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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.

Marx and Gramsci remain two of the most constant presences and inspirations for those on the left. Yet there is a persistent sense that we have still to get them right. Perhaps this indicates that sources like this are now fully classics, to be returned, and returned to. In the case of Marx and Gramsci, a series of major works published in the Brill Historical Materialism series breaks new ground as well as returning to older controversies, both resolved and unresolved. Apart from remaining arguments concerning the status of materials unpublished in their own lifetimes, the major tension that emerges here is that between the task of immanent, contextual philology and the challenge of reading ‘Marx for today’ or ‘Gramsci for today’. The tension between text and context, and the question of what travels, conceptually persists.

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 (2001) and Portrait with Keys (2006). 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 Vladislavic plays his subjects and his readers, placing not only fiction (or realism) under question but placing writing itself closer to the editor's deletion mark. This may be, we suggest, a kind of writing sideways. © Thesis Eleven Pty, Ltd., SAGE Publications.

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. © Thesis Eleven Pty, Ltd., SAGE Publications..

The theory of needs in Agnes Heller is iconic in her work: yet it is also part of the past. This paper revisits her early work (1976) and connects it through to the later, but also pathbreaking idea of the dictatorship over needs (1983). It then aligns the project of dictatorship over needs with van Bremzen’s 2015 work on the dictatorship over food production and consumption . This is claim that the idea of dictatorship over needs remains a privileged optic for the critique of Soviet-type societies, but also to insist that food is a far more fundamental issue that much recent writing in social sciences or humanities allows. The issue of needs persists: even well after Marx, we remain creatures seeking to be rich in needs. The additional focus on food throws all this into a different and more powerful light. It draws Heller’s distant work closer to us, and to the present.