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Jean Martin was a pioneer of sociology, inventing a version of the discipline that was uniquely suited to Australia in the post-war period. Jean Isobel Martin (1923-79) made herself a sociologist before the discipline was established in Australia. Regarded as a founder of Australian sociology, her writing, teaching and policy helped shape Australia in the period of economic growth and social development that followed World War II. The Martin Presence is a biography that examines her life and her work across the concerns of the time - the needs of country towns, the factory work floor, families.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This measured and thoughtful book provides a comprehensive critical commentary on Bauman's social theory. It explores the roots of his ideas in questions of capital and labour, and explains how these ideas flourished in Bauman's later writings on culture, intellectuals, utopia, the holocaust, modernity and postmodernism. Bauman's work has been wide-ranging and ambitious. This book fulfils the objective of providing an authoritative critical guide to this essential thinker.

Long before he became one of the leading voices in American sociology and letters, Daniel Bell had a tough early life. He experienced poverty and socialism early, in a life taking on the big themes of the 20th century: communism, capitalism, Marxism, Americanism, modernism. In this he was the beneficiary as well as the critic of modern Americanism, or American modernism. In this essay I focus on a relatively overlooked Bell classic, Marxian Socialism in the United States (1996 [1952]). Here Bell works in an essentially Weberian optic, but one which takes Marx and Marxism very seriously. This is a major contribution to history of ideas and to labour studies, but also to cultural sociology. Some closing remarks connect Bell's legacy and these frames to the much more influential, if also unread, collection The End of Ideology (1960). © 2013 The Author(s).

Bernard Smith (1916-2011) was a giant on the Australian intellectual scene, and a major analyst of and contributor to the processes of cultural traffic between the antipodes and the centres of the world system. He was a lifelong Marxist, or historical materialist. Yet his scholarship also wore an open weave. Was he then a Marxist in politics? This essay argues that his historicism placed his thinking firmly with the owl of Minerva, rather than in the driver's seat of history. Marxism, for Bernard Smith, was ex post facto, placing him with the tragic irony of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire rather than with the activist intent of the Theses on Feuerbach. Distance, for Smith, was everything. © The Author(s) 2013.

The recent, premature death of art critic Robert Hughes registered significant celebrity attention, but little for the extent and depth of his intellectual achievement. Hughes called himself a writer, or else a journalist. He had at least two especial qualifications, in this capacity. He had an Eye, but he also had a Voice. He was a brilliant, if sometimes prolix, writer and presenter. He was a performer, and his work should be seen as performance. This essay, offered as a promissory note, seeks to place Robert Hughes in terms of style and substance but also in terms of centre and periphery, in terms of the cultural traffic between them. It touches on three aspects of his reception. First, on the obituaries, which sought largely to reclaim his body as Australian, even after 50 years of absence. Second, on The Fatal Shore and its reception, itself indicative of the difficulty in neatly placing Hughes in terms of nationalist conceptions. Third, it discusses leading critical interpretations, asking for more, please, and promising to help contribute to the appreciation of Hughes as Tory radical stylist and contrarian. © The Author(s) 2013.

This interview-conducted by Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan with Clinton Walker over the course of three months (July to September 2011) between Melbourne and Sydney via email and Skype-explores the questions of Australian popular culture writing with, against, and of the culture industries themselves. Walker is a leading freelance Australian cultural historian and rock music journalist. He is the author of seven books, five about Australian music. He has been a radio DJ and TV presenter. He compiled and produced four double CD album collections of Australian music-Inner City Sound, Buried Country, Long Way to the Top, and Studio 22. He has been a key writer in several multi-media projects, including the Powerhouse Museum Real Wild Child exhibition and CD-Rom (1995) and ABC TV's hit documentary series/CD/DVD Long Way to the Top (2001). In 2006, a new US edition of his first book Inner City Sound (with soundtrack CD) was published. His Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car (2005) has been published in a revised edition in 2009. In 2012, his eighth book, The Wizard of Oz, will be published. Walker is currently writing with Beilharz and Hogan a book called The Vinyl Age: The History of Australian Rock Music, 1945-1995. The interviewers invited Walker to reflect critically on his 35-year 'career' as pop avatar, independent writer and critic in the post-war to post-modern Australian popular culture industries. Going from journalism to his path-finding books and television documentaries, the article traces this work's development both in personal terms and as a symptom of the broader cultural evolution, from the suburbs to pop to art and rock and back again; between London and the provincial cultures of Oz; from one-way American consumerism to local DIY egalitarianism, analogue to digital to global dialogue, youth culture to multi-culturalism, and from the putative low brow to the legimitization process itself of popular culture. © The Author(s) 2012.

