Panic buying of toilet rolls in Australia began in early March 2020. This was related to the realisation that the novel coronavirus was spreading across the country. To the general population the impact of the virus was unknown. Gradually the federal government started closing the country’s borders. The panic buying of toilet rolls was not unique to Australia. It happened across all societies that used toilet paper rather than water to clean after defecation and urination. However, research suggests that the (...) panic buying was most extreme in Australia. This article argues that the panic buying was closely linked to everyday notions of Western civilisation. Pedestal toilets and toilet paper are key aspects of civilisation and the fear of the loss of toilet paper is connected to anxiety about social breakdown, the loss of civilisation. This is the fear manifested in the perceived threat posed by the virus. (shrink)

This essay examines Perth as portrayed through the lyrics of popular songs written by people who grew up in the city. These lyrics tend to reproduce the dominant myths about the city: that it is isolated, that it is self-satisfied, that little happens there. Perth became the focus of song lyrics during the late 1970s time of punk with titles such as ‘Arsehole of the Universe’ and ‘Perth Is a Culture Shock’. Even the Eurogliders’ 1984 hit, ‘Heaven Must Be There’, (...) is based on a rejection of life in Perth. However, Perth was also home to Dave Warner, whose songs in the 1970s and early 1980s offered vignettes, which is itself a title of one of Warner’s tracks, of the youthful, male suburban experience. The essay goes on to examine songs by the Triffids, Bob Evans, Sleepy Township and the Panda Band. (shrink)

Western Australia, like Tasmania, can slip too easily off the map, a periphery on the periphery, its significance occluded by the hegemony of the eastern states of Australia. Yet Western Australia is core to Australia’s economy, not least through mining, and through its proximity to Asia. The West is itself connected more closely to region, in both the local and transnational senses. Its tradition of secessionist thinking indicates a kind of exceptionalist culture. This is a difference which begs for explanation. (...) This essay introduces some motifs and themes of this special issue of Thesis Eleven, entitled ‘Way Out West: Mapping Western Australia’. It locates the West in some recent historical, geographical and narrative context. It gestures toward the biography of its editors, Jon Stratton and Peter Beilharz, and their locations spread across the west and east of the continent. It calls for further scrutiny of these, and other antipodes. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe basis of my argument is that the cultural trauma now identified as the Holocaust occupied a latency period of around thirty years, or one generation, before surfacing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Alongside theorists such as Ron Eyerman and Jeffrey Alexander I argue that cultural trauma, the trauma experienced by a social group, functions in a similar way to individual trauma. In this article I examine a number of texts that exhibit expressions of the trauma of the (...) Holocaust before that trauma was identified and narrativised. These texts include the television series Hogan’s Heroes, the film The Producers, and the musical Fiddler on the Roof. My approach to the texts has been through the idea of haunting as developed by Jacques Derrida. I argue that during the period of latency texts are haunted in various ways by the traumatic events that were later integrated as the Holocaust. (shrink)

In the early 1980s Perth was probably the most important city in Australia for Cultural Studies. Through that decade many intellectuals who became leaders in Australian Cultural Studies and important players in Cultural Studies outside of Australia worked in Perth. Among them were John Fiske, John Frow, John Hartley, Tom O’Regan, Lesley Stern, Graeme Turner and, a decade later, Ien Ang. This essay discusses the presence of these academics in Perth and advances some reasons why Perth became so important to (...) Cultural Studies in Australia. It also discusses the kind of Cultural Studies that became privileged in Perth and considers some of the reasons for this. Perth Cultural Studies in the 1980s was primarily text-based and focused on screen-related popular culture, especially television programs and popular film. Cultural Studies in Perth developed in a city thought of as marginal to Australia, in institutions that were either not universities or, in the case of Murdoch University, was a very new university, by cosmopolitan academics who mostly came from either elsewhere in Australia or from the United Kingdom. (shrink)

The purpose of critical thinking, according to this text, is rethinking: that is, reviewing, evaluating, and revising thought. The approach of Critical Thinking for College Students is pragmatic and pluralistic: truth is viewed in terms of public confirmation and consensus, rather than with regard to naive realism, relativism, or popular opinion. The value of empathy and the legitimacy of diverse points of view are stressed. Nevertheless, it is necessary to use specific linguistic, logical, and evidential standards in order to evaluate (...) thought. (shrink)

One component in the vote to leave the European Union was a nostalgic image of Empire and the assertion by Brexiteers like Boris Johnson that after Britain had left the EU new trade links would be made with countries who were members of the Commonwealth, countries that Britain had previously governed as colonies. The foundation for this idea was the understanding that Britain’s governing of its colonies had been benign and, indeed, that British control had brought with it the benefits (...) of civilisation. This view of the British empire was pervasive in the UK. This article focuses on the sitcom As Time Goes By in which the male protagonist, Lionel, is writing a book about his time in Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s. Everybody who reads the ms considers it boring. Yet Kenya during those decades was subject to a grass-roots uprising against the British colonists known as Mau Mau and Kenya was granted independence in 1963 by which time large numbers of white settlers had left the country. The portrayal of Lionel’s book as boring elides this history and reinforces the perception that British colonialism was well received by the indigenous population. (shrink)

This article argues that certain Cadbury television advertisements reflect a change in the relationship between the north and the south of England. Historically, the south of England has understood...

This article compares two of the groups generally regarded by critics as the most important in Australia in the post-punk period, The Birthday Party and The Scientists. While they had much in common – each was governed by the vision of one man, Nick Cave for The Birthday Party and Kim Salmon for The Scientists, both had record deals in Australia and both went to London – The Birthday Party became a cult success while The Scientists are only now, 30 (...) years after their heyday, receiving the popular credit due them as a foundational noise group. There were important differences between the groups. The Birthday Party came from Melbourne and their members were middle-class. The Scientists came from Perth, at that time a small city remote from the cultural centres of Australia, and Salmon and his associates were working-class. The Birthday Party was self-consciously in a High Art tradition of nihilism going back to Dada while The Scientists’ music was an existential critique of the values of the middle-class suburbia that dominated Perth. (shrink)

The Easybeats’ 1960s career is viewed as being in two halves. In the first, they played pop songs composed by Stevie Wright and George Young. The group was incredibly successful in Australia spawning the term Easyfever to describe the adulation heaped on them by mainly teenage girls. In the second half, the group go to England and Young starts writing with Harry Vanda. The group had one huge international hit ‘Friday On My Mind’ and then their popularity declines as their (...) audience loses interest in the group’s more complex music and seemingly sophisticated lyrics. In this article I argue that the earlier songs can be read in terms of power pop avant la lettre and that a continuity can be discerned between the earlier songs and certain key later songs as Vanda and Young begin to develop a harder melodic rock sound anchored in power pop aesthetics that will be the template for AC/DC, a group that included Young’s two younger brothers, and which helped define the generic form of Oz rock. I argue for the importance of Snowy Fleet’s Merseybeat experience in the creation of the early sound, analyse the group’s appeal for teenage girls and discuss the later song ‘Good Times’ as a melodic hard rock precursor of the kind of music played by AC/DC. (shrink)