Why do caravans matter? Australians, like others, holiday in them, travel in them, cook, eat, drink, play, sleep and have sex in them. They also live in them, often involuntarily. Caravans have a longer history than this, however caravan life has almost no presence in existing historical or cultural sociology scholarship. Our immediate interest is in caravans in Australia, modernity and mobility. Some broader interest is apparent. Theoretical arguments about mobility on a global scale have been developed by Bauman and (...) Urry. Sociologists like Jasper have connected mobility, masculinity and automobility in Restless Nation. The sociologist and writer Marina Lewycka has used caravans as the locus of everyday life study in her novel Two Caravans. In this paper we background some of these broader issues, and offer a case study of postwar caravan manufacturing. This paper anticipates a larger possible research project in these fields. We anticipate this project raising themes like freedom, mobility, escape, utopia; images of domesticity on wheels, décor and design, materials, technology, DIY production and Fordism; caravan parks as homes and as itinerant and long-term accommodation. These themes and images are also necessarily interwoven with class, gender, sex and age. We are interested in the possibilities of using the caravan as a carrier for making sense of postwar Australia. (shrink)

The work of Ivan Vladislavić is well established in his native South Africa, and increasingly recognized on the larger world stage of writing, editing and publishing. If his work nevertheless eludes scrutiny in some quarters, this may also have to do with its nature, and not only with its origin. The works differ and vary; there is no formula or project which proceeds neatly by sequence. No single work can be second-guessed from any other. This is a project full of (...) surprises, connecting variously to art, photography, architecture and to urban studies, setting to work images and practices at once realist and surreal, absurdist and layering, and given to time and place and the universal. How then do we read it, and how does he write? For the purposes of this paper, we explain and locate our enthusiasm with reference to two works, The Restless Supermarket and Portrait with Keys. We seek to identify some key tropes about place and place-writing and cities and city-writing with reference to Johannesburg and the way in which Vladislavić plays his subjects and his readers, placing not only fiction under question but placing writing itself closer to the editor’s deletion mark. This may be, we suggest, a kind of writing sideways. (shrink)

Greg Macainsh is a major actor in the Australian popular music scene. He was the pioneer ethnographic filmmaker of the youth gang the Sharpies, and then bass player and songwriter for the most innovative band of the seventies, Skyhooks. Skyhooks combined new composition, driving music, sarcastic and local lyrics, and keen attention to visuals and costume. This article backgrounds Macainsh and his context. The interview that follows looks further into musical history and performative culture in Melbourne and its suburbs in (...) the period. (shrink)

The work of Ivan Vladislavić is well established in his native South Africa, and increasingly recognized on the larger world stage of writing, editing and publishing. If his work nevertheless eludes scrutiny in some quarters, this may also have to do with its nature, and not only with its origin. The works differ and vary; there is no formula or project which proceeds neatly by sequence. No single work can be second-guessed from any other. This is a project full of (...) surprises, connecting variously to art, photography, architecture and to urban studies, setting to work images and practices at once realist and surreal, absurdist and layering, and given to time and place and the universal. How then do we read it, and how does he write? For the purposes of this paper, we explain and locate our enthusiasm with reference to two works, The Restless Supermarket and Portrait with Keys. We seek to identify some key tropes about place and place-writing and cities and city-writing with reference to Johannesburg and the way in which Vladislavić plays his subjects and his readers, placing not only fiction under question but placing writing itself closer to the editor’s deletion mark. This may be, we suggest, a kind of writing sideways. (shrink)

Janina Bauman was a sociologist of everyday life. Her autobiographical texts, Winter in the Morning (1986), A Dream of Belonging (1988), and the synthetic volume Beyond These Walls (2006), manage a kind of personal poignancy combined with world-historic content and attention to the detail of everyday life that sets her work apart. This essay responds to these attributes and offers a contribution to her remembrance as a writer, an actor in and observer of everyday life in Warsaw and Leeds across (...) the 20th century. (shrink)