Search

Pacific Possessions: The Pursuit of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Oceanian Travel Accounts, by Chris J Thomas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. ISBN cloth, 978-0-8173-2094-2; e-book, 978-0-81739358-8; 184 pages, 27 black-and-white [...]

This paper examines the high levels of social connectedness and civic engagement between the [North] Brisbane School of Arts and the local metropolitan newspapers in their eagerness to establish and promote a reading club that would curb what they felt was the local community's preoccupation with reading popular novels. The Brisbane Literary Circle was charged with placing "the best thoughts of the best minds in the way of everybody" and achieving the ambitious Arnoldian quest of "universal culture". The paper also examines why the Circle failed to attract the interest of the working-classes, which had always been the primary target audience. (Contains 51 notes.)

The past year has seen a global upsurge of violent attacks by lone, mentally unstable individuals. The motivations for these attacks have varied and extremist ideological drivers are rarely ‘pure’, but mental health problems and personal grievances are common themes. Mentally ill and disenfranchised individuals may be vulnerable to extremist messages and propaganda because such beliefs can be a means of interpreting their social difficulties. Terrorist messages can also be adopted by psychotic people who are seeking to make sense of their symptoms. Most lone-actor attacks are preventable, if there is a system in place for identifying and intervening with antecedent behaviours, which include mental disturbances and the social problems that frequently accompany these conditions. Joint police-mental health models developed to assess and manage fixated persons can be applied to other forms of grievance-fuelled, lone-actor violence. This paper describes the establishment of such a service in Australia, and provides some preliminary data. It also discusses the role of mental health in the current security environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]