'In recent decades, historians have produced a wealth of scholarship demonstrating the importance of the exploration of domestic contexts and familial dynamics to the development of understandings of women's historical experiences. However, the home lives of a particular group of women—those on the criminal margins of society—warrant further investigation. The study of such women challenges the hetero-orthodox assumption that women's relationships with men have historically been more important than their relationships with one another. This article suggests that men were often fleeting figures in the families of criminal women. Male absence encouraged women from criminal subcultures, instead, to draw together to form female-centred households. Such living arrangements were further facilitated by the general instability in the home lives of criminal women caused by financial uncertainty, periodic incarceration and crackdowns by authorities, as well as by separations from their natal families and a high degree of personal mobility. These issues are explored through archival material from late nineteenth- and early twentieth century Melbourne, and through the writings of prison poet Janet Dibben.'
Source: Abstract.
'Don'o Kim's The Chinaman is an Australian jeremiad lamenting the Australia still shadowed by the self-privileging White Australia policy and making a plea for a more pluralist society. A powerful narrative firmly rooted in the sociohistorical context of white-East Asian encounters in Australia, it recalls symbolic moments of interracial conflict such as the 1854 anti-Chinese race riots at Bendigo and the 1980 bombing of a Japanese resort project at Yeppoon. Kim also interrogates Anglo-Celtic Australia's espousal of cultural whiteness as the heart of national identity from his firm belief that Australia is not only an extension of the British cultural tradition but also a significant departure from it. He ultimately criticises white Australia's self-identification as a transplanted Europe through dissociation from their neighbours in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. The Chinaman is the Korean-Australian writer's arduous and sustained rumination on the future direction of multiracial Australia, eloquently expressed in the “Quovadis”, the name of the white yacht on which most episodes of the narrative take place.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
