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Some internationally minded liberal intellectual men in Melbourne and Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s became obsessed with the Pacific, viewing its peoples as instructive and appealing, even as possible guides for solving Australia's population problems. I follow three of them—Frederic W. Eggleston, Stephen H. Roberts, and Adolphus P. Elkin—as they read the lessons of Oceania. In particular, experiences in Hawaii and intimacies with Pacific peoples led them to revise their opinions of Aboriginal Australians, re-evaluate the mixing of races, and even question the white Australia policy. Additionally, I consider here what these reflections on the beach and entanglements in the boarder-lands of the surf may have meant for the development of a style of internationalist white masculinity during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Arthur Melville ('Mel') Thompson graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1938 with First Class Honours in Physics. After graduation he joined Australia's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research as one of the 'founding fathers' of the National Standards Laboratory and embarked on a life-time career in metrology. His work in precision electrical measurement, ratio-arms transformer bridges and techniques for defining and measuring small capacitances is internationally renowned. He conceived the design of a calculable-capacitor, the Thompson-Lampard capacitor, which led to a new theorem in electrostatics and provided the basis for an absolute determination of the unit of resistance with an increase in accuracy of an order of magnitude. Beyond the calculable capacitor his work had a major impact in electrical impedance measurement in general and on other fields of metrology such as dilatometry and thermometry. Mel Thompson was an inspirational leader and his work facilitated the development of many scientific careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Historical Records of Australian Science explores some of the sciences that have contributed to our understanding of inland Australia, country variously known as desert, the arid zone, drylands and the outback. The sciences that have concentrated on deserts include ecology, geomorphology, hydrology, rangeland management, geography, surveying, meteorology and geology, plus many others. In recognition that desert science has surged ahead in the past few decades, we have invited contributors who describe various different desert initiatives. We use these case studies to open up the discussion about how Australians see their desert lands, how this has changed over time and how desert scientists from the rest of the world regard the distinctive desert country in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interwar years saw the initiation of a number of important periodicals that reflected the emerging vitality of public intellectual life in Australia. One such publication was The Morpeth Review, a quarterly that appeared between the years 1927 and 1934. Edited by three Anglican intellectuals - E. H. Burgmann, Roy Lee, and A. P. Elkin - it included contributions from prominent historians, political scientists, anthropologists, cultural critics, and theologians. Though its range of concerns was broad, it was guided by a basic vision of intellectual and social life that aimed at reconciling the conflicting elements of modernity. Such conflicts included the divide between the world of work and the family, the divide between classes, between nations, and between church and state, or more broadly, between the secular and the religious spheres. This article will suggest that in the endeavour to reconcile such competing elements The Morpeth Review expressed a kind of political theology that was modernist in inspiration (welcoming science and the critical consciousness) and drew on several overlapping traditions of thought including liberal Anglicanism, Christian socialism, and British idealism, all of which rejected the modern tendency to compartmentalise life and with it to relegate religion to the private sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the philosophy and political thought of the 20th century Australian proprietor of the newspaper the "Sydney Morning Herald" and executive of the media company John Fairfax & Sons Warwick Oswald Fairfax. An overview of the philosophical influence of British idealism on Fairfax, including in regard to his attending of Balliol College of Oxford University in Oxford, England, is provided.

This paper traces the networks through which particular practices of collecting cultures became imbricated in new relations governing colonial populations. It investigates the socio-technical arrangements associated with “practical anthropology” as they were enrolled in the Australian administered territory of Papua. The paper follows the assemblage of a new kind of anthropological actor: one which is framed in relation to new articulations of the administrative, academic and museum networks associated with a programme of “scientific administration” and the doctrine of “humanitarian colonialism”. In particular, it focuses on the office of the Government Anthropologist and the ways in which “native culture” emerged as an administrative surface. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the 1940s and 1950s, the Australian microbiologist F. Macfarlane Burnet sought a biologically plausible explanation of antibody production. In this essay, we seek to recover the conceptual pathways that Burnet followed in his immunological theorizing. In so doing, we emphasize the influence of speculations on individuality, especially those of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead; the impact of cybernetics and information theory; and the contributions of clinical research into autoimmune disease that took place in Melbourne. We point to the influence of local experimental and intellectual currents on Burnet's work. Accordingly, this essay describes an arc distinct from most other tracings of Burnet's conceptual development, which focus on his early bacteriophage research, his fascination with the work of Julian Huxley and other biologists in the 1920s, and his interest in North Atlantic experimental investigations in the life sciences. No doubt these too were potent influences, but they seem insufficient to explain, for example, Burnet's sudden enthusiasm in the 1940s for immunological definitions of self and not-self. We want to demonstrate here how Burnet's deep involvement in philosophical biology - along with attention to local clinical research - provided him with additional theoretic tools and conceptual equipment, with which to explain immune function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1914, before the outbreak of the World War One, H. B. Higgins travelled at the invitation of ‘industrial counsellor’ Robert Valentine to the United States, where he found an intellectual community of a kind that no political cause or group of people offered at home. There he joined a network of public-spirited experts who moved easily between universities, business, labour reform groups and