This paper revisits a book I published 20 years ago. Labour's Utopias-Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy (Routledge, 1992) began from the proposition that utopia was a ubiquitous figure in Western political and social thinking. On the Left the common sense has often been that reform and revolution are but different proposed roads to the same utopian end. Labour's Utopias shows that this is not the case: Bolshevism, Fabianism and social democracy actually embody different ends. Revisiting the text 20 years later, my sense is that its most interesting and significant weakness lies not in its diagnosis of utopia, but in its failure to differentiate significantly between labour and its intellectual representatives. I hint at the issue of 'social' or 'socialist ventriloquism', but fail to follow it through. The issue of representation, or claims to representation, remains under-illuminated, as does the possibility that there are significant differences between working-class and middle-class utopias. © 2012 The Author(s).

This article responds to the new and major work on Lobby Loyde by Paul Oldham. It focuses on the middle period of Loyde's career, from the Chicago-period Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs through to Lobby's work with Sharpie band (was it?) Coloured Balls, and connects and compares Lobby's trajectory to that of the post-Lobby Aztecs, as expressed in Sunbury, the 1972 parallel Australian event to Woodstock. Who led these processes, the bands or the crowds? If the crowd claimed a band, what happened to musical autonomy in this process? This was a moment when mass audience response became tribal, and opened the possibility that musicians were no longer in charge of their art. Trying to escape from the wiles of the music industry, these musicians instead seem to have become captive to their audiences. © The Author(s) 2012.

Over the past 50 years, rock music has been the prime mover of an emergent national recording industry in Australia. This is a story in turn of increasing size, complexity, diversity, and sophistication, before its ultimate decline into the 21st century. This story has not been told in full previously and this article is a first step to make good this gap in the historical and cultural sociology of popular music. In this study, which has two parts, we survey record labels, recording techniques and forms, and the music that was bought and sold. In Part One (published in Thesis Eleven 109, 2012: 71-88) we chronicled the emergence of modern record production, the rise of rock music, and the development of a local recording industry in Australia between 1945 and 1970. In Part Two we narrate the rise and fall of Australian local, regional and national rock music cultures and the ebb and flow of independent labels and their labyrinthine relations to the transatlantic centre of the world-system of rock music industry. In particular we focus on four aspects: 1) technological change: the dominance of the vinyl album in the 1970s but its eventual usurpation by cassettes and then compact discs before the ultimate decline of all formats in the rise of the internet and the i-pod; 2) infrastructure: the development of the recording industry as a system of recording studios and record factories; as a system of impresarios and musician management; and also as a system that integrates performance circuits, radio, television, film, and eventually computer, product placement, advertising, and promotion through the cultivation and manipulation of taste markets in consumer culture etc.; 3) business logistics and markets: the tracking of the record labels, their struggles for markets and copyright control, local and global; and 4) musical production and repertoire. Since the digital revolution started eating away firstly and most conspicuously at the recording industry, the 50 years from

Over the past 50 years, rock music has been the prime mover of an emergent national recording industry in Australia. In this study, which has two parts, we survey record labels, recording techniques and forms, and the music that was bought and sold. Part One narrates the emergence of modern record production, the rise of rock music, and the development of a local recording industry in Australia between 1945 and 1970. Part Two (to be published in Thesis Eleven 110) recounts the rise and fall of Australian local, regional and national rock music cultures and the ebb and flow of independent labels and their labyrinthine relations to the transatlantic centre of the world-system of the rock music industry. In particular, we focus on four aspects: technological change, infrastructure, business logistics/markets, and musical production/repertoire. Since the digital revolution started eating away firstly and most conspicuously at the recording industry, the 50 years from 1945 to 1995 can now more clearly be seen as the rise and fall of rock music and its major technological form, the vinyl record. This is why we call it 'the vinyl age'. This story has not been told in full previously, and this two-part article is a first step to bridge this gap in the historical and cultural sociology of popular music. © The Author(s) 2012.

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. © Thesis Eleven Pty, Ltd., SAGE Publications 2011.

The idea of the 'Australian settlement' has been normalized since its popularization by Paul Kelly into the Keating years. This essay responds further to existing discussion of the idea, including attempts to develop it by expanding its descriptive and analytic criteria. It argues for the pluralization of the idea of settlement, rather than for attempts to develop the 'Australian settlement' by adding further exhaustive detail. The real challenge, beyond the controversy, is the adequate specification of the conditions of Australian modernity. Here the idea and institution of arbitration remains central. Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications.