Traffic 3: Write The Wrongs
The Best TV Reception in Melbourne': Fitzroy 'Low-Life' & the Invasion of the Renovator
Tony Birch, Department of English with Cultural Studies.
In the 1960s the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy began a process of economic and social change, resulting in the dislocation of many long-term residents. Some people were shifted out of the suburb as a result of government 'housing reforms'. Others were more gradually dislocated. It was the renovator's paint-brush and the commodification of Fitzroy's 'diversity' that would eventually transform the suburb into the place that it is today; a place of 'real delis', 'taste' and 'fashion sense'. This article engages with some of these Fitzroy narratives.
Sex Work & Study
Sarah Lantz, Youth Research Centre
This article draws on empirical research into the lives of forty young women students working in the Melbourne sex industry. It reveals how students are funding their tertiary education under more difficult financial conditions than ever before. The article suggests that while the government continues to implement 'user pay' reforms to the education system, young people will continue to enter both the formal and informal labour market, including the sex industry, to get an education. Further, the article reveals how students working in the sex industry challenge perceptions of their work as marginal, or 'outside the mainstream'.
Historical Neglect of an Enduring Chinese Community
Keir Reeves, Department of History
That there was a Chinese presence on the Victorian goldfields during the 1850s is well known, but misunderstood. Many historians have emphasised other social or political aspects of the rushes in their attempts to explain the historical significance of the period, but have neglected the broader role of the Chinese. Although social historians of the 1970s and early 1980s redressed this historical imbalance, the story of the Chinese gold miners remains incomplete and obfuscated by popular historical misconceptions. This article argues that considering mining landscapes as sources inscribed with historical meaning offers a new way of understanding the nineteenth-century Chinese experience on the goldfields. This is done via a case study of the Maclaren's Flat mining and market gardening site in the southern part of the Mount Alexander diggings in Victoria.
Gender & the Geek Factor: Why don't Women do IT?
Catherine Lang, Centre for the Study of Higher Education
There are flaws in the explanations presented in the 'Women and Computing' literature that the lack of role models and the inhospitable nature of the IT field are an explanation for poor female enrolments. There is a lack of analysis into why over twenty years of intervention programs are not improving the gender balance in this discipline. In this study, an analysis of Australian university enrolment data is used to compare computing and information systems participation to the disciplines of Law and Medicine. Questions are raised about the role that perceived status plays in determining career choices by young people, particularly the influence of the media in forming perceptions.
A Question of Valore: Translating Cavalcanti & Dante
Simon West, Department of French & Italian Studies
In translating, as in reading, the so-called stilnovistic poetry of Guido Cavalcanti and Dante Alighieri, one must pay careful attention to changes in semantic value which some words have undergone since the thirteenth century. This is no more evident than in terms these poets adopted from the language of contemporary writings on natural philosophy. The use of one such word, spirito, in the poetry of Cavalcanti and Dante is here examined in detail. What does the adoption of such language reveal about the poets' aesthetic aims, and what difficulties does it pose for the translator? Finally, how can the changes in language over time which lead to such problems be overcome?
Why doesn't Development Aid work?
Syed Mohammad Ali, Development Studies Program, School of Anthropology, Geography & Environmental Studies
This article identifies salient issues associated with poverty alleviation within an aid for development context. In cognisance of historical and conceptual considerations as well as current efforts being made to deal with poverty in the developing world, it suggests that a real remedy to this problem requires not only greater financial commitments but also an increased willingness to revise means that have already proven ineffective in reducing global poverty.
Exposing the Failings of our Betters: Bad Laws don't improve with Age
MM Park, Department of Geomatics
A continuing tension exists between practising lawyers (practitioners and judges) who are unable to choose which cases make up their work and the academic gadflies who may cherry-pick. The standard academic method is to treat most decisions of the lower courts as beneath contempt, decisions of the appeal courts as obviously unsound, and to begrudge those of the highest court as right but for the wrong reasons (and to delight in pointing out the logical flaws). This gadfly offers his analysis of a 'wrong' decision in land law that has stood for nearly half a century and recently been reaffirmed as 'correct'.
Writing the Lake Boga Failure
Felicity Jensz, Department of History/Australian Centre
This article examines three people's interpretations of the events surrounding the 1856 closure of the Lake Boga mission station, a Moravian-run Aboriginal mission station in Northern Victoria. Writing (history) is a political act and the events or factors that different people emphasise in their writings inform the reader of the writers' biases and also of the intents behind their stances. By analysing the reasons behind their biases before these histories are combined, a more complex and richer understanding of events can be created. While this piece is not singling out a wrong to write/right, it will suggest that writing from one perspective, although not 'wrong', is a simplistic way of understanding the truth of history.
Missing the Point? Misprints, Mistranslations & Transformations
Helen T Frank, Department of French & Italian Studies
The translation of literary works necessitates a process of linguistic and cultural transfer. This paper analyses French translations of twentieth-century Australian children's fiction and highlights the variety of translational tendencies and interpretive choices at work in moving texts from one culture to another. While 'mistakes' in translation represent an undesirable yet inevitable side effect of the translation process, they offer choice moments of insight into constraints of culture and language. These constraints account for the important distinction between simple error, reinterpretation, and the appropriation of cultural content to reflect a preferred set of images.
The Death of Criticism
Beornn McCarthy, Department of English with Cultural Studies
This article carries the theme of 'write the wrongs' so far as to spell it out in a eulogy for the death of criticism. It traces the life of criticism in the undeciphered hieratic figures of the nineteenth century. These hieroglyphics are diffused in exposing and deconsecrating the superior image of criticism. The thesis is that critical knowledge fails to facilitate interdisciplinary research. True interdisciplinarity-the crossing of the disciplines-is a thing of praise. The theme of criticism, 'writing the wrongs', must reverse its own superiority: it must praise that which criticism refuses.