journalism. Higgins' intellectual exchanges with jurists including Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and Learned Hand and labour reformers such as Josephine Goldmark and members of the American Association for Labor Legislation formed the distinctive American context that shaped his iconic ‘Australian’ essay on ‘A New Province for Law and Order’ and a larger transnational Progressivism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is a contribution to the re-evaluation of the formative years of the emergent international relations discipline. Work on this topic, extensive over the past decade and a half, has overturned a number of the foundational myths of the global discipline, especially regarding the period between the two world wars. The literature on international relations in Australia, slow to reflect this re-evaluation, generally still locates the first important developments in the 1960s, and characterises the scholarship that emerged as predominantly ‘realist’. This study both pushes back the boundaries and challenges the theoretical perspectives used to categorise thinking in Australia at that time. A student of C. A. W. Manning and thus conversant with British ideas of ‘international society’, George Modelski's early exposure to theoretical work in the USA and his endeavours to give his department a strongly regional focus gave his work a richness and multifaceted character not easily captured by the ‘realist–rationalist’ dichotomy. Modelski went on from the Australian National University to become a major figure in international relations in the USA, contributing to the original debates on globalisation and best known for his work on ‘long cycles’ in world politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on the insights of the current literature concerned with the institutions which fostered and supported the emergence of the international relations (IR) discipline, this article reassesses the Australian contribution in the interwar years. From this period, teaching materials and surviving lecture notes, as well as documentation of Australian participation in the International Studies Conference, show that, contrary to the received view, academies and institutions supported a recognisable IR, albeit in its formative stages. Even by the early 1920s there was a developing awareness that ‘international relations’ was a discrete subject worthy of presentation in a specific curriculum. The Melbourne school initiated by William Harrison Moore exerted the greatest influence; an energetic pioneering effort in Sydney under H. Duncan Hall was not maintained after his departure. Law and history departments offered such courses, though their place in wider programs depended upon the contingencies of personalities and appointments. By the 1930s, IR teachers were familiar with the major methodological debates of the era in the UK and the USA. While consistent attention was devoted to international organisation, and ‘collective security’ had its champions, the predominant view, in the terminology of the ‘first debate’, was neither idealist nor realist. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Computers are now commonly used in Australian schools, as in most developed countries. In the early 1980s, a multitude of incompatible microcomputers sought to enter the education market, presenting a significant problem in terms of technical support and teacher professional development. To address this, Australia investigated designing and building its own educational computer. This article tells the story of how Australia's educational computer was designed but never actually built. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The potency between text and image is an integral part of visual and cultural disciplines. In this article the value of the image or leitmotifs is explored as a methodological tool in the genre of biography. In the case of the eminent Australian art historian Bernard Smith, the image has always had the potential to reflect the traditions and ‘spirits of the past’ as well as the realities and interdisciplinary contours of the present, but it is argued that leitmotifs and the image, be it the black swan, Minerva's owl or that of Antipodean distance can also tap into the sui generis of the individual, signalling the intricate shadows and larger ideas central to this major Australian intellectual. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An examination of John Anderson's work in relation to other political theorists of his time would help to provide a more adequate assessment of one of the 'greats' of Australian intellectual and cultural life. Comparisons between Anderson's libertarian strain and F.A. Hayek's have been noted but there has been no real attempt to draw out the real differences arising from their substantive theoretical positions. Anderson and Hayek rejected any notion of a single, complete ethical code; they despaired at the demoralising effects of a culture of dependence and irresponsibility; they rejected the ameliorative liberalism represented by T.H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet. But they disagreed centrally in their assessments of those practices and movements which act as sites of resistance to the levelling standards and values of commercial and consumerist institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of the Morpeth Review between 1927 and 1934 was a milestone in the evolution of an authentic public sphere for Australian political intellectuals. The Review covered several areas of political and philosophical concern, ranging ideologically from Christian socialism and idealist liberalism, through market economics, to reactionary anti-Bolshevism, within the editorial context of a strongly idealist liberalism inspired by the Oxford liberals of the early twentieth century, and both evangelical and sacramentalist Anglican Protestantism. Ernest H. Burgmann and Roy Lee used the magazine to develop a unique form of Anglican social and political activism and other members of an identifiable group of radical clergy also contributed. A.P. Elkin's writings on Indigenous politics are of particular interest as they can be viewed simultaneously as a turning toward the novel idea of Aboriginal citizenship, and at the same time as a restatement of Darwinist biological determinism and racialism, both lit by genuine compassion and affection for Aboriginal Australians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor G. W. L. Marshall-Hall's dismissal from the University of Melbourne in 1900 has been explained in terms of prudery, despite being sparked by his views on militarism. This article explores the international intellectual influences of Nietzsche and his editor, the Social Darwinist writer Alexander Tille, on Marshall-Hall. This article reveals that Tille influenced Marshal-Hall's misreading of Nietzsche to associate Nietzsche with militarism. Marshall-Hall rejected this Tille-influenced misreading of Nietzche in 1915, only to adopt a Wagnerian, dogmatic nationalist aesthetics reminiscent of those criticised by Nietzsche. The article argues Marshall-Hall's long misunderstood dismissal, and his often unacknowledged intellectual shift in 1915 