, the way poetic communities and the readerships of poetry have changed through history, and continue to change in the present.

This engaging volume explores the management of fire in one of the world’s most flammable landscapes: Australia’s tropical savannas, where on average 18% of the landscape is burned annually. Impacts have been particularly severe in the Arnhem Land Plateau, a centre of plant and animal diversity on Indigenous land. Culture, Ecology and Economy of Fire Management in North Australian Savannas documents a remarkable collaboration between Arnhem Land’s traditional landowners and the scientific community to arrest a potentially catastrophic fire-driven decline in the natural and cultural assets of the region – not by excluding fire, but by using it better through restoration of Indigenous control over burning. This multi-disciplinary treatment encompasses the history of fire use in the savannas, the post-settlement changes that altered fire patterns, the personal histories of a small number of people who lived most of their lives on the plateau and, critically, their deep knowledge of fire and how to apply it to care for country. Uniquely, it shows how such knowledge and commitment can be deployed in conjunction with rigorous formal scientific analysis, advanced technology, new cross-cultural institutions and the emerging carbon economy to build partnerships for controlling fire at scales that were, until this demonstration, thought beyond effective intervention.

Australia's leisure culture is legendary, and as millions of British viewers of Neighbours, fans of Yothu Yindi or drinkers of Castlemaine XXXX would attest, Australian popular culture is popular outside of Australia. Australian Popular Culture is an exciting collection of essays bringing together new perspectives on the nature and meaning of a nation's changing life. The collection also explores the idea of popular culture at large. Leading authors represent a range of approaches, backgrounds and fields to explore subjects of wide interest within the categories of 'the everyday', 'the mass media' and 'critical theory'. Chapters are devoted to the Aussie Back Yard; Vegemite; postage stamps; Australian Rules football; the introduction of television; Crocodile Dundee; The Lindy Chamberlain Affair; Spycatcher; Domesticity, leisure and love and Postmodernism and Australian Culture.