which led to his support for an Australian identity in music, can only be understood by placing Marshall-Hall in an international context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although British idealism has recently undergone a minor scholarly revival, its impact on Australian intellectual life remains an underexplored area of inquiry. Such work as there is on the Australian idealists has largely focused on social and political themes despite the fact that idealism was driven by deeply religious interests. This paper explores the religious writings of five Australian intellectuals whose work was shaped by the tradition of philosophical idealism. The writers chosen include two Scottish émigrés — Charles Strong (1844–1942) and Francis Anderson (1858–1941) — and three Australian born students of Anderson — M. Scott Fletcher (1868–1947), E.H. Burgmann (1885–1965), and A.P. Elkin (1891–1979). By identifying the threads that connect these writers, along with some of their British contemporaries, the case is made that they can be understood as giving voice to a coherent, if rather loosely bound, intellectual tradition. Among much else, this tradition sought a reconciliation of religious and secular knowledge, proposed an evolutionary or developmental understanding of religious truth, and defended the idea of human personality in an increasingly scientific and mechanistic civilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian scholarship on “International Relations and the environment” rests on the shoulders of a comparatively small number of researchers. Their contribution to scholarly debate and policy analysis, however, belies the numbers. The corpus thus produced offers both breadth, through the range of environmental issues explored, and depth through a strong commitment to theoretical inquiry and a willingness to challenge and defy traditional disciplinary boundaries. Underpinning this is a recognition that the agenda of “IR and the environment” has long moved beyond policy-tracing analysis of inter-state cooperation, diplomatic negotiations and multilateral institutions. Robust intellectual, conceptual and empirical “conversations” on global environmental issues mean that there are often points of divergence among those working in this field. Nevertheless, the Australian scholarly output on International Relations and the environment can be characterized by three important themes: a critique of neoliberalism, a commitment to ethical inquiry (and, indeed, to a politics of solidarity) that reveals a complex politics of knowledge, discourse and power; and a disciplinary heterodoxy accompanied by a critical interrogation of theoretical constructs and organizing principles embedded in ideas about the state, sovereignty and security. This is not, I argue here, an interest in theory for theory's sake. Rather, Australian scholarship on International Relations and the environment is motivated by real concerns about how best to protect the environment and by a real commitment to those who are most affected by the ecological, social and economic consequences of environmental change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An article is presented on the Australian Labor Party's policies regarding Australian national identity and social policy. It is presented in the form of a provocation and response, each by a different author. The provocation discusses change and controversy in Australian culture during the 20th century, emphasizing sociopolitical issues such as immigration, same sex couples, and apologies to Australian Aborigines. It is argued that the Labor party did not articulate a coherent approach to such issues. The response presents an overview of the evolution of Australia's national identity, and discusses the plans of the Labor government under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

This paper is a reading of early twentieth-century government high school culture as it was expressed through a twenty-year run of one Australian high school's student-authored magazines. From its first issue the editors of The Parramatta High School Magazine were keen to promote its role in the making of a community. The idea that high school people belonged to a special and exclusive group was reiterated in a number of ways. Writing in the magazines described the features of a shared culture - whiteness, literacy, good taste, rational behaviour - and implicitly defined high school students as different from other categories of people, including non-English speaking foreigners and 'the uneducated'. Central to the process of classification and identification were statements of 'who we are' and 'who we are not' which were grounded in the language of meritocracy, and encompassed particular contemporary understandings of social class, race and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of Australian universities after the Second World War was made possible by growing support from the Commonwealth government, which sought both to increase participation in higher education and promote research that would serve national purposes. This article considers the efforts of social scientists to persuade the government that their research had such utility. Through an examination of the endeavours of Mark Oliphant and Douglas Copland, it compares the fortunes of the physical and social sciences during the post-war period. It also suggests that the strategies adopted by social scientists had lasting consequences, and confirmed their subordinate status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of the eugenics movement in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century have failed to provide an adequate explanation for its place and relative importance both within public policy planning and more generally in the zeitgeist. This article argues for a new approach, characterising eugenics as a science or technology being utilised on occasions for the more fundamental and time-honoured task of the elimination of racial degeneracy. Thus, a wider question is raised about the role of eugenics as a central plank in the development of scientific racism in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the establishment of the George Ernest Morrison Lectures on Chinese-Ethnology, first delivered in 1932 at the Australian Institute of Anatomy, Canberra, Australia. Some of the notable people responsible for establishing the scholarly lectures included Australian orthopaedist Sir Colin MacKenzie (1877-1938), Chinese Australians attorney William Ah Ket and merchant William Liu, and F. J. Quinlin of Australia's Ministry of Home Affairs. The article also provides excerpts from Liu's 1978 oral history interview about raising sponsorship for the lectures as well as correspondence written between 1931 to 1941 regarding the lectures, mostly written between Liu, Quinlin, and MacKenzie.

Cases of Hendra virus infection in horses in Australia have been seen regularly since the virus was first isolated in 1994. Kristopher Hughes, associate professor of equine medicine at Charles Sturt University in Australia, gives an overview of how knowledge of the virus has developed in the past 20